Navoi innovation university faculty of philology and language teaching

CHAPTER II. “SHEPHERD’S CALENDAR” NOVEL’S IMPORTANCE NAD SEASONAL APPERANCE
2.1. “Shepherd’s calendar” novel’s importance nad seasonal apperance
“Of the Shepherd’s Calendar as poetry we must frankly confess that it commits the one sin for which, in literature, no merits can compensate; it is rather dull.” Thus begins C.S. Lewis’ account in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). That's a jejune kind of criticism, no doubt; so was Lewis's source in Henry James' "The Art of Fiction": "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." It hadn't taken modernists very long to problematize James' bourgeois category of interestingness.
It's a little jejune, and besides Lewis was, as he always was, stitching together an ideological myth. This one is about the great conservative poet who had not yet found his true voice. (Lewis's myths are always about the early twentieth century as well as the sixteenth century.) In his youth, the future conservative poet risks the left-wing temptations of coterie poetry and smart young forward-thinkers. Only later will his true, inner, spiritual and timelessly conservative vision be allowed to glide forth without being hindered by his clever friends. The place of dullness in the Lewisian myth of the young Spenser is therefore complex. On the one hand it is a hit at coterie productions in general: the Shepheardes Calender was supposed to be the sensational Next Big Thing, but it turns out to be a bit dull. On the other hand, the dullness is also a gentle prefigurement of Spenser's future greatness; it is a mark of his seriousness, his inability to be "turned". He will never be smart or sexy; he will never be the most brilliant or lovable of personalities. But when he does become great, the greatness will be of a quieter and more enduring kind. That, more or less, is Lewis' myth.
But there was also some truth to what Lewis said; it wouldn't have much power as a myth if there wasn't. If you want to know whether it would be more exciting to read Venus and Adonis, or The Pardoner's Tale, or [Insert your own choice of thrilling poem] - well, there’s no more to be said. You do not come to the Shepheardes Calender to be enthralled in that sort of way.
But still, you get a new job in Bedfordshire (or Cambridgeshire, perhaps?) - and then it’s no longer useful to be told about how dull the landscape is. These things happen and you’re going to make the best of it and you want to know how to live there and how to feed your imagination. You’re optimistic and you know that, once you’ve managed to adjust, your imagination will survive the shock, and dullness is going to turn out to be, really, rather interesting. You don’t have the choice of extinguishing Bedfordshire; it just exists. And therefore there is a way, not perhaps an instantly obvious way, of becoming absorbed in it.
It’s this landscape quality – let’s name it quietness, though that's just a cipher – that I’m trying to fix on. It can’t be done directly, not by me anyway, but these notes have a common purpose in trying to re-direct a focus on it. What one must add at the outset is that The Shepheardes Calender has a beguilingly complex structure, at least in principle. It takes the already complex form that Virgil derived from Theocritus and superimposes an annual cycle, a love-situation of the kind used in sonnet-sequences (semi-static and unrequited), and political commentary of the post-Mantuan type. Plus obscure references to his friends in disguise.
[In what follows, line-length and rhyme-scheme are shown as e.g. a4b3a4b3. The letters indicate the rhyme-scheme and the numbers indicate the number of accents in each line.]
Januarye.
Six-line stanzas, a5b5a5b5c5c5, regularly iambic. The poem ends with an alexandrine. Januarye is quiet, stately and isolated (like a sunny day in the deep of winter). Spenser’s winter eclogues reflect a tension between the English season dictated by the calendrical scheme and an originally Mediterranean form in which the weather is always suitable for outdoor versifying. Januarye is to some extent an introduction to the whole sequence. It tells us all we need to know about Colin, Rosalind and Hobbinol. More importantly, it introduces us to the mental climate that the poem will inhabit; often doleful, rather quiet, and engaged with long-term moods not with drama. It also introduces us to the prevalent neo-Medievalism of Spenser’s style. As early as line 10, we are sensitized to Chaucerian echoes: Well couth he tune his pipe, and frame his stile.
More integrated with the poem is a general debt to the alliterative tradition, probably Langland in particular. Spenser does not use Langland’s rhythms, but he uses alliteration in a similar way, not as a lapidary feature but as a background that comes and goes like a not-too-summery breeze. (Langland, compared with most of his peers, reduced alliteration and discovered a new flexibility by e.g. alliterating on unaccented syllables, or somewhat vaguely on vowels, or on prepositions and other low-key words.) In Januarye rather more than half the lines contain some sort of fairly overt alliteration – it becomes less prevalent in the last three or four stanzas when a new sharpness of tone appears, especially in the clinching couplets at the stanza-ends.
The two terms are not synonymous here. To “pyne” in this instance is to waste away physically, i.e. the line means “I’m getting thin because I’m sad, but you’re sad because you’re so thin”. Colin has momentarily felt an impulse of care for his flock, fondly addressed as “Thou feeble flock”. At this point, he registers a sense of community with the sheep – Poor fellows, we’re all together under an angry heaven. But the switch to “you” in the last line shows him moving away from identification with the sheep, and it actually expresses a contrast between himself and them. From this point onwards he ceases to make analogies between himself and the state of things around him. It’s the thought of his individual story that destroys the fragile equilibrium of his lament and leads eventually to the small upset, the tantrum at the end of St 12.⁶
Most commonly the lines look like nearly regular tetrameters, loaded with extra unaccented syllables, producing the characteristic rhythm of blankety-blank: “The soueraigne of seas”, “So loytring live”, “You thinken to be || Lords of the yeare”, etc.
However, no description fully covers all the lines. The verse may have a bent for certain kinds of regularity, but it never attains them for more than a couple of lines at a time – and, I believe, must not do so; just as the composer of atonal music avoids bringing notes together that could suggest a common tonality. Alliteration is frequent but not predominant, and it may cut across from one half-line to the next, or drop around the accents rather than onto them. Some lines have no plausible caesura. The upshot is that you can never predict the rhythm of the next line with any confidence; you can’t settle into a lilt. It was meant to sound joltingly rough.
This dialogue achieves a wonderful contrast between Cuddie’s celebration of youthful vigour and Thenot’s persuasive defence of tradition. For some reason I can't explain Cuddie is minding cows here, not sheep.
The story of the briar and the oak plainly (yet elusively) evokes consideration of church reforms. At the same time this should not distract from the visual image. The briar is a field-rose, with waxy, smooth (though thorny) stems – young growth mostly. The oak in those pre-industrial times of clean air would have been covered with tree-lichens (in those days they were not distinguished from moss, and indeed one of the commonest UK tree-lichens is still known as “oak moss”); so when the briar talks about “The mouldie mosse, which thee accloieth” he is mainly referring to the masses of shaggy lichen that envelop the twigs. This extraneous growth can give a very misleading sense of a tree’s senility, and the fable thus reports the wonder that everyone feels at how oak-trees can seem so robust and yet apparently tolerate such a weight of other life living on them.
The frame consists of pentameter quatrains, a5b5a5b5, often linked (i.e. successive quatrains b5c5b5c5 c5d5c5d5 etc) – compare the frame of Nouember. The lay of Eliza has a complex stanza-form a5b2a5b2c5c5d2d2c4. Each b line is (usually) uncapitalized, suggesting that it is to be understood in combination with the preceding a line as a divided fourteener. The poem is at first regularly “iambic”, but from line 60 onwards (in the middle of the lay’s third stanza) rhythmic irregularities become the norm. This is odd (though cf. March) but it works well; the splendid lay gains a sprightliness from irregularities that lie aslant the original flow – as if at first we observe the surface of a smooth river in shadow, and then see a play of sunlight across it.
Neo-Medieval couplets, and see the remarks on Februarie. Yet the effect here is somewhat different. It is a slacker, more garrulous poem (the longest in the Calender) and the talk of the old men looks like it could run on and on: even at the close Piers is saying: “Of their falshode more could I recount...”. It is also in contrast to the urgency of March, whose youthful protagonists have to watch their own sheep. Spenser loosens the fabric, displaces the caesuras and includes a number of lines that it is difficult not to read as iambic pentameters:
The smooth negotiation of this demanding rhyme-scheme was meant to be noticed, and is even emphasized when two successive stanzas share a rhyme-sound (81-96).
The poem promises a summer idling in the grateful shade, and it delivers it, despite Colin’s sense of alienation; for he does in fact relax and to some extent strives to accommodate the seasonal mood. For example, he attributes his lack of interest in fame to a shepherd’s vocation – “But feede his flocke in fields, where falls hem best”. (We know that this is not the true cause of his lack of ambition; the true cause is that Rosalind has rejected him.) From the same momentary relaxation arise his confidences about that affair, and the heart-rending simplicity of
That she the truest shepheards hart made bleede, That lyues on earth, and loued her most dere.
Not perhaps a line that will strike you as worrying. I'm sure 99 out of 100 readers take it in their stride as an unimportant but decorative fill-in. It sounds wonderful, the grammar seems fine, and it seems at any rate feasible that compared to the dales the hills might be lacking in holly-bushes, briars and wych-elms.
Nevertheless I'm bothered about it, and it's all the fault of D'Orsay W. Pearson. "In June, Rosalind appears as a metaphorical Circe who enervates Colin's poetic power. Hobbinol urges him, 'Forsake the soyle, that so doth the bewitch:/ Leave me those hilles, where harbrough nis to see,/ Nor holybush, nor brere, nor winding witche' (18-20). It is not the "soyle" but Rosalind, 'the winding witche', who bewitches Colin." (D'Orsay W. Pearson, article on witches in A.C. Hamilton, ed. The Spenser Encyclopaedia (1990).)
When I first read this, I had one of those A-ha! moments. Of course! (I reflected) Spenser is not the sort of poet who goes around mentioning a "winding witche" without a symbolic purpose. Obviously (I conceded) there is a Circean theme hidden in this carefully chosen vegetation. Throw in some ravens black as pitch and some ghastly owls... Well, case closed!
But it doesn't work. Hobbinol is advising Colin to try a change of scene. If the "winding witche" symbolizes Rosalind then it ought to be in the place that Colin is advised to flee from, and not in the place that he is advised to flee to. Nevertheless I was so enthusiastic about Pearson's interpretation that I was tempted to mend the appearances with a conjectural emendation:
Leaue me those hilles, where harbrough nis to see
You must admit this tightens up the argument considerably. First, it supplies a reason for mentioning the shrubs at all, i.e. their potential as makeshift shelters in the absence of sheep-folds. Second, by sounding the Circean theme earlier in the stanza it means that the later claims ("Here no night Rauens lodge" etc) no longer seem quite so left-field.⁷
But no, it won't do. This Circean theme is a mirage, I think. Are those three plants really so Circean? Surely if Spenser is being symbolic he could hardly be unaware of the Christmas association of holly (especially when spelled "holy")? The ravens and elvish ghosts are adequately led up to by Colin's description, in the preceding stanza, of his gloomy state of mind, pursued by angry gods. The real function of these last lines is to lead in (by contrast) to the subject of the Muses, with which Iune is much concerned.
E.K. informs us that Hobbinol's advice to leave the hills refers to the author moving back to the soft South - and takes the opportunity for an absurd digression on the North and South, Hilliness of, Compared. I don't know why E.K. would make this up, but there is no other evidence that Spenser visited the North (Grosart's theories of Rose Dineley and Burnley and Pendle Hill, still widely distributed around the internet, are at best an extrapolation from E.K.'s notes, at worst grounded in sheer error). The shepherdly world of these "dales", so blessed by the Muses, seems to me an image not of the South in general but of some poetry-dedicated circle such as the Sidneys.
I'm continuing to worry over it, just a bit. What close examination of Iune definitely reveals is that Spenser is not in a schematic mood. Hobbinol's attempt to invoke a contrasting "there" and "here" is much undercut by the rest of the poem. Neither Rosalind nor the Muses nor Colin seem to stay pinned down in one place. There are other threats to tidy thinking, too. As Paul Alpers complained, Colin says that he took delight (in the Muses, etc) when he was free from love, and then immediately adds that those were the days when he sang of love. The refusal of the poem to fit in with its own schemes is probably the main lesson of this divagation. Perhaps, along with "Conjectural Emendation, Finally Rejected", it could stand as an example of the kinds of interest to be found in dull country.
In quatrains, with the form a4b3a4b3. The b lines are not capitalized, so the quatrain can also be interpreted as two divided fourteeners.
A debate between the lover of hills and the lover of valleys, this poem arises boldly from a sub-theme that had been pervasively present in Iune. E.K. calls Morrell a proud and ambitious pastor, and the woodcut shows him with a tonsure, but the actual poem is more nuanced.
(A pastor and a shepherd: the words mean the same. So what are the two sides in this debate, really? Is it about what language to use?)
The position we are placed in here, of witnessing an allegorical debate without fully fathoming its application, strikes me as quite characteristic of the Shepheardes Calender, and as a feature that connects it with the poetry we write today. For some of us it gives this earlier poem a relevance that Spenser's later work, specifically the incessant and monumental achievement of the Faerie Queene, never approaches.
This sense of relelvance may seem to disappear to the extent that you accept Percy W. Long's persuasive demonstration (PMLA vol 31 no 4, 1916), that Februarie, Iulye and September are all about bishops (Spenser was secretary to the Bishop of Rochester in 1578, whatever services that post might entail!). According to Long, Morrell represents Aylmer, Bishop of London in 1579 (and Grindal's successor). But when you read the poems, these local references don't seem to exhaust them, it's almost like Spenser used his bishops as building blocks.
Chaucer and his followers permitted rhyme between two identical phonemes, but only if they meant different things, which in this case is what the varying orthography also seems to imply. But what distinction in meaning is intended here? It is saints who dwelled, and it is saints who died. The distinction I suggest is doctrinal; Spenser is staking out a Puritan reinvention of traditional piety. One way or another, he was determined to reverence those hills.⁸