Poetic Background
[In the following excerpt from a study of Spenser's background and work, Shire introduces the literary and poetic context for Spenser's writing.']
A new poetry for Elizabeth's England
Certain regions of belief and attitude in Elizabethan times have been explored because they differed from ours today and acquaintance with them would help us to draw near to Spenser's poetry. We are now confronted with that poetryCagain different in so many ways from ours today. We must find out how it works. We need to discern what the poet believed himself to be doing, what he aimed to achieve and by what means, and the reasons why he did so. In this project two things are difficult. First, there are voices enough from the sixteenth century of poet and of theorist, foreign or native, to inform us on those matters, but the terms they use are unfamiliar coinage to our minds or, worse, they are oldfashioned and misleading as to the values they represent. Then there are certain important issues wherein poet and writer about poetry were at that time so completely agreed that these issues are not mentioned, far less debated.
The well-known verses quoted above come from Duke Theseus, a notable sceptic as to poetry or enchantment; but his words show what was taken for granted about the process of imaginative composition, though he speaks to discountenance it. A poet was inspired: his vision could be seen as a coming and going between earth and heaven, whence proceeded forms that shaped and ordered his purpose and matter, thus rendering the 'ideal' accessible in earthly terms. Certainly a general agreement existed on the nature of poetry and the special status of the poet. It was the fruit of more than a century of discussion and experiment, development and achievement, since the revival of learning had brought the poetry and philosophy of antiquity powerfully into the current of new thought and writing in western Europe, and since poetry in 'the sweet now style' had arisen in Italy, blossomed with Petrarch and spread to France with the work of du Bellay and Ronsard, to take firm root in England with the writing of Philip Sidney. At this point Spenser enters the story.
With this new poetry in the Renaissance style 'the theory and practice …. form such a coherent unity that any poem written in what is called the Italianate tradition is a concrete embodiment of the theory that lies behind it, and even a slight working knowledge of this can add unsuspected dimensions to the poetry'. To begin then with the theory, and in the simplest terms possible. The view of the universe and of the nature of reality in which a poet was operating was still the hierarchical cosmos, in which the universal and the particular were bound together in a complex system of correspondences. If earth is a microcosmos, everything on earth is an earthly, finite, imperfect, perishable version of its ideal, perfect archetype existing in heaven. If the archetype is the true, the real, the ideal, then man should concern himself with that rather than with the imperfect manifestations he is in contact with in his everyday life. For if he comes to understand the real, the essential, he will understand fully and evaluate justly the imperfect manifestations of 'actual' experience.
A poet is a 'seer'—one who perceives the true, the real; his aim in his poetry is to express what he has perceived and convey it to those who hear or read his poems. The experience of hearing or reading the poems means for the receiver access to the true, the real, via the poet's vision—a process that brings the reader enlightenment. Poetry is didactic, not in the sense of finger-wagging precept but in that the poem well understood widens and deepens human experience. The effect to which contemporary readers of Spenser's poetry testify is, again and again, a 'fulness of joy', 'As who therein can ever joy their fill', or
but let one dwell upon them [the works] and he shall feel a strange fullness and roundness in all he saith…. The most generous wines tickle the palate least but they are no sooner in the stomach but by their warmth and strength there, they discover what they are.
In the reading of poetry the enlarging of scope in perception and knowledge, the enriching of consciousness brings joy, or pleasure or delight. All three words are used and are sometimes interchangeable. When 'pleasure' is used, the argument recognizes the sensuous appeal of the verse medium—delectable pictures, rhythm, harmony proportion, sweet sound—and the fact that such appeal may make a moral lesson palatable, as with a 'medicine of cherries'. But 'delight' was intended also to convey that moment of excitement and achievement with which one nowadays exclaims 'I see'. It registers the moment of shared vision, of discovery of correspondence revealed by the poet, of access to the 'truth', of contact with the real.
That poetry should give 'profit and delight' was confirmed in classical theory; Horace had said it in his Art of Poetry. When the use of poetry to man was called in question this was apt to be the reply. And so the function of poetry came to be defined as the discovery of truth (uncovering or revealing of the real, the ideal) and the giving of profit and delight. The function of poetry was extended farther along the line of discovery and imparting of truth to an inculcating of fresh insights spiritual, moral or (as we should say) psychological. Poetry had for centuries been regarded as a kind of rhetoric, belonging, that is, to the art of persuasion. Poetry in discovering the true, the real, should display virtues in their true brave colours and expose vices in their essential hatefulness, and so win men to love virtue and wish to cleave to it and hate, avoid and cast out vice. Poetry presented a picture of true kingship or heroism or loyalty, or the very essence of envy or malice; but it could go farther. By bodying forth the virtue to be attained only with effort, the easy and alluring vice, the evil seeming good, the moral dilemma, it could so involve the receiving mind that a mental act of choice and of will took place. 'Poetry' says George Puttenham 'invegleth the judgement of man, and carrieth his opinion this way and that' (The Arte of English Poesie, I, iv, p. 8). For instance, as we follow with our reason the argument between Despair and Redcrosse (see pp. 146-9) we, not being weary and spent as the Knight is, perceive the dangerous traps and will him to avoid them and to prevail. We have undergone the moral discipline of resisting despair through participating in the knight's adventure, reading the allegory from the inside.
A poet is also a maker. He was called so in earlier English and the Greek word poesis means 'making'. As he belongs to the microcosm and was himself created in God's image, his act of making is a repetition in little, an imitation, of God's great act of creation. It follows that what he makes will of necessity be created on the model of the ordered universe: of its very nature it should have order, harmony, proportion, hierarchy. Every aspect of it should be in keeping. Every contributory part of it should be 'in place', as everything has its appointed place in a sacral universe. Every part should have a vital relationship with other parts and with the whole. A poem thus conceived and executed had decorum. A poet observed decorum when he manifested the sense of what belongs to what, of what is fitting in context.
Decorum as a concept operates over the whole range of poetic theory and practice. As hierarchy was manifest in the cosmos and manifest in the pattern of man's living on earth from monarch downwards rank on rank, there belonged to each level a mode of converse that conveyed the part they played in the whole: royal, heroic, courtly, scholarly …. and so down to rustic and simple. So in poetry a treating of kings or heroes should be done in high and splendid terms, courtly matters should be couched in the speech of courts, and at the other end of the scale country matters and rustic manners should use simple, rough words and even rustic, regional turns of speech. The writing of a poem, then, is not only a matter of perceiving a vista of truth, reality, the ideal, and of communicating the perception but also of rendering it in the form, style and language that will best express it and present it to best advantage. (Clothes must fit perfectly and should be chosen to meet the occasion.) Hierarchy and rank in the universe made it natural that there should be different ranks in creative writing. Here the example of classical literature helped with its developed system of 'kinds'. Epic and tragedy are noble—to them a high style belongs. Pastoral treats of country matters and allows a satiric vein, so its style is low, simple and rough; being simple it was held to be well suited for a poet's first flight. A 'mean' or middle style of writing best suits the elegiac complaint and many varieties of poetry of love.
'Decorum' in large means literary 'kind' chosen according to the poet's purpose and subject-matter. In small it governs the choice of single words in their sentence or line of verse. An adjective is chosen not primarily in order to extend by an individual added detail the scope of the noun it qualifies; far less is it chosen to evince the author's powers of observation; it belongs to the whole stanza, indeed to the whole poem. For instance in Prothalamion stanza 3…. the waters are bidden not to wet the silken feathers' of the two swans who are most fair and white and pure. 'Silken' is precise and vivid as conveying delicacy and vulnerable finery and as reflecting on plumage of swans; but it is also there as the first hint of the major metaphor of the poem, for the swans will later be revealed as human brides on their way by river-barge to their betrothal ceremony. The silk belongs to the bridal gowns to come. Epithets that did not 'work' in this energetic way were condemned by Ronsard as lazy, oisifs.
Decorum is a much-embracing virtue of Spenser's poetry. In The Shepheardes Calender the new poet is praised in the introductory Epistle for
his complaints of love so lovely, his discourses of pleasure so pleasantly, his pastorall rudenesse, his moral wisenesse, his dewe observing of Decorum everywhere, in personages, in seasons, in matter, in speach, and generally in al seemely simplicitie of handeling his matter and framing his words.
As to 'framing his words' we have seen it in the example of 'silken' above. The word is in place. Being in place and energetically contributing to the whole, it helps bind part to part and part to whole. So decorum is a dynamic principle in making a poem. And for the reader the perception of decorum at work is an experience both artistic and moral. 'What is in place' for renaissance poetry will not separate from the greater issue in the ordered universe—where 'nothing is there by chance'.
Imitation of Nature
From the idea of poet as maker, we recall, derived the concept of imaginative composition fashioned on the model of the created universe. Such a process of creative composition went by the name of imitation of nature. Nature is divinely ordered, not formless but the source of form. The famous lines from Shakespeare given above express this process. The poet, inspired with vision from heaven, casts his eye up to heaven for form with which to express it; 'things unknown' in Theseus' phrase, are the ideal, the real, the true; the poet's pen then embodies them in earthly terms. The 'shaping spirit of imagination' derives from celestial pattern the order, harmony and proportion with which it endows its artefact, the poem.
How did an 'imitation of nature' show itself as successfully achieved, in a poem? In a total coherence. Metaphor, simile or personification that enters the poem must contribute to its value as an artistic construction; those of the 'April ode'….will serve as example. If number or set is introduced in any way into the substance or ordering of the poem it will be meaningful. (The concept of 'completeness' could not enter into a poem through a treatment of three of the four elements). In so contributing to the whole of the poem either in content or in form, imagery, set or number take part in conveying the 'truth', which is the poem's purpose.
The use of poetic imagery, then, is not primarily decorative, though it may make for beauty, variety and enrichment of the whole effect. (Nor is it there because revelatory of the personal experience or subconscious trains of association in the mind of the poet.) But it is chosen and used of set purpose to direct the receiving mind to the value of what is being expressed. Again and again in The Faerie Queene an epithet, a simile or metaphor delivers the tacit message 'Think what values are entailed!' The use of the epithet 'golden' in Book II, in the name of Guyon's horse Brigador (Bridle of Gold) and in many other places, directs the mind to the golden mean of temperance, a vital expression of the Book's Legend. The character in an adventure may be oblivious for the moment, or plain mistaken, as to what he is confronted with; but the reader can receive the poet's message if he is 'wary and wise'. The mythological simile that ends the description of Belphoebe/Gloriana is a good example of energetic poetic imagery: it 'dilates' the meaning, carrying it into new regions, enriching by the parallel and at the same time aiding the precise delineation of the poet's intention.
'Imitation of the model' had a further meaning, deriving from the first somewhat in this fashion: if poetry is an imitation of nature and excellent poets of antiquity had imitated nature excellently well, poets of the present age could learn how it was done from study of their poems. Such examples in Latin or Greek became intermediary models, as it were. Examples of excellence in description, in debate, in depiction of character through speech, in celebration of the ruler were studied, translated, analysed, discussed and reproduced in modern languages and used as models in fresh composition. The Gloss in The Shepheardes Calender draws attention to many points where the new poet has learned from makers of classical antiquity, or from earlier French or English poetry. The scale of the model used ranges from a turn of phrase, a figure of rhetoric, an inset fable or song, to the whole eclogue for 'September' as imitated from Mantuan and 'December' from Marot. If we remember that the aim of such imitation was to 'learn how to do it well' and the outcome was an enormous widening and enriching of the scope of English poetry, we will not misjudge it. The mind receiving the poetry, if not lettered in Latin, French or Greek, enjoyed what it otherwise would not have reached: both the matter and something of the manner. The reader who knew the original had a pleasure like that of one listening to variations on a theme in music, the delighted recognition of points made in the implied parallel.
A poet learned his art through imitation of a model. Once master of his craft he could by a similar gesture pit his skill against that of a fellow poet in literary contest, as shepherd poets did in a singing match. Spenser calls this 'overgoing'. He set out to 'overgo' Ariosto in certain parts of The Faerie Queene—indeed in the passage studied from Book II in the critical analyses…. He overgoes the French poet Marot in the lament for Dido, 'some mayden of greate bloud' in The Shepheardes Calender. Marot had written an elegy in pastoral mode for the Queen Mother of France, recently dead: 'De Madame Loyse de Savoye, mère du Roy'. In a single-standing eclogue of two shepherds Colin and Thenot, Colin the poet is requested to sing a mourning song in honour of the royal lady; he complies in a piece of 'ten times ten verses' (200 lines) and is then thanked and praised. The verse pattern is uniform throughout, continuous quatrains interlinked by rhyme, abab, bcbc and so on. Colin expresses the sense of loss felt for the well-loved royal lady and nature mourns in sympathy assuming mourning colours. Then the mood changes and he bids his verses cease to plain, for she is in the Elysian fields of the blessed. It is a beautiful and elegant poem in a mode that was perhaps 'old-fashioned' to poets of Spenser's day.
Spenser takes the theme, the persons of the shepherds and the verse form, and devises afresh an elegy for the unknown 'Dido'. He 'dilates' the theme by making it part of a greater coherence, his Calender. It now belongs to the season of dying in nature, to November. The lament is now in place in cosmic rhythm, and under the deadly archer Sagittarius, as the wood-cut shows. He distinguishes the lament from the speeches of Thenot and Colin by giving it a distinctive stanza. The stanza has a refrain element that marks by a change in its wording the change in mood from sorrow to joy: 'O heavie herse … O carefull verse' becomes 'O happy herse … O ioyfull verse'. The meaning is now articulate in the form. The whole is well trussed up togetherCin the phrase of the 'Epistle' that precedes The Calender. And form and meaning are at one in the reiterated refrain word 'herse'.
This is an excellent example of Spenser's 'wittinesse in devising, his pithinesse in uttering', again to quote the Epistle. This Renaissance pun is worth expounding. A modern reader knows 'hearse' and 'rehearse' but probably does not connect them; in fact 'rehearsal' probably sounds as if it were connected with hearing, 'a hearing of music in practice'. But all these words are in fact derived from the French word for harrow: to rehearse is to go over the ground again in preparation. From 'herse' as harrow the word came to designate the funeral bier which it resembled, and so to mean 'funeral ceremony' in Spenser's day. For him too the sound of the word embraced 'hearing' as well as recital. All these senses are made to reverberate in his poem as 'herse' echoes 'verse' throughout the elegy, voicing the quick of the poem's meaning.
Spenser's ideas on the poet and on poetry were to have been expounded in his 'The English Poet', a work mentioned in The Calender as ready for print, but never published. Into the October Eclogue, however, he has poured as much as he could of his beliefs and intuition on this matter, his learning and his faith in his vocation: why the poet should be honoured by great men, the poet as seer and maker wielding extraordinary powers, the poet's inspiration, and his art bordering on that of magic.
The theme of poetry and inspiration belongs to October, month of the wine harvest in the old tradition of 'works and days', for 'Bacchus fruite is frend to Phoebus wise'. It belongs under Scorpio, sign of intellect and genius. The woodcut shows in the background a 'Florentine academy' with gentlemen grouped in discussion. From them advances into the shepherd scene a pastoral poet, bearing crook and pan-pipes and crowned with leaves—Bacchus' ivy or laurel for acclaim? The new Renaissance poetry is honoured in The Calender, its potentialities explored, its nature exemplified and expounded; and it is portrayed enjoying its due place in the cosmic scheme.
Pastoral and allegory
Allegory is metaphor sustained and explored. In pastoral the metaphor is of the shepherd living in a shepherd-land, who is everyman in his realm and in Christendom. By the same token in Spenser's heroic poem the metaphor is of the knight of chivalric virtue who is 'on his way' of endeavour in Faerieland, committed to be champion of a virtue and ready to challenge powers that oppose it, whether in the world or within himself.
In his pastoral poetry—The Calender, Colin Clout or Book VI of The Faerie Queene—Spenser shows that he is deeply versed in the long tradition of poetic pastoral, from the Greeks through Vergil and Mantuan to Skelton or Marot. The nature of that pastoral tradition and Spenser's contribution to it has been wisely expounded by Professor Kermode in his volume English Pastoral Poetry. It will serve our purpose here rather to show how Spenser went to the root of the shepherd metaphor as understood by plain people and how he then did something completely new in making his first pastoral a Calender of shepherds.
The metaphor of the shepherd in earlier pastoral had established a relation of shepherd-land to actual life: action there was 'ideal' in that it was human action reduced to simpler terms and 'removed' from more sophisticated civilization, which nonetheless it cast light on. In that 'ideal' landscape could be presented the essentials of the human lot.
In poetic pastoral certain patterns of activity, certain roles and themes, had become favourites: the good shepherd and the bad, the young and the old, at work with their flocks, the singing and piping of the shepherd in his hours of pastime and his simple joys and sorrows in love, a country commonwealth at peace with praise of the ruler. The relationship of shepherd-land to sophisticated society was rendered specifically in one of the themes: the shepherd's journey, from countryside to town and back again, with a telling of what he had learned.
The metaphor of the pastoral shepherd was familiar to every schoolboy who learned Latin, as the eclogues of Mantuan, Latin poet of fifteenth-century Italy, were an elementary textbook in common use. These were imitations of Vergil's eclogues and they made, more pronouncedly that he had done, satiric comment on contemporary society. In Tudor England classical eclogues had been printed in translation and eclogues had been composed in English in imitation, for instance by Barclay. 'Eclogues' means 'select pieces' and such eclogues were separate poems, 'episodes of shepherd life' rendered in dialogue, sometimes with narrative introduction and conclusion, presented alone or in a series.
Pastoral was regarded as the easiest and least ambitious of poetic kinds, 'in which a young poet could fittingly take his first flight'. The style was simple, 'low', even harsh where satire had hard things to say. Spenser in his first poetic endeavour aptly chose pastoral. But he took the pastoral of poetic tradition into a region it had not known. His pastoral work was to be Renaissance poetry in its fullest power. First, as to 'the part and the whole'. Spenser says in his preface that 'eclogues' does not mean 'select pieces'; the Greek word means 'goat-songs'. His book of verses will be no miscellany. His pastoral volume is a whole, a cycle not a series, with each part related to each other part in parallel and contrast, the sequence providing a pleasing variety of pieces moral, recreative or satirical; what is more, each single eclogue is now related to each other and to the whole through cosmic perspective.
Number comes into it. Vergil's eclogues had been ten, a good round number such as Romans liked. Spenser makes his eclogues twelve, 'proportionable to the twelve moneths', as his title announces. He has taken the pastoral's programme of scenes in shepherd-land that showed man's works and pastimes at various seasons and has related that work and pastime to the great medieval scheme of 'the labours of the months'. The activity or topic of each eclogue is related to its seasonable time in the solar cycle of the year, the course of the months in character under their zodiac signs, and there is tacit reference to the year of the Church. Thus poetic 'truth', in the sense of how any phenomenon belonged to the sacral universe, is perceived, and imitation of nature is achieved for pastoral in a new way. In this new dimension decorum is observed throughout, both in form and content.
Secondly, Spenser enriched and extended the pastoral genre by combining it with another. (Combinatico was a skill of the rhetorician.) He laid Vergil's eclogues beside another very different book, but one also treating of the shepherd as everyman. This was 'an old book', familiar to men of Renaissance Europe in print in many languages, in English The Kalendar and compost of Shepherds, Le compost et kalendrier des bons bergiers. It was as we saw, a handbook for everyman 'the shepherd', bringing together all he needed to know for his physical moral and spiritual wellbeing. It gave a régime of diet for the season, a tree of the virtues and vices (with penalties), the main sacraments and prayers of the Church; it taught him to find his way by the stars and showed in diagrams how his body was constituted and conditioned by celestial powers of planet or zodiac sign. It was illustrated by many woodcuts which included pages giving the character of each month, its labours or pastimes, its zodiac sign and its religious festivals….
Thirdly, Spenser, learning from earlier theological writing in French on the 'shepherd' theme, now explored the metaphor of the shepherd in terms of the sacral universe. (In a way he was providing a Christian gloss for Vergil's pastoral, as Renaissance scholars did for a classical text.) The shepherd of traditional pastoral poetry was everyman; but scripture showed 'the shepherd' as a far richer metaphor. The shepherd was Christ himself in his own words of parable, the good shepherd, keeper of the Christian flock. His antetype in the Old Testament was Abel, a good shepherd as Spenser points outCand his forerunner was David, shepherd-boy who became king, ancestor on earth of Christ, singer of 'the Psalms'. God in the twenty-third psalm led the human soul as a shepherd by quiet waters, as is seen in the picture for the December eclogue. Shepherd as episcopus was the bishop of the Christian Church, who carried a crook as emblem of his office. At several points the two uses of the metaphor confirmed one another. The pastoral shepherd sang of love, David of love of God. By thinking in parallel God could be figured as Pan, God of shepherds all. As the head of the Christian Church on earth was, in England since Henry VIII's reign, the monarch, Eliza is Queen of shepherds all; her pastoral genealogy shows her as daughter of Pan and Syrinx.
Exploration of the metaphor of the shepherd enriched the character of shepherd-land. The shepherd's journey in 'September' shows an eclogue of Mantuan done in reverse; Diggon Davie has journeyed not to the city or court but to a wilder land far in the west where 'all is of misery' and his curious dialect, echoing Celtic-English, brings news which can only be from Ireland. The May eclogue in a fable extends the view to Scotland—the court a goat-pen and the kid the boy king seduced by a wily Catholic. Universals of pastoral are linked by hint or name-conceit to particular living instances. The friend is Hobbinol/Harvey, critic of the poet-shepherd's singing. Two bishop-shepherds suggest the Bishop of Rochester (Roffy) and Grindal (Algrind). And Spenser (of the Merchant Taylors' School) is, aptly, Colin Clout: 'Colin' had been the French poet Marot's pastoral name for himself and Colin Clout was that of the English poet Skelton under King Henry VIII. (Spenser's devising draws all these into one name-idea.) Historical pertinence gave particular examples of the general 'truth', as it was to do in The Faerie Queene. The delight of the reader in following the poet's invention was spiced with an element of 'delicious you-know-who'. The poet-shepherd emerges as chief among shepherd rôles. And Colin Clout we shall hear sing again in a later pastoral eclogue, play again in the apt Book of The Faerie Queene.
Spenser's reader, opening the pages of this work by an unknown poet, would see eclogues like Vergil's but with a title and pictures that strongly recalled those of the familiar handbook (indeed the month pictures were designed, like those in that volume, on the pattern of a Book of Hours). His imagination was challenged to relate the metaphor of the shepherd in one and in the other, to discern wherein lay the aptness of each woodcut to its eclogue's meaning. As in a Book of Hours the scene might be located by a significant building in the background. And the matter and manner of the shepherds' discourse would be deepened by its timing in season on earth and in the heavens.
For instance January, cold and wet under Aquarius the Water-carrier, shows the shepherd Colin Clout in a wintry landscape tending a dejected flock by a sheep-cote. On the horizon is a strange group of buildingsCthe Coliseum for Rome, the bridge at Avignon for Petrarch, the twin towers of Rochester Cathedral, and a church; thus Colin is 'placed' as young Spenser, secretary at Rochester, pastoral poet of Christendom in a poetic tradition of Vergil, Mantuan and Petrarch. In the foreground lie his shepherd's bagpipes, broken. Colin's discourse is a plaint of love's pain and dejection in tune with the barren wintry season with its icy tears; unloved by Rosalind he has broken his pipe. And the 'broken pipe' glances by metaphor at the Circumcision, the feast of the Christian year with which January opens, when Christ suffered his first pain on earth for love of mankind….The eclogues for April and May are treated in the critical analysis of the 'April ode'.
The book was, moreover, a calendar that took the particular year 1579 and reflected life in the realm and Christendom in that year, showing issues and personalities of import in it. The year was the twenty-first of Elizabeth's reign, in number a 'turning-point' of life, as Petrarch expounded. The calendar was itself a focus of interest and anxiety at the time, as we have seen. Spenser made this one of poetry, the particular thus achieving universality. He endowed this year of his sovereign's reign with 'durance perpetual'.
Loe I have made a Calender for every yeare
That steele in strength and time in durance shall outweare
And if I marked well the starres revolution
It shall continewe till the world's dissolution.
In the great gesture of Renaissance creative writing, poetry should be seen to conquer time, in terms of time's own instrument. It was a project brilliant in conception and of dazzling ambition. Spenser the poet by it established himself as an accomplished Renaissance poet in English; but as a young man green in judgment he o'erreached himself in vaulting ambition, and 'fell on the other'. The Calender indeed bodied forth the year 1579 in its essence, showing its place in the pattern of history unfolding; but the poet as 'seer' had seen more and spoken more 'truly' than certain great ones could tolerate.
One final feature of The Shepheardes Calender was remarkable. Each Eclogue had a Gloss, as scholarly texts did. Here unusual or difficult words were explained, figures of rhetoric noted, classical references explained and any use of literary 'model' noted. That is to say the new poetic work was presented as for serious study. But a teasing note can be detected here and there. The maker of the Gloss is one 'E. K.', who may be Spenser's friend Edward Kirke but is as likely to stand for Edmundus Kalendarius—Spenser the Calender-maker. This is a clever young man's production. For instance some of the woodcuts feature bird flight and in the Gloss augury by bird flight is recommended as worth a young man's study! No one has cracked the code here, but something momentous in the events of the year 1579 may be registered. The Renaissance poet's delight in the arcane, that was to lead Spenser to use Egyptian symbol in Britomart's dream in his heroic poem, is already here. In his first work Spenser's poetry may indeed be 'perceived of the leaste, understoode of the mooste, but judged only by the learned'.
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1590: The Poem to the Poem
In liuing colours and right hew: The Queen of Spenser's Central Books