Satyr,” a paean to discontent, the best emotion one can feel in a corrupt age.

A Fig for Momus

By the time he wrote A Fig for Momus, Lodge seems to have adopted this harsher Juvenalian mode of satire. This series of poems opens with a satire of flatterers and hypocrites, and Lodge is at his best in the imaginary characters and situations he evokes. Meeting an innkeeper with “a silken night-cap on his hed,” the narrator is told that the man has had “An ague this two months.” The narrator comments sardonically that “I let him passe: and laught to heare his skuce:/ For I knew well, he had the poxe by Luce.” Lodge’s second satire—incorrectly labeled the third—urges parents to set good examples for their children. The piece owes a special debt to Juvenal’s Satire 14 on the same subject, and, if much of it seems simply moral preaching, the sheer number of vices that he catalogs keeps the poem moving. Perhaps Lodge’s fourth satire offers his most memorable and bitter character study: a miser, old and decrepit, but still concerned with amassing a greater fortune. The gruesomely realistic description of the man shows Lodge at his best. His fifth satire opens with a paraphrase of Juvenal’s Satire 10, although his debt to Horace is also apparent in his description of the contented life. If this satire is less bitter and harsh than his others, it is perhaps because of the influence of Horace. In addition to introducing Juvenal into English literature, Lodge made one other lasting contribution to English satire: He was the first to use the epigrammatic pentameter couplet.

If A Fig for Momus does not seem, as a whole, the bitter invective that the satiric elements might lead one to expect, it is because Lodge has interspersed other genres: eclogues and verse epistles. His eclogues offer little new to English literature—Alexander Barclay, Barnabe Googe, Edmund Spenser, and Michael Drayton had already worked in this form—and their general theme of human corruption is not developed in an interesting way. Furthermore, their poetry, compared to Spenser’s masterpiece in this genre, is noticeably deficient, Lodge’s verse epistles, however, were the first to appear in English and, although they are uneven, the best of them have a lightness and wit that are typical of Lodge. The epistle “To his Mistress A. L.” opens with a buildup in the first two lines that the following ones humorously deflate: “In that same month wherein the spring begins,/ And on that day when Phoebe left the twinnes/ (Which was on Saturday, the Twelfth of March)/ Your servant brought a letter seal’d with starch.” The letter turns out to be a request for information on how to lose weight, and the epistle cites various learned authorities on the subject, concluding that it is better to be “fat, slicke, faire” than “leane, lancke, spare.” The epistle titled “In praise of his Mistris dogge” opens wittily enough with a request that his mistress “for a night . . . grant me Pretties place,” and then proceeds to a canine history, ending with a pun: “Thus for your dog, my doggerell rime hath runne.”

Scillaes Metamorphosis

If Lodge introduced the verse epistle into English, he was also one of the first to write Ovidian narrative, a literary type that would later appear in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe (1595), and John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires (1598). Ovid had, of course, been known before Lodge: Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphosis (1567) was a standard Elizabethan treatment of the Roman poet. Yet Golding allegorizes Ovid to make his eroticism acceptable; Lodge is far from finding any allegory in his source.

Scillaes Metamorphosis is noteworthy for its elaborate images and conceits: Lodge has taken Ovid’s 143 lines and expanded them to nearly 800. To the original story of Glaucus’s love for the disdainful Scilla, Lodge adds an opening frame story in which the narrator, also a rejected lover, walks along the shore “Weeping my wants, and wailing scant reliefe.” Finally, he meets Glaucus, the sea god, and hears his story. As Glaucus recounts Scilla’s disdain to a group of nymphs, Venus appears with Cupid. Cupid cures Glaucus’s lovesickness with an arrow and then shoots Scilla, who immediately falls in love with Glaucus, who now rejects her. Knowing her case to be hopeless, Scilla finally curses all men, whereupon she is beset by the personifications Furie, Rage, Wan-hope, Dispair, and Woe, who transform her into a flinty isle.

If one could sum up Lodge’s handling of Ovid in one word, it would be “embroidery.” Whenever Lodge can stop for a lengthy and sensuous description, he does. Some of these are very successful, such as the description of Venus after she has found the wounded Adonis: It ends with Lodge’s touching lines “How on his senseless corpes she lay a crying,/ As if the boy were then but new a dying.” The story of Venus and Adonis itself shows Lodge’s leisurely narrative pace, since it is interpolated in the main story of Glaucus. Glaucus’s description of Scilla is also leisurely and sensuous. Ovid simply says that she was sine vestibus when Glaucus saw her; Lodge’s Glaucus minutely recounts her physical beauty, dwelling on her hair, cheeks, nose, lips, neck, breasts, and arms.

The flaws in Lodge’s poem—and it is by no means of uniform quality—have to do in part with this massing of description and detail. Lodge does not seem to have any awareness that his poem cannot sustain the same high pitch stanza after stanza: Glaucus’s laments, for example, all begin to sound alike. Lodge has partially dealt with this problem in the frame story at the beginning of the poem, the very place where the reader is unlikely to need a rest from the high pitch of the poem. Nevertheless, Lodge does offer an interesting double perspective on Glaucus that the rest of the poem might have done well to develop. After the narrator spends four stanzas crying and groaning over an unrequited love, Glaucus appears and berates the narrator’s love-sickness in stanzas that almost bristle with moral advice. After counseling the narrator, however, Glaucus falls into exactly the same error and even faints while describing his own hopeless love. This humorous contradiction between Glaucus’s words and actions lends an ironic perspective to the story that the rest of the poem does not explore. Indeed, the personifications from medieval allegory who transform Scilla seem totally out of place in Lodge’s poem, as if he had not really decided what the dominant tone of Ovidian narrative should be.

His verse form is also ill-chosen, although he does the best he can with it. Composed of stanzas consisting of a quatrain (abab) and a couplet (cc), the poem has difficulty moving forward: The couplets are always stopping the flow of action. In one sense this hardly matters, since Lodge is more concerned with leisurely description than with fast-paced narrative action. The poem, nevertheless, is a narrative, however leisurely, and the recurring couplets do present a problem. Lodge almost seems to feel that this is so and usually manages to begin a new clause as the couplet begins, avoiding at least the awkwardness of the self-contained couplet having to continue the lines before it.

Hardly any of Lodge’s long poems are unqualified successes, although they all have striking passages and show much facility of versification. That he was an experimenter is evident in the number of new poetic forms he introduced into English; experimenters cannot always produce perfect products. Nevertheless, music and lightness of tone mark many of Lodge’s best works and make him a considerable figure in the development of Renaissance poetry.