English 205 Study Guide |
Introduction to Edmund Spenser, pp. 614–616
“Epithalamion”, pp. 868–878
Edmund Spenser's writing is so beautiful, and so filled with idealized descriptions of beauty, that one can forget what makes artistic beauty both a goal and a necessity for Spenser the artist and his readers. As we saw with Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, art is a means by which people can gain perspective on hard times and face them as squarely and directly as they can. In the case of English Renaissance culture, especially as related to the Tudor court, anxiety and desperate hope underwrite the great brilliance and beauty of art. Wyatt, a nobleman, was in extreme danger precisely because he was a nobleman. Spenser, on the other hand, was from the urban middle class, and his attempts to rise in the world depended upon the whims and good will of the noble persons upon whom he depended. This led him to good fortune, which is reflected in his deep outpourings of affection for English aristocratic ideals, but also led him to ruin when his prize for serving the nobility—an estate stolen from a native Irish nobleman in Munster, Ireland—turned into a target for native Irish rage.
In this turbulent life, which generally allowed neither complacency nor total despair, Spenser invested in hope. The hope to become England's greatest lyric poet, which placed him in the noble lineage of Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, is widely known. What we will touch on here, though, in order to understand Spenser's dense and gorgeous wedding poem "Epithalamion," is Spenser's hope for an escape to nature, civilized by marriage and family, in a hostile world.
If you pay close attention to the Introduction to Spenser and take a look at the date of composition at the end of "Epithalamion," you will see that only three years intervened between this great love poem to the woman who would be his second wife—with its explicit sexual desire, desire to father children by her, and hope for domestic bliss—and Spenser's forced departure from Ireland, when the enraged and rebellious Irish burned Spenser's house to the ground and also burned his newborn child to death. When Spenser wrote "Epithalamion," he knew full well the shaky ground on which the hope of the poem is based. At the same time, hope was all he had.
In "Epithalamion," one can see Spenser dovetailing natural cycles (morning, noon, and night) and natural imagery (especially water) with the Greek god of marriage, Hymen, who leads the wedding procession of the local bachelors and maids and reconciles civilized humanity with nature. By the end of the poem, then, when Spenser anticipates consummating his marriage and falling into blissful sleep with his wife in their marriage bed, he envisions a world in which political and social conflict and other external evils have dissolved for a moment into the sacred act of marriage, an escape from the dangers that surrounded the family he was trying to begin.
Spenser died four years after writing this poem, after having fled in grief with his wife to England. More than most poems, "Epithalamion" reveals both the transcendent power and the fragility of the hope that sustains us.
Reading Chaucer is hard enough; reading a modern writer who is trying to sound like Chaucer can be downright annoying, and that is exactly what Spenser was trying to do on one level. From this point on, though, sounding out words will clarify what spelling may not (you will also find this technique useful with Milton's Paradise Lost). If you read the stanzas out loud, pausing occasionally to check out footnotes or margin notes for words that simply stump you, you will likely find this poem quite easy to read. What I will provide here is not a guide to making sense of the words, but a quick key to making sense of the poem in general and its individual stanzas.
1. First, go through the poem quickly and write down definitions for the classical allusions to gods and semi-deities: the Muses; Hymen and Juno, deities of marriage and procreation; nymphs, semi-deities who tend to be associated with streams and wells; etc. Spenser put these things in because he was adapting a pagan wedding poem form and acknowledging the source. Writing this list will keep you from having to learn that stuff while you immerse yourself in the poem. (Once again, consider this a test run for Milton.)
2. Second, go through the poem again, sounding it out and savoring phrases that sound nice. Spenser is one of English literature's "tastiest" poets.
3. Third, go back for a serious reading of the poem by some understanding of the way the stanzas work. That is what I will describe now. Each stanza begins with a scenario (such as "Bring with you all the Nymphes that you can heare" [p. 869, line 37]) and concludes with a variant on the gorgeous refrain, "That all the woods may answer and [your, our, their] Eccho ring." Within each stanza is a discussion of the scenario in four parts: three sets of iambic pentameter lines followed by a shortened line and one concluding couplet made of an iambic pentameter line and the concluding hexameter line. The impression created is of an almost breathless outpouring of passion and anticipation, occasionally broken, always terminating in a philosophical reflection on how marriage is like an "Echco" of our voice cast into the world that affirms an accord between us and the world. (In the last "Eccho" line, the calling out is silenced as hope takes over [p. 878, line 426].)
4. Read the poem all the way through again with your prior knowledge intact, just enjoying it. In terms of the pure beauty of language, this reading and Shakespeare's As You Like It are the "ice cream" of the course.
1. Only one stanza deals explicitly with Spenser's estate in Ireland, and it is worth studying (pp. 869–870, lines 56–73). On a literal level, it asks the nymphs who guard and keep the lakes and wildlife of Spenser's estate to keep the lakes clear so that they may serve as mirrors for his beloved, to keep the wildlife away, and "To helpe to decke her and to help to sing, / That all the woods may answer and your Eccho ring" (p. 870, lines 72–73). Given Spenser's awareness of the deadly hostility directed his way by the native Irish, how might this stanza be read? What kind of protection and participation is he asking of the region's natural deities? Where do nature and politics intersect in this instance?
2. Beginning with a stanza that asks the wedding procession to disperse (p. 875, line 296), each of the major stanzas concludes not with the varying affirmative statement that has come before ("That all the woods may answere and our Eccho ring"), but with variants on a negative, or silencing, version of that line ("The woods no more us answer, nor our Eccho ring"). Despite the negative structure of this repeating and changing line, though, it communicates affirmative things. What is the meaning of this shift in the wind from a call-and-response with external message and a ceasing of that process? What is Spenser doing here?
Move on to William Shakespeare's As You Like It.