Week 06, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Hariot

Notes on Edmund Spenser.

Even Queen Elizabeth I is said to have complained that Spenser wrote in an anachronistic style. But it’s a splendidly anachronistic one, as the stately, elaborately structured “Epithalamion” or wedding song shows: 1 introductory stanza, 10 stanzas as pre-wedding unit (3-4-3 subunits), 2 Wedding Stanzas: the ceremony proper, 10 stanzas as post-wedding unit (3-4-3 subunits), 1 brief concluding stanza, for a total of 24. The poet first invokes the Muses to memorialize the wedding, tells them to awaken the nymphs who will attend the bride, and so forth. The bride appears, and the poet sets forth her virtues. A celebration follows and the poem shifts towards the evening and ceremonializes the consummation of the wedding. Finally a call for silence is made to the woods, and Diana is invoked (felicitous birth) and Juno (reproductive genius). The woods are continually urged to “answer” and “echo” to the poet’s utterance and do his bidding. Nature, the springtime, must bless the union just as the gods do and participate in the couple’s union. The woods shelter and amplify the poet’s words, picking them up and sending them back to him. Procreation is at base simply a necessity if society is to continue, but the poet dignifies it and renders it decorous, and he calls on nature to help him accomplish his task by harmonizing with his words.

Poets have always had a special regard for the natural world and its powers, of course, and have long intertwined them with the virtues of art. Ovid and Theocritus are sophisticated classical examples, but the impulse is at least as old as Homeric epic. When we invoke “nature,” we should be mindful that this concept hasn’t always meant the same thing to people as it generally does today. To us, in the age of global warming and endangered ecosystems, nature may seem fragile, something to be protected, even though it still has plenty of ways of showing us who’s really in charge. That attitude is fairly new, I should think, and doesn’t go back beyond the Industrial Revolution. In Spenser’s time, as in most other eras before the 20 th-21 st Centuries, the natural world had its delights but could also manifest itself as ferocious and pitiless: I doubt that people were able to forget for a moment that nature was both, as Shelley says in keeping with the Hindu pantheon, “destroyer and preserver” of human life. A great deal of poets’ energy might, therefore, go towards allying themselves with the more benign forces of nature and setting up their words as a hedge against its destructive powers. Ceremony—including the language arts—was important to people in Spenser’s time in a way that it’s hard for us to make contact with now, and this importance shows in a poem such as the “Epithalamion,” which aims to ward off the violence of nature and harness its positive energies, its beauty and fertility, for human good. Spenser’s speaker is more than an observer: he expresses his hopes, he describes, he memorializes, and he commands that certain actions be taken on his behalf and on the behalf of his bride-to-be. This poem amounts to what one of my former professors at Irvine calls “idealizing eroticism,” or spiritualizing what is otherwise basically “animal sexuality.” That’s what the entire courtly love system seems designed to do: it transforms potentially threatening impulses into something more or less controlled and positive, something useful (though not always tame, as we can see from the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Malory, and others) to the task of civilization.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Walter Ralegh.

917-18. In “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” the female speaker sees beyond the Shepherd’s pastoral annihilation of time—everything is subject to change and to the vicissitudes of time and opinion. She understands that his high words are situational. This poem winks at pastoral of Marlowe’s sort, and calls its idyllic bluff.

918-19. “What is Our Life?” This is a dark poem featuring the common metaphor that “all the world’s a stage.” The only thing we do “in earnest” is the one thing that we can’t really experience, in the common understanding of that term: we die once and for all.

918. “Ralegh to His Son.” Ralegh’s poem is more threatening and bitterer than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 to “the fair young man,” which begins “They that have power to hurt, and will do none…” (1070). Ralegh’s poem seems designed to frighten the addressee into behaving well and not, as in Shakespeare’s sonnet, to encourage sensitive introspection.

919-20. “The Lie.” There’s religious piety and privileging of soul over body to be found in Ralegh, but in this poem, the escape from mortal life is not an untroubled one. The speaker couldn’t act on his own advice during his life, so he passes it on to those who will survive him. Is the price of honesty death? On the whole, Ralegh’s poetry is more cynical and declarative than the experimental style of Sir Thomas Wyatt. In “The Lie,” Ralegh denounces the gap between what people should do in their various offices and what they actually do; the gap between what they say and what actually motivates their actions. At the heart of everything lies corrupt self-interestedness, the very opposite of charitable dealings with our fellow human beings. Things and activities are turned from their proper purposes.

921. “Farewell, False Love.” This poem professes a need to renounce “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” but of course (as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129), this is the hardest thing to do, particularly in the corrupted courtly setting of Ralegh’s experience. Ralegh always seems to understand the Petrarchan conventions (otherworldly, unattainable love objects, extreme passions, etc.) as posing and game-playing. There’s more bitterness in his love poetry than delight. The extremes lead to philosophical reflections on death and decay.

921-22. “Methought I Saw the Grave Where Laura Lay.” Ralegh was a friend and patron to Edmund Spenser, and he describes his epic dedicated to Queen Elizabeth as the summation of the Petrarchan and chivalric literary tradition.

922-23. “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk.” In this exchange between Nature and Love, Nature creates what Love has asked her to create, but this new being has “a heart of stone.” Then Time comes in and destroys what has been created. As usual, Ralegh credits nothing with permanence or comforting softness: the heart’s desires are set against cold, hard reality, and the latter is bound to win sooner or later. The medieval Christian strain of melancholy is very strong in Ralegh’s poetry: it’s as if he’s determined to invoke the strongest feelings only to tell us not to take them too seriously because, after all, nothing lasts.

923-26. Guiana. This is promotional literature similar to what we can find in Hariot. Ralegh describes Guiana as something like El Dorado, a new world where people can “live large,” as we would say, rather than be frustrated in Europe by the law of diminishing returns, where even a prodigious helping of ambition and courage has come to yield only the pittance Hamlet accords the men who fight for Fortinbras in Poland:

Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell…. (4.4.46-52)

Here in Guiana, men from the tired Old World can renew themselves in a land of endless promise of gain in any area of life we would care to mention: commercial, military, political, etc. Commerce takes center stage in Ralegh’s attempt to convince Elizabeth to support his colonial scheme.

Page-by-Page Notes on Thomas Hariot.

939. Hariot says in his Report on Virginia that the main goal is to instill “fear and love” in the native population. The tone is Machiavellian: inspiring love is good, but if that’s not attainable, fear will serve the purpose. The best combination would be love and fear. Hariot is brutally frank about the possibilities, and makes little attempt to dissemble about his goal of subjugating the natives.

940-41. Hariot points out that the natives of Roanoke Island are by no means lacking in ingenuity, which, he thinks, is promising because it may allow European settlers to “bring them to civility” and to the Christian religion. He describes Algonquins’ religion—they are polytheists who believe in an afterlife.

942-43. Hariot says that the European visitors’ technology convinced the natives that they were almost gods. Ominously, whenever the visitors left a town where they had not met with kind treatment, the natives began to die. This effect—no doubt the effect of something like smallpox—Hariot again suggests is promising in that the natives may soon be brought to love and obey.

On the whole, Hariot’s selection is clearly intended as what we might call promotional literature. His assumption is apparently that European ways are so obviously superior and so impressive to the native Algonquins as to make assimilation of them very likely. With hindsight, of course, we know things didn’t go so smoothly; the first few colonies set up on Roanoke did not fare well at all, and the subsequent history of European settlement in what would become “the Colonies” is anything but smooth or painless.