The Columbia History of British Poetry (50 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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terms of the powers that move and govern it. In Books IVVI acts of valor in the world of romance are less securely consonant with the nature of things, and their significance becomes increasingly limited (e.g., to the political sphere in Book V) and problematic.
The Faerie Queene
sometimes seems to depend on rather simple ideas of heroism and allegory. We may wonder what to make of a poem that begins with a knight, clad in "the armor of a Christian man" ("Letter to Ralegh"), encountering a dragon identified as Error and slaying her when his companion Una (i.e., One, representing Truth) tells him to "add faith unto your force" (I.i.19). But the point of the episode is not simply to convey the moral platitude that with faith the true Christian overcomes error. Nor is the knight immune from defeat. Spenser's heroes, like Homer's Achilles and all serious epic heroes, are vulnerable to and must define themselves in terms of the forces they seek to dominate. When the Red Cross Knight hears Una's cry
                                        in great perplexitie,
His gall did grate for griefe and high disdaine,
And knitting all his force got one hand free,
Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine,
That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine.
                                                                              (I.i.19)
This is allegorical versefar from Spenser's most remarkable, but instructive for just that reasonbecause it makes the physical action, the monster's wrapping her tail around the knight, represent a moral and psychological experience. Just as the preceding stanza concluded by referring to "the man so wrapt in
Errours
endlesse traine," where the two meanings of "traine" (tail and "deceipt") make represented action and metaphoric meaning interpenetrate, so here "perplexitie" not only names a state of mind but engages the physical action by its root meaning (Latin
plexus
, interwoven, entangled). The psychology in these lines can be called heroic, because the threatening entanglement is not made simply to disappear, but is translated into coherent action"knitting all his force''by human powers that explicitly answer to the enemy monster's summoning of strength in the previous stanza: "Yet kindling rage, her selfe she gathered round." (We can thus see that Una is not a magical
dea ex machina
but, as is typical with allegorical characters, represents an element of the hero's being.) Hence, in the final lines, "with so great paine" refers to both the utmost effort the knight can
 
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summon and what he inflicts on his enemythat is, to both aspects of his "force." This kind of ambiguity is frequent, indeed ordinary, in Spenser's verse. Precisely for that reason it shows the strength of a style that can bring to life a commonplace like "spiritual struggle."
The sense of the hero's implication in the forces that threaten him underlies some of Spenser's most remarkable poetry. It is easy enough to see that Guyon must deal with Pyrochles, the embodiment of wrath, because anger was well recognized as an ambiguous motive, potentially destructive, but also to some extent necessary for effective action. More remarkable are passages that involve feelings at the opposite extreme from wrath. Pleasure and its settings provide some of the most distinctive poetry of
The Faerie Queene
. Spenser endowed English poetry with the rhetoric and rhythms of a passage like the following:
And fast beside, there trickled softly downe
A gentle streame, whose murmuring waue did play
Emongs the pumy stones, and made a sowne,
To lull him soft a sleepe, that by it lay.      (II.v.30)
For the Romantic poets, who were deeply influenced by Spenser, verse like this came from Fairyland itself, the realm of pure imagination. But for Spenser, it came from a more worldly sense of the problematics of human nature. The human center of the setting described by these lines is not a poet, but an arch-sensualist, spying on naked women:
He, like an Adder, lurking in the weeds,
His wandring thought in deepe desire does steepe,
And his fraile eye with spoyle of beautie feedes.
                                                                  (II.v.34)
With its image of steeping thought, the second line draws out the psychological dangers of the passivity induced by those trickling, murmuring streams, while in the next line, "spoyle of beauty" brings out the corruption of aggressive desires. The poisoning of the spirit suggested by the image of the adder (the proverbial "snake in the grass" brought brilliantly to moral life) is conveyed not by further imagery, but rather by the ambivalent "lurking" (is this creature waiting to strike or fearing to be discovered?) and by the unstable and displaced satisfactions suggested by the alliterated phrase ''his fraile eye . . . feedes."
 
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Despite what our discussion may have hitherto suggested, Spenser's allegorical representations are not confined to generalizing individual psychological experience. He is a master also of moral and spiritual debatethat is, of presenting plausible versions of human motives, values, and purposes that challenge ideas of heroic identity. The Red Cross Knight is almost seduced by Despair not only because of the famous lines evoking a desire for rest"Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please" (I.ix.40)but also because old man Despair is an expert debater ("The knight much wondred at his suddeine wit"), who almost persuades Red Cross that if he judges himself by his own knightly standards, a just God must condemn him. (The theological idea of despair is not the world weariness that was all the Romantic tradition saw in this episode, but the believer's losing his or her hope of salvation by forgetting that the God of Justice is also the God of Mercy.) In Book II the expert debater (another aged cave dweller) is Mammon, who tries to make Guyon acknowledge his massive wealth as ''the riches fit for an aduent'rous knight" (II.vii.10). But Guyon also has to deal with persuasions by the flirtatious Phaedria, who, in one of the wittiest passages in
The Faerie Queene
, sings a song of idleness that is based not on some obvious immorality, but on Christ's otherworldly recommendation to "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin" (Matthew 6:28).
Nor is moral confrontation in
The Faerie Queene
confined to episodes of explicit debate. In the climactic episode of Book III Britomart rescues Amoretthe virgin devoted to Venus, as her twin, Belphebe, is devoted to Dianafrom the palace of the evil Busyrane, in order to restore her to her husband, Scudamour. The underlying idea is to free human sexuality to fulfill itself in faithful lovewith Britomart's powers of penetrating the terrible wall of flame and staunchly enduring the sights of the palace being a heroic version of the fidelity the two lovers maintain to each other in their separateness and misery. In order to rescue Amoret, the Knight of Chastity must confront not arguments as such, but a series of tapestries and a masquelike procession that represent the power of Busyrane's lord Cupid and that challenge the knight (and the reader) to stand up against the ways in which they value sexual devotion.
The tapestries, in particular, contain some of Spenser's finest writing. They depict the pagan gods humbled by the power of love, but
 
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made grand, even glamorous, by their erotic suffering. Yeats (who edited an anthology of Spenser's poetry and wrote a fine essay to introduce it) certainly remembered the description of Leda and the Swan:
O wondrous skill, and sweet wit of the man,
That her in daffadillies sleeping made,
From scorching heat her daintie limbes to shade:
Whiles the proud Bird ruffing his fethers wyde,
And brushing his faire brest, did her inuade.
                                                             (III.xi.32)
Here the god retains his power, but other scenes are compelling, even when the god is humiliated. A powerful description of Neptune and his sea chariot, riding the sparkling waves, his horses snorting the briny waters, leads not to the god exerting his power over nature, but rather suffering an all-too-human experience, whose own power is thereby intimated:
The God himselfe did pensiue seeme and sad,
And hong adowne his head, as he did dreame:
For priuy loue his brest empierced had.
                                                         (III.xi.41)
Even dehumanizing metamorphoses retain their fascination and thus suggest the attractive powers of love. Neptune, in another scene, feeds on fodder as a steer, but then "like a winged horse he tooke his flight" and begets "faire
Pegasus
, that flitteth in the ayre" (III.xi.42). All these representations are grounded in imaginings of humiliation and dominance. At the climax of the Busyrane cantos, the tyrant Cupid, riding on a lion, undoes his own blindfold in order to view, with sadistic pleasure, the torment devised for Amoretopening her breast and displaying her heart, "quite through transfixed with a deadly dart" (III.xii.21). This torture is nothing less than the traditional emblem of being in love. This moment, one of those in which
The Faerie Queene
most deeply engages the problematics of its culture, reveals a fearsome possibility in being one of those whose hearts, as the poet says at the beginning of Britomart's adventures, are "buxom" and "prone'' to "imperious Love." This is to say that the "bitter smarts" of love are the signs and perils of being human, and they must be confronted and endured as Britomart does in undoing Busyrane's evil charm.

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