Complete Works of Edmund Spenser

by Edmund Spenser

  . . . vpon the highest hights

  Of Arlo-hill (Who knowes not Arlo-hill?)

  That is the highest head (in all mens sights)

  Of my old father Mole, whom Shepheards quill

  Renowmed hath with hymnes fit for a rurall skill.

  His poem called Colin Clouts Come Home Again, written in 1591, and dedicated to Sir W. Raleigh ‘from my house at Kilcolman the 27 of December, 1591’ written therefore after a lengthy absence in England exhibits a full familiarity with the country round about Kilcolman. On the whole then we may suppose that his residence at Kilcolman began not later than 1588. It was to be roughly and and terribly ended ten years after.

  We may suppose he was living there in peace and quiet, not perhaps undisturbed by growing murmurs of discontent, by signs of unrepressed and irrepressible hostility towards his nation, by ill-concealed sympathies with the Spanish invaders amongst the native population, when the Armada came and went. The old castle in which he had lived had been one of the residences of the Earls of Desmond. It stood some two miles from Doneraile, on the north side of a lake which was fed by the river Awbeg or Mulla, as the poet christened it.

  ‘Two miles north-west of Doneraile,’ writes Charles Smith in his Natural and Civil History of the County and City of

  Cork, 1774, (i. 340, 341)’is Kilcoleman, a ruined castle of the Earls of Desmond, but more celebrated for being the residence of the immortal Spenser, when he composed his divine poem The Faerie Queene. The castle is now almost level with the ground, and was situated on the north side of a fine lake, in the midst of a vast plain, terminated to the east by the county of Waterford mountains; Bally- howra hills to the north, or, as Spenser terms them, the mountains of Mole, Nagle mountains to the south, and the mountains of Kerry to the west. It commanded a view of above half the breadth of Ireland; and must have been, when the adjacent uplands were wooded, a most pleasant and romantic situation; from whence, no doubt, Spenser drew several parts of the scenery of his poem.’

  Here, then, as in some cool sequestered vale of life, for some ten years, his visits to England excepted, lived Spenser still singing sweetly, still, as he might say, piping, with the woods answering him and his echo ringing. Sitting in the shade he would play many a ‘pleasant fit;’ he would sing

  Some hymne or morall laie,

  Or carol made to praise his loved lasse;

  he would see in the rivers that flowed around his tower beings who lived and loved, and would sing of their mutual passions. It must have sounded strangely to hear the notes of his sweet voice welling forth from his old ruinto hear music so subtle and refined issuing from that scarred and broken relic of past turbulencies

  The shepheard swaines that did about him play

  . . . with greedie listfull eares

  Did stand astonisht at his curious skill

  Like hartlesse deare, dismayed with thunders sound.

  He presents a picture such as would have delighted his own fancy, though perhaps the actual experience may not have been unalloyed with pain. It is a picture which in many ways resembles that presented by one of kindred type of genius, who has already been mentioned as of affinity with himby Wordsworth. Wordsworth too sang in a certain sense from the shade, far away from the vanity of courts, and the uproar of cities; sang ‘from a still place, remote from men;’ sang, like his own Highland girl, all alone with the ‘vale profound’ ‘overflowing with the sound;’ finding, too, objects of friendship and love in the forms of nature which surrounded his tranquil home.

  Of these two poets in their various lonelinesses one may perhaps quote those exquisite lines written by one of them of a somewhat differently caused isolation: each one of them too lacked

  Not friends for simple glee

  Nor yet for higher sympathy.

  To his side the fallow-deer

  Came and rested without fear;

  The eagle, lord of land and sea,

  Stooped down to pay him fealty.

  . . . . .

  He knew the rocks which angels haunt

  Upon the mountains visitant;

  He hath kenned them taking wing;

  And into caves where Faeries sing

  He hath entered; and been told

  By voices how men lived of old.

  Here now and then he was visited, it may be supposed, by old friends. Perhaps that distinguished son of the University of Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey, may for a while have been his guest; he is introduced under his pastoral name of Hobbinol, as present at the poet’s house on his return to Ireland. The most memorable of these visits was that already alluded to that paid to him in 1589 by Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom it will be remembered he had become acquainted some nine years before. Raleigh, too, had received a grant from the same huge forfeited estate, a fragment of which had been given to Spenser. The granting of these, and other shares of the Desmond estates, formed part of a policy then vigorously entertained by the English Governmentthe colonising of the so lately disordered and still restless districts of Southern Ireland. The recipients were termed ‘undertakers;’ it was one of their duties to repair the ravages inflicted during the recent tumults and bring the lands committed to them into some state of cultivation and order.

  The wars had been followed by a famine. ‘Even in the history of Ireland,’ writes a recent biographer of Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘there are not many scenes more full of horror that those which the historians of that period rapidly sketch when showing us the condition of almost the whole province of Munster in the year 1584, and the years immediately succeeding.’

  The claims of his duties as an ‘undertaker,’ in addition perhaps to certain troubles at court, where his rival Essex was at this time somewhat superseding him in the royal favour, and making a temporary absence not undesirable, brought Raleigh into Cork County in 1589. A full account of this visit and its important results is given us in Colin Clouts Come Home Again, which gives us at the same time a charming picture of the poet’s life at Kilcolman. Colin himself, lately returned home from England, tells his brother shepherds, at their urgent request, of his ‘passed fortunes.’ He begins with Raleigh’s visit. One day, he tells them, as he sat

  Under the foote of Mole, that mountaine hore,

  Keeping my sheepe amongst the cooly shade

  Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore,

  a strange shepherd, who styled himself the Shepherd of the Ocean

  Whether allured with my pipes delight,

  Whose pleasing sound yshrilled far about,

  Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right

  found him out, and

  Provoked me to plaie some pleasant fit.

  He sang, he tells us, a song of Mulla old father Mole’s daughter, and of another river called Bregog who loved her. Then his guest sang in turn:

  His song was all a lamentable lay

  Of great unkindnesse and of usage hard,

  Of Cynthia the ladie of the sea,

  Which from her presence faultlesse him debard,

  And ever and anon, with singults rife,

  He cryed out, to make his undersong:

  Ah! my loves queene and goddesse of my life,

  Who shall me pittie when thou doest me wrong?

  After they had made an end of singing, the shepherd of the ocean

  Gan to cast great lyking to my lore,

  And great dislyking to my lucklesse lot

  That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,

  Into that waste where I was quite forgot,

  and presently persuaded him to accompany him ‘his Cinthia to see.’

  It has been seen from one of Harvey’s letters that the Faerie Queene was already begun in 1580; and from what Bryskett says, and what Spenser says himself in his sonnets to Lord Grey, and to Lord Ormond, that it was proceeded with after the poet had passed over to Ireland. By the close of the year 1589 at least three books were completely finished. Probably enough parts of other books had been written; but only three w
ere entirely ready for publication. No doubt part of the conversation that passed between Spenser and Raleigh related to Spenser’s work. It may be believed that what was finished was submitted to Raleigh’s judgment, and certainly concluded that it elicited his warmest approval. One great object that Spenser proposed to himself when he assented to Raleigh’s persuasion to visit England, was the publication of the first three books of his Faerie Queene.

  CHAPTER III. 1590.

  Thus after an absence of about nine years, Spenser returned for a time to England; he returned ‘bringing his sheaves with him.’ Whatever shadow of misunderstanding had previously come between his introduceror perhaps re-introducerand her Majesty seems to have been speedily dissipated. Raleigh presented him to the Queen, who, it would appear, quickly recognised his merits. ‘That goddess’

  To mine oaten pipe enclin’d her eare

  That she thenceforth therein gan take delight,

  And it desir’d at timely houres to heare

  Al were my notes but rude and roughly dight.

  In the Registers of the Stationers’ Company for 1589 occurs to following entry, quoted here from Mr. Arber’s invaluable edition of them:

  Primo Die Decembris.Master Ponsonbye.

  Entered for his Copye a book intituled the fayre

  Queene, dyposed into xii bookes &c. Aucthorysed

  vnder thandes of the Archb. of Canterbery &bothe

  the Wardens, vjd.

  The letter of the author’s prefixed to his poem ‘expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke, which for that it giveth great light to the reader, for the better understanding is hereunto annexed,’ addressed to ‘Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, Lord Wardein of the Stanneryes and her Maiesties lieftenaunt in the county of Cornewayll,’ is dated January 23, 1589that is, 1590, according to the New Style. Shortly afterwards, in 1590, according to both Old and New Styles, was published by William Ponsonby ‘THE FAERIE QUEENE, Disposed into twelve books, Fashioning XII Morall vertues.’ That day, which we spoke of as beginning to arise in 1579, now fully dawned. The silence of well nigh two centuries was now broken, not again to prevail, by mighty voices. During Spenser’s absence in Ireland, William Shakspere had come up from the country to London. The exact date of his advent it seems impossible to ascertain. Probably enough it was 1585; but it may have been a little later. We may, however, be fairly sure that by the time of Spenser’s arrival in London in 1589, Shakspere was already occupying a notable position in his profession as an actor; and what is more important, there can be little doubt he was already known not only as an actor, but as a play-writer. What he had already written was not comparable with what he was to write subsequently; but even those early dramas gave promise of splendid fruits to be thereafter yielded. In 1593 appeared Venus and Adonis; in the following year Lucrece ; in 1595,

  Spenser’s Epithalamion; in 1596, the second three books of the Faerie Queene; in 1597 Romeo and Juliet, King Richard the Second, and King Richard the Third were printed, and also Bacon’s Essays and the first part of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. During all these years various plays, of increasing power and beauty, were proceeding from Shakspere’s hands; by 1598 about half of his extant plays had certainly been composed. Early in 1599, he, who may be said to have ushered in this illustrious period, he whose radiance first dispersed the darkness and made the day begin to be, our poet Spenser, died. But the day did not die with him; it was then but approaching its noon, when he, one of its brightest suns, set. This day may be said to have fully broken in the year 1590, when the first instalment of the great work of Spenser’s life made its appearance.

  The three books were dedicated to the Queen. They were followed in the original editionare preceded in later editions first, by the letter to Raleigh above mentioned; then by six poetical pieces of a commendatory sort, written by friends of the poetby Raleigh who writes two of the pieces, by Harvey who now praises and well-wishes the poem he had discountenanced some years before, by ‘R.S.,’ by ‘H.B.,’ by ‘W.L.;’ lastly, by seventeen sonnets addressed by the poet to various illustrious personages; to Sir Christopher Hatton, to Lord Burghley, to the Earl of Essex, Lord Charles Howard, Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir John Norris, Knight, lord president of Munster, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Countess of Pembroke, and others. The excellence of the poem was at once generally perceived and acknowledged. Spenser had already, as we have seen, gained great applause by his Shepheardes Calendar, published some ten years before the coming out of his greater work. During these ten years he had resided out of England, as has been seen; but it is not likely his reputation had been languishing during his absence. Webbe in his Discourse of English Poetrie, 1586, had contended ‘that Spenser may well wear the garlande, and step before the best of all English poets.’ The Shepheardes Calendar had been reprinted in 1581 and in 1586; probably enough, other works of his had been circulating in manuscript; the hopes of the country had been directed towards him; he was known to be engaged in the composition of a great poem. No doubt he found himself famous when he reached England on the visit suggested by Raleigh; he found a most eager expectant audience; and when at last his Faerie Queene appeared, it was received with the utmost delight and admiration. He was spoken of in the same year with its appearance as the new laureate. In the spring of the following year he received a pension from the crown of 50l. per annum. Probably, however, then, as in later days, the most ardent appreciators of of Spenser were the men of the same craft with himselfthe men who too, though in a different degree, or in a different kind, possessed the ‘vision and the faculty divine.’

  This great estimation of the Faerie Queene was due not only to the intrinsic charms of the poemto its exquisitely sweet melody, its intense pervading sense of beauty, its abundant fancifulness, its subtle spiritualitybut also to the time of its appearance. For then nearly two centuries no great poem had been written in the English tongue. Chaucer had died heirless. Occleve’s lament over that great spirit’s decease had not been made without occasion:

  Alas my worthie maister honorable

  This londis verray tresour and richesse

  Deth by thy dethe hathe harm irreperable

  Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse

  Dispoiled hathe this londe of swetnesse

  Of Rethoryk fro us; to Tullius

  Was never man so like amonges us.

  And the doleful confession this orphaned rhymer makes for himself, might have been well made by all the men of his age in England:

  My dere mayster, God his soule quite,

  And fader Chaucer fayne would have me taught,

  But I was dull, and learned lyte or naught.

  No worthy scholar had succeeded the great master. The fifteenth century in England had abounded in movements of profound social and political interestin movements which eventually fertilised and enriched and ripened the mind of the nation; but, not unnaturally, the immediate literary results had been of no great value. In the reign of Henry VIII, the condition of literature, for various reasons, had greatly improved. Surrey and Wyatt had heralded the advent of a brighter era. From their time the poetical succession had never failed altogether. The most memorable name in our literature between their time and the Faerie Queene is that of Sackville, Lord Buckhursta name of note in the history of both our dramatic and non-dramatic poetry. Sackville was capable of something more than lyrical essays. He it was who designed the Mirror for Magistrates. To that poem, important as compared with the poetry of its day, for its more pretentious conception, he himself contributed the two best pieces that form part of itthe Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham. These pieces are marked by some beauties of the same sort as those which especially characterise Spenser; but they are but fragments; and in spirit they belong to an age which happily passed away shortly after the accession of Queen Elizabeththey are penetrated by that despondent tone which is so strikingly audible in our literature in the middle years of the sixteeth century, not surpris
ingly, if the general history of the time be considered. Meanwhile, our language had changed much, and Chaucer had grown almost unintelligible to the ordinary reader. Therefore, about the year 1590, the nation was practically without a great poem. At the same time, it then, if ever, truly needed one. Its power of appreciation had been quickened and refined by the study of the poetries of other countries; it had translated and perused the classical writers with enthusiasm; it had ardently pored over the poetical literature of Italy. Then its life had lately been ennobled by deeds of splendid courage crowned with as splendid success. In the year 1590, if ever, this country, in respect of its literary condition and in respect of its general high and noble excitement, was ready for the reception of a great poem.

  Such a poem undoubtedly was the Faerie Queene, although it may perhaps be admitted that it was a work likely to win favour with the refined and cultured sections of the community rather than with the community at large. Strongly impressed on it as were the instant influences of the day, yet in many ways it was marked by a certain archaic character. It depicted a worldthe world of chivalry and romancewhich was departed; it drew its images, its forms of life, its scenery, its very language, from the past. Then the genius of our literature in the latter part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign was emphatically dramatic; in the intense life of these years men longed for reality. Now the Faerie Queene is one long idealizing. These circumstances are to accounted for partly by the character of Spenser’s genius, partly by the fact already stated that chronologically Spenser is the earliest of the great spirits of his day. In truth he stands between two worlds: he belongs partly to the new time, partly to the old; he is the last of one age, he is the first of another; he stretches out one hand into the past to Chaucer, the other rests upon the shoulder of Milton.