Forwarded from Jim Nohrnberg. Brad.

Re:  Forgettable Spenser (and Forgetful Spenserians)

Alleging and lamenting the decline in or neglect of the
celebration of aristocratic patrons' deeds and lineage,
Spenser's Calliope speaks as follows:

Ne doo they care that late posteritie
Should know their names, or speak their praises dew:
But die forgot from when at first they sprong, As they
themselves shalbe forgot ere long.

What bootes it then to come from glorious
Forefathers, or to have been noble bredd?
What oddes twixt Irus and old Inachus, Twixt best and
worst, when both alike are dedd; If none of neither mention
should make,
Ne out of dust their memories awake?   Or who would ever
care to doo brave deed, Or strive in vertue others to
excell;
If none should yeeld him his deserved meed,
Due praise, that is the spur of doing well?

Do we remember this, from the Teares of the Muses?  Milton
apparently did, when paying Lycidas "the meed of some
melodious teare," that is, when he recalled both the
earlier poet's rhetoric and thought at "boots," "noble,"
"care," "spur" and perhaps "raise" (as in "praise"):  Alas!
what boots it with incessant care
To tend the homely, slighted, shepherd's trade
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;

This is of course personal, but I myself don't see why
anyone would find the language of Spenser's poetry in the
least forgettable, even if, paradoxically, they were unable
remember a line of it (as likewise might be the case with
the prose of the Arcadia or Euphues).  When Alpers says the
depth is all on the surface, perhaps he means that Spenser
is a master-rhetorician (look at the Orphic catalogue of
trees in the stanza in FQ I.i), and that much of the action
is in what Martha Craig's essay title named "The Secret Wit
of Spenser's Language" -- an essay I think that Alpers
himself anthologized.  Hamilton's editions call abundant
attention to the phenomenon in question, on the semiotic
and etymological level.   But what about the verse as
verse?  Verse of many kinds is a kind of "rote" of sound to
which the language of meaning is played or sung, and
certain passages in our poet are acutely conscious -- to
the point of parody -- of this fact:  as in the allurements
of Phedria's locus amoenus, which are rhetorically "canned"
in the verses cited here:

No tree, whose braunches did not bravely spring;
No braunch, whereon a fine bird did not sit:
No bird, but did her shrill notes sweetly sing;
No song but did contain a lovely dit;
Trees, braunches, birds, and songs were framed fit,
For to allure...  (2.6.13)

In the following verbose example (where Cymocles is using
imagery as an aphrodisiac), a surfeit of alliteraton and
long-voweled rhyme-words occupies the place of an excess of
"chyme" in the chemistry of Cymochles' consequently
wanton-ized imagination.  The words convey the role of
self-hypnotism and the dimming of consciousness in the
casting of an erotic spell:

He, like an Adder, lurking in the weeds,
His wandering thought in deepe desire does steepe,
And his fraile eye with spoyle of beautie feedes;
Sometimes he falsely faines himselfe to sleepe,
While through their lids his wanton eies do peepe,
To steal a snatch of amorous conceipt,
Whereby close fire into his heart does creepe:
So, them deceives, deceiv'd in his deceipt,
Made drunke with drugs of deare voluptuous receipt.  (FQ
2.5.34)

Such effects are endemic to Spenser's mode of story-telling
(in self-reflective verse).  Here, for another example, is
the false Una, warning us precursively that she is
virtually one with Duessa:  by means of a wordplay
stammeringly suspended between proverb and pun, confession
and retraction (in regard to her subjection to Amor and/or
Archimago, "he"):   Yet thus perforce he bids me do, or die.
Die is my dew, yet rew my wretched state, You,   (FQ 1.1.51)

But I should try to stick to examples from the first part
of Book II, that is, for Andrew Zurcher's sake.  Here,
psychomachia-wise, the intemperate Pyrochles is asked to
get a-hold of himself, rather than let his violent passions
utterly possess him, in verses that model the rational
quadrature that can do this for him:

Fly, O Pyrochles, fly the dreadfull warre,
That in thy selfe thy lesser parts do move,
Outrageous anger, and woe-working iarre,
Direfull impatience, and hart murdring love;
Those, those thy foes, those warriours far remove,  (FQ
2.5.16)

Such verse clearly does not forget itself.
But perhaps, instead of citing mimetic and echoic effects,
and if we begin from some favorite passage from the poem,
some personal touchstone, we might also conclude that the
verse has not proved entirely forgettable: at least at that
point.  In my own case I expect I shall continue to
remember, or at least want to:

The dronken lampe down in the oyle did steepe (FQ 3.1.47)

-- partly because it deliberately remembers something
earlier and equally nocturnal in Latin, but especially
because it can be taken with this favorite, from the same
canto, ten stanzas later, with its laborious last line:

By this th' eternall lampes, wherewith high Iove
Doth light the lower world, were half yspent,
And the moist daughters of huge Atlas strove
Into the Ocean deepe to drive their weary drove.  (3.1.57)

To conclude:  Much of the pleasure or "wit" or "craft" or
"cunning" of Spenser's verse is in its amplication,
dilation, and re-use of itself:   as, for another example
of its self-consciousness in this respect, the striking
phrase "is let and crost" in FQ 6.12.1 (a stanza about the
pattern and progress being made by the poet-narrator across
the ocean of his poem), where the phrase almost appears in
"cost/Is met," "surges tost;/Yet," and "compasse lost" [=
's lost] in the first and last words of the sentence "Yet
... 's lost."  This kind of patterning is so insistent and
defining a feature in Spenser -- why invent the Spenserian
stanza if it were not? -- that if it is doing its work it
should be a large factor in creating the taste by which
this poet is to be appreciated.

Historical Footnote, "Who knows not Colin Clout?":
At the exercise at the ruins of Kilcolman, as Marianne
Micros recalled it (we were to recite from memory any 3
lines from the FQ is how I remember it), I was gratefully
not called upon to present at the microphone (there surely
was one?); but if I had been, I'd planned to stick to FQ
I.i, namely the following:  "A gentle knight was pricking
on the plain," "The Eugh obedient to the benders will," and
"God help the man so wrapt in Errours train."  And had I
been asked for an encore, it would have been, in view of
our situation and our faulty memories, "O pitious worke of
MUTABILITIE!"   -- For honor's sake, I'll not look these
four up (and hence no numbers), to see whether I've in fact
remembered them correctly.  -- Jim Nohrnberg


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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English
Univ. of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903


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