All ---
David's reminder regarding the way Greek and Latin meters were taught brings to mind the post-Renaissance line (a comment, I believe, on Alexander Pope's precocious talent): "he lisped in numbers." Without an OED at hand, I can't guess when "numbers" came to be used as a synonym for metrical feet.
If there is to be further discussion, here or elsewhere, of numerological signifying and structural patterns, several cautions should be observed. If we don't retain a sense of proportion, the game will not have been worth the candle. I recall the skepticism voiced by my mentor from college, William Whallon, when I connected with him a few years after finishing my graduate work. This was not long after Kent Hieatt's and Alastair Fowler's earliest work had been published, and Whallon was familiar also, as I was not, with the work of classicists on numbers and proportions. With no investment of his own in Spenser's reputation, Whallon wondered whether, when all the figuring-out had been finished, we would have more to admire, or less. Would the poetry reveal, at the end, some sort of craziness? (Of course, like beauty, craziness may be mostly in the eye of the beholder.)
Are there, in all the mysterious things that a great poet does deliberately, and the more mysterious things that the language does willy-nilly on the way to the page, some essentials that are better left beyond the pale of critical inquiry? I would rather not think so. I'm wary of all manifestations of the guild mentality, ruling some lines of inquiry out of order. On the other hand, there are times when one says, "O, life is too short!"
The short excursions that I took into number-crunching led me to no conclusion, as to whether Spenser intended the numerically based patterns in his poem to remain hidden from readers. Or were they like guild secrets, to be known only to certain initiates? I did arrive at an analogy that might have some heuristic value. Are the numbers in Spenser's poetry to be understood as its bones, or as its spirit and soul? Or, by a further analogy with the particles and waves in modern physics, are they to be seen as sometimes one, sometimes the other?
Cheers, Jon Quitslund
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