Thomas: No (or yes), that's probably right, and I'm in need of correction
much of the time! But yes, surely the line attaches (adheres?) to the
Spenserian oeuvre and the poem I'm thinking of is in the mode of a companion
piece, and Bryskett and Spenser seem to have been
hand-in-collaborative-glove on some or other of their literary project/s.
I guess I thought the Colin in the poem I was referring to was Spenser, and
perhaps Milton possibly might have thought that too? There is a certain
overlap (Philisides is dead / Philisides now dead), given line using the
name of the deceased in Ruines of Time, "But was th' Harpe of Philisides now
dead" (609). This harp belongs/ed to Orpheus, and now to the late Sidney,
and it is floating down the lee like Orpheus' head in Milton's poem.
(The Spenser-like poem I had in mind is "A Pastorall AEglogue vpon the death
of Sir Philip Sidney, Knight, &c.," where the speech is between Lycon and
Colin, Colin being COL. and Lycon being LYC. in the text at "COL.
PHILLISIDES is dead. O harmful death, / O deadly harme ... LYC. PHILLISIDES
is dead. O dolefull rime, / Why should my tongue espresse thee? who is left
/ Now to vphoulde thy hopes... COL. PHILLISIDES Is dead. O lucklesse age
... Lyc. PHILLISIDES dead. O happy sprite, / That now in heaun with blessed
soules doost bide." At the top of the page of "Astrophel, A Pastoral Elegie
vpon the death of ... Sidney" in the 1617 edn. of the poet's works
"Collected into one volume" the running title (top of page) reads "Colin
Clouts come home againe.", and it does indeed change to "The morning [sic,
in first case] Muse of Thestylis," after the Astrophel (which has the
signature "foul ARLO" in it. "A Pastorall AEglogue" follows, correctly
headed, and signed, at the end, "L.B." Three more poems on Sidney's death,
and in the vein, follow, "An Elegie, or Friends Passion," "An Epitaph," and
"An other of the same." I guess I'm arguing less for a Collected Spenser
than a Collective Colin.
On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 17:16:01 -0500
THOMAS HERRON <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I never thought I'd correct Jim N (!) but it's Lodowick Bryskett who
>writes
> plaintively "Philisides is dead" in "The Mourning Muse of Thestylis"
> appended to CCCHA + Astrophel... Or is this line in a part of Sp's oeuvre
>as
> well?
>
> That pastoral elegy is certainly a source/inspiration for "Lycidas" as
>Scott
> Elledge notes in his handsome edition of the poem and sources.
>
> But I'm getting fussy. This raises the question, and perhaps Jim is right
> after all: what might Spenser have co-written? His alter-ego "Colin" is
> after all a character in the "Mourning Muse". Could Spenser have
>co-written
> (or ghost-written) "The Mourning Muse" and its companion piece also by
> Bryskett? Conversely, could Bryskett have co-written parts of CCCHA, esp
>in
> the conversation of shepherds at the opening?
>
> Cf. the authorship problems of the "Doleful Lay". What if Spenser wanted
> the authorship to be seen as confused?
>
> Sincerely, Thomas
>
>
>
>
> On 2/5/2009 4:40 PM, "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]>
>wrote:
>
>> On Feb 5, 2009, at 12:06 AM, Michael Saenger wrote:
>>
>>>> Perhaps it would be easier to determine who, among poets in English
>>>> after Spenser, was *not* influenced by him.
>>
>> LYRIC POETRY: The question "Who knows not Colin Clout?" can often be
>> answered "Who does?" Marianne Moore1s "Spenser1s Ireland," "the greenest
>> place I1ve never been," might be construed to mean "the greatest poet I1ve
>> never read," though she knows about the Vewe from a footnote in Maria
>> Edgeworth1s Castle Rackrent. The lintel at the entry to the bedchamber of
>> Robinson Jeffers1 Tor House is carved with "Sleep after toilS<caron>" and his
>>wife
>> was named Oona. The preference of my teacher Robert Lowell for Milton
>> reminds us that the New Critics who taught him were much fixed on
>>"Lycidas"
>> - the original draft for "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" has the same
>> number of lines. (Yet Lycidas may get some of the resonance of its
>>refrain
>> "Lycidas is dead" from Spenser1s "Philisides is dead," and the memorable
>> question, "What boots it with incessant care?" comes pretty directly from
>> The Teares of the Muses [just as "old Damoetus" comes from Sidney1s "old
>> Languet"].) Gordon Teskey1s version of allegory in his book on that
>> putatively strained mode may revive some of Allen Tate1s strictures
>>against
>> it (and against Spenser) as evincing a will-to-power abstractionism - or
>> will to dominate - then found soon after Spenser in Galilean Science:
>> though this connection is not bruited or reported in the more recent
>> critic.
>>
>> When, to confirm Spenser1s being out of poetical fashion--and anything but
>> "a text we should be born that we might read"--we have recourse to the
>> modern and modernist-influenced teaching anthologies, where the emphasis
>>is
>> fairly inevitably on lyric utterance ((Poe having said the long poem
>>cannot
>> be written at all)), and where Spenser is represented scantily, if at all.
>> He appears merely as a reference for assonance in X.J. Kennedy1s
>> Introduction to Poetry; in Hugh Kenner1s Art of Poetry two pieces are
>>given,
>> one to illustrate that Spenser1s Rose Song (FQ II.xii) is hardly
>>sing-able,
>> and the other to illustrate that Willy and Perigot1s roundelay is not
>> genuine folk poetry, or authentically naïve. John Frederick Nims1 Western
>> Wind: An Introduction to Poetry gives Spenser a single sonnet (LXXV).
>>Brooks
>> & Warren1s Understanding Poetry, my text in high school, ends with Keats1
>> "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which itself ends with "all ye need to know," but
>> Spenser is not included. Huntington Cairns1 ambitious Limits of Art
>> (another of my books from back then) offers no Spenser, presumably on the
>> grounds that nobody was found who had said anything sufficiently laudatory
>> or over-the-top about him for that volume1s critical quotations feature.
>> Exceptions: Louis Simpson1s An Introduction to Poetry gives the entire
>> Epithalamion. The 2nd edn. of The Norton Introduction to Poetry, ed. J.
>>Paul
>> Hunter (1981), gives five sonnets as well as the "Prothalamion."
>>
>> Spenser appears as the colonialist in/from the Vewe in Seamus Heaney1s
>>"Bog
>> Oak," and Louis MacNeice1s admiration of -- and indebtedness to Spenser
>>for
>> -- the poetical technique of particularized abstraction has been elegantly
>> set forth by Richard Danson Brown1s "MacNeice in Fairy Land" in J.B.
>> Lethbridge, Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions. Just as Colin
>> Clout1s musical instrument may well be present in MacNeice1s poem1s title
>> "Bagpipe Music," (a favorite poem of mine in high school) so Colin1s poem
>> "January" may be part of the inspiration for the wintery first piece in
>>John
>> Crowe Ransom1s The Manliness of Men, with a Rosalind-type representing the
>> femininity and abiding memory of the other sex. But as these two examples
>> show, the question of who knew Spenser after 1930 is only partly
>>answerable
>> by academic Spenserians, (Spenser having become the professors1 poet from
>> having been the poet1s poet) because the professors bring to the seminar
>> table their own knowledge of what a given text surely ought to have known.
>> An example that comes to my mind is the opening of the 3rd section of
>> Wallace Stevens1 "Credences of Summer" (1946), which must sound to us like
>>a
>> Dante-inflected gloss on Mt. Acidale and the line quoted from Marianne
>> Moore:
>>
>> It is the natural tower of all the world,
>> The point of survey, green1s green apogee,
>> But a tower more precious than the view beyond,
>> A point of survey squatting like a throne,
>> Axis of everything, green1s green apogee
>>
>> And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.
>> It is the mountain on which the tower stands,
>> It is the final mountain.
>> S<caron>
>> This is the refuge that the end creates.
>>
>> (Similarly, "The Plot against the Giant" - the giant I think being a
>>florist
>> coming into his cutting garden - seems to me to be hatched by the charming
>> and blooming Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia, who hale from the same
>>Ficinian
>> locus amoenus; they are three flowers.) The poetry of my learned offspring
>> Peter is not obviously Spenserian, and yet I know he had to write verses a
>> decade ago in Spenser1s style for John Hollander1s course; I believe his
>> concerned the three "Re" brothers Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.
>>
>> PROSE FICTION (& CINEMA): The first Star Wars film has Obi-Ben-Kenobi (is
>> that right?) disappear in combat like Orgoglio, and features a dwarfish
>> Droid whose appellation is short for android, as Spenser1s Dony is short
>>for
>> Adonis. I.e., Lukas ought to have read Spenser, but the secular scripture
>>in
>> general has probably done it for him (and the Japanese movie that was his
>> actual inspiration). Ditto Talus and Robocop. George Grella, with whom I
>> was in seminar in Gambier in 1959, wrote an early article for The Nation
>>(I
>> think) identifying James Bond as a dragon-slayer in the line of Spenser1s
>> hero; Parker1s detective story pedigree must surely include Ian Fleming1s
>> spy stories? The second chapter of Dr. No, "Choice of Weapons," needs to
>>be
>> read with Erich Auerbach1s chapter in Mimesis, "The Knight Sets Forth,"
>>and
>> at one point rather later we hear Bond thus: "ŒIt1s like this. I1m sort
>>of
>> a policeman. They send me out from London when there1s something odd
>>going
>> on somewhere in the world that isn1t anybody else1s business1 S<caron> Bond told
>> the story in simple terms, with good men and bad men, like an adventure
>> story of a book." And see this from the chapter called "The Thing," which
>> is swamp-thing: "Half a mile away, coming across the lake, was a
>>shapeless
>> thing with two glaring orange eyes with black pupils. From between these,
>> where the mouth might be, fluttered a yard of blue flame. The grey
>> luminescence of the stars showed some kind of a domed head above two short
>> batlike wings. The thing was making a low moaning roar that overlaid
>> another noise, a deep rhythmic thud. It was coming towards them at about
>> ten miles an hour, throwing up a creamy wake." Bond reassures his
>> associate, "you can forget about dragons," but thinks "Have to fight it
>> here. What1ll its weak spots be? The drivers. S<caron> I1ll go for its
>>headlights
>> S<caron> Must have some kind of giant tyres S<caron> I1ll go for them too." Elsewhere
>>we
>> learn that Bond is a member of the Order of St. George. (Cp. U. A.
>> Fanthorpe, "Not My Best Side," on Paolo Uccello1s S. George and the
>>Dragon,
>> National Gallery: "I have diplomas in Dragon / Management and Virgin
>> Reclamation. S<caron> Don1t you want to carry out the roles / That sociology and
>> myth have designed for you?" [= III: voice of the young hero, whom the
>>lady
>> and the dragon have to go along with].) C.S. Lewis1 Mr. Tumnus gets his
>> name from a comparison of Milton1s Satan with Eve to Vertumnus with Pomona
>> in PL IX, but The Silver Chair1s title surely partly refers to that same
>> enchanted object in the "underland" recesses of Mammon1s Cave, since it
>>too
>> is chair of remembering and forgetting and underworld bondage ("ŒAh,1 he
>> groaned. ŒEnchantments, enchantments S<caron> the heavy, tangled, cold, clammy
>>web
>> of evil magic. Buried alive. Dragged down under the earth, down into the
>> sooty blackness S<caron> how many years is it? Have I lived ten years, or a
>> thousand years, in the pit?1" The speaker is bound to the chair.) The
>> title of Michael Moorcock1s Gloriana, or The Unfulfill1d Queen (1978)
>>tells
>> us that it is the work of a frustrated pro-romance anti-Spenserian (in the
>> line of Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast trilogy). The Gloriana in
>>question
>> is actually an Acrasian type, and her Capt. Arturo (Quire - as in Squire?)
>> is into espionage and assassination (cp. Sp's Arthur in bad company). --
>> Jim N.
>>
>> [log in to unmask]
>> James Nohrnberg
>> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
>> Univ. of Virginia
>> P.O Box 400121
>> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
|
