[Faults Escaped, A New Post from Jim Nohrnberg:]
Re forgettable Spenser:
Andrew Zurcher is of course right, and my numbers are
wrong -- and more or less backwards. My posting about the
allegedly memorable lines should have read, at this point:
The dronken lampe down in the oyle did steepe (FQ 3.2.47)
-- [which I am partial to] partly because it deliberately
remembers something earlier and equally nocturnal in
Latin, but especially because it can be taken with this
favorite [passage], from the same narration, 57 stanzas
previous, 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)
I do not suppose the numeration (57...) is significant
here, but numerological considerations do call one's
attention to the more general point of my posting, which
is like that of C.S. Lewis in regard to Spenser's laden
and "artificial" (in the good sense) kind of style:
namely, that the best fruit ripens on espaliers. This
comparison might apply to the mythographic programs for
Botticelli's most famous paintings, of course, but also to
the elaborate rhetorical-lexical schemes and the
co-ordinated phonetic patterning so apparent in Spenser's
diction.
Re Andrew on Tasso on Dante's "asking us almost smell the
oil" as a indication that the lamp of the later Spenser
passage is related to the solar progress of the earlier
one:
"The lamp of the world," as found in the passage to which
Tasso apparently refers, in Paradiso 1.38, itself, may be
the point (Tasso then merely serving to give us evidence
that "lucerno" can be taken to mean a specific kind of
lamp, namely a smelly one using oil); that is, since Dante
is describing the equinoctial and solsticial points on the
armillary sphere of the cosmos as if they were dawn, noon,
nightfall, and midnight of the diurnal round (Singleton
trans.: "The lamp of the world rises to mortals through
different passages; but through that which joins four
circles with three crosses it issues with a better course
and conjoined with better stars, and tempers and stamps
the wax of the world more after its own fashion. Almost
such an outlet had made morning there [in Europe] and
evening here [in Purgatory], and all the hemisphere there
was white, and the other dark, when I saw Beatrice turned
to her left side and looking at the sun...") In Spenser
the lamp does seem to extinguish itself -- with
Britomart's restless consciousness, and in the remains of
its own oil -- in the middle hours of the night.
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English
Univ. of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
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