Yet hope I well that, when this storme is past,
My Helice, the lodestar of my lyfe,

Will shine again, and looke on me at last.

The allusions in the Sonnets to the Faerie Queene present a difficulty under the accepted interpretation of In Sonnet xxxiii. (to "Lodwick ") the

the sequence.

writer reproaches himself for the wrong he is doing

To that most sacred Empresse, my dear dred,

Not finishing her Queene of faëry,

and in Sonnet lxxx. he announces apparently that he has completed six books:

After so long a race as I have run

Through Faery land, which those six books compile,

The six books (with the second instalment of three) were not published till 1596, and I think it most improbable that they were finished in the early part of 1594 (which is the necessary inference from this under the accepted chronology) and held over, especially as other poems were being published in 1595.

Sonnet lxxx. closes with a reference apparently to the love celebrated in F.Q. VI. x. (see above, p. 366):

But let her prayses yet be low and meane,
Fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene.

Such a description is not rationally applicable to the wife of Spenser in Ireland. Moreover, in the canto in question of the Faerie Queene, and in Colin Clout, the love referred to appears to be a vision of the past rather than an actuality of the present. But, as I said at the end of the last chapter, I shall endeavour to offer some further remarks on this subject.2

1 It is necessary, under the accepted interpretation of these poems, to regard the love celebrated in them as Spenser's wife, or to believe that Spenser published a poem within less than a year of his marriage in which he declares that he is devoted till death to the memory of another woman. 2 See Chapter XVII.

Sonnets lxii. and lxv. are love sonnets in a sincere vein, without admixture of flattery, and are applicable to the case of any mutual affection. From there onwards the sequence becomes less marked, and the artificial note, which is so pronounced in these poems, is less felt. Sonnet lxvii. may or may not have been suggested by the circumstances of Ralegh's wooing of Elizabeth Throgmorton, but it certainly describes the subjugation of a woman to the will of a man.

The last four sonnets, beginning "Venemous tongue," etc., are clearly a sequence, and deal with a serious breach between the lovers, and with that the sonnets end; surely an extraordinary ending for a published collection if a marriage followed. It has been suggested by Grosart that these four pieces belong to a different and earlier episode. But this is a very arbitrary method of interpretation. My own view of them is that they deal in appearance, under a poetical figure, with Ralegh's breach with the Queen in 1592 on her discovery of his relations with Elizabeth Throgmorton, but in reality more with the author's own troubles. The "Culver on the bared bough" of the last sonnet is the same image as that used for the disconsolate "Timias" in the Faerie Queene, Book IV., and it would appear that the design in that episode was to work on the Queen's feelings. This question, however, will be more fully discussed in another chapter.1

Even more difficult than the problem of the Amoretti is that presented by the Epithalamion, which was published at the same time. It is supposed to be the culmination of the Sonnets, written in celebration of the poet's own marriage in June 1594. The poem has received the highest praise from critics, and is accepted as a spontaneous expression of personal feeling. It is customary to describe it as a poem of sustained rapture; but I 1 See Chapter XVII.

really cannot see it. The poem seems to me extremely artificial, and the tone, in places, unpleasant. No doubt it is highly imaginative, and contains some very beautiful workmanship, but that is a different matter. Is it natural that a man should sit down on the eve of his marriage and pen an elaborate poem describing his nuptial anticipations ? And is it really true (as is alleged in justification of this poem) that Englishmen of that day were such children of nature as to see no unfitness in public expressions of feeling of this character? The ancients, where the women of their family life were concerned, were always reticent, and what evidence is there that Englishmen were otherwise?

An even greater difficulty presents itself in the age and circumstances of the supposed writer. Spenser was about forty-three when this poem appeared, and "rapture," in relation to the sense of love, does not belong to that age, at any rate where sensibility has developed early. The rapture of the thinker, still more of the saint, may persist and increase, but not the rapture of love. It can no more be recaptured after a certain age than the rapture, in the poet, of the imagination. Both the one and the other come under the domination, for necessary ends, of reason and experience, or, if they do not, the life of the spirit is arrested. At the age when Spenser is supposed to have written this poem, love, though it may be deeper and more disinterested than in earlier years, does not express itself in rapturous imagery of physical idealisation, and therefore, on psychological grounds, the accepted theory of this poem is, to my mind, unacceptable. The same remarks apply in the case of Francis Bacon, who in 1595 was thirty-four. In a very interesting passage (interesting because, I believe, personal1) with which the essay on

1 The Essays, which are written in such a way as to produce the impression of detached observation of the world, are, in my opinion, much more self-regarding than appears to be generally supposed. In one instance at any rate this was recognised even by contemporaries-I refer to the essay on "Deformity" which appeared in the 1612 edition after the death of the Earl of Salisbury in that year. It concludes with the words, "and Socrates may go likewise amongst them, with others"; and Chamberlain writes with regard

"Youth and Age "1

opens, he refers to the brief period of imaginative spontaneity:

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time; but that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second: for there is a youth in thoughts as well as in ages; and yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream into their minds better, and as it were more divinely.

When the Epithalamion was written Bacon was no longer young in the sense described. Indeed he speaks of himself as old, that is, old in feeling, at thirty-one.2 A young man could not have written this poem (which is artificial, not spontaneous), and I do not think any man of mature age would have written it as an expression of his own experience. The conclusion, therefore, at which I arrive is that it was written for some one else. Το provide a poem for special occasions has always been the business of Court poets, and there is, therefore, nothing extraordinary about this. An examination, however, of the poem in detail will throw further light on the problem. As in the Amoretti, so in the Epithalamion, there are a number of expressions which are only really appropriate in speech about a sovereign, and there are others which seem to contain barely disguised allusions to Queen Elizabeth. In stanza 9 we read:

Loe! where she comes along with portly pace,
Lyke Phoebe, from her chamber of the East.

Queen Elizabeth is referred to by Spenser under the names of the moon.

In the same stanza:

that ye would weene

Some Angell she had beene.

to it to Carleton: "Sir Francis Bacon hath set out new Essays, where, in a chapter of Deformity, the world takes notice that he paints out his little cousin to the life."

1 First published in 1612.

2 Spedding, Life, i. 108. Cf. also ii. 162.

This is the "Angel" allusion (see p. 383 above), and it is repeated in stanza 13:

That even th'Angels . . . about her fly.

...

Again, in the description in stanza 9:

Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,

Sprinckled with perle.

The hair of Belphoebe and of Britomart (both representing Queen Elizabeth) is described in the same way:

Her yellow lockes, crisped like golden wyre,
About her shoulders weren loosely shed.

F.Q. II. iii. 30.

And round about the same her yellow heare,

Like to a golden border did appeare,
Framed in goldsmithes forge with cunning hand :
Yet goldsmithes cunning could not understand
To frame such subtile wire, so shinie cleare.

Compare also Sonnet xv. :

F.Q. IV. vi. 20.

her locks are finest Gold on ground.

It is true that the image of "golden wire" for hair is used by Spenser in other connections, as, for instance, F.Q. III. viii. 7, and Ruines of Time, 1. 10; but the point in the present connection is at least noteworthy.

Again

seeme lyke some mayden Queene,

is an undisguised allusion, and it seems very unlikely that any writer of that day would have had the hardihood to compare his bride to the Queen. For a man to do so situated as Spenser was would also be very absurd.

The description in stanza 10, which corresponds to Sonnet xv., is in the manner of Spenser when he is alluding to the physical charms of the Queen. Compare, for instance, the description of Belphoebe in F.Q. II. iii. 21 sq.; also of the Queen ("Elisa ") in the Eclogue for "April."