The stanza of eight pentameters rhyming ababbcbc turns slowly, pausing as the point
ofbalance is reached in the central couplet rhyming ‘bowre/Paramowre’. Against this
ground (repeated 3700 times in the poem) the unfolding chain of sense is decorated
by various patterns and repetitions. Sound and sense are equal, or, where the theme
is familiar as here, sense is the weaker. But to the existing octave Spenser added a
ninth line of twelve syllables, an alexandrine: ‘Whilest loving thou mayst lovèd be
with equall crime.’ The asymmetry of this longer line is marked by rhyme:
‘crime/time’ makes the closing couplet lopsided and slows the galleon still further.
The stanza becomes a lyrical frame to be contemplated in itself, and Time seems to
stand still.
‘Crime’ breaks the sensuous spell. The captive knight’s warlike arms, ‘the idle
instruments / Of sleeping praise’, hang on a tree. Guyon and his guide, the Palmer,
rescue the knight, and Guyon breaks down the bower ‘with rigour pittilesse’.
Acrasia’s sleeping beasts are turned back into men (as in the episode of Circe in the
Odyssey). But one beast, a hog ‘hight Grille by name’ (Gk: ‘pig’), wishes to remain a
pig.Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,
That hath so soone forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when he life began,
That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.
To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind
Delights in filth and foule incontinence:
Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind,
But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.A lucid epitome of the humanist doctrine of self-fashioning – man can choose to
perfect himself or to ruin himself: his physical form shows his spiritual nature.
For Spenser, ethics, religion and politics coalesce, since in its ideal ‘conceit’
England was a united, Protestant, virtuous nation. Thus, Red-Crosse is not
seduced by duplicitous Duessa (the Catholic Church) but prefers honest Una (the
English Church).Unity had been imposed on England, but not on the British Isles:
the conquest of Ireland did not go smoothly. Sir Walter Ralegh was involved in
some bloody episodes, and Spenser was burnt out of his home. As The Faerie
Queene went on, the gap between ideal and real was such that the proclaimed
perfection of an ideal England can be read ironically. In his remaining years,
Spenser wrote a few stanzas on Time and Mutability, the last of which is a prayer
to ‘rest eternally’.
The Faerie Queene is its age’s greatest poetic monument, and one can get lost in
its musical,pictorial and intellectual delights. Historically, it is Spenser’s major work,
and takes precedence over lesser but delightful works such as the wedding hymns
Prothalamion and Epithalamion, poems of wonderful musical vigour, and the
Amoretti (containing perfect sonnets, such as ‘One day I wrote her name upon the
strand’).
Spenser was loved by Milton and the Romantics, but in the 18th century his influ-
ence faded. Poets followed the simpler clarity of Ben Jonson, who remarked of
Spenser, ‘In affecting the ancients, he writ no language.’ This echoes Sidney’s objec-
tion to the ‘old rustic’ style ofThe Shepheardes Calender, and anticipates Dr
Johnson’s strictures upon Milton’s style. In humanist theory, decorum was ‘the100 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603