EPITHALAMION EDMUND SPENSER (1594)
Written in 1594 as a celebration of his own nuptials to
Elizabeth Boyle and published a year later, EDMUND
SPENSER’s Epithalamion follows the basic tenets of its
classical predecessors. The poem begins before dawn,
follows the bride on her wedding day (which is also
the summer solstice), and ends with nighttime felicita-
tions of the bridal bed and prayers for fertility.
The poem insists that the festive day is a day outside
of the mundane: “The joyfulst day that ever sunne did
see” (l. 16). The longest day of the year is a triumph for
the sun and the couple. It is set apart from time and
simultaneously participates in it by banding opposi-
tions into one—day and night and man and woman.
The polarities also engender the poem’s structure.
There are (including the ENVOI) 24 STANZAs paralleling
the 24 hours of the day as it passes from predawn to
night. It has been noted that there is a shift from posi-
tive to negative as day turns into night.
There also is a varying rhyme scheme, but each stanza,
with the exception of the last, is linked through the
REFRAIN of an “Eccho” that the speaker demands “ring.”
This links to the ringing of the solstice bells. However,
the ring imagery is not limited to the aural: Wedding
bands, garlands, ring dances, and the revolution of the
heavens also serve to link the stanzas together.
The poem marks time to protect itself from the ero-
sion of memory: “This day is holy; doe ye write it
downe / That ye forever it remember it may” (ll. 263–
264). Although the speaker, the groom, is impatient,
“for this time it ill ordained was, / To choose the lon-
gest day in all the yeare, / And shortest night, when
longer fi tter weare” (ll. 270–272), the conjunction of
the wedding day and the summer solstice establishes a
natural connection between the natural rhythm of the
calendar year and the artifi ciality of human rituals:
childbirth. Additionally, a child conceived on the eve-
ning of the summer solstice and carried for the expected
nine months would be born in March—a Lenten
month culminating in the Christian celebration of the
ultimate triumph of light over dark with Christ’s death
and resurrection.
The poem insists on this inextricable nature of the
human and the cosmic. For example, the wedding is
dependent on the movement of the muses, the poem,
and the bride herself. All are linked to the movement
of the sun and the hours. The movement of the human
is notably mirrored by, and therefore linked to, the
heavenly.
Similarly, the poem takes a position between the
classical and popular. The setting is a village celebra-
tion in the Irish countryside, attended by muses, dei-
ties, and local rustics, and thereby fully encompasses
the actual landscape (Ireland) and the limitless geogra-
phy of the gods and goddesses. Spenser reconciles the
evocation of the Christian and the non-Christian in
typical Renaissance fashion by easily linking one with
the other. The solstice is the “day the sunne is in his
chiefest hight, / With Barnaby the bright” (ll. 265–266)
and the pagan customs are still very much evident
despite the dedication of the day to St. Barnabas, and
the Christian wedding. For example, in accordance
with solstice custom, the young men of the town ring
bells, light bonfi res, and dance and sing about them to
make the day wear away for the coming of night. The
solstice rituals help mark time on the longest day of the
year in its symbolic passage of birth, life, death, and
rebirth. Likewise, the wedding and the celebratory
feast afterward help to mark time and to celebrate a rite
of transition from one state to another—virginity to
connubial, and hopefully fruitful, bliss. This celebra-
tion is marked by music, an artful lay.
The double meaning of the word lay (the noun
meaning “a song” and the verb meaning “to lay down”)
marks the ingenious transition from music to silence in
stanza 17, when “day is doen, and night is nighing fast”
(l. 298). The speaker’s former commands for song are
replaced by invocations for silence: “But let the night
be calm and quietsome” (l. 326). He asks the attending
damsels to “lay” the bride in her nuptial bed (ll. 302–
308) and then commands them to “leave my love
alone, / And likewise your former lay to sing: / The
woods no more shal answere, nor your echo ring” (ll.
312–314). The word lay in both its contexts marks the
transition from the music of the day, the virginal bed,
into the silence of the night, the marriage bed. The
transition is complete, and the speaker asks, “Send us
the timely fruit of this same night” (l. 404).
Through the allusions to festivity and its numero-
logical structure, Epithalamion is richly endowed withEPITHALAMION 167