imagery in spenser's amoretti.pdf

THE IMAGERY OF SPENSER’S AMORETTZ

The imagery of Spenser’s Amoretti has received little detailed atention. This is so, in part, because the sequence has not inspired the same interest as the other major sequences, Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s’ However, there has also been a problem in the images themselves which often strike readers as embarrassing and extravagant. Lever, for instance, wishes to exclude from the sequence eighteen sonnets which characterize the lady as a cruel tyranness; he sees in their apparent excesses mere allegorical “pas- teboard” incapable of expressing genuine emotion.2 For Robert Kellog, on the other hand, the Amoretti is a test case to argue that one should not look for the expression of “actual experience” in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence, that the images of the Amoretti must indeed be read only as having “doctrinal (i.e. allegorical) significance;” for, otherwise we are left with the repulsive and improbable notion that Spenser himself might be the “abjectly enamored” speaker whom the images project3 Martz, on the other hand, offers a middle ground, defending what might seem to be offensive in the Amoretti as counters in a knowing and witty game played for the mutual amusement of Spenser and his future bride.4

Most criticism since Kellog has tended to avoid the issues raised in the earlier debate by treating the speaker of Amoretti as a character in either a fiction or a dramatic action; the emphasis here is on psychological conflict and the ironies arising out of the speaker’s limited awareness, and ques- tions of imagery become secondary.5 The present essay wishes to re-focus attention on Spenser’s images. It will not address head-on the very difficul- tissues of Spenser’s tone and imagistic extravagances, because any such focus would only again detract from detailed imagistic analysis. Instead, I will assume, using Earl Miner’s formulation, that Elizabethan lyric poetry is generally written from a “middle aesthetic distance”,6 at the intersection of self and convention and that, therefore, in cherishing Spenser’s images we are admitted to a world which is profoundly his own and which reveals to us within the convention the poet and his experience.’

As we learn in the two hymns of earthly love and beauty, of which we shall say more below, love for Spenser is a mode of self-realization, a form of self-transcendence by means of which the self perfects its identity. This being so, lovers must be prepared to accept and to suffer inward change. Hence the need for change and the fear of change (or mutability) become in Amorettiimportant sources of imagery and poetic energy. The necessity for change, for self-transcendence, is stated at the very beginning of the sequence when, in the second sonnet, the poet suffers the pain of an “Un- quiet thought;” “bred/Of th’inward bale of my love pined hart,” it lurks in the poet’s “inner part” “lyke to vipers brood.” Unless he finds the courage to transcend himself, and can in the expression of this thought go beyond his own psychic confinements, he will remain locked within a dangerous

Neophilologus 12 (1988) 284-299

Myron Turner - Amoretti 285

self-enclosure where, “with sighes and sorrowes fed,” potential victim of the poisonous vipers, he will be cut off from the lady, who is his “soules long lacked food”.* Therefore, he urges his thought to “Breake forth at length out of the inner part,/... And seeke some succour, both to ease my smart/And also to sustain thy self with food” (2).

In Amoretti 3, despite this exhortation to his “Unquiet thought,” the poet remains locked within, neither pen nor tongue able to give expression to his suffering, and still unable to reach out beyond himself to the being in whom he will sustain and nourish his soul. In Amoretti 4, however, under the influence of the New Year, the poet does “at length” break forth. This sonnet is throughout shaped by a metaphor, explicit and implicit, of com- ing forth from a place within into an external fertile landscape of love and delight. Thus, the New Year is found to be “forth looking out of Janus gate.../And calling forth out of sad Winters night/Fresh Love, that long hath slept in cheerlesse bower.../For lusty Spring now in his timely howre/ Is ready to come forth, him to receive.” Appropriately, in the concluding couplet the poet, having come forth, for the first time in the sequence turns to his lady and addresses her directly: “faire flowre, in whom fresh youth doth raine,/ Prepare your selfe new love to entertain.” Amoretti 4 has an almost celebratory tone, which is reinforced by the refraining of “forth... out, ” “forth out,” “ forth.” This awakening to celebration is inspired in part by the poet’s release from within and, in part, by that which draws him out from within, the New Year’s promised “hope of new delight.” This promise, however, is contingent upon “bidding th’old adieu,” upon heeding the lesson of the New Year to bid “all old thoughts to die in dum- pish spright.” The theological reverberations of this sonnet give Christian authority to the need for inward change. Man’s spirit, like the year, will be regenerated only through the death of that which is old - through the death of the Old Man and his “old thoughts.” What awaits the lovers at the conclusion of their inner transformations is an earthly paradise, the fecundity of which is shared by the poet’s beloved, a “faireflowre, in whom fresh youth doth raine”.

I seems almost certain that Spenser placed the opening sonnets as a significant introduction to his major themes and images. In order to arrive at the earthly delight envisioned in Amoretti 4, we will find, the lover must set forth upon the dangerous waters of mutability, the only route by which he can arrive at his “happy shore” with its “Fayre soyle... fraught with store/Of all that deare and daynty 1s alyve” (63). The risk of this perilous journey must be undertaken, because only on this fertile soil can he find his “soules long lacked food” (1). The vipers brood of Amoretti 2, like the “scattered brood” of Error (F.Q., I. xxii. 29, are the poisonous thoughts and words which oppose themselves to spiritual sustenance. At the end of the sequence, they are outside of the poet and have no place within him. This is the metaphorical meaning of the biographically controversial eighty-sixth sonnet:

286 Myron Turner - Amoretti

Venemous toung, tipt with vile adders sting. Of that selfe kynd with which the Furies fell Theyr snaky heads doe combe, from which a spring Of poysoned words and spiteful speeches well, Let all the plagues and horrid paines of hell Upon thee fall.

The lover’s unexplained grief at the conclusion of Amorettiis an important element in Spenser’s design. It shows us how significant has been the change since the unquiet thought first lurked like a viper in the poet’s innermost self. For now he possesses “Deepe in the closet of [his] parts entire” (85) a light that nourishes, “th’onely image of that heavenly ray,/ Whereof some glance doth in mine eie remayne./... With light thereof I do my selfe sustayne,/And thereon feed my love-affamisht hart” (88).

As we begin to examine the larger body of the sequence, we discover that Spenser retains the food metaphor throughout and that a central con- cern is the poet’s effort to define the nature of the “fulness,” i.e. fulfillment, for which he hungers and which will complete the act of self-transcendence which initiates the sequence, the breaking forth out of the inner part. The poet explores three forms of transcendental fultilment, two of which he rejects. One, that of mystical Platonism, is a state of being towards which he does not aspire; a second involves a restless and, finally, unfulfilling expense of energy: this is the experience of ecstatic transport inspired by the lady’s beauty. What he does desire, instead, both for himself and his beloved, is the mutually fulfilling and reciprocal self-transcendence which exists within and makes possible the love relationship; it involves a limited Platonism.

The poet’s experiences of transcendence originate in the lady’s beauty. For she is “The glorious image of the Makers beautie,” “divinely wrought,/And of the brood of angels hevenly borne,” one of the “heavenly formes” (61), on whose eye-beams “angels come, to lead fraile mindes to rest/In chast desires, on heavenly beauty bound” (8). However, his mind is more commonly bound not on heavenly beauty but on his lady’s heavenly charms, another realm of transcendence altogether. In 72, for example, his winged spirit is deflected from its intention “to mount up to purest sky” and instead flies to the heaven of his lady’s beauty where his “fancy, fed with full delight,/Doth bath in bliss.” The discrepancy between earthly and heavenly beauty often results in a witty treatment of transcendence, as in 39, where the poet recounts his rapture when the lady smiles on him:

. . . rapt with joy resembling heavenly madness, My soule was ravisht quite, as in a traunce, And feeling thence no more her sorrowes sadnesse, Fed on the fulnesse of that chearfull glaunce. More sweet than nectar, or ambrosial1 meat, Seem’d every bit which tenceforth I did eat.

Not only does he feed here on the fullness of a transcendental food, but he does so in a trance resembling the poetic frenzy, “ravisht quite,” that is


wholly, from himself. The images play wittily on mystical ecstacy, in which the soul is freed from the body to experience divine things. And the wit, of course, is a sign of the distance between heaven and earth, between divine madness and the earthly madness of love.

Often - we saw an instance of this in 72 - the poet’s ecstasis is repre- sented as a bird sent forth from within himself into the enrapturing presence of the lady, where he is fed on pleasure or delight; it is an important symbol of the poet’s power to transcend himself. A witty instance of this important image occurs in 76; “ravisht” by a glimpse of his lady’s breasts, the poet’s “frayle thoughs... rashly led astray” are compared to birds of prey:

Whiles diving deepe through amorous insight, On the sweet spoyle of beautie they did pray, And twixt her paps, like early fruit in May, Whose harvest seemd to hasten now apace, They loosely did theyr wanton winges display.

Placing themselves “boldly” there, they find themselves “blest.” Again, this sonnet is a witty parody of ecstatic vision, and the parody here devel- ops out of the poet’s frank admission of the “envy” that his physical self has for the raptures of his mental self. As the wit makes quite clear, such ecstasies are second best, and while they may put the poet’s “thoughts” to rest, the poet himself remains restless and unsatisfied: “Sweet thoughts, I envy your so happy rest,/Which oft I wisht, yet never was so blest.” In part, the restlessness of ecstatic experience is also the subject of sonnet 84. After warning himself not to “molest” her “sacred peace” or “work her gentle mindes unrest” with the least “sparke of filthy lustful1 fyre” or “glance of sensual1 desire,” he sends forth on a journey towards transcen- dent fulfillment “pure affections bred in spotlesse brest,/And modest thoughts breathd from we1 tempred sprites.” “Goe,” he urges them,

. . . visit her in her chast bowre of rest, Accompanyde with angelick dehghtes. There till your selfe with those most joyous sights The which my self could never yet attayne.

The sonnet is a tribute to the purity of the lady’s body and an affirmation of the purity of the lover’s desire. It is, more specifically, shaped by the pressure of the lover’s Platonism as he rises out of the level of sensuality and journeys, through the purity of his mind and heart, to the sphere of “angelick delightes” where he beholds in the ecstatis of his thought the “joyous sights” of her chaste body. But the sonnet contains a curious ambiguity, because for all its idealism, it tells us that the poet cannot rise above his fascination with the lady’s body. He indulges a voyeuristic wish to enjoy the sight of her body without desiring it. But what has happened to desire? He must “speake no word to her of these sad plights” which he


suffers at being denied “those most joyous sights” which are permitted only to his thoughts. In order to preserve her “sacred peace,” he must take the burden of sensuality and its unrest upon himself.

The answer for the poet is not merely to satisfy the unappeased sexual energy that becomes increasingly evident as the sequence draws to its conclusion. His metaphors of ecstacy and transcendence acknowledge the kinship between the ecstacies of love and mysticism; they recognize as well that ecstatic desire of either kind remains restless, capable of feeding itself to fulness only in the ecstatic moment. If the poet’s initial act of self- transcendence is to fulfill itself with any steadiness through the love which took him from himself, the lady herself must act: she must renounce this “too constant stiffenesse,” this wall of selfhood which keeps him at a voyeuristic distance from her. She must make a place for him within “her chaste bowre of rest.” The poet takes up some of these issues in the seven- ty-third sonnet, the first lines of which recapitulate the metaphorical arc of his love:

Being my sclfe captyved here in care, My hart, whom none with servile bands can tye, But the fayre tresses of your golden hayre, Breaking his prison, forth to you doth fly. Like as a byrd, that in ones hand doth spy Desired food, to it doth make his flight, Even so my hart, that wont on your fayre eye To feed his till, flyes backe unto your sight.

A captive of himself and care, he breaks the prison of self-enclosure and flies into the lovely presence of his “Desired food.” While such images of flight, as we have seen, are usually associoated with ecstasis, this sonnet does not emphasize the raptures of ecstacy but, instead, reveals the insuf- ficiency and consequent restlessness of a love which continues solely as the need to be nourished, solely as appetite. For, on inspection, the bird of this metaphor repeatedly flies to the hand, or eye, where it is “wont... To feed his fill,” and then “flyes backe” again. The most complete statement of restless appetite is number 3L9 There the lady is the object of a transcen- dent vision by comparison to which “All this worlds glory seemeth vayne.. . And all their showes but shadowes.” Yet, however nourishing such vision, it leaves the lover with an unappeased hunger:

My hungry eyes, through greedy covetize Still to behold the object of their Paine, With no contentment can themselves suffize, But having pine, and having not complaine. For lacking it, they cannot lyfe sustayne, And having it, they gaze on it the more: In their amazement lyke Narcissus vaine, Whose eyes him starv’d: so plenty makes me poore.

Emphasizing his sense of its transcendental quality, the poet relates his


love to the Platonic hunger for beauty “Begot of Plentie and of Penurie” (HL, 1. 53). But in the very moment of so dignifying his love, he casts doubt on its nature by identifying its Poverty and Plenty with the line which Ovid’s Narcissus utters in his despair: inopem me copiufecit. Is the poet’s love for his lady a manifestation of a Platonic hunger for a beauty which, however abundantly present to the lover, is never sufficient? Or does the poem recognize that such restless appetite is inherently self-des- tructive? Or are both these notions involved and does the poem, therefore, suggest the limits of the poet’s Platonism? Certainly, it is another curiously ambiguous handling of the poet’s idealism. ‘O It suggests not only that the poet might perish, like Narcissus, for lack of what he can never have in sufficient abundance; it suggests as well that the destroyer is the narcissism of ecstatic desire and of that desire’s voyeuristic pleasures.

One of the poet’s most basic insights is that his love must be requited not merely to satisfy appetite but to give appetite its proper place and structure. The metaphor for this place and structure is captivity, a captivity which replaces both the despairs of self-enclosure and those of unrequired love, where he is “her captive quite forlorn,” with another captivity, one in which, as “her faithful thrall” (29) he attains a hitherto unknown liberty. The most important metaphorical variant of captivity is the caged bird. For the ecstatic heart and mind that so often take wing and fly can find their metaphorical rest only in the cage of his lady’s bosom; his account of his restless heart in 73 is, therefore, prelude to the following tender plea:

Doe you him take, and in your bosome bright Gently encage, that he may be your thrall: Perhaps he there may learne, with rare delight, To sing your name and prayses over all.

In the cage his restlessness is replaced by a new activity, the process of learning to sing his beloved’s name. Here the appetite for ecstacy yields to the appetite for knowledge, a knowledge of the lady’s innermost self, which he cannot attain unless, as the metaphor tells us, she opens her heart to him. Here, in this cage where lovers learn to know each other’s names, they find freedom and in their knowledge of each other a fulfillment which the ecstatic appetite could not attain:

The doubt which ye misdeeme, fayre love, is vaine, That fondly feare to loose your liberty,... Sweet be the bands the which true love doth tye, Without constrayn or dread of any ill: The gentle birde feeles no captivity Within her cage, but singes and feeds her till. (65)

In the metaphors of the caged bird, the appeal of ecstatic transcendence has been replaced by a more limited and realistic form of transcendence, that which enables the lovers to go beyond the particular self, first in the knowledge of the beloved’s self, on which love feeds and fulfills itself, and


secondly in the song which overflows the cage and broadcasts its beauty to the world. Because the lover is a poet the form of his overflowing is song, song with the potential to “fill the world with her victorious prayse” (29). This gift of song and its power to fill the world recall the conclusion to Epithalamion where the lovers repay the plentious blessings of Heaven and earth with a “large posteriry” of “fruitful progeny.” Love in both Amoretti and Epithalumion is a creative bond, ultimately a marriage, in which lovers fulfill themselves and fill full their world with gifts of gratitude. Love of this sort, concludes the poet in his Easter sonnet, “is the lesson which the Lords us taught.” The Easter sonnet follows “Lyke as a huntsman,” where the lady freely allows herself to be captured, and it explains the meaning of love’s captivity in terms of Christ’s harrowing of Hell: “On this day” Christ made his

. . . triumph over death and sin, And having harrowd hell, didst bring away Captivity thence captive, us to win.

The sonnet refers to Paul’s statement that “When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men” (Eph. 4:9). Human love is a reflection of Christ’s love: it releases us from the Hell of our inner captivity; but once won over by love, we are captive in a new way, as was Paul, who proclaims himself “the prisoner of Jesus Christ,” (Eph. 3:1), “the prisoner of the Lord” (Eph. 4: 1). Love is an imprisonment in which captivity is captive, freeing the lovers to model themselves on their Lord, to give back to God and the world the gifts of their creativity.

The theme of liberty within restraints is clearly related to central Chris- tian Humanist concerns, but its coloration is peculiarly Spenserian, transforming, as it does, the conventional thraldom of love into an exhili- rating spiritual liberty in which fulfillment is an effortless attainment, a caged bird singing and feeding its fill, and filling the world with its gifts. The dark side of this theme is fear of chaos, of inexplicable mutability. When the lady capitulates in “Lyke as a huntsman,” the poet’s success is figured as the taming of a “beast so wyld;” it is for this reason, this wildness, that the “gentle deare” must be “fyrmely tyde.” The figure of the tamed beast, like the pervasive metaphors of caged and nesting birds, mir- rors the poet’s desire to domesticate the wildness of nature, both human and external. In the final analysis, the external world loses all appearance of order, unless the inner world, the self, is secured within “fyrmely” established bounds.

Nature without bound or limit is what the poet fears and flees when, like a “gentle bird,” he seeks his safety in the cage of his beloved’s bosom or, as in 42, wishes

her thrall for ever to remayne, And yield for pledge my poor captyved hart; The which, that it from her may never start, Let her, if please her, bynd with adamant chayne, And from all wandring loves, which mote pervart His safe assurance, strongly it restrayne.


Bound to her “with adamant chayne,” he is secure from the threat of aimless impulse, of the insecurity of a heart whose need to love is not safe within the assurance of strong restraints. To be separated from her is to feel as though let loose to wander the face of the earth, as in the concluding sonnet where we find the poet “wandring here and there all desolate” (89). To be apart from her, even to part from her at the end of a day, is for him to feel as though he is traversing an alien terrain, destined to the exile of a wanderer:

So oft as homeward I from her depart, I go lyke one that, having lost the field. Is prisoner led away with heavy hart, Despoyld of warlike armes and knowen shield. So doe I now my selfe a prisoner yeeld To sorrow and to solitary Paine. From the presence of my dearest deare exylde, Longwhile alone in langour to remaine. (52)

Without her guiding presence, he is “despoyld” of secure identity, for as we shall see below, when we speak about mutability, only through her can he come to the knowledge of himself; therefore, he is here an “exile” both from himself and from his world: he becomes a wanderer in an unpropi- tious natural universe.

Lyke as a ship, that through the ocean wyde By conduct of some star doth make her way, Whenas a storme hath dimd her trusty guyde, Out of her course doth wander far astray; So I, whose star, that wont with her bright ray Me to direct, with cloudes is overcast, Doe wander now in darknesse and dismay, Through hidden perils round about me plast. (34)

In her absence, he is left to wander in this treacherous universe - left to hope that his “Helice, the lodestar of [his] life,/Will shine again” and “cleare [his] cloudy grief.” The storm, the danger, is both within and without: separated from her, neither self nor universe has “course” or “direction.” When she rejects him, her rejections, therefore, wrench from him the bitterest of naturalistic visions:

Fayre be ye sure, but cruel1 and unkind, As is a tygre, that with greedinesse Hunts after bloud, when he by chance doth find A feeble beast, doth felly him oppresse. Fayre be ye sure, but proud and pittilesse, As is a storme, that all things doth prostrate, Finding a tree alone all comfortlesse, Beats on it strongly, it to ruinate. Fayre be ye sure, but hard and obstinate, As is a rocke amidst the raging floods, Gaynst which a ship, of succour desolate, Doth suffer wreck both of her selfe and goods. (56)


Here nature offers no prospect of “succour, ” conceals within itself no hidden star, “dimd” and “overcast” (34), that could at any moment re-emerge. Rather, nature here preys upon and despoils itself, an image of the poet’s own self-alienation. The pathetic fallacy of the “tree alone all comfortlesse” bespeaks indeed the pathos of this insentate universe. In his helpless ship, man has no special status, but is only another object of col- lision and accident in the vortex of Fortune: a wanderer, the poet sought direction but, like the feeble beast, he is found instead “by chance”.

All those images in which the lady appears as a predator lead, ultimately, to this incipient naturalistic despair. But the poet’s love for his lady goes beyond her, to his love of Christ, whose Sacrifice makes love between human beings meaningful and, even more, makes it man’s grateful obliga- tion (68). There is a strength in this faith, which enables the lover to turn away from despair, sometimes with indignation, and to oppose his lady’s ferocity with the example of Christ’s mercy. In 53, where he compares her to a panther, he scolds her for making her beauty,

the bayte her gazers to embrew: Good shames to be to ill an instrument: But mercy doth with beautie best agree, As in theyr Maker ye them best may see.

In 49, he admonishes her to “know that mercy is the Mighties jewell,” that it is “greater glory... to save than spill.” “Such mercy,” he concludes, mix- ing indignation with pleading, “shal you make admyred to be;/So shall you live by giving life to me. ” Merciful love, like Christ’s sacrifice, has the power to save and give life. If it did not exist in God, man, and nature, the universe would be bleak and life-denying. But that is not the case.

In those sonnets, beginning with 62, where the poet recounts the lady’s capitulation, he has an opportunity to renovate his earlier metaphors in which nature mirrored a grief that verged upon despair. For the advent of mercy transforms the appearance of nature, and what once seemed to him savage seems now astonishingly tame and gentle. The predators of his earlier experience are transformed by the lady’s mercy into the “gentle deare” of 67. “Strange thing,” the poet marvels, “to see a beast so wyld” so “fyrmely tyde.” Nature now is captive, tied like the caged bird of 65 in the “bands” of love, whose restraints give the poet’s universe its meaning. Therefore, he is no longer adrift without direction on a sea of mutability:

After long stormes and tempests sad assay, With which my silly barke was tossed sore, I doe at length descry the happy shore, . . . Fayre soyle it seemes from far, and fraught with store Of all that deare and daynty is alyve. (63)

The poet’s direction is clear: it is towards a version of nature in which the natural world is tamed, hospitable, a habitation created by love for the nourishment of man.


Amoretti is a sequence of love poems; it does not move outside its genetic limits to ask why or if savagery can persist in a universe “fyrmely tyde” in the “bands” of love. Instead, it uses the pastoral device, established in Petrarchan practice, by which the natural world is made a mirror of man’s feelings, and it does so in order to show how the universe appears in the presence and absence of merciful love, a redemptive love that is returned to the self from the world beyond the self. The presence of such love makes possible not perhaps paradise itself, but a prospect of paradise, the garden of the lovers’ relationship. This garden is the “happy shore” that comes into view in 63 and which the lover elaborates in 64 where, on “Comming to kisse her lyps,” he smells “a gardin of sweet flowres,/That dainty odours from them threw around.” The garden is the lady’s body, profusely deli- cious: “Her goodly bosome lyke a strawberry bed;/Her neck lyke to a bounch of cullambynes,” “brest lyke lillyes,” “nipples like yong blos- somed jessemynes.” The frank sexuality of these images and their mode of stylization draw upon the fragrant, sexual gardens of The Song of Solo- mon,]’ a work which gave biblical authority and spiritual meaning to the erotic. The opening verses of the Song might have served Spenser as an epigraph for his sonnet: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for thy love is better than wine. Thine oils have a goodly fragrance; Thy name is as oil poured forth” (4:2-3). In the exigetical tradition, this kiss “typif- ied” the “wedding of flesh and spirit” which “is the ultimate subject of’ The Song of Solomon. ‘* As in Spenser’s sonnet, moreover, it is associated with the odors of the beloved, and in those odors are the fragrance of the beloved’s name, the name which the poet can learn only within the pre- cincts of the lady’s bosom. Until now, however, the lady has been enclosed within herself, both sexually and spiritually. Like the beloved of Solomon, she has been “A garden inclosed” (4: 12), a garden which is, on one level of exigetical interpretation, the hortus conclusus of the individual soul. In Amoretti, however, the garden must encompass more than the indivudal soul; it must extend to embrace both the lovers. Thus, it becomes a shared garden of both flesh and spirit in which the lovers are united. It is towards the perfecting of their shared garden that the poet looks in 71, where the lady is figured as a bee and the lover as a spider which has caught her in its web:

as your worke is woven all about With woodbynd flowers and fragrant eglantine, So sweet your prison you in time shall prove, With many deare delights bedecked fyne: And all thensforth eternal1 peace shall see Betweene the spyder and the gentle bee.

Here, as the graceful wit suggests, is a shared paradise of sexuality, which the lover awaits with pleasurable anticipation; but it is also a shared inner garden, which will come into perfection only as the lady comes to learn that love is not a prison - only that is through inward change, in the experience, or proving, of time.


Such acceptance of the positive value of change is characteristic of the poet and this is so in spite of his dread of mutability. He has ventured forth onto the sea of mutability in spite of his fears and its dangers. Without the courage to face such dangers, he would have remained locked in his poisonous self-enclosure, never to reach the “happy shore” that waited across the sea of change which separates two human beings. In contrast to the poet, the lady throughout the sequence resists change, even after her acceptance of the poet’s love. Her resistance consists in her capacity to make a virtue of self-enclosure; in light of this, the poet’s entrance into the garden signals her readiness to accept change and, ultimately, the alteration of self that love requires. This alteration and the nature of the lady’s resistance are our two remaining themes.

Like the poet, the lady, too, is a ship, but she guides herself through the seas of Fortune with an inner strength that remains untouched by, super- ior to, the external world of accident and change:

Thrise happie she that is so well assured Unto her selfe, and setled so in hart, That nether will for better be allured, Ne feard with worse to any chaunce to start: But, like a steddy ship, doth strongly part The raging waves, and keepes her course aright, Ne ought for tempest doth from it depart, Ne ought for fayrer weathers false delight. Such selfe assurance need not feare the spight Of grudging foes, ne favour seek of friends: But in the stay of her owne stedfast might, Nether to one her selfe nor other bends. (59)

The lady stands opposite the poet as one for whom self-enclosure is the source of strength. For she can be what the poet, as her lover, cannot - sufficient unto herself, capable of extending her equanimity beyond external fortune and “spite/ Of grudging foes” even to the “favour” of her “friends.” For she relies solely on her own “steadfast might” and, having closed herself within her own self-assured “course,” cannot be deflected, not even by “fayrer weathers false delight”.i3 In Amoretti 75 the lady lectures her lover on vanitas, displaying an almost medieval contempt for the mutable world. The difference between them, however, is that for the poet nothing in our experience, not even the mind itself, is free from change.

Nevertheless, the poet cannot help but praise, if ambivalently, the lady’s capacity for distancing herself from the vanity of a mutable world, which makes her like the sky, “haughty” but “pure immortal hye.” Nor can he do other than praise her capacity for self-enclosure, her virtuous self-assurance: if she behaves like “senceless stone” towards her lover’s troubled heart (54), she is also like the “fayrest ymages/Of hardest marble.” His ambivalence is not merely that he must admire in another what causes him pain; it arises equally out of his awareness of her limitations and his knowledge that what causes him pain are virtuous but limited, even flawed


qualities. Proud, stubborn of will (38), revealing only a “hard hart” (1 S), she is, in the matter of her self-assurance, like Guyon as he approaches the Cave of Mammon, “on his way of none accompanyde;/And evermore himself with comfort feedes/Of his owne vertues” (II.vii.2). What Guyon learns by means of the Cave of Mammon is that the powers of resistance and self-reliance must exhaust themselves, that man must ultimately rely on forces outside of and transcending the self. This critique - a Christian critique-of pagan self-sufficiency is at the center of the poet’s argu- ment.

If sonnet 59 expresses praise for the lady’s virtuous self-sufficiency. number 58 creates an admonitory context for that admiration:

Weake is th’assurance that weake flesh reposeth In her owne powre, and scorneth others ayde; That soonest fals, when as she most supposeth Her selfe assurd, and is of nought affrayd. All flesh is frayle, and all her strength unstayd, Like a vaine bubble blowen up with ayre: Devouring tyme and changeful chance have prayd Her glories pride, that none may it repayre. Ne none so rich or wise, so strong or fayre, But fayleth, trusting on his owne assurance.

The powers of the individual human being must inevitably fail. Nothing is safe from change and, therefore, no one can seek safety within the enclo- sures of the self. Clearly, the poet needs no lectures on vanity and mutability (75); that she does lecture him suggests her failure to under- stand her lover as sensitively as he understands her. Never harsh nor condemnatory, his understanding penetrates to her lack of self-awaneress: his reference in 58 to time’s devouring of the flesh and its glories is an implicit criticism of the lady, whom he elsewhere warns against taking too much pride in her beauty which, “how ever fayre it be,/Shall turne to nought” (79; cf.27). She lectures him on the vanity of a mutable world but appears to be herself all too vain. The most serious manifestation of that vanity is the error of self-assurance, to “misdeem so farre,/That to your selfe ye most assured arre” (58). The poet recognizes his beloved’s potential weaknesses, giving good reason to suspect her lack of self-awareness; yet he cannot help but admire her powers. His is an ampler view, one that encompasses - hers an attitude of resistance, which excludes and is therefore narrower. Unlike her, therefore, he does not attempt somehow to prevent mutability from having an effect upon his inner parts; rather, he seeks to encompass it and in encompassing it to give it value.

From the very first, he pleads a case which accepts the inevitability of change:

The rolling wheele, that runneth often round, The hardest Steele in tract of time doth teare: And drizling drops, that often doe redound, The firmest flint doth in continuance weare. (18)


For, of course, from the very first the poet’s only reassuring hope lies in the possibility of change, the lady’s change of heart:

The durefull oake, whose sap is not yet dride, Is long ere it conceive the kindling fyre: But when it once doth bume, it doth divide Great heat, and makes his flames to heaven aspire. (6)

Images such as this argue for accepting change, instead of resistance, as a function of inner life. They suggest, as here in the heavenly aspiration of the flames, that moments of change in both man and nature may be part of a pattern of significant, even sacred transformation. It is in this context that the lover sees his courtship as an effort to “convert” the lady:

Playnts, prayers, vowes, ruth, sorrow, and dismay; Those engins can the proudest love convert. (14)

The conjunction of “love” and “convert” makes for some lattitude of interpretation, as each word offers at least two possible meanings. If “love” refers to the lady, then the poet expresses his hope that he may be able to “convert,” i.e. to “turn” his beloved form disdain to affection, “turn” being the least emotive and most literal possibility for convert (OED, 1.1) Love may refer not to the lady, nowever, but to the emotion, and the “proudest love” may be her self-assurance, the love of self, which he seeks to convert, that is to “transform” (OED, II. lI.b) into the love of another; here “convert” has the overtones, moreover, of conversion from “a sinful to a religious life” (OED, 11.10).

Ultimately what the poet offers his lady is a sacred conversion to life itself. In Amoretti 32, the poet complains that “The paynefull smith with force of fervent heat” and“his heavy sledge” can transform “The hardest yron,” while the heat and strength of his love have been unable to “soft a whit” “Her hart, more harde then yron. ” “What then remaines,” he asks in despair, “but I to ashes burne,/And she to stones at length all forsen turne?” If he is to prevent this double death of spirit, he must find some way to “move her,” who in her resistance is, as we have seen, like “senceless stone” (54); therefore, in Amoretti 51 he sees himself as a type of Pygmalion who must convert one of the “fayrest ymage/Of hardest marble” to the softness of life. Parallelling this hoped-for upward transformation from stone to life is the transformation that the poet himself has already undergone, whose “fraile spirit” has been “from baseness raysed” by the “heavenly fyre” of her beauty (3). Here is indeed a trans-forming; for he has not only transcended his former self, he has been re-formed:

Thrugh your bright beams doth not the blinded guest Shoot out his darts to base affections wound; But angels come, to lead fraile mindes to rest In chast desires, on heavenly beauty bound. You frame my thoughts, and fashion me within. (8)


The poet’s horror of aimless wandering is not a fear of mutability alone, but of mutability withoutform. This form is a process of upward, sacred transformation, through which change becomes meaningful and, far from threatening human identity, becomes the means by which the self achieves perfection. The poet’s attitude in Amoretti towards love and the changes which lovers suffer is governed by one of Spenser’s most comprehensive insights into his universe, which he formulates in the Mutabilitie Cantons:

all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd, They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate... (F.Q. VII.vii.58)

Through the dilation ofbeing mutability works upward towards the perfection of all created things. Dilation of being is what the lady has to gain from love:

For now your light doth more it selfe dilate, And in my darknesse greater doth appeare. Yet since your light hath once enlumind me, With my reflex yours shall encreased be. (66)

These few lines condense the rather intricate process, adapted from Ficino and explained in the “Fowre Hymnes,” by which love becomes the agency of self-realization.‘4 The lady’s light is dilated not only because of the contrast between its brilliance and her lover’s self-deprecatory darkness. Rather, her light has illuminated him and is, as in a mirror, reflected back to her and added to the strength of her own brilliance. Since the light is her own, however, this enrichment is a form of self-enrichment, of self-illiumi- nation, which would not be possible were it not for the power which her light has had to illuminate her beloved. There is an ambiguity typical of the sequence in the poet’s reference to “my reflex”. This reflex is both the poet himself - his image - and the reflection within him of her light.i5 In the “reflex,” therefore, there is a superimposition of being, each self inter- volved with, and dependent for its dilation upon, the self of the other. For only when her “light hath once enlumind” the poet shall hers “encreased be.” In the forty-fifth sonnet the poet warns the lady not to seek herself by looking into her “glasse of christall clene,” but instead, he urges her,

in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane, Most lively lyke behold your semblant trew. Within my hart, though hardly it can shew Thing so divine to vew of earthly eye, The fayre idea of your celestial1 hew And every part remaines immortally.

This “celestial1 hew” is an original beauty which “remaines immortally” with the poet from that time when, as Ficino describes it, “the souls, slip-


ping down out of the milky way... are draped in a certain heavenly and clear wrap, clothed in which, they are then enclosed in earthly bodies”.“j Only through love and in her beloved will she discover this “Fayre idea” of her self, which is the perfect possibility of her being.

In Spenser’s view of love as self-realization, there is no place for self- enclosure, even where it is a matter of ethical choice. One must have the courage to break forth out of the inward part, to voyage out on the sea of mutability whose dangers provide the only access to one’s true self. That self is found waiting in the bosom of another human being, the “happy shore” on which the Divinity has planted the garden which will nourish and sustain this life.

The University of Manitoba MYRONTURNER

Notes

1. WaldoF. McNeir complained about the lack of attention and even of resuect accorded Amoretti in “An Apology for Spenser’s Amoretti,” in Essential Articles for- the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Hamden, Conn., 1972) pp. 524-33; the article was originally published in Die Neueren Sprachen, 14 (1965), but Hamilton’s decision to reprint it indicates that things were not very much different in 1972, and they still are not: one only has to look at how much has been done on Astrophel and Stella by comparison.

2. J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, University Paperback, 1966), pp. 102-103.

3. Robert Kellog, “Thought’s Astonishment and the Dark Conceits of Spenser’s Amoret- ti,” Renaissance Papers (1965); rev. and rept. in John R. Elliott, Jr, ed., The Prince of Poets, (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 141.

4. LouisL. Martz, “The Amoretti: ‘Most Goodly Temperature’,” in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. William Nelson (N.Y., 1961); rpt in Elliott ed., The Prince of Poets, pp. 120-138.

5. Treatments which view the sneaker as fictional character include: Peter M. Cummines. “Spenser’s Amoretti as an Allegory of Love,” TSLL, 12 (1970) 163-179; DonM. Ricks; “Persona and Process in Spenser’s “‘Amoretti’,” Ariel, 3 (1972), 5-15; Alexander Dunlop, “The Drama of Amoretti,” in Spenser at Kalamazzo. Proceedingsfrom a Special Session at the Thirteenth Conference of Medieval Studies in Kalamazzo. Michizan. 5-6 Mav. 1978 (Cleve- land: Cleveland State University microfiche ed., 1978), pp. 273-276; and .Carol Barthel, “Amoretti: A Comic Monodrama?” Soenser at Kalamazzo (1978). DD. 287-293. In addition to the use of the dramatic analogy in Dunlop and Barthel, it appd& also in Cummings, who sees the sequence as being dominated by an “interior monologue” (TSLL, 12, 169).

6. Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Modefrom Donne toCowley (Princeton, 1969), p. 6. 7. My view is not entirely at odds with Kellog’s, insofar as he approaches Miner’s formu-

lation when he argues that the poet images, if not “actual experience,” then “ideal experience.” Moreover, it does not exclude the possibility of seeing Amoretti as allegory, because there is a sufficient pattern of interrelatedness among Spens&‘s images to make for the kind of continuity one might wish to call allegorical. What I find most problematic in Kellog’s thesis is his failure to explain how the distasteful abjectness of Spenser’s lover is related to the serious “doctrine” of love which he finds in the sequence; at least those who see Amoretti as narrative or dramatic nrovide a wav of accountine for anv ironies that must emerge once the speaker is understood to be shamefully abject. - ’

8. Amoretti I; theedition cited throughout is from The Complete Poetical Works of&ens- er, ed. R.E. Neil Dodge, The Riverside Press Cambridge-Edition (Boston: Houghton MiBlin, 1908); citations are included in the text by sonnet number. Dodge’s text is the 1595 Ponsonby edition; however, as he omits the repetition of Amoretti 35 as number 83, he ends up with eighty-eight instead of eight-nine sonnets; I have, therefore, renumbered the last six sonnets of his edition to bring them in line with standard practice.


9. This sonnet is clearly crucial to the discussion of restless desire; one can, therefore, see why there might have been some confusion about its placement in the sequence, possibly having been first numbered as thirty-live and later re-numbered as 83 in order to place it where it more loaicallv belongs.

10. For a full& but less positive view of the neo-Platonism of this sonnet, see CalvinR. Edwards, “The Narcissus myth in Spenser’s Poetry,” SP, 74 (1977), 71-75.

11. The parallels between 64 and Song of Songs were first detailed by Israel Baroway in “The Imagery of Soenser and the Sona of Sonas.” JEGP, 33 (1934). 39-40.

12. St&y Stewart, The Enclosed&&n (Madison: The Hnivkrsity of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 28.

13. In number 84, the poet criticizes the lady for “her too constant stiffeness;” it is quite possible that Spenser is there referring to an excess of the virtue of constancy, the virtue which he describes here but criticizes in 58. Constancy, a characteristic of Sidney’s Pamela as well, is close relative to Renaissance versions of magnanimity; see C. B. Watson. Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept ofHonor (Princeton, 1960) p. 167, and my “The Heroic Ideal in Sidney’s Revised Arcadia,” SEL, 10 (Winter, 1970). 68-70.

14.. Lines 176-245 of “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie” are an adaptation of Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, trans. Sears Jayne, University of Missouri Stu- dies, 19 (Columbia, 1944), 188-189.

15. For a line treatment of the ambiguities of language and personal reference which tend to conflate the identities of poet and lady, see JacquelineT. Miller, “‘Love Doth Hold My Hand’, Writing and Wooing in the Sonnets of Sidney and Spenser.” ELH, 46 (1979), 541, 558.

16. Commentary, p. 187.

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