Spenser in Ireland
After seven years as secretary to the English government in Ireland, Spenser received from the confiscated property of Irish rebels the castle of Kilcolman, between Mallow and Limerick, together with three thousand acres. There he settled as a respectable gentleman farmer and wrote verse worthy of a gentleman. He composed a eloquent but long elegy on Sidney, Astrophel (1586), then revised The Faerie Queene and added to it. In 1589 he went to England full of hope, was presented to the queen by Raleigh, and dedicated the first three books to her so that her fame would endure. To win favor for the work he prefaced it with sonnets praising the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Carew, Sir Christopher Hatton, Raleigh, Burghley, Walsingham, Essex and many other peers. Burghley, Leicester's enemy, called Spenser a worthless rhymer, but many thought him the greatest poet since Chaucer. The queen was generous enough to set him a pension of 50 pounds a year, but Burghley, as treasurer, delayed paying it. Spenser, who had hoped for more, returned in disappointment to Ireland and continued his fantastic epic amid savagery, hatred and anxiety.
The Faerie Queene
He had meant to write the poem in twelve books. Three appeared in 1590 and three more in 1596, and he went no further. Even so, it is twice as long as the Iliad and three times as long as Paradise Lost. Each book is an allegory in tale form about holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy, its aim being to fashion gentlemen and men of breeding by instructive examples. All this followed Sidney's view of poetry as moral teaching through imagined examples. Spenser, who in this way devoted his life to modesty, was rarely sensual; in his sonnets he defined love, in the manner of the knights, as faithful service to the ladies of the world.
For us, who have forgotten the code of chivalry and tire of its deeds and allegories, The Faerie Queene is at first strangely delightful and in the end wearisome. We are ignorant of the historical allusions that thrilled or irritated readers then, and what remains concerns religious quarrels whose last echoes faded in our childhood. Its tales echo Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso. For artificial ideas, clumsy inversions, grand archaisms, strange new words and romantic exaggeration (without Ariosto's smile) no poem in world literature surpasses it. Yet Keats and Shelley loved Spenser and called him the poet's poet. Why? Perhaps the beauty of the form sometimes redeems the medieval nonsense, or splendid description makes the unreal beautiful. The new nine-line stanza he devised was hard to manage, and we are often amazed at its fluency, though he sometimes spoils the sense of a line for the rhyme.
Spenser abandoned the epic to write shorter poems that would confirm his fame. His sonnets, Amoretti, may imitate Petrarch or reflect his year-long courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. He married her in 1594 and expressed the joy of the wedding in his loveliest poem, the Epithalamion. Without vanity he shares with us his delight in her beauty. Tell me, he asks the merchants' daughters, whether you ever saw in your city so sweet and lovable and calm a creature, so adorned with beauty and virtue; her eyes shine like sapphires, her brow is white as ivory, her cheeks like apples reddened by the sun, her lips like cherries, her neck like a marble tower. When the wedding feast ends he asks the guests to leave at once: let the maidens cease their revels, the day is over and night draws on; bring the bride to her chamber, lay her among lilies and violets, under silks and perfumed sheets; let the night pass quietly, with no storm or tumult, and let the youths and maidens sing no more, nor the woods answer them. Did any bride have a more charming ending?
Spenser's Four Hymns praise earthly love, earthly beauty, heavenly love and heavenly beauty. Following Plato, Ficino and Castiglione, he repents of his many sensual compositions, a note that influenced Keats's Endymion, and he bids his soul pierce through universal beauty to discover and feel the heavenly beauty found in varying degrees in all earthly things.
The end in Ireland
Living on a volcano of Irish suffering, Spenser was in daily danger. Shortly before the eruption of Irish anger, he wrote in fine prose (only poets can write fine prose) A View of the Present State of Ireland, advising how the English might spend money and force to subdue the island. In October 1598 the dispossessed Irish of Munster rose, drove out the English settlers and burned Kilcolman. Spenser and his wife barely escaped to England, and three months later, broken in strength and means, the poet died (1599). The Earl of Essex, a young man whom fate had marked to follow him out of the world soon after, paid the cost of his funeral. Poets and nobles walked in procession and threw elegies and flowers into the grave at Westminster.
The sonnet craze and the ballads
In these years all Englishmen loved the sonnet as much as the drama. Sonnets were excellent in form but alike in subject and phrase, and poets in almost all of them complained of the cruelty of maidens and the stinginess of patrons. They advised beauties to let their lovers gather the flower before it withered. Sometimes a strange theme appeared, as when a lover promises the beloved a child if they marry at once. As Petrarch drew inspiration from Laura, each poet sought a mistress to inspire him, found her, and published a sequence in her name: Daniel his Delia, Lodge his Phyllis, Constable his Diana, Fulke Greville his Caelica. The best known was Daniel, though Ben Jonson, a severe judge, called him an honest man but no poet. Michael Drayton's Idea displays every poetic form, and in one of its sonnets a new theme appears: he takes leave of his stingy mistress with irony, saying that since there is no other remedy, let us kiss and part.
On the whole, apart from drama, English literature of the Elizabethan age was still a generation behind French. Its prose was strong, flexible, often involved, long-winded and fanciful, with royal grandeur and a stately rhythm, but it produced no Rabelais or Montaigne. English verse, except the Epithalamion and The Faerie Queene, was a humble imitation of foreign forms. Spenser never found admirers on the Continent, just as Ronsard found none in England; poetry makes from language and feeling a music that cannot be heard beyond the border of speech. Ballads were accepted by the people long before court poetry; they were hung on the walls of houses and taverns, sold and sung in the streets. The lament of Lord Randal still moves us. Perhaps it was these popular songs, and not the polished sonnets, that prepared the Elizabethan public to understand Shakespeare.