Edmund 1552-1599 Spenser

On reaching home, or so he would have us believe, Spenser wrote Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, dedicating it to Raleigh "from my house of Kilcolman the 27. of December 1591."' It was not published, however, till 1595, when it appeared in one volume with Astrophel.

Colin Clout; Astrophel.

Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is the most charming of Spenser's poems. He is again in Arcady, telling his fellow-shepherds of his voyage with the Shepherd of the Ocean, his reception by the mighty Cynthia, her court, her ladies and brave poets. Then the note changes to the old complaint of courtly falsity and praise of the shepherd's life. The whole poem is exquisitely written, in "an easy running verse with tender feet." There is nothing more attractive in Spenser than Colin's chivalrous defence of Rosalind.

Astrophel is the prelude to a set of pastoral elegies on Sidney by several hands. The second "number," the Lay of Clorinda, though credited to Sidney's sister, is demonstrably from Spen ser's pen. If Astrophel seems conventional and frigid we must remember that Spenser had already lamented Sidney in the Ruines of Time, and that the Sidney whom he now laments is not the hero of Zutphen but the author of the Arcadia.

Colin's praise of the shepherd's life prepares us to find that Spenser, though disappointed of preferment in England, and harassed by law-suits with his Irish neighbour Lord Roche, had begun to love his Munster home and to weave its legends and scenery into hiS verse. Towards the close of 1592, on the ortho dox view of the Amoretti, he fell in love with Elizabeth Boyle and married her on June 1594. He celebrated his wooing in the Amoretti and his wedding in the Epithalamion, which were entered together at Stationers' Hall in November and pub lished together in 1595. It is highly probable that some of the Amoretti had already done service to express an amour courtois for Lady Carey during his English visit. It is probable that Elizabeth Boyle was the orphan daughter of Stephen Boyle, of Bradden in Northamptonshire, who had accompanied her brother 'Yet the dedication of Daphnaida is dated "London this first of Januairie, 1591" (i.e., 1592 n.s.). No convincing explanation of this discrepancy has been offered. On the whole it is easiest to believe that

Spenser, writing on New Year's Day, used the new style, i.e., that his 1591 means our 1591.

Alexander when he went to Ireland to seek his fortune under the protection of their kinsman Richard Boyle, afterwards earl of Cork. The view that she was a widow, having been married to one Tristram Peace in 1588 or 1589, at present lacks documentary confirmation, and is hard to reconcile with Burke's statement that she bore seven children to her third—on this view her f ourth husband, Sir Robert Tynte, after 1612 or 1613.

Amoretti; Epithalamion.

The Amoretti are love-sonnets, all but one in a form which Spenser made his own, consisting of three linked quatrains and a couplet. It had already been used in Scots, but Spenser may have got it direct from Marot. Though it lacks the pyramidal strength of the Petrarchan form, and the freedom of the Shakespearean, its "linked sweetness" suits Spen ser's style. Many of these sonnets are imitated from French or Italian, especially from Desportes and Tasso: for one a Spanish original has been found. They are all graceful, but only the famous sonnet on Easter can be called great. The Etithalamion, on the other hand, is by common consent the greatest of all wedding songs ; rich in poetic allusions and in echoes from his own earlier poems, as if Spenser had gathered up all the fruits of his study and all the flowers of his fancy to present them to his bride. Here for once his whole nature speaks, flesh and spirit reconciled in the sacrament of marriage. The stanza, suggested by the Italian canzone, is magnificent far beyond anything previously heard in English. The structure of the whole poem is as perfect as that of its parts.

Towards the end of 1595 Spenser, having finished three more books of the Faerie Queene, came to London to publish them. During this year he also published his Prothalamion and Fowre Hymnes, and composed or revised his Veue of the Present State of Ireland, which, though entered at Stationers' Hall in 1598, was not allowed to be printed without further authority, and, in fact, did not see the light till 1633.