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Spenser's Feast
Anthony Esolen on the Theological Depth of a Neglected Wedding Hymn
One of the great pleasures I enjoy as a teacher of poetry is witnessing the astonishment of my students when I begin to reveal to them the subtle, manifold, and sometimes maddeningly complex craftsmanship the artists of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance employed. It is a pleasure mingled with a touch of scorn, I confess, because once one has beheld it, most of the art of our time, and especially what is consciously modern, seems pretty jejune—seems like a dry crust of white bread in place of a banquet.
Yet that lends us Christians a tremendous opportunity, both to recover the glories of our heritage and to apply their lessons to the world that God has sent us to evangelize. Let me take for example Edmund Spenser's wedding hymn, the Epithalamion.
The Amoretti
Let me begin by outlining the poetic and theological structure of the work; the two are inseparable. First, it is not just one poem. It is the final poem in a longer work, the Amoretti and Epithalamion. The Amoretti, or "little love gods," are 89 sonnets arranged in a loose biographical succession, as Spenser's narrator moves from courtship to marriage, and also from a sometimes self-centered passion to genuine Christian love, accompanied by his growing appreciation for the lady, whom he first accuses of pride and stubbornness, until he understands that what he really is beholding in her is an admirable constancy.
These 89 poems are set, moreover, in the context of passing time; most important is the passage from Lenten sorrow to Easter joy. Indeed, Spenser has set a block of 47 sonnets exactly in the center of the Amoretti, the first of these alluding to Ash Wednesday ("This holy season fit to fast and pray") and the last one being a hymn to Easter itself, and to Christ, who teaches us what love really is:
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin,
And having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive us to win:
With joyous love, dear Lord, this day begin,
And grant that we for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin,
May live forever in felicity.
The reader may well note the crowding Scriptural allusions in this octet; what he will not note, unless he has made his way through the Amoretti, is that Spenser is bringing to their culmination several important motifs he has woven through the previous sonnets. One of these is his reference to the "dear" blood, picking up, from the sonnet immediately preceding (a sonnet therefore colored by the liturgy of the Easter Vigil and Psalm 43, "As the deer longs for the running streams"), the two meanings of "dear" (beloved, costly) and its pun on "deer" (Christ is the white hart who gives himself in sacrifice). Another is "captivity": the narrator has lately been at pains to show to his betrothed that love is a bond that sets us free, when we "knit the knot that ever shall remain."
I am, understand, only playing the quick-tour guide here; we could really spend an entire day teasing out the interconnections between the Easter sonnet and the rest of the sequence, and still there would remain for us all the others, too. But let me go on.
The Three Centers
Spenser inserts four "Anacreontic" poems, lighthearted poems about Cupid and his antics, between the sonnets of the Amoretti and the Epithalamion;since these poems comprise nine stanzas, and since the Epithalamion comprises 24 long stanzas in the fashion of the Italian canzoni, we are suddenly confronted with a variety of ways to determine the "center" of the work.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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