Simon Heffer Hinterland

Don’t have time to read 4,000 stanzas? This sonnet gives a flavour of one of England’s greatest poets

Edmund Spenser is famous as the author of The Faerie Queene, first published in 1590, which, if you haven’t read it – and probably only PhD students researching Spenser read it all – is an allegorical poem of 4,000 stanzas, so long it makes Paradise Lost appear a short trek. A thinly disguised hymn of praise to Elizabeth I, it alludes to many contemporary events, such as the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (James VI of Scotland, her heir, banned the poem there having noted the negative portrayal of his late mother).

I managed, more than 40 years ago, to get a few cantos into the first of the six books, where I am ashamed to say I began to feel over-allegorised. My shame is real: Spenser is unquestionably a great and innovative poet. One day, I shall read the lot, the impatience of youth having long passed.

The purpose for which Spenser wrote the epic – to curry royal favour – certainly worked. Thanks, it seems, to an intervention by Sir Walter Raleigh, who presented the first three books to Elizabeth I in 1589. It is not recorded that she ever read a word of it, though she did grant him a pension of £50 a year. But Spenser’s hopes of a place at court were thwarted by the Queen’s adviser Lord Burghley, who disliked him. Spenser had spent the 1580s in Ireland in the entourage of Lord Grey de Wilton, the Lord Deputy, during a period of serious turbulence, though he had gained an estate in County Cork that had been confiscated after a rebellion. He would spend most of the rest of his life there until fleeing to London during another uprising in 1598. He died the following year, aged just 46.

A good preparation for The Faerie Queene is to read some of Spenser’s shorter poems. My own favourite is to be found in his sonnet sequence Amoretti, 89 poems describing his courtship of his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, whom he married in 1594 after having been widowed. Number LXXV is about an attempt to secure his beloved’s immortality: “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,/ But came the waves and washed it away.” She rebukes him for his arrogance: “Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay,/ A mortal thing so to immortalise,/ For I myself shall like to this decay,/ and eek [also] my name be wiped out likewise.” But the poet remains defiant: “Not so (quoth I) let baser things devise/ To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:/ My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,/ And in the heavens write your glorious name.”

Nothing will smother his belief in the power of their love: “Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,/ Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

The other sonnets are as beautifully crafted and can, unlike Spenser’s great epic, be read with care and reflection in an evening. They make the case for Spenser as one of England’s greatest poets, not just for his technical skill, but for his gifts of perception and humanity. And that we still know his and Elizabeth Boyle’s names more than 425 years later, and read about his love for her, suggests he wasn’t as wrong about immortality as she imagined.

g Hymn of praise: Spenser reading The Faerie Queene to his wife and Sir Walter Raleigh, after the 1846 painting by Marshall John Claxton