Then came October full of merry glee:
For, yet his noule was totty of the must,
Which he was treading in the wine-fats see,
And of the ioyous oyle, whose gentle gust
Made him so frollick and so full of lust:
Vpon a dreadfull Scorpion he did ride,
The same which by Dianaes doom vniust
Slew great Orion: and eeke by his side
He had his ploughing share, and coulter ready tyde.
Next was Nouember, he full grosse and fat,
As fed with lard, and that right well might seeme;
For, he had been a fatting hogs of late,
That yet his browes with sweat, did reek and steem,
And yet the season was full sharp and breem;
In planting eeke he took no small delight:
Whereon he rode, not easie was to deeme;
For it a dreadfull Centaure was in sight,
The seed of Saturne, and faire Nais, Chiron hight.
And after him, came next the chill December:
Yet he through merry feasting which he made,
And great bonfires, did not the cold remember;
His Sauiours birth his mind so much did glad:
Vpon a shaggy-bearded Goat he rode,
The same wherewith Dan Ioue in tender yeares,
They say, was nourisht by th'Idæn mayd;
And in his hand a broad deepe boawle he beares;
Of which, he freely drinks an health to all his peeres.
– Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Mutabilitie, Canto 7, 39 - 41
The Faerie Queene is a very long, complex, dazzling, allusive & elusive poem, whose stated intention is to inculcate virtue in the reader by illustrating through allegory correct moral choices. These stanzas occur towards the work's end, after the six main books, in the fragment of a seventh book known as the Mutabilitie Cantos. Mutabilitie is a Titaness, goddess of perpetual change & uncertainty, who is seeking to overthrow the rule of Jove & his associated gods & goddesses on the grounds that they, too, are subject to the perpetual change she embodies. The judge is Nature, an androgynous figure embodying all creation; there are vague gestures made towards a Christian God who has appointed Nature to this role, but they are surprisingly muted for a poem that is often reduced to an allegory supporting the Protestant Reformation.
As part of her case, Mutabilitie brings out the four elements, the sun & moon, the seasons & the months, the hours & life & death as proof that all is constantly changing. Nature ultimately rules against her, as the change is not chaotic but ordered (the seasons give way to each other, the months & hours succeed in turns. . . ). Despite the denial of Mutabilitie's claim, we are left with a disturbingly unsettled view of the world; what does it mean to infer moral lessons from the ambiguous adventures we have been shown? The world seems swept out from under our feet, & the avoidance of answers provided by the theology of Christian salvation makes the final cantos, despite their formal structure, sometimes antiquated language, & reliance on classical learning, seem very much of the forlorn modern world.
The procession of months begins with March, as did many calendars of the time; this makes sense, as March is when the world begins its annual renewal, known as Spring. All twelve months go by in turn, though I've only put three of them here. The stanzas act as units, often detachable from their surroundings; each month is personified in traditional ways (as in those beautiful pages in illuminated manuscripts showing the aristocratic patron, month by month, the appropriate rural activities of the peasants, from planting through to harvesting, along with such lordly amusements as hunting & feasting).
The language of these stanzas may seem more recondite & antiquated than it really is; some of that is due to the retention not only of the poem's original spelling, but its original typesetting – after a while, certainly by the time of the Mutabilitie Cantos, the reader is used to the i/j & u/v conventions, & doesn't even pause to puzzle out that Ioue is Jove. And it's simple enough, especially with context, to figure out that steem is steam & boawle is bowl. (I've been reading Catherine Nicholson's Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism, which has a fascinating discussion of the convention of not modernizing the poem's spelling.)
In the first stanza, second line, his noule was totty of the must, noule means his head (noll) & must, though maybe an obscure term, is still used for young wine; put the two together, & it's easy enough to deduce that totty means dizzy (& what a wonderful & vivid word to describe the condition!). In the next line, wine-fats see means a sea of wine vats. October is wine-making month, obviously. The months are accompanied by their astrological symbols, in this case the scorpion (though Scorpio doesn't take over until towards the end of the month). The myth referred to is the hunter Diana's punishment of the mortal Orion for boasting of his prowess in the chase; she had him killed by a scorpion & then, to make up for it, threw them both in the sky as constellations. (From Mutabilitie's point of view, Dianaes doom vniust emphasizes the failures of the gods as equitable rulers & also their own changeability.) The ploughing share (plowshare) & coulter (the metal blade in a plow that cuts the furrows) are ready, but fastened securely – they won't be needed until the next Spring.
November is the traditional month for hog slaughtering, & despite the increasing cold (sharp and breem; breem means cold, chill, rough weather – notice how many of the odd words are rhyme words, though they sound natural enough in context, & it's an amazing technical feat that Spenser was able to sustain the formal requirements of his stanza through so many pages). the month is sweating with his labor. I'm assuming that In planting eeke he took no small delight (eeke meaning also, as well) means "he took no delight, even a small amount, in planting"; November, with its oncoming cold, isn't planting season. The zodiac sign is Sagittarius the Centaur, & the half-man/half-horse seems a suitable symbol for a month both chill & steaming, abundant yet harsh.
December, like October, is drinking too much, but in his case, it's not the heady proximity of new wine but part of the season's cheer (the reference to Christmas, in the form of His Sauiours birth, is almost startling, so unChristian, at least on the surface, is this world). Capricorn, the Goat, is the astrological symbol, associated with the myth of Jupiter's childhood; there are variants, of course, on the story, which may explain They say in line 7. [T]h'Idæn mayd is Amalthea, a goat-herder (or, in some tellings, an actual goat) who suckled Zeus/Jove/Jupiter when he was hidden as a child to prevent his father from eating him like his other children. (Again, Mutabilitie is emphasizing the changeable status & uncertain rights of the gods themselves.) The goat is shaggy-bearded, part of the rich & exuberant descriptive language of the poem, which has made it, regardless of its ostensible moral purpose, much-loved by sensuous poets such as Keats.
Despite the Spenserian stanza's strength in presenting emblematic pictures, its accumulation does not result in a static poem but in one that is endlessly oscillating & shimmering. The Faerie Queene's world of knights, dragons, & sorcerers is rooted in the world of romance & such elaborate Italian Renaissance epics as Orlando Furioso, but such subjects have become newly popular in our own time, as what is loosely termed Fantasy Fiction has claimed a large number of readers. I always hope these posts will lead someone to try a new poet or rediscover an old one; let me recommend The Faerie Queene. (The edition I have is the one edited by Thomas P Roche Jr with the assistance of C Patrick O'Donnell Jr, issued by Yale University Press, though it might now be out of print.)
No comments:
Post a Comment