Edmund Spencer

 Edmund Spencer 

Edmund Spenser was born in London in the year 1552 or 1553. Little is known about his family or his childhood, except that he received a scholarship to attend the Merchant Taylor School, where he likely studied Latin and Greek. He went on to study literature and religion at Cambridge University’s Pembroke Hall, receiving a BA in 1573 and an MA in 1576.

Spenser published his first volume of poetry, The Shepheardes Calender (Hugh Singleton), in 1579, dedicating it to the poet Sir Philip Sidney. He was also the author of The Faerie Queene (William Ponsonby, 1596), a major English epic, and Amoretti andEpithalamion (William Ponsonby, 1595), a sonnet sequence dedicated to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle.

Alongside his poetry, Spenser pursued a career in politics, serving as a secretary first for the Bishop of Rochester and then for the Earl of Leicester, who introduced him to other poets and artists in Queen Elizabeth’s court. In 1580, he was appointed secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland; later, in 1596, he wrote an inflammatory pamphlet called A View of the Present State of Ireland (James Ware, 1633).

In 1598, during the Nine Years War, Spenser was driven from his home in Ireland. He died in London in 1599 and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Work:-

      In 1580, Spenser was appointed secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, the Lord Deputy of Ireland; with the exception of a few visits to England, Spenser lived the rest of his life in Ireland, and his love of the Irish countryside is evident in his poetry. In 1588, Spenser was granted a three-thousand-acre estate, Kilcolman, between Limerick and Cork in Munster. There, while serving in various official capacities, he practiced his poetic craft.

        Most Elizabethan poets engaged in the fashionable practice of sonnet writing, and Spenser was no exception: His sonnet sequence Amoretti was published in 1595. Always the innovator who transformed his models, Spenser combined the Italian and English sonnet forms to create the Spenserian sonnet: three linked quatrains and a couplet, rhyming ababbcbccdcdee. Spenser also imbued the Petrarchan sonnet with his own Christian, Neoplatonic sensibility. Sonnet 79, for example, celebrates the “true beautie” of his mistress, which is not physical but spiritual and proceeds from God, the source of beauty. It is thus “free from frayle corruption.” The sequence’s structure is loosely based on the Christian liturgical cycle (reflecting the concern with time’s movement introduced in The Shepheardes Calender. 

   The Faerie Queene 

( https://youtuhttps://youtu.be/Uqu7MHPYJ4I.be/Uqu7MHPYJ4I) 

            The Faerie Queene tells the stories of several knights , each representing a particular virtue , on their quest for the Faerie Queene , Gloriana. Redcrosse is the knight of Holiness , and must defeat both theological error and the dragon of deception to free the parents of Una. Guyon is the knight of Temperance , who must destroy the fleshly temptations of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss. Britomart, a woman in disguise ad a male knight, represents chastity ;she must find her beloved and win his heart . Artegall,  the knight of Justice , must rescue the lady Eirene from an unjust bondage. Cambell and Triamond, the knights of Friendship , must aid one another in defense of various ladies honor . Finally , Calidore , the knight of Courtesy , must stop the Blatant Beast from spreading its slanderous venom throughout the realm .

          Each quest is an allegory , and the knight given the quest represents a person's internal growth in that particular virtue . Such growth happens through various trials , some of which the knights fail , showing how personal development is a struggle requiring the aid of other forces and virtues to make it complete .

  The Shepheardes Calender 

     

(https://youtu.be/rk1jqN7xoUs) 

January. Colin, forlorn and rejected by his beloved Rosalind, compares his mood with the wintry landscape:

Thou barrein ground, whome winters wrath hath wasted,Art made a mirror to behold my plight:Whilome thy fresh spring flowrd, and after hastedThy summer proud with daffadillies dight,And now is come thy winters stormy state,Thy mantle marred wherein thou maskedst late.At the end of this poem, Colin breaks his shepherd’s pipes and resolves to write no more poetry.

February. An impudent young shepherd, Cuddie, complains of the wintry blasts to the elderly Thenot, and he scorns the old man’s philosophical view that one must learn to endure the long succession of misfortunes that this world brings and be concerned only with the safety of the flock. Tired of Cuddie’s rudeness, Thenot tells the fable of an old oak and a proud briar bush. 

The briar persuades a farmer to cut down the tree to show off its own beauty. All is well until winter comes; the briar then dies without the protection of the oak against wind and frost. Cuddie is unmoved by this parable of youth and age and breaks it off abruptly.

March. Two young shepherds welcome spring as a time for love. They describe Thomalin’s encounter with Cupid. Thomalin tells a friend how, while he was hunting on one shepherds’ holiday, he heard a rustling in the bushes:

With that sprung forth a naked swainWith spotted wings like peacock’s train,And laughing lope to a tree,His gylden quiver at his back,And silver bow, which was but slack,Which lightly he bent at me.

     

April. Thenot finds Hobbinol grieving over the sorrows of his friend Colin Clout and mourning that Colin’s unrequited love deprived all the shepherds of his poems. Thenot asks Hobbinol to recite one of Colin’s verses to while away the hours as their flocks graze, and he complies with an ode on “Fair Elisa, queen of shepherds all.” Colin calls upon the muses, the graces, the sun, and the moon as he begins his praise of the daughter of Pan, the shepherds’ god, and Syrinx. Then Colin describes Elisa’s beauty:

       

See, where she sits upon the grassie green, (O seemly sight!)Yclad in scarlet, like a maiden queen And ermines white.Upon her head a cremosin coronet,With damask leaves and daffadillies...