Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction ‘Subject unto chaunge’: Spenser's Complaints and the New Poetry
- Part One: The Translations
- Part Two: The Major Complaints
- Chapter Three A ‘goodlie bridge’ between the Old and the New: the Transformation of Complaint in The Ruines of Time
- Chapter Four Poetry's ‘liuing tongue’ in The Teares of the Muses
- Chapter Five Cracking the Nut? Mother Hubberds Tale’s Attack on Traditional Notions of Poetic Value
- Chapter Six ‘Excellent device and wondrous slight’: Muiopotmos and Complaints’ Poetics
- Chapter Seven ‘And leave this lamentable plaint behinde’: the New Poetry beyond the Complaints
- Appendix Urania-Astraea and ‘Divine Elisa’ in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527–88)
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Six ‘Excellent device and wondrous slight’: Muiopotmos and Complaints’ Poetics
from Part Two: The Major Complaints
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction ‘Subject unto chaunge’: Spenser's Complaints and the New Poetry
- Part One: The Translations
- Part Two: The Major Complaints
- Chapter Three A ‘goodlie bridge’ between the Old and the New: the Transformation of Complaint in The Ruines of Time
- Chapter Four Poetry's ‘liuing tongue’ in The Teares of the Muses
- Chapter Five Cracking the Nut? Mother Hubberds Tale’s Attack on Traditional Notions of Poetic Value
- Chapter Six ‘Excellent device and wondrous slight’: Muiopotmos and Complaints’ Poetics
- Chapter Seven ‘And leave this lamentable plaint behinde’: the New Poetry beyond the Complaints
- Appendix Urania-Astraea and ‘Divine Elisa’ in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527–88)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Such beauty, set beside
so brief a season,
suggests to our stunned reason
this bleak surmise:
the world was made to hold
no end or telos,
and if – as some would tell us –
there is a goal,
it's not ourselves.
No butterfly collector
can trap light or detect where
the darkness dwells.
Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Butterfly’A poem about tapestries is necessarily ecphrastic. I begin with an ecphrasis – a mode which for Spenser invariably entails reflection on the nature of artifice.
At the climax of The Faerie Queene II, Guyon and the Palmer discover the enchantress Acrasia with her current lover. This voyeuristic moment enables Spenser to present her both as a delusive artist and as a work of art:
Vpon a bed of roses she was layd,
As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin,
And was arayd, or rather disarayd,
All in a vele of silke and siluer thin,
That hid no whit her alabaster skin,
But rather shewd more white, if more might bee:
More subtile web Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets, which oft we wouen see
Of scorched deaw, do not in th'aire more lightly flee.
Acrasia is an erotically provoking self-fashioner. Spenser focuses on her ‘vele’ as a key part of her sexual armoury, which as Bender notes ‘almost becomes a part of [her] body.’ In comparing the ‘vele’ with Arachne's ‘subtile web’, Spenser heightens the reader's sense of the danger underlying Acrasia's attractiveness; like the spider's web, her artifice is designed to entangle and destroy her prey. Yet the web – like the veil – remains ‘subtile’ – an artful construction, ambiguous because of its skilful manufacture. In evoking Arachne at the moment before Acrasia is herself caught in the Palmer's ‘subtile net’, Spenser signals the fundamental ambiguity of artifice. Acrasia's veil is an erotic enchantment which is being used perversely; the Palmer's ‘net’ shares the veil's subtlety, but has a corrective and restraining function:
that same net so cunningly was wound,
That neither guile, nor force might it distraine.
Dundas compares this net with Vulcan's; equally it is an immediate counterpoint to Arachne's web. For Spenser, Arachne embodies a basic tension within human art: it is skilful, yet also amoral.
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- Information
- 'The New Poet'Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints, pp. 213 - 254Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999