Spenser and Donne

Thinking poets

Yulia Ryzhik

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526117380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la poesía

This edited collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge the traditionally dichotomous view of these two major poets and to shift the critical conversation towards a more holistic, relational view of the two authors' poetics and thought.

1

Caring to turn back: overhearing Spenser in Donne

Richard Danson Brown

It is in terms of form that conventional literary history sees the starkest contrast between Spenser and Donne. This is a narrative of complacent smoothness being righteously usurped by avant-garde roughness, as the Monarch of Wit ousts ‘Englands Arch Poet’.¹ Thomas Carew’s supercharged elegy for Donne as the ‘Promethean’ pioneer of a new poetic who purges ‘The Muses garden’ (lines 386–7) remains prophetically at the heart of this literary-historical narrative. As recently as the Oxford Handbook of John Donne (2011), for leading scholars the space between Donne and Spenser can seem almost an ontological chasm. In an essay on the genres of Donne’s love lyrics and their problematic description in literary history, Dayton Haskin reaches for a binary characterization of the two poets, which is, as he is well aware, of long duration: ‘Modernist poets found vital inspiration in Donne’s having made so productive a break with his predecessors. Even today, to come upon Donne’s voice after hearing Spenser’s can seem a difference as great as between night and day.’² The night/day opposition is another way of putting what John Carey stated less tactfully thirty years earlier: ‘In place of Spenser’s dreamy conservatism’, a completed Metempsychosis would have been ‘not only progressive and contentious in its intellectual cast, but also wedded to immediacy and the real world’.³ The assumptions are, in their different forms, analogous. Donne’s voice is individual and contentious where Spenser’s is monolithic and conservative; a new Donne day emerges out of old Spenserian [k]night, in which the immediacy of the real is proleptic of the intellectual adventure of the empirical seventeenth century as it brushes aside dusty chivalric absurdities.⁴ Of course these are broad-brush characterizations – pedagoguish metaphors intended to provoke reflection on the experience of reading very different poets – which few literary historians would defend without qualification.⁵ They do nevertheless provide a useful sighter for a chapter which aims to take another look at the formal affiliations between Spenser and Donne. My contention is a simple one: Donne learned much about verse form and verse shape from his reading of Spenser; the dialogic connections and resonances of tone between their works are richer and less negative than is conventionally assumed. Indeed, Donne’s Satires are more thoroughly Spenserian than is often thought, which in turn underlines the extent to which satire is an important, often neglected facet of Spenser’s work. I contend that Donne’s poetry covertly and explicitly ‘leans and hearkens after’ Spenserian forms and discoveries about poetic form.⁶ This is not to say that Donne writes like Spenser so much as to suggest that Donne’s innovations of form, metre, and morphology have significant Spenserian precedents. By characterizing Donne as a bold stylistic innovator, conventional literary history has neglected Spenser as himself a risky, innovative writer, thus muting the rich dialogue which exists between their works.⁷

I want to overhear Spenser in Donne, and to suggest through this critical eavesdropping that the latter owes the former a more significant debt both in terms of poetic forms and in terms of genre. ‘Overhear’ of course is different from ‘trace the influence of’, or ‘establish the debt to’. The traditional view has been that Donne reacts against Spenser more than he builds upon him. His lyric forms have been seen as either testament to his individuality – in which a new voice imposes itself on tradition – or, more persuasively, as a continuation with difference of a tradition of short poems not written for music.⁸ But to overhear Spenser in Donne offers a different approach, which suggests not so much influence as a way in which the textures of Donne’s poetry may be seen to echo, and intersect with, Spenser’s. Above all, it suggests a different way of thinking about literary affiliations. Rather than Bloom’s still influential anxious conversation between competing ‘strong’ poets intent upon ‘misreading’ the work of their coercive parents, the reader who overhears Spenser in Donne’s formal structures is attentive to an alternative literary history, in which formal resonances, variations around similar melodies, may be as important as direct, frictive, filial allusion. In brief, to understand the relationship between Donne and Spenser we need a model of reading which is intertextual, Andersonian, rather than anxious, Bloomian.⁹

How did Donne hear Spenser, and to what extent is it possible to overhear Spenser in Donne? Donne’s Metempsychosis is the orthodox place to begin this enquiry, since it has long been read as a Donnean response to, or parody of, The Faerie Queene, written in a stanza form based on the Spenserian.¹⁰ As a number of scholars have highlighted, Metempsychosis has several Spenserian echoes, not only of The Faerie Queene.¹¹ Consider an intertext which has not received as much significant comment: the description of the proud swan, which rechannels an image from Prothalamion.¹² Spenser describes a pair of swans of staggering, supra-Jovian whiteness:

With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe,

Come softly swimming downe along the Lee;

Two fairer Birds I yet did never see:

The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew,

Did never whiter shew,

Nor Jove himselfe when he a Swan would be

For love of Leda, whiter did appeare:

Yet Leda was they say as white as he,

Yet not so white as these, nor nothing neare;

So purely white they were,

That even the gentle streame, the which them bare,

Seem’d foule to them

(lines 37–49)¹³

Prothalamion is worth quoting at length, because it is only at length that we get the dazzling sense of the swans’ overbearing whiteness: fair birds become the snow on Pindus become Jove-as-swan mating with the über-white Leda, yet not even these lovers were ‘so white as these’; Spenser launders his swans beyond previous example and any sense of realism. Donne takes in these emblems of purity when describing his own swan: ‘A swan, so white that you may unto him / Compare all whitenesse, but himselfe to none, / Glided along’ (lines 232–4).¹⁴ At one level, Donne’s swan confirms Carew’s analysis: where Spenser seems ‘windy’, Donne laconically juxtaposes a very white swan with its predatory instincts: ‘And with his arched necke this poore fish catch’d’ (line 235). Yet as John B. Bender long ago commented, Spenser’s superficially prolix description is emblematically functional: ‘the extreme whiteness of the swans removes them from the realm of ordinary worldly birds, or even ordinary mythological birds’.¹⁵ Donne’s side-swipe remembers Prothalamion in a different fictional setting: where Spenser’s birds emblematically represent the mysteries of marriage, Donne presents a symbol of pride, opportunistically gobbling the fish which is the current resting place of the wandering soul.

A more complex exchange takes place in stanza XL. Donne’s version of this ‘familiar elephant lore’, ultimately deriving from a contemporary Portuguese account of India, looks back to Spenser’s Visions of the Worlds Vanitie sequence from Complaints (1591): a huge elephant is destroyed either by an ant (Spenser) or by a mouse (Donne).¹⁶ Spenser’s version concentrates on the elephant’s ‘foolish vanitie’ and, like the rest of the sequence, issues a compact warning against the ‘surquedrie’, or arrogant pride, of the powerful (Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, lines 103, 105). For Donne, the same source materials furnish a sardonic reflection on the mouse’s selfdestructive malice: ‘thus he made his foe, his prey, and tombe: / Who cares not to turn back, may any whither come’ (Metempsychosis, lines 399–400). What is provocative about Donne’s version is that it fails to repudiate Spenser’s; unlike the allusion to Prothalamion, this one has no sense of teasing or parody. Rather, Donne’s focus on the mouse (another incarnation of the wandering soul) enables a related form of moralizing. Despite the anti-Spenserian claim of the Epistle that he ‘would have no such readers as [he] can teach’, this stanza shows a Donne able to work ambiguously within the constraints of the moralizing tradition.¹⁷ Not caring to turn back is certainly reckless, and yet the line is pitched between admiration and warning. The mouse destroys itself, but the speaker enjoys the mouse’s daring while at the same time building on Spenser’s satirical depiction in the Visions sequence of the high and mighty being undone by the apparently insignificant.¹⁸ The next sonnet in the Visions concludes with a couplet which is akin to Donne’s line in its ambivalence about the catastrophes it describes: ‘Straunge thing me seemeth, that so small a thing / Should able be so great an one to wring’ (lines 125–6). The nod to Spenser invites the reader to enjoy the spectacle of Donne inhabiting the Spenserian tradition; to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, mature poets care to turn back.¹⁹ This example also shows Donne mimicking a key facet of Spenser’s form. The aphoristic alexandrine follows the pattern of two equal hemistichs of six syllables each, a permutation used numerous times in The Faerie Queene.²⁰ Donne’s line is congruent with the antithetical, summarizing function Spenser frequently gives to his alexandrines. Donne’s stanza suggests the sophistication of his reading of Spenser. As the didactic aesthetic of The Faerie Queene is more complex than the programme sketched in the Letter to Raleigh, so Donne’s adaptation of Spenser’s poems – juxtaposing a form adapted from the epic with content borrowed from the significantly less celebrated Visions of the Worlds Vanitie – indicates a supple responsiveness to Spenserian modes alongsid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the texts
• Introduction: Spenser, Donne, and the trouble of periodization
• 1 Caring to turn back: overhearing Spenser in Donne
• 2 Comparing figures: figures of comparison and repetition in Spenser’s Cantos of Mutabilitie and Donne’s Anniversaries
• 3 Refiguring Donne and Spenser: aspects of Ramist rhetoric
• 4 Artes poeticae: Spenser, Donne, and the metaphysical sublime
• 5 Spenser and Donne look to the Continent
• 6 Ovidian Spenser, Ovidian Donne
• 7 Cosmic matters: Spenser, Donne, and the philosophic poem
• 8 ‘Straunge characters’: Spenser’s Busirane and Donne’s ‘A Valediction of my name, in the window’
• 9 Marriage and sacrifice: the poetics of the Epithalamia
• 10 Spenser’s and Donne’s devotional poetics of scattering
• 11 Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, and the modernist reinvention of Spenser and Donne
• Index