Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

I think it is the want of human interest that makes the “Faëry Queene” so little read. Hazlitt has said that nobody need be afraid of the allegory; it will not bite them, nor meddle with them unless they meddle with it. It was the first poem I ever read, and I had no suspicion of any double meaning in it. If we think of the moral as we read it will injure the effect of the poem, because we have an instinctive feeling that Beauty includes its own moral, and does not need to have it stuck on.

Charles Lamb made the most comprehensive criticism upon Spenser when he called him the “poets’ poet.” This was a magic mirror which he held up to life, where only shapes of loveliness are reflected. A joyous feeling of the beautiful thrills through the whole poem.

I think that Spenser has come nearer to expressing the unattainable something than any other poet. He is so purely a poet of beauty that with him the meaning does not modulate the music of the verse, but the music is a great part of the meaning. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he. He knows too well that in poetry enough is parsimony. The delight of beauty is that it is like a fountain, forever changing, forever the same, and forever more than full.

Spenser has characterized his own poem in the song which the Sirens sing to Sir Guyon in the twelfth canto of the second book. The whole passage also may be called his musical as distinguished from his picturesque style.

In reading Spenser one may see all the great galleries of painting without stepping over his threshold. Michael Angelo is the only artist that he will not find there. It may be said of him that he is not a narrative poet at all, that he tells no stories, but paints them.

I have said that among our poets Spenser stands for the personification of the poetic sense and temperament. In him the senses were so sublimed and etherealized, and sympathized so harmoniously with an intellect of the subtlest quality that, with Dr. Donne, we “could almost say his body thought.” This benign introfusion of sense and spirit it is which gives his poetry the charm of crystalline purity without loss of warmth. He is ideal without being merely imaginative; he is sensuous without any suggestion of flesh and blood. He is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither call it mere intellectual perception of what is fair and good and touching, nor associate it with that throbbing warmth which leads us to call sensibility by its human name of heart. In the world into which he carries us there is neither space nor time, and so far it is purely intellectual, but then it is full of form and color and all earthly gorgeousness, and so far it is sensual. There are no men and women in it, and yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women.

To appreciate fully the sensuous intellectuality of this divine poet, compare him for a moment with Pope, who had an equal subtlety of brain without the joyous poetic sense. Pope’s mind was like a perfectly clear mirror hung in a drawing-room, and reflecting with perfect precision of outline and vividness of coloring, not man, but good society, every grace and every folly that belong not to human nature in its broad meaning, but as it is subordinated by fashion. But Spenser is like a great calm pool that lies brooding in delicious reverie over its golden sands in some enchanted world. If we look into it we know not if we see the shadows of clouds and trees and castles, of bright-armored knights and peerless dames that linger and are gone; or whether those pellucid depths are only a mysterious reservoir, where all the fairest dreams of our youth, dreams that were like hopes, and hopes that were but dreams, are visionarily gathered. Anon a ripple, born of no breeze, but of the poet’s own conscious joy, startles it into a dance of sunshine that fades away around its shores in a lapsing murmur that seems the shadow of music rather than its substance.

So entirely are beauty and delight the element of Spenser, that whenever in the “Faëry Queene” you come upon a thought or moral reflection it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one’s teeth close upon a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets. Sensation passing over through emotion into reverie is the characteristic of his manner.

And to read him puts one in the condition of reverie—a state of mind in which one’s thoughts and feelings float motionless as you may see fishes do in a swift brook, only vibrating their fins enough to keep themselves from being swept down the current, while their bodies yield to all its curvings and quiver with the thrills of its fluid and sinuous delight. It is a luxury beyond luxury itself, for it is not only dreaming awake, but dreaming without the trouble of doing it yourself; letting it be done for you, in truth, by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who has the art of giving you all his own visions through the medium of music.

Of the versification of Spenser we need attempt no higher praise than that it belonged to him. If we would feel the infinite variety of the Spenserian stanza, as Spenser uses it, its musical intricacies, its long, sliding cadences, smooth as the green slope on the edge of Niagara, we have only to read verses of the same measure by other poets.