Thou kenst not, Percie, howe the ryme should rage,
O! if my temples were distaind with wine,
And girt with girlonds of wild Yvie twine,
How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,
And teache her tread aloft in buskin fine,
With queint Bellona in her equipage!
Reading these words to-day they may well seem to us the charter of the new age of England's song; and the effect is rendered all the more striking by the rhythm of the last line with its prophecy of Marlowe and mighty music to come. Piers, on the other hand, though with less poetic rage, is a truer idealist, and approaches the high things of poetry more reverentially than his Bacchic comrade. When Cuddie, acknowledging his own unworthiness, adds:
For Colin fittes such famous flight to scanne;
He, were he not with love so ill bedight,
Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne;
Piers breaks out in words fitting the poet of the Hymnes:
Ah, fon! for love doth teach him climbe so hie,
And lyftes him up out of the loathsome myre.
And throughout this high discourse the homely names of Piers and Cuddie seem somehow more appropriate, or at least touch us more nearly, than Mantuan's Sylvanus and Candidus, as if, in spite of all Spenser owes to foreign models, he were yet conscious of a latent power of simple native inspiration, capable, when once fully awakened, of standing up naked and unshamed in the presence of Italy and Greece. One might well question whether there is not more of the true spirit of prophecy in this poem of Spenser's than ever went to the composition of Vergil's Pollio.
The 'November,' like the 'April,' consists for the most part of a lay composed in an elaborate stanza--there a panegyric, here an elegy. This time it is sung by Colin himself, and we again find reference to the Rosalind motive. The subject of the threnody is a nymph of the name of Dido, whose identity can only be vaguely conjectured. The chief point of external form in which Spenser has departed from his model, namely Marot's dirge for Loyse de Savoye, and from other pastoral elegies, is in the use of a different form of verse in the actual lament from that in which the setting of the poem is composed. Otherwise he has followed tradition none the less closely for having infused the conventional form with a poetry of his own. The change by which the lament passes into the song of rejoicing is traditional--and though borrowed by Spenser from Marot, is as old as Vergil. Both Browne and Milton later made use of the same device. Spenser writes:
Why wayle we then? why weary we the Gods with playnts,
As if some evill were to her betight?
She raignes a goddesse now emong the saintes,
That whilome was the saynt of shepheards light,
And is enstalled nowe in heavens hight.
I see thee, blessed soule, I see
Walke in Elisian fieldes so free.
O happy herse!
Might I once come to thee, (O that I might!)
O joyfull verse!
Although some critics, looking too exclusively to the poetic merit of the Calender as the cause of its importance, have perhaps overestimated the beauty of this and the April lyrics, the skill with which the intricate stanzas are handled must be apparent to any careful reader. As the Calender in poetry generally, so even more decidedly in their own department, do these songs mark a distinct advance in formal evolution. Just as they were themselves foreshadowed in the recurrent melody of Wyatt's farewell to his lute--
My lute, awake! perform the last Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute, be still, for I have done--