Over the last 25 or so years, the view of Tasso from the vantage point of Spenser studies has remained fairly consistent, and at times somewhat one-dimensional: the Gerusalemme Liberata as the paradigm of neo-classical epic closure, with all of the ideological associations this generic form entails. In 1991 Richard Helgerson saw in Tasso the ‘victory of unity over multiplicity, of historic verisimilitude over the marvellous, of antiquity over the middle ages, and, one must add, of the modern absolutist state over its feudal predecessor’, and in Sleep, Romance, and Human Embodiment (2012) Garrett Sullivan, Jr. added to this list the victory of the human over its others, ascribing to Tasso a ‘view of epic heroism’ which ‘assumes the human to exist in a relation of agonistic superiority both to other forms of life and to the environment’.[1] For Sullivan, Tasso’s ‘straightforwardly (and notoriously) epic … design’ and the human exceptionalism it entails are the foil to Spenser’s more nuanced interweaving of epic and romance, which emphasises what David Quint called the ‘romance episode’ in order to foreground ‘conflicting conceptions of the human’. [2] On this reading, Spenser reconfigures the rigid generic structure of Tasso’s poem to reflect the continuity as well as the difference between the human and non-human forms of life that are intrinsic to the nested structure of the Aristotelian tripartite soul.

Yet Sullivan’s subtle exploration of sleep and related states in The Faerie Queene might itself prompt us to think about Spenser’s relation to Tasso differently and less oppositionally. After all, as Helgerson acknowledged Tasso’s poem remains ‘half-romantic’ – pervaded, as de Sanctis put it long ago, by the ‘languors and laments of the idyll’ – while, on the other hand, if the vertical humanness prioritised by epic wins out over those languors in Tasso, it ultimately does so in Book Two of the Faerie Queene as well.[3] The triumph of epic closure may be more absolute in the Gerusalemme Liberata, but in the following pages I wish to entertain the notion that states of languor in Tasso extend well beyond the strict confines of the romance episode, and are just as suggestively attuned to the limits of the human as they are in Spenser. Or to put this claim the right way around: it is precisely in Tasso’s pervasive ‘languors’ that Spenser could have found a model for his own depictions of sleep and languishment, as well as for the exploration they enable of the continuities between human life and that of animals, plants, and the cosmos itself.

From his earliest works, states of inexplicable languishment are something of a keynote in Tasso’s poetry. Here is the title character’s description of his innamoramento from Aminta (1573):

A poco a poco nacque ne ’l mio petto,
non so da qual radice,
com’erba suol che per se stessa germini,
un incognito affetto,
che mi fea desiare
d’esser sempre presente
a la mia bella Silvia;
e bevea da’ suoi lumi
un’estranea dolcezza
che lasciava nel fine
un non so che d’amaro:
sospirava sovente, e non sapeva
la cagion de’ sospiri.

 

But as I made the beasts my pray, I found
My heart was lost, and made a pray to other.
By little and little in my breast beganne
To spring, I know not from what hidden roote
(Like th’herbe that of it selfe is seene to growe)
A strange desire, and love still to be neere
And hourely drinke from the fair Silvias eyes
A sweetnesse past all thought, but it had still
(Me thought) a bitter farewell; oft I sigh’d
Yet knew no cause I had to sigh; and so
Became betimes a lover, ere I knewe
What love meant. [4]

This passage exemplifies the kind of languorously idyllic quality which de Sanctis saw as characteristic of Tasso’s poetry, and which for Helgerson and Quint is ultimately subordinated to epic closure.[5] Yet already in this passage from Aminta, there is something distinctively Tassesque about the nature of the feeling described – something which goes beyond the stock, Circean distractions of eros as encountered in romance. Characters who fall in love in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (usually minor, since the major characters inherit their fixations from Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato) tend to do so following the Petrarchan paradigm, in other words at first sight (for example when Bireno falls in love with the daughter of the King of Frisia in Canto 10: ‘fuoco mai cosí non accese esca …. come egli se n’accese immantinente’; ‘fire was never lit so fast by fuel…..as he was fired immediately by her’)[6]. What Aminta describes in this passage is something murkier – a feeling whose boundaries, both temporal and psychological, are harder to define. This quality is conveyed by Tasso’s preference for non-Petrarchan metaphors involving plants and vegetal life: Aminta compares his love to a plant which sprouts by itself from an unknown radice. Such eros thus turns us not into raging animals, as in the Platonic concept of ‘bestial love’ which informs Ariosto’s depiction of Orlando’s fury, but rather into languishing vegetal beings that grow and change and feel but can do little else, alive and yet only one step removed from the inorganic. It is experienced as a mood rather than a pang, a changed state of being which percolates slowly and at first imperceptibly through the speaker’s whole physical self rather than suddenly striking from without. Aminta’s repeated ‘non so che’ captures the unknowable, even mysterious quality that characterizes such feeling; his metaphor of ‘drinking’ suggests a potion which has, without his initially knowing it, already altered his own perceptions and thoughts.

‘Non so che’ will be a favorite phrase of Tasso’s. In the Gerusalemme Liberata, we encounter it at what may appear to be a very different moment, just after Tancredi has fatally wounded Clorinda in their duel in Book 12:

   Ma ecco omai l’ora fatale è giunta
che ’l viver di Clorinda al suo fin deve.
Spinge egli il ferro nel bel sen di punta
che vi s’immerge e ’l sangue avido beve:
e la vesta, che d’or vago trapunta
le mammelle stringea tenera e leve,
l’empie d’un caldo fiume. Ella già sente
morirsi, e ’l piè le manca egro e languente.

   Segue egli la vittoria, e la trafitta
vergine minacciando incalza e preme.
Ella, mentre cadea, la voce afflitta
movendo, disse le parole estreme:
parole ch’a lei novo un spirto ditta,
spirto di fe, di carità, di speme:
virtù ch’or Dio le infonde, e se rubella
in vita fu, la vuole in morte ancella.

  – Amico hai vinto; io ti perdon … perdona
tu ancora, al corpo no, che nulla pave,
a l’alma sí: deh! per lei prega, e dona
battesmo a me, ch’ogni mia colpa lave. –
In queste voci languide risuona
un non so che di flebile e soave
ch’al cor gli scende ed ogni sdegno ammorza,
e gli occhi a lagrimar gli invoglia e sforza.  (12.64-66)[7]

 

[But now alas, the fatall howre arriues,
That her sweete life must leaue that tender hold,
His sword into her bosome deepe he driues,
And bath’d in lukewarme blood his iron cold,
Betweene her brests the cruell weapon riues
Her curious square, embost with swelling gold,
  Her knees grow weake, the paines of death she feeles,
  And like a falling Cedar bends and reeles.

The Prince his hand vpon her shield doth streach,
And low on earth the wounded damsell laith,
And while she fell, with weake and woefull speach,
Her praiers last, and last complaints she saith,
A spirit new did her those praiers teach,
Spirit of hope, of charitie, and faith;
  And though her life to Christ rebellious weare,
  Yet died she his childe and handmaide deare. 

‘Friend thou hast wonne, I pardon thee, nor saue
This bodie, that all torments can endure,
But saue my soule, baptisme I dying craue,
Come wash away my sinnes with waters pure’:
His hart relenting nigh insunder raue,
With woefull speech of that sweete creature,
  So that his rage, his wrath and anger dide,
  And on his cheekes salt teares for ruthe downe slide.]
  

On the surface of it, the ‘non so che’ refers to something more obvious here: Tancredi’s surprise at hearing a ‘flebile e soave’ female voice. But Tancredi does not in fact recognize the voice as female yet, only a quality in it that he cannot quite pin down, and which he initially experiences, like Aminta, as an inexplicable change in his own emotional state. Clorinda herself has been moved to speak and ask for baptism by a new and unfamiliar spirit, and so we might well see Tancredi’s access of pathos as responding to hers by means of a kind of unconscious transfer of affect brought to completion – though not consciousness – once he does recognise her a few moments later:

   D’un bel pallore ha il bianco volto asperso,
come a’ gigli sarian miste viole,
e gli occhi al cielo affisa, e in lei converso
sembra per la pietate il cielo e ’l sole;
e la man nuda e fredda alzando verso
il cavaliero in vece di parole
gli dà pegno di pace. In questa forma
passa la bella donna, e par che dorma.

   Come l’alma gentile uscita ei vede,
rallenta quel vigor ch’avea raccolto;
e l’imperio di sé libero cede
al duol già fatto impetuoso e stolto,
ch’al cor si stringe e, chiusa in breve sede
la vita, empie di morte i sensi e ’l volto. 
Già simile a l’estinto il vivo langue
al colore, al silenzio, a gli atti, al sangue. (12.69-70)

 [As Violets blew mongst Lillies pure men throw,
 So palenes midst her natiue white begonne.
 Her lookes to heau’n she cast, their eies I trow
 Downeward for pitie bent both heau’n and sunne,
 Her naked hand she gaue the knight, in show
 Of loue and peace, her speech (alas) was donne,
   And thus the virgin fell on endlesse sleepe,
   Loue, beautie, vertue, for your darling weepe.

  But when he saw her gentle soule was went,
  His manly courage to relent began,
  Greefe, sorrow, anguish, sadnes, discontent,
  Free empire got, and lordship on the man,
  His life within his hart they close vp pent,
  Death through his senses and his visage ran:
   Like his dead Ladie, dead seem’d Tancred good,
    In palenesse, stilnesse, wounds and streames of blood.]

Tancredi himself now languishes in a near-death state for the rest of the Canto, recovering only when Peter the Hermit reproaches him (12.85-89) and Clorinda appears in a dream to tell him she is in heaven (12.91-93).

In The Faerie Queene, it is Britomart and Artegall who most obviously echo the relationship of Clorinda and Tancredi. But their duel in Book Four, Canto Six, is more closely modelled on Tancredi and Clorinda’s duel in Canto Three of the Liberata than on the latter’s death scene in Canto Twelve. I want here to consider that death scene in relation to a different passage in Spenser’s poem, a near-death moment from Book Three which, even if not obviously modelled on this episode in Tasso, nonetheless draws on a similar vein of languishing affect expressed through vegetal imagery, an almost sickly pathos which is typical of Tasso’s poetry more broadly. Near the middle of Book Three, Arthur’s squire Timias is grievously wounded during a battle against the foresters who had been chasing Florimell. Belphoebe comes across his prostrate body ‘as shee pursewd the chace / Of some wild beast’ (3.5.28):

Shortly she came, whereas that woefull Squire
With blood deformed, lay in deadly swownd:
In whose faire eyes, like lamps of quenched fire,
The Christall humor stood congealed round;
His locks, like faded leaues fallen to grownd,
Knotted with blood, in bounches rudely ran,
And his sweete lips, on which before that stownd
  The bud of youth to blossome faire began,
  Spoild of their rosy red, were woxen pale and wan.

Saw never living eie more heavy sight,
That could haue made a rocke of stone to rew,
Or riue in twaine: which when that Lady bright
Besides all hope with melting eies did vew,
All suddeinly abasht shee chaunged hew,
And with sterne horror backward gan to start:
But when shee better him beheld, shee grew
  Full of soft passion and vnwonted smart:
  The point of pitty perced through her tender heart.    (3.5.29-30)[8]

In the Longman edition of the Faerie Queene, A.C. Hamilton follows Thomas Roche in comparing this scene to Canto 19 of the Orlando Furioso, in which the Saracen knight Medoro is injured after a fierce battle with the Scots and discovered in a near-death state by Angelica. (She heals him and they fall in love, driving Orlando mad.) Yet the descriptive attention which Spenser lavishes here upon the unconscious Timias goes far beyond the one-line account of Medoro’s condition he would have found in Ariosto: ‘languir ferito, assai vicino a morte’ (‘languishing wounded, very near to death’). The two stanzas are much closer in manner to the two stanzas of the Liberata I quoted above, in which Tancredi beholds the figure of the dying Clorinda: in both passages, the first stanza describes the prostrate body as a fading flower while the second captures the changing emotions of the onlooker. Different though the circumstances may be – Belphoebe has merely come across Timias in the forest whereas Tancredi and Clorinda have been fighting, and of course Clorinda dies while Timias will slowly heal – the two scenes momentarily converge in the arrested motion of one figure hovering uncertainly over the languishing body of another. The relenting of Tancredi’s ‘manly courage’ parallels the ‘melting eyes’ with which Belphoebe sees Timias while Timias’s languor echoes and expands the floral imagery that Tasso uses for Clorinda. In the extensive description of Tancredi’s own subsequent faint, moreover, he too overlaps with Timias. I may seem to have tipped the scales by quoting Tasso in the highly Spenserian translation of Edward Fairfax, published in 1600. But perhaps it is not too far-fetched to suggest that Fairfax’s translation represents not just a Spenserian reading of Tasso but a sense of how Tasso himself might have sounded to Spenser. A memory of a passage such as this from Tasso would have allowed Spenser to develop more fully a narrative situation derived from the Furioso but described there in more matter-of-fact or even ironic terms.            

The question is in part one of style. In his recent book on the subject, David Scott Wilson-Okamura argues that both Tasso and Spenser exemplify what he calls ‘the triumph of the flowery style’ – that is the ‘middle style’ which, ostensibly appropriate primarily for lyric, in the Renaissance colonised epic poetry as well.[9] But the juxtaposition of these two moments bears witness not merely to the pervasiveness of lyric style even in the epic poem but also to its intimate relation with moments of languishing affect in which the human loses hold of its ontological distinction. Such moments are characteristic of both poets, and they can be found (just like the flowery style itself) outside as well as within the well-regulated borders of the romance episode. If the ‘flowery’ in Spenser always has a tendency to become literal, blurring the boundary between human and vegetal forms of life – if, as Heather James puts it, ‘Spenser collects flowers with abandon and in abundance and yet refuses to surrender them to allegorical significance’ – then this is a tendency that emerges not in opposition to Tasso but, as we have already seen in the passage from Aminta, under his influence.[10] Indeed Spenser’s language emphasises even more than Tasso’s the plant-like quality of the languishing body: Clorinda’s paleness is merely like that of lilies mixed with violets, whereas Timias’s lips themselves become flowers that seem to blossom, wilt, and die in a single moment. The flowery language is also linked to the feminisation of Timias’s body: thus far a figure of rugged and virile simplicity, it is only now, when he is languishing on the brink of death, that our attention is drawn to ‘the bud of youth’ beginning to ‘blossom faire’ on his lips. That transformation, the dissipation of identity which the languishing body undergoes as it reverts to a condition of biological life and death, suggests why Spenser would have been able to adapt Tasso’s scene along with its characteristic diction and style to a situation in which the genders were reversed (of course Clorinda herself is already a figure who crosses gender lines). 

In both scenes, then, the languishing body loses hold of both its personal identity and of its gender – and ultimately, as we have already begun to see, of its distinctively human traits as well. Shorn of the powers of reason and language which distinguish it from animals, and even for that matter of the powers of motion and sensation which it shares with animals, the body reverts to the condition of a vegetal substrate and of mere organic vitality. This loss of identity extends beyond the character who is languishing to involve the onlooker as well, in a transfer of affect facilitated by the weakening of subjective boundaries. Indeed in Tasso’s version, Tancredi explicitly takes on Clorinda’s languishing after her death: ‘Like his dead Ladie, dead seem’d Tancred good’ (12.70). His soul is temporarily depersonalised, reduced to a condition of minimal vitality in which the only remaining distinction is between life and death: ‘At last he deepely groan’d, which token was / His feeble soule had not her flight yet take’ (12.73). This sense of the tremulous vitality of a body at its limits is developed in Spenser’s parallel account of Timias’s healing: Belphoebe can tell ‘by his pulses beating rife, / that the weake sowle her seat did yett retaine’ (3.5.31) and only after she ministers ‘hearbes, that mote him remedy’ (3.5.32) does Timias come back to consciousness, ‘groning inly deepe’ (3.5.34) just like Tancredi. For all  their differences, the two scenes reflect a post-humanistic fascination with bodies on the brink of death that Tasso and Spenser have in common, a sense of mysterious significance hovering around moments in which the lines between human and non-human are difficult to draw precisely – moments in which humans are reduced to organic matter even as matter takes on an uncanny kind of life, and which the ‘flowery style’ is uniquely suited to convey.

It is not a coincidence, then, that in both Tasso and Spenser the description of these languishing bodies reverting to pre-human forms of life is soon followed by a scene in which the earth itself, as if by way of a transfer of affect both chiasmic and cosmic, takes on the qualities of a living organism: the drought and restoration of the earth described in Canto Thirteen of the Liberata, soon after the battle of Tancredi and Clorinda, and the Garden of Adonis in Book Three, Canto Six, of The Faerie Queene. Just as access to the Garden of Adonis seems to be mediated by the prone bodies which surround it, so the massive drought induced by Ismeno’s spell and the restoration which follows it in Canto Thirteen of the Liberata recapitulate, on the level not only of the whole Christian camp but of the cosmos as well, Tancredi’s swoon, languishing, and return to health: 

   Vedi le membra de’ guerrier robuste,
cui né camin per aspra terra preso,
né ferrea salma onde gír sempre onuste,
né domò ferro a la lor morte inteso,
ch’or risolute e dal calore aduste
giacciono a se medesme inutil peso;
e vive ne le vene occulto foco
che pascendo le strugge a poco a poco.

   Langue il corsier già sì feroce, e l’erba
che fu suo caro cibo a schifo prende,
vacilla il piede infermo, e la superba
cervice dianzi or giù dimessa pende;
memoria di sue palme or più non serba,
né più nobil di gloria amor l’accende:
le vincitrici spoglie e i ricchi fregi
par che quasi vil soma odii e dispregi.

   Languisce il fido cane, ed ogni cura
del caro albergo e del signor oblia,
giace disteso ed a l’interna arsura
sempre anelando aure novelle invia;
ma s’altrui diede il respirar natura
perché il caldo del cor temprato sia,
or nulla o poco refrigerio n’have,
sí quello onde si spira è denso e grave.

   Così languia la terra, e ’n tale stato
egri giaceansi i miseri mortali,
e ’l buon popol fedel, già disperato
di vittoria, temea gli ultimi mali;
e risonar s’udia per ogni lato
universal lamento in voci tali:
- Che più spera Goffredo o che più bada
sì che tutto il suo campo a morte cada?  (13.61-64)

[The sturdie bodies of the warriours strong,
Whom neither marching far, nor tedious way,
Nor weightie armes which on their shoulders hong,
Could wearie make, nor death it selfe dismay;
Now weake and feeble cast their limmes along,
Vnweildie burthens, on the burned clay,
  And in each vaine a smouldring fire there dwelt,
  Which dride their flesh, and sollid bones did melt.

Languisht the stead late fierce, and profred gras,
His fodder earst, despis’d, and from him kest,
Each step he stumbled, and which loftie was
And heigh aduanst before, now fell his crest,
His conquests gotten all forgotten pas,
Nor with desire of glorie sweld his brest,
  The spoiles wonne from his foe, his late rewards,
  He now neglects, despiseth, nought regards.

Languisht the faithfull dog, and wonted caire
Of his deare Lord and cabben both forgot,
Panting he laid, and gathred fresher aire
To coole the burning in his entrals hot:
But breathing (which wise Nature did prepare
To swage the stomackes heat) now booted not,
  For little ease (alas) small helpe they win,
  That breath foorth aire, and scalding fire sucke in.

Thus languished the earth, in this estate
Lay woefull thousands of the Christians stout,
The faithfull people grew nie desperate
Of hoped conquest, shamefull death they dout,
Of their distresse they talke and oft debate,
These sad complaints were heard the campe throughout,
  What hope hath Godfrey? Shall we still here lie,
  Till all his souldiers, all our armies die?]
 

Even while going ‘down’ the scala naturae, from man to horse to dog to earth, Tasso at the same time horizontally expands his vista to take in the cosmos as a whole – the anaphora across the stanzas here flattens the hierarchy of creation so that all of its strata are joined in a universal languishment which does not respect differences between species, genders, or orders of life. When God sends down a rainstorm in answer to Goffredo’s prayer, Tasso specifically emphasizes that it is not only human beings who rejoice:

  Né pur l’umana gente or si rallegra
e dei suoi danni a ristorar si viene,
ma la terra, che dianzi afflitta ed egra
di fessure le membra avea ripiene,
la pioggia in sé raccoglie e si rintegra,
e la comparte a le piú interne vene,
e largamente i nutritivi umori
a le piante ministra, a l’erbe, a i fiori.  (13.78)

 

[Nor man alone to ease his burning sore,
Herein doth diue and wash, and hereof drinks,
But earth itselfe weake, feeble, faint before,
Whose solid limmes were cleft with rifts and chinks,
Receiu’d the falling showres and gathred store
Of liquour sweet, that through her vaines downe sinks,
 And moisture new infused largely was
 In trees, in plants, in herbes, in flowres, in gras.]

 

The anthropomorphism of these lines is made still more explicit in the next stanza, which compares the regenerated earth to a ‘patient … whose liuely blood / Hath ouercome at last some sicknes strong’ (13.79).

For Spenser, too, languishing bodies open out a vista onto the living body of the cosmos. The depiction of Belphoebe rescuing Timias in Canto Five occasions the digression of Canto Six, in which the account of Belphoebe and Amoret’s birth from Chrysogone, impregnated by the sun while she is lying on the grassy ground in a ‘gentle slombring swowne’, in turn leads to the description of the Garden of Adonis. The connection between the ‘slombring’ body and the ‘first seminary / Of all things, that are borne to live and dye’ (3.6.30) is more than merely adventitious. As stanza 35 makes clear, the forms contained in the garden do not extend to include ‘reasonable sowles’, but rather are ‘fitt … t’indew’ them:

Infinite shapes of creatures there are bred,
   And vncouth formes, which none yet euer knew,
   And euery sort is in a sondry bed
   Sett by it selfe, and ranckt in comely rew:
   Some fitt for reasonable sowles t’indew,
   Some made for beasts, some made for birds to weare,
   And all the fruitfull spawne of fishes hew
   In endlesse rancks along enraunged were,
That seemd the Ocean could not containe them there.  (3.6.35)

When it comes to human beings what the Garden contains are the forms which comprise the organic soul: ‘the principle responsible for those life functions inextricably tied to the bodies of living beings and immediately dependent on their organs….[ranging] from the vital operations of digestion and reproduction through sensation and emotion to the higher cognitive functions of imagination and memory’.[11] It is this soul, governing everything other than intellect and will, whose functions come to the fore in sleep and in moments of languishing, when intellect and will are inactive. In their ‘slombring swowne’, therefore, the bodies of Timias and Chrysogone serve as natural points of connection to the Garden, which in turn links them to cosmic processes of languishing and regeneration at the broadest level. For as the ‘father of all forms … that living gives to all’ (3.6.47), Adonis was traditionally identified with the Sun, bringing back life to Venus as earth in contrast to the boar as symbolic of deathly winter (Spenser could have found this reading in Natalis Comes’ Mythologiae).[12] Indeed the Sun as ‘great father … of generation / … th’author of light and life’ (3.6.9) was already active at the beginning of the Canto, impregnating the slumbering body of Chrysogone and foreshadowing Adonis’s role as revealed at the Canto’s conclusion.

Thus for Spenser as for Tasso, states of languishing both represent and facilitate our intimate involvement, on the level of the organic soul, in cycles of cosmic death and regeneration. Spenser’s Garden, of course, depicts those cycles as an allegorical image of sempiternal metaphysical process rather than as the one-time event depicted by Tasso in Canto Thirteen of the Liberata. Yet in both cases the process is the same – one of cosmic regeneration – and in both cases we have a glimpse of a cosmic vitality only disclosed to us when we revert to psychic levels ‘below’ those of consciousness and intellect. Timias’s swoon has quite literally prepared the ground for this strange Garden by exposing that state of pre-rational vitality to which we revert when we float in and out of awareness. If what happens to the languishing body is that it is restored to the condition of living but dehumanized matter, then it’s not a great stretch from Timias and Chrysogone in their faints to a vision of the material earth itself as a vast body, potentially subject to swooning and languishing – from the ‘bud of youth’ beginning to ‘blossom faire’ (3.5.29) on Timias’s lips to the ‘weeds, that bud and blossom’ (3.6.30) in the Garden of Adonis.

And for both Tasso and Spenser, this horizontal continuity of life forms as exposed by the swoon is expressed through the rhetorical figure of anaphora. This is perhaps clearest in Tasso’s stanzas on the drought from Canto 13, each of which begins with a form of ‘langue’, but Spenser’s description of the ‘comely rows’ of creation is, aptly enough, organised by anaphora as well (3.6.35). In both poets, anaphora expresses the condition of cosmic horizontality in which all orders of life, on the border with death, are joined by a fundamental sameness – vitality itself – that subtends distinction and hierarchy. For both poets, it is rhetorical figures such as this one that facilitate what Jim Ellis, in a recent article for the Spenser Review, describes as ‘literature’s appeal to the vegetal soul’. Drawing on Lodowyck Bryskett, Ellis shows that for Spenser song is a means of influencing – for good and ill – the lowest level of the tripartite soul: ‘it is’, he writes, ‘the pure musicality, the physical aspects of the song or the sound vibrations, that delight the vegetative soul, not the words or the images’.[13] Ellis’s account of the power of song on the non-human parts of the soul draws primarily on Bryskett’s Aristotelian psychology in his Discourse of Civill Life, but it also echoes Marsilio Ficino’s account of song as a means of connecting the organic soul to the spiritus mundi in Book Three of his De Vita (1489), De Vita Coelitus Comparanda or ‘On Obtaining Life from the Heavens’: ‘By the same power, when [song] imitates the celestials, it also wonderfully arouses the spirit upwards to the celestial influence and the celestial influence downwards to our spirit.’[14] Through the ‘vibration’ of its rhetorical structures poetry is what plays this role for the reader, mediating a cosmic transfer of affect between the organic soul and the body of the world itself. In anaphora reading can approach a condition of languishment even as poetry takes on the power Ficino and Bryskett ascribe to song: to make the non-human elements of our souls resonate with the life of the cosmos.

                                                                                                Giulio J. Pertile

                                                                                    University of St Andrews

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• Carmichael Fencing Company 5 months, 1 week ago

  The triumph of epic closure may be more absolute in the Gerusalemme Liberata, but in the following pages I wish to entertain the notion that states of languo

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• Flagstaff Onsite Truck Repair 5 months ago

  Don’t worry if you need to become more familiar with how a differential works.

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• Cleveland Pro Mobile Mechanic 5 months ago

  That’s why we use only the highest quality parts and tools to ensure that your repair work is done to the highest standards.

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