Unknown continental artist, Queen Elizabeth I, oil on panel, c. 1575, © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Imagine this: You enter a dark room, where a woman turns to look at you. It is the Queen. Do not be frightened. She has not turned her head of course (because you do not matter), but she has turned her eyes ever so slightly (because she takes note of everything, even such as you). They, her eyes, have slid toward you and toward the corners of the sunken, sleepless sockets of her skull. The dim light from a door, where you stand, falls on her, as though she were a spider that had been sitting in the dark, waiting – utterly composed, utterly watchful – a spider with delicate ivory hands. You notice the tension around her mouth, especially the tense muscularity near the corners of her downward-drawn lips, and there is no mistaking her intelligence, her seemingly infinite cognisance. Do not be frightened. Her eyes are as dark as the darkness behind her and as deep. It would be better if you did not seek your reflection in her eyes; you will not find it. Not because of her famed virgin impenetrability, but just the opposite: because your image has entered her eyes and passed through them, as through a pitch-black tunnel, into the inner archive of her intricate mind (a mind more intricate than the amazing needlework of her ruff and gown). There, behind her eyes, surely, your image has already been filed and stored, alongside your father’s and his father’s and his father’s images. Noted, too, is their service to the government. Do not be frightened. Surely, it is better to be bold since she admires boldness, but perhaps be not too bold. You think of the Earl of Leicester, and bow. Meanwhile, do not be disconcerted that she, for now, says nothing. She has become the screen for every one of your fears, including your fear of God and your fear of death. You continue looking at her eyes, which seem to reject reciprocity as weakness, at least reciprocity with insects such as you…

But why am I beginning this work of scholarly interpretation with such a flight of imagination? On the one hand, this imaginative experience that I am describing is specific to this particular painting of Queen Elizabeth I. Recall Elizabeth’s motto, video et taceo (‘I see and remain silent’), which conjures the quality of coiled power that can reside in the silence of the sovereign. William Camden relates how, when the coffers of Mary Queen of Scots were opened, revealing various potentially incriminating documents stored inside, Queen Elizabeth ‘notwithstanding passed all ouer in silence, vsing her old Motto. Video, Taceoq; I see, and say nothing’.[1] This is the language of God, who in His restraint also ‘passes over’ those whom He (for now) silently spares; such silence becomes a claim of power in the Aristotelian sense of potential, conveying her restrained capacity to strike. Geffrey Whitney associates the saying with Jove’s forbearance in not striking down every offensive man, lest – so many offensive men are there – the king of the gods use up all his thunderbolts.[2] Surely, it would require a person as deftly literary as she to discover within the clichéd virtue of female silence such a poetics of threat.[3]

On the other hand, the imaginative experience that I am describing of this painting’s fraught silence encapsulates for me something intrinsic to aesthetic experience more generally. It may be that this motto of Elizabeth’s applies so well to artworks because she rendered herself into a complex kind of artwork – and, as such, proved generative of seemingly infinite interpretations. If aesthetic objects could speak, at least complex ones that elicit our imaginations and demand our interpretive efforts, they too might make the claim, as she does, that ‘I see and keep silent’.

Spenser’s Amoretti: Sonnets that See You

In this essay, I am going to explore the sonnets in the first half of Edmund Spenser’s 1595 Amoretti in light of this motto of Elizabeth’s. My central idea is that Queen Elizabeth’s motto expresses, in highly concise form, key aspects of how we experience some artworks, especially these lyric poems. Lyric has a long association with silence – of maintaining a pretence that it is about what cannot be spoken, what cannot be written. In that sense, even though lyric is made out of words, it is (or pretends to be) a silent object. And lyric can also, more surprisingly, create the illusion that it is a seeing object, in the sense that, if you imaginatively project into it, you experience it as if it were looking back at you. At stake for me in exploring the applicability of this motto of Elizabeth’s to Spenser’s poems is the status of imaginative projection in the effort of interpretation. This essay is a consideration of this question and, as the beginning might suggest, an enactment of it. While Spenser’s poems provide ample textual evidence that might justify comparing his beloved with the queen,[4] I am interested in a connection that is not entirely grounded in the facts, that is partly imaginative, and that thereby will draw attention to a kind of gap between us and the object of our study, a gap that raises problems of interpretation that I will develop as we go on.

These poems of Spenser’s, like the Darnley portrait, explore what occurs in the silent exchange between two pairs of observing eyes. Variations of the word ‘eye’ appear 34 times in the sequence in the Amoretti; ‘look’ 29 times; ‘behold’ 15 times – not to mention words like ‘admire’, ‘gaze’, ‘spy’. The sequence (especially its first half) often depicts the lover’s act of looking at his beloved, who in turn is looking back at him. Sometimes what emerges is a kind of mirroring. Such seems to be the case in sonnet 7, for example, where Spenser addresses the eyes of his beloved as ‘the myrrour of my mazed hart’:

Fayre eyes, the myrrour of my mazed hart,
what wondrous vertue is contaynd in you
the which both lyfe and death forth from you dart
into the object of your mighty view?
For when ye mildly looke with lovely hew,
then is my soule with life and love inspired:
but when ye lowre, or looke on me askew
then doe I die…(7.1-8)[5] 

As in other Petrarchan sequences that draw on Plato’s Phaedrus (255D),[6] the beloved is the narrator’s ‘myrrour’, and he sees himself reflected in her eyes.

Renaissance poets were experts in the mirroring gaze. In Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Armida looks at herself in a mirror while her lover Rinaldo ‘spies himself in the calm reflection of her eyes’[7] (Ella del vetro a sè fa specchio: ed egli / Gli occhi di lei sereni a sè fa spegli, 16.20). The ‘eye babies’ of the lovers represent, at least in some poems, the most immediate possible form of communication – a kind of union of self and other.[8] The lover overcomes distance by finding himself represented in miniature within the eye of the beloved, and vice versa. In such desire, narcissism is an ever-present threat: ‘when first your eye I eyed’, Shakespeare writes in sonnet 104, and the reader is made to see the ego that lies at the centre of that mirror-like interaction between the narrator’s eyes and those of his beloved. Narcissism is also the fear when Britomart looks into ‘the glassy globe’ (III.ii.21) of Merlin’s mirror, which is ‘round and hollow shaped’ (III.ii.19), and sees her future mate, Artegall, represented there in miniature.[9]

Miniature portraits, such as those by Nicholas Hilliard, may also have been subtly playing on this tradition. Not unlike the surface of an eye, the surfaces of many such paintings are small, rounded, glassy, and – what is rarely discussed – convex.[10] Like the miniature reflection in the eye of the lover, these paintings offer a ‘mini-me’ that achieves an imagined intimacy with the beloved by being located within her private space –held in the palm of her hand or worn on her person.[11]

But in sonnet 7 of Spenser’s Amoretti, there is no mere replication of the lover in the beloved. Rather than seeing his outward form repeated in the mirror of her eyes, he sees his innermost self, his ‘mazed hart’. And there is another difference as well from the narcissistic mirrors referred to above: she may be the mirror of his heart, but this mirror does not offer a miniaturised repetition of him; rather, the mirror resists, deflects, chastises, and trains his impulses. In this respect, it is a mirror that acts more like those in the tradition of the mirror of princes (speculum principum), which presents an ideal against which he can learn to check himself.[12] This tradition draws on Neoplatonism in guiding the lover from desire for the physical to desire for the ideal. In developing this aspect of the mirror, Spenser in this same poem emphasises her eyes’ special power, or ‘vertue’, to shoot back at him both approval and disapproval. Through this process of gazing and being gazed at, the lover-narrator becomes not just the subject doing the action, but also the ‘object’ of her ‘mighty view’. It is sometimes almost as though she were authoring him, rather than the reverse. Like Queen Elizabeth, she looks back at him – and does so in a manner both alluring and chastising.

In some sonnets, the alternating approval and disapproval which emanate from the beloved’s eyes take on an almost instructional quality, as though the beloved were teaching the lover how to read her. Consider sonnets 8 and 21:

Thrugh your bright beams doth not the blinded guest [Cupid]
shoot out his darts to base affections wound:
but Angels come to lead fraile mindes to rest
in chast desires on heavenly beauty bound.
You frame my thoughts and fashion me within,
you stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake,
you calme the storme that passion did begin,
strong thrugh your cause, but by your vertue weak. (8.5-12)

For with mild pleasance, which doth pride displace,
she to her loves doth lookers eyes allure:
and with sterne countenance back again doth chace
their looser lookes that stir up lustes impure.
With such strange termes her eyes she doth inure,
that with one looke she doth my life dismay:
and with another doth it streight recure;
her smile me drawes, her frowne me drives away.
Thus doth she traine and teach me with her lookes,
such art of eyes I never read in bookes. (21.5-14)

Her looks seem to lure his eyes to her but also to chase away his lascivious glances. In both these sonnets, the beloved teaches the lover what her gazes mean. In the earlier excerpt, his interpretation of her eyes’ meaning is posed as a question (‘doth not…’). But in the later sonnet, the narrator seems to have decided that, indeed, her glances should be interpreted as both drawing him in and driving him away. As though slowly learning a lesson, the narrator in sonnet 21 repeats this interpretation in ever-more succinct form (four lines [5-8]; two lines [10-11]; one line [12]). It is as if the point were becoming increasingly familiar, as if he were learning what she has been teaching. ‘Thus doth she traine and teach me with her lookes….’

Through this process, the beloved becomes a kind of text that she is teaching him how to read. The poet compares her looks at him in sonnet 23 to Penelope’s weaving and unweaving in the Odyssey. In this metaphor, the beloved becomes the artist who, through her gazes, is making something that he is interpreting. Lines like ‘For in those lofty lookes is close implide, / scorn of base things…’ (5.5-6) start to seem like a scene of what we would call ‘close reading’. The narrator is learning to read the meanings hidden (or ‘close implide’) within the lover’s eyes.

This process of looking, imagining and looking again for instruction is not dissimilar to the interpretive process that Leo Spitzer describes, a process which, he says, happens through a set of ‘to-and-fro voyage[s]’. What the critic must do, he writes, is ‘work from the surface to the “inward life-center” of the work of art’. That is, the critic must observe details related to the ‘superficial appearance’ of the artwork and then imagine the ‘soul of the artist’ in these details. But the process does not end there. Spitzer describes a further stage: a ‘return trip’, whereby the critic then goes back to the surface of the artwork to check his idea and ‘to find whether the “inward form” one has tentatively constructed gives an account of the whole’. After three or four such ‘voyages’, the critic ‘will surely be able to state … whether he has found the life-giving center, the sun of the solar system ….’[13] Just as the lover perceives details of the features of the silent beloved and develops an imaginative  sense of what these features indicate about her thoughts or about the soul that lies within her, so, too, does the critic develop his or her ideas about the inner meaning of the text or poem. And, to carry this analogy further, the gazes go both ways. I see her looking at me, and correct my interpretation based on my sense of her soul, which seems to have the power to rebuke me.

There is no simple flinging forth of imaginative projections. Rather, there is a sustained dynamic process that entails both imagining the meaning of the object, but then also checking or correcting that idea against further observations. Theodor W. Adorno is especially articulate on this point. For him, true attentiveness to an art object requires imaginative projection – but as a stage in an increasingly complex and ongoing process of comprehension. ‘The more the observer adds to the process [of perceiving an artwork], the greater the energy with which he penetrates the artwork, the more he then becomes aware of objectivity from within. He takes part in objectivity when his energy, even that of his misguided subjective ‘projection’, extinguishes itself in the artwork. The subjective detour may totally miss the mark, but without the detour no objectivity becomes evident’.[14] Recalling the lover who imagines what the beloved’s gaze means and corrects himself by continuing to look, and Spitzer’s critics who correct themselves by looking again at the artwork, subjective ‘projection’ is one stage in a sustained process of comprehension. This subjective projection produces, eventually, an encounter with the alterity of the artwork – as it did in the fantasy that I described at the opening of this essay, where I tried to evoke looking at Queen Elizabeth so intently that she seemed as if she were looking back at me. A cursory or entirely detached encounter, in contrast, doesn’t allow for our attention to animate the artwork sufficiently so that it can act on us.

The Silence of the Text

So far, I have been concentrating on the seeing part of Elizabeth’s motto, ‘I see and keep silent’. But it is the keeping-silent part that may elicit the interpretive effort in the first place. In suggesting that the seeing silent woman is an analogue for the artistic object itself, I’d like to suggest in this section that her silence is matched by a paradoxical silence of the text.

The theme of silence is often downplayed in current studies of lyric.[15] In Jonathan Culler’s 2015 Theory of the Lyric, for example, the theme is hardly discussed.[16] But silence has a long history in lyric tradition. Take these lines of Petrarch as a seminal example:

he who knows how to think, let him esteem the silent truth
which surpasses every style, and then let him sigh: ‘Therefore
blessed the eyes that saw her alive!’

chi sa pensare, il ver tacito estime
ch’ ogni stil vince, et poi sospire: ‘Adunque
beati gli occhi che la vider viva!’ (309)[17]

Petrarch asserts, paradoxically, that there are no words which can express Laura’s ‘silent truth’. For all his words (the sonnets are of course composed of words), what the narrator articulates repeatedly is the impossibility of words. To take another example from Petrarch: ‘Since your seeing shines in me as a sunbeam penetrates glass, let my desire suffice, without my speaking’ (95); and ‘I write in my heart even more than on paper’ (105). It is as though the poems were claiming for themselves the ability to articulate an experience beyond words.

What emerges is a kind of secularised apophatic discourse,[18] not entirely unlike Augustine’s vision at Ostia. In that garden, the saint and his mother seemed to glimpse a reality that lies beyond discursiveness and, confronted with this vision, ‘we gaped with the mouth of our heart’ (inhiabamus ore cordis, 9.10.23). This vision was a silent experience that, paradoxically, Augustine then narrated in words. The language of Petrarch’s poems, like the language of Augustine’s vision, is grounded thus in a condition of impossibility. The words want to say what words cannot, as he emphasises, possibly say.

In the Amoretti, Spenser repeatedly plays on this tradition. Up until sonnet 58, where his beloved Elizabeth seems to speak,[19] she is wordless. But the poet also, paradoxically, depicts himself repeatedly as silent. We have already looked at sonnet 8, where Spenser writes, ‘you stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake’. In sonnet 3, similarly, Spenser develops the conceit of not being able to express his beloved’s beauty:

So when my toung would speak her praises dew,
it stopped is with thoughts astonishment:
and when my pen would write her titles true,
it ravisht is with fancies wonderment:
Yet in my hart I then both speake and write
the wonder that my wit cannot endite. (3.9-14)

While his tongue and pen are rendered mute by her stunning beauty, he asserts that a different kind of speech and writing are happening in his heart. The possibly religious source of the last two lines is the beginning of Psalm 45, ‘My heart is inditing of a good matter / I speake of the things which I haue made vnto the king / My tongue is the penne: of a ready writer’.[20] The difference, of course, is that Spenser draws out the Petrarchan paradox: he can speak and write in his heart what he cannot speak and write with his tongue and pen.[21]

Interpretation is needed because the words of his poem do not say what they say; they cast us therefore into a nonliteral understanding of what they mean. For Simon Rawidowicz, whose 1957 article ‘On Interpretation’ has been neglected in literary studies, the acknowledgment of this nonliteralism lies at the very core of interpretation. According to Rawidowicz, if we want a text to remain alive, we cannot treat it as closed, finished, self-sufficient, literal: ‘Literal interpretatio is a contradictio in adjecto. All interpretatio transcends by its very nature the literal. The literal can only be identical with itself, repeating itself’.[22] Rather than denying interpretation’s creative element, Rawidowicz foregrounds it, valorises it, and renders it a crucial element of engaging with texts in such a way that they remain alive and ‘open’ to changing questions.

Preserving and Losing the Gap

For the various Jewish émigré thinkers I’ve drawn on in this essay, a sense of distance underlies interpretation, which becomes then a kind of negotiation between the world of the text and the world of ourselves. Interpretation expresses, in Rawidowicz’s words, the ‘tension between continuation and rebellion, tradition and innovation. It derives its strength both from a deep attachment to the “text” and from an “alienation” from it, a certain distance, a gap which has to be bridged’.[23] Interpretation positions itself in the gap between the lover (the critic) and the text (the beloved). Interpretation does not erase this distance but builds itself out of the ‘crisis’ of meaning that this distance creates.

What I have been emphasising in this essay is the meta-literary dimension of various poems of Spenser’s. At the same time, this essay could also be understood as making a case for a renewed interest in the early poems of the Amoretti, which are frequently dismissed as being examples merely of ‘Petrarchan convention’. The word ‘convention’ is tricky because it can suggest that what draws on tradition is somehow less radical (or more conventional) than what doesn’t, as though society moves teleologically toward liberation – which of course is not always the case. [24] ‘The whole is the untrue’, wrote Adorno in the modern era.[25] For him, the drive toward a final coherence (he is responding against the total identification of the Hegelian subject with the state or the whole) is not desirable; Adorno instead wanted to preserve what he called ‘distinctness without domination’ — which he describes as a kind of happiness in which particularity can be known in an unsubsumed condition, with the various manifestations of the distinct ‘participating in each other’.[26] Such ‘distinctness without domination’ would be, for us, hardly imaginable if it were not preserved, at least to some degree, within the formal complexity of various artworks, with which we engage imaginatively. In the reading I’ve been presenting here, the beloved in Spenser’s early sonnets stands for something non-harmonious that preserves this distinctness – just before this distinctness disappears.

It is significant that the tensions that I have been valorising in this essay are, arguably, largely overcome by the end of the 1595 edition of the Amoretti and Epithalamion.[27] Note that in the Epithalamion, the beloved no longer looks back at the narrator. ‘Her modest eyes abashed to behold / So many gazers, as on her do stare, / Upon the lowly ground affixed are. / Ne dare lift up her countenance too bold…’ (159-62). Almost as though she has become a different person from the one who, with her ‘soverayne beauty’ (sonnet 3), expressed ‘powre to kill’ through her ‘imperious eyes’ (sonnet 49), she now keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. Virgins, the poet says, can learn obedience by looking at her. Adorned, decked and arrayed, she can be looked at by everyone, but no longer can look back at anyone. In these later poems, she is subsumed within a given hierarchy, within a great chain of being. No one tries to understand what her gazes mean; the space between her and him collapses, and by the end it is as though their marriage has ended all forms of distance and mutual negotiation.

The image of Narcissus may return – but, if so, no longer as a threat. In the Epithalamion, the groom’s joy echoes as it resounds throughout the heavens: ‘Sing ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing, / That all the woods may answere and your eccho ring’ (240-1). She, like the fragmentary repetitions which are the sign of the mythic Echo (in the background of Ovid’s version of the Narcissus story), has now no existence of her own. But if he now plays the corresponding role of Narcissus, this role is no longer problematic because the community, the surrounding natural world and even heaven itself relieve him of isolation by rendering his happy experience the governing law of the universe. Concord has been achieved, yes, but at the price of her non-dominated distinctness and otherness.

Putting to one side the additional complexities introduced by the Anacreontics, critics often note that Spenser’s 1595 volume offers at least two major plots: first, there is the guerra amorosa Petrarchan plot, on which I have been focussing, and which may appear to the reader deliberately overcharged with tradition and, for that reason, self-ironising. Second, there is the Protestant plot, which shows that this love could have a happy resolution through the sacrament of marriage. It may be that these two plots are, as Roger Kuin suggests, so irreconcilable as to create, between them, a kind of gap whereby the reader, ‘experiencing the text in its gradual unfolding, is halted and forced to make sense’.[28] If that is the case, then the harmonisation offered by the Ephithalamion is not just a release of tensions, but also the creation of a new tension. And yet that latter tension is lost if we too quickly dismiss the early Petrarchan poems as merely Petrarchan, effacing their claim on us through a false familiarity that drops them into the (w)hole called ‘Tradition’. Such an assertion of memory may in effect constitute a lapse into a kind of forgetting.

In the end, perhaps it is both because of and despite the harmonisation triumphantly offered by the Epithalamion that the early poems of the Amoretti might reclaim our attention. The beloved engages with the lover’s gaze in a manner that activates the space between them. By looking back, she energises and draws attention to the gap between her and him and generates his (and our) interpretive efforts. The lover does not resolve but, in a sense, enacts the ongoing problem of meaning as he strains across a divide to understand her. Just as the lover learns to interpret the beloved’s silent gaze by looking at her, and then looking again at her, and continuing to look at her even when she looks back at him, a reader might try to interpret these poems by maintaining eye contact – whatever the subtle tinge of peril that attends, possibly, any interpretive effort made in earnest. 

And an Epilogue

It is an aim of The Spenser Review to foster scholarly conversation. In that spirit, as well as in keeping with Spenser’s own penchant for including what disrupts his ‘argument’, I’d like to re-end my essay by including an account of a conversation that challenged one part of what I have presented here.

In an exchange by email, Linda Gregerson generously commented on this essay and, in so doing, provided a persuasive counter-reading of the Epithalamion. Drawing attention to the poem’s signs of danger, such as its housefires, screech owls, witches and raven, Gregerson suggested that otherness may persist in the Epithalamion, albeit in a new form. She posed this question: ‘Perhaps the radical otherness of the universe, its refusal to keep our best interests in mind, has been relocated rather than resolved as Spenser’s double poetic sequence moves toward its close?’ In other words, according to Gregerson, the Epithalamion does not undo earlier tensions, but situates these tensions in the larger sphere of a threatening universe.

But if Gregerson’s reading of the Epithalamion is true, which I feel it is, does that mean the one I touched on at the ending of my essay is false? What would it mean to say that both are true? That is, the Epithalamion produces the effect of a resolution, but also, for the attuned re-reader, suggests the fragility of this resolution, its temporariness, its irresolution.

As Gregerson points out, there is a maze hidden in sonnet 7’s ‘mazed heart’, with which I began. Such a maze might connect, Gregerson suggests, the two parts of Spenser’s sequence: first, ‘the lover’s heart in the early Amoretti’, and second, ‘the mazy woods that surround and threaten to disrupt the colonial wedding celebration’. In the ars critica mode of my essay, I might add that this maze also describes the nonlinear shape of a now-shared interpretive process – the looping and looping back again of critical to-and-fro voyages, of reading and rereading, of thinking and talking. As my possibly clunkier and more overt reading gives way to her subtler one, we might almost experience Spenser’s poetic world starting to tremble and change, revealing its vulnerabilities and morphing before our eyes – as though it were alive.

Rachel Eisendrath

Barnard College, Columbia University

Comments

• Removals Eastbourne 2 months ago

  Wonderful points on the "mirroring gaze". Truly touching

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