Jump to: Séan Lysaght, Trevor Joyce, John McAuliffe, Leanne O’Sullivan
Responding to Spenser
When I was growing up in Limerick, my father and I would occasionally travel south into Tipperary or towards Cork city on a book-buying mission: in winter time the white, snow-capped summit of Galtee Mountain often dominated the horizon in the distance. I did not associate this mountain with Edmund Spenser’s Munster Olympus at that time, but on another visit, to the North Cork Writers’ Festival in Doneraile, we heard a learned woman from Oxford talking about cosmology and astronomy in The Faerie Queene, and I realised then that the English Renaissance had had its own Munster rep. Seamus Heaney’s Wintering Out (1972) had just been published, where Spenser puts in a brief, shadowy appearance, in ‘Bog Oak’, as a classically trained coloniser trying to come to terms with Irish ways and weather. The peat smoke in that poem was a familiar smell; by contrast, Spenser’s vast field of Renaissance learning was as remote to me as the top of Galtee.
Later, as a student of English at UCD, I came to Spenser tentatively: the sonnet ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’ spoke directly to me from the dull ranks of the ‘Amoretti’ sequence, before I knew that the poem was probably set on a beach in Cork. Andrew Carpenter’s teaching brought ‘Colin Clouts come home againe’ and ‘Epithalamion’ to life for us, and gave me a strong sense of the proximity of this early legacy to Ireland. A few years later, when Andrew curated a substantial section on Spenser in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, it seemed that Colin Clout truly had come home to Irish literary tradition.
By the time I was teaching literature on a new degree programme in Heritage Studies at GMIT, Mayo in 1995, I had Spenser’s View, the Mutability Cantos, and extracts from The Faerie Queene on the syllabus. There was a new scholarly accommodation of Spenser within Irish studies, in the work of scholars such as Nicholas Canny, Willy Maley, and Andrew Hadfield, and his career seemed to me like a moment of origination in Anglophone tradition in Ireland. At the same time, I felt a quiet dissatisfaction that the poet had been largely taken over by commentators, with the poetry hard to discern beneath the scholarship.
The verse narrative of Spenser’s life that I published in 2011 was an attempt at creating a plausible subject from the lacunae, evasions and meagre evidence of the time. Spenser was a scholar steeped in both the culture of Renaissance Europe and Christian Scripture; but, like Milton after him, his ideological stake in Protestantism alienated him from the greater part of his imaginative legacy, in the classical, pagan world of the Greeks and Romans. The internal stresses of that alienation produced what W.H. Auden referred to as a ‘crooked heart’, something we can recognise in ourselves, given our own compromises and failures. These stresses are most apparent in the sumptuous descriptions of the Garden of Adonis in Book III, which go against the allegorical grain of the legend of Chastitie.
For the sake of the day job, Spenser had to stick to the party line as a card-carrying member of the Tudor state, whose ideology, like other ideologies, disguised or legitimated violence. The complicity of Spenser’s imagination with violence, I discovered, reached far beyond his approval of policy in the View, to the Tarantino-style exuberance of killing throughout The Faerie Queene, where even the final Book of Courtesie begins with a beheading. I read his Faerie Queene in that context as a work of escapist fantasy in the contemporary sense, as an imaginative failure that was answered, in the end, by more violence during the Nine Years’ War and the destruction of his personal fortune.
[Lysaght is the author of Spenser (Westport: Stonechat Editions, 2011), reviewed by Jeff Dolven in the Winter 2013 issue of The Spenser Review: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-42/issue-422-3/briefly-noted/spenser/ ]
Plus ça change
Two takes on Spenser
As a poet, encountering the work of Spenser, I found myself doubly entangled, sharing with him both a landscape and a language. I have long family history in Munster, where I live, and in which he wrote much of The Faerie Queene, and my own poetry is in English, in which his prior presence cannot be ignored. The former engagement I could have dealt with in discursive prose or verse, but any response adequate to the latter, I felt, needed to be conducted through the formal dynamics of our shared medium, poetry.
I read Du Bellay’s Les Antiquités de Rome as a lament for the destruction of a complex civilization. Indeed, one of Du Bellay’s poems (III), resonating with Latin, Polish, and Spanish analogues, can itself compactly stand for the complexity of European Renaissance culture. That Spenser should publish his version of this sequence just ten years after his participation in the Smerwick massacre, struck me as significant, and it was to this fact that my initial response was directed. Recognizing his role in the destruction of the complex culture of the native Irish and Anglo-Normans, I thought it fitting to seize upon his eloquent English and return it, hamstrung and hobbling. Hence my move to shrink his latinate pomp to plain English monosyllables, ‘the Berecynthian Goddess bright / In her swift Charret’ to ‘a she god, quick in her cart / of war’, yet it was good to find then a terser and still integral strength to fasten on, beneath his flash surface.
Just as, in his final sonnet (XXXII) Du Bellay pivots to survey his own position in the human succession, and Spenser likewise (I omit his Envoy), so did I.
And is it that you hope, my words,
that you’ll be heard through worlds and times
to come? Do you have hopes verse lasts
while years turn, modes change, and men fail?
The skies grow dark. No fame stands fast
or these stones spread round, clean cut, cold
and hard, dressed by sharp steel, so far
less frail than script, should have it made.
I use the tools I’ve got: hard words
passed down, passed on, may speak on some
days when the live voice breaks.
Not all words bear the weight. I mean;
but they may not. And these? Pen’s mark
lives on, but not the mouth that sang.
Because I’ve stuck rigidly throughout the sequence to the constraint of exactly eight words, that is, syllables, per line, the six-word stump which constitutes line eleven is crucial to my meaning. So too that my final ten words English the proverbial Irish epigraph of my sequence, Maireann lorg an phinn, ach ní mhaireann an béal a chan.
Spenser makes a similar move in the final two stanzas of his Mutability Cantos, foregrounding the authorial voice in an attitude of oversight. Here, from my Fastness:
I’m sick to death of seeing
this dodgy state of things, and alienated too
from all attachments in this so unperfect world,
those sky-flowers falling furiously.
But then I think of Nature’s summing up,
about that time when no more change shall be,
but a settled fastness of all things firmly fixed
on everlasting grounds, set hard to withstand
Mutability’s blitz. All that moves commotion
loves, is indisputable truth, but from here on in
all will be set fast at rest, with Him, my Lord
of Hosts. Haste, Lord, to make me fast!
Here too I’ve opted to zero in on the rhetorical shift. While ‘no more change shall be’ is retained unaltered, I introduce a canonical register of my choosing in ‘those sky-flowers falling furiously’, posing Dogen’s Shobogenzo as counterpart to Spenser’s Johannine apocalypse.
That final prayer, its pun on ‘fast’ a partial analogue to Spenser’s ‘Sabbaoth’, has changed its force for me over the years, so I now find yet a third entanglement unlooked for. Having through sympathy felt I might claim to be of Mutability’s party, I’ve increasingly had to recognize myself as bonded and secured with Spenser and with Jove, fast within fortress Europe, while it is those marginalized within or held at a remove without, who might truly claim that titanic kinship; Mincéirs and forced migrants. What further change must come, I wait to see.
[Trevor Joyce is the author of Rome’s Wreck: Translated from the English of Edmund Spenser’s ‘Ruines of Rome’ (Cusp Books, 2014) and Fastness: A Translation from the English of Edmund Spenser (University of Miami Press, 2017). Fastness was reviewed by Richard Danson Brown in Winter 2018: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/48.1.14/]
I studied Spenser in Galway as a straightforward example of colonial discourse (concentrating on the View of the Present State). It was years later when the poetry transformed my understanding of the poet. That began when I picked up on the Arlo as a corruption of Aherlow, an area I knew well from childhood. Then, living in England, and as the parent of children who have been born and raised in England, I became more interested in the complex to-and-fro between Ireland and England. Which led me to think about Yeats’s fascination with Spenser and how that may have been informed by Yeats’s own interest in crossing English and Irish modes.
I visited Kilcolman in 2011, just after I’d published a book called Of All Places, which set up conjunctions between North Kerry and North Korea, Manchester and Inis Mor, Philadelphia and Knocknarea, relocated Jane Eyre to Derry etc. I was primed for seeing Spenser as an alien in North Cork (where my parents are from), but his familiarity surprised me, as did his obvious attachment to a landscape he knew well, or better than I did. I began to feel, in spite of the overlaid historical readings of his work, that Spenser might help me to think about writing living in and in between two places.
Kilcolman is a mysteriously underdeveloped site in the history of Irish literature, and almost unmarked in the cultural story the nation tells itself. I had to stop to ask directions to find the castle and met (unbelievably) a man called Colin who told me that his father hated that his mother had named him for Colin Clout. He asked me where in England I lived before he said, No one of our family ever had to go to England, which is a not uncommon statement about the kind of shame attached to the fact of emigration. I knew I had material for work then. I didn’t guess that my poems’ more hopeful consideration of Spenser co-existing in an Irish and an English context would soon seem even more far-fetched. The Brexit referendum has restored the border and the all-powerful state as the means for thinking about Ireland and England, and Europe: it is yet another historical development which re-casts or renews the primacy of one historical context for thinking about Spenser and his poems.
Such complicated historical and political contexts have shaped the ways in which Irish writers have approached Spenser (Welch, Heaney, Lysaght, O’Donoghue, Eilean NI Chuilleanain, Trevor Joyce and more recently, Leanne O’Sullivan). It is, excepting Leanne’s work, a mostly antagonistic relationship. And all this fed into Home, Again, a sequence of poems in the middle of my 2015 book, The Way In. Home, Again is a sort of re-telling of “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again”, which reverses that poem’s journey to and from a ‘court’: my poem begins in England with a conversation with other Irish and English writers, reporting on what it is the speaker had seen on a long trip to Ireland, and ends with poems in praise of the English city to which my poem returns (though I don’t oppose the two places; the Irish and English scenes ‘blend’ more).
The Irish poetic tradition is sometimes imagined to be a sort of succession in which apprentice writers achieve status via a kind of mimetic, expert, formal repetition of existing modes. I can see the value in that, but there is another, more offensive (in both senses) way of looking at what a poem can do, ie, poets (not just in Ireland) can be productively alienated by ideas of community and tradition and succession, ideas they critique or look slant at. Which is how I read Spenser’s fantastical, quicksilver poems, inventing prismatic places which reflect oddly on their moment and also make up other potential imaginative places, seeds of time. I wanted my sequence to go against the grain of what I read as simplifying colonial readings of the poems: I find in Spenser – and how he folds into some of Yeats’s similarly critical imaginings of his time— a good model.
As a footnote, one of the odder facts about Spenser is that his valency in England is so different: when English poets respond to Spenser they align their work with a central element in the culture (the work is likely to be commissioned by UCL and premiered in a cathedral). There is not much room for new work to emerge in such a dutiful setting. For an Irish poet, responding to Spenser can be – or so it felt to me writing these poems — a more dynamic exchange.
RUIN 2 (SATNAV VERSION)
Arriving in the dark, a low satellite gleams
like a high window beyond the orchard.
It has ideas about how things are
and, once in a blue moon, returning,
not sure where I am, things
glitter and twinkle with an underwater look,
every high wall legible as crevice, foxhole,
breathing space, so nothing seems, for an instant,
outside its pale and wholly comprehending mouth,
like the well-bred voice which would correct
every accidental left or right,
until I start to make out, by its light,
the overgrown entrance to the house,
summer retreat turned safe house and symbol.
Hard, escaping the swim of work,
not to fall for its big picture, bumping into
the glassy fact of slow thought
becoming a long life. It lights up
around the sagging, blutacked A4 sheet headed
OPW and the sign for visitors
which bars entrance to the tower’s kitchen garden
whose apples are dry and sweet.
In the long grass, shadows falter where a path breaks in,
flattened stalks unbending, the matted way
dipping every so often to the brown river
no one steps in. It brought us here, the satellite.
It might last forever, a sort of
Anglo-Norman, laying down a route
for which the old map is no help, its flash
visible from the black and watery meadow
that keeps being gone back to, the old names
feverishly hovering behind its aspirations.
Leanne is the author of A Quarter of an Hour (Bloodaxe Books, 2018).
The first time I encountered the work of Edmund Spenser was during my undergraduate studies at University College, Cork. I had not heard of him before, but was intrigued by the fantastical aspects of The Faerie Queene. I was writing and publishing poetry at the time about the mythical Hag of Beara, and so Spenser completely fed into that fascination I had with metaphor and allegory. However, my interest ended there, and once I completed my exam I never went back to read beyond Books I & II, the chapters upon which the exam was set!
My interest in Spenser revived almost a decade later – and here I must admit, and speak more personally, while I did become fond of Spenser during my studies, the lecturer on the subject captured my attention more. Not only did I pass my exam, but I also married that lecturer seven years later. And a year and a half after that, my husband became very ill, with a temperature of 42degrees. In the ambulance, on the way into the hospital, he was rambling, and when I asked him where he thought he was he replied, ‘Book I of the Faerie Queene’. Needless to say, I decided I had better read the whole thing, and it turned out to be a road map of sorts, back to life.
When he woke up from a coma, three weeks later, my husband was very confused, and his memory was quite impaired. This was where my fascination with the character Eumnestes began, and his little aide, Anamnestes. Eumnestes reminded me of my old Primary School teacher – an elderly man who was also the local genealogist, and who collected the names of everyone born to the families of the Beara Peninsula since the famine. He wrote everything down. Anamnestes then, to me, was this curious side-kick. He was voiceless, but interested. He was complicit. I wondered what it would be like for him to hear Eumnestes tell people the stories of the world but never to experience it himself. And then to make the decision to leave the tower, and go out into the world. In a way that is what happened to my husband. We told him about his life, but many experiences had completely disappeared. It was so strange to see him come home, but not really know that he was home.
In the poem ‘Anamnestes’ the world is his inheritance, and rather than read about it in books he comes to understand it by living in it and through it. It was a poem written about new life, experiencing it for the second time – the first through the books and manuscripts – other people’s stories – and the second by going out to it, and making the most of it.
The poem I am presenting here uses a little bit of creative license.
Anamnestes
Old Man,
I am thinking about you today.
The years have taken off, and if you’re living only
in my mind and nowhere else I can’t be certain.
But in light of everything that has come and gone
I thought it right to make this brief connection.
You see, there was always more to it than just a boy
in the outback of a library, living and growing
among the oakwood stacks, fetching books and histories
when people would knock on your door enquiring –
who they truly were and where they were really from.
Then one late night while you were sleeping,
out of curiosity I crept back in. The lamps were dim
and dampness sweated down the rough stone walls,
but still I gathered and balanced in my arms
all that I could and sat cross-legged upon the floor,
vague as a ghost-boy washed clean of memory,
and began to read: of the history of the courts,
of tribunals and their theatres; of common wealth,
of policies and of law; the sciences and all philosophies;
then cities of stone and steel were raised up before me;
the grand romancers, the men of the court,
the King’s men and the man of solitude;
the man of wisdom and the blind man holding forth;
the man of letters and the man of the world.
Some had their names in books and some in long
parchment scrolls, worm-eaten and canker-holed.
Then in The Book of the Ancestors I read them first -
the creatures of the forest and names I had not heard,
before or since; their syllables a blood-knot,
a tonnage in the sound of the sea, in the eye of God,
in the scriptural, ashen geographies; in the moment
of conception, the moment of birth, of love,
of light treading the air, of what’s immeasurable,
of the matter of just memory in the rhymes and furies
of all the world - a world I saw I could live in
and in it become anyone. When morning glanced
along the shutters I rose light-headed for the first time
and for the first time in my life I was gone,
travelling down the narrow road with the grass-banks
so heavy-white with snow it felt as though my own
shoulders were broadening out to touch them.
And so the years have passed and it was no easy thing.
You yourself knew that: metaphors of light and always
an image of the road on which we set out.
But still I hope it has not been too long. Eumnestes,
out of the words you wrote mine were borrowed
but followed their own meandering course.
If you are there to read them now be sure and know that life
is still turning, and it’s a wonder what can be borne.
I say this truthfully because, in the end, I had done it alone –
stood at the step of my own front door, as at the portals
of your house, and breathed the full of it.
I put my ear to the machinery of the deep earth
and listened. I came to understand it myself.
49.3.3
Comments
You must log in to comment.