Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros80Pays, pages, paysages dans le mon...“Written with teares in harts clo...

Pays, pages, paysages dans le monde anglo-américain des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

“Written with teares in harts close bleeding book”: Reading the embodied page in Spenser’s poetry

Lianne Habinek

Résumés

Qu’ont en commun la lecture et l’amour ? Tout, selon les séquences de sonnets de la Renaissance, ou plus précisément, le fait que la lecture et l’écriture sont des moyens nécessaires qui permettent d’atteindre l’amour, ou à défaut de véritablement l’atteindre, au moins espérer le refléter, le saisir ou s’en approcher. Les Amoretti de Spenser jouent sur l’entrelacement des plaisirs sensoriels et sensuels de la lecture dès leur apparition, en insistant sur l’incarnation de la lecture, de l’écriture et de l’amour. Cet article détaille comment Spenser conjugue dans cette séquence de sonnets l’indépendance et l’interdépendance de l’âme, de l’esprit, du cœur et du corps. L’étude centrée sur les descriptions des amants des sonnets lisant et étant lus par les sens montre que leurs actes de « bonne » lecture mutuelle les forgent et les construisent.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

  • 1 Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion, in The Yale Edition: 1.7-8. Unless otherwise noted, all referen (...)
  • 2 See, for example Dunlop, Gibbs, Prescott, Quitslund. See, too, Johnson, who complains that, while c (...)

1What has reading to do with love? The early modern sonnet sequence would answer that the one has everything to do with the other – or, more precisely, that reading and writing are necessary means by which one might attain love, or if not attain it outright, might at least hope to mirror, capture, or move a little closer to it. Yet such sequences acknowledge a particular danger inherent in the linking of reading, writing, and love, a danger Edmund Spenser describes vividly in the very first of his Amoretti, noting that his reader/lover will be handling “the sorrowes of my dying spright / written with teares in harts close bleeding book.”1 First published along with the marriage poem Epithalamion in 1595, the Amoretti as a whole interweave such wounded imagery with an imagined (and eventually actualized) unity. While the individual concerns of the Amoretti vary from referential nameplay to Christian liturgy to a neo-Platonic sensory hierarchy, ultimately at stake in the sonnets is the tension between a fragmented and fragmentary reading/writing practice and a wholeness intertwined with love.2 Yet certain numerical and sequential patterns exist, certain readings (of love both divine and earthly, for example) prove reliable for the bulk of the eighty-nine sonnets, and one can, at any rate, recognize that, while Spenser is playing with various literary precedents, he is also forging something complex and new.

2The Amoretti’s tendency to elude specific signification, or, more precisely, to graciously allow themselves to be subject to nearly every kind of critical signification, renders them a puzzle with multiple, sometimes conflicting, solutions. The true aim of the lover-poet may actually involve tackling the even more infinite, even more inscrutable human mind, the mind of the other, his beloved. The Amoretti’s technique of setting up cycles and plotting the progression of (at least part of) a year recalls, of course, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: each set of poems stages a conflict between the cyclic, repeatable nature of the year and the unstoppable march of time. The Amoretti depend, for series and progression, on the universality of love and the specificity of the lover’s status. And, in a break with the sonnet form Petrarchan tradition, while the lover suffers, he ultimately obtains his love.

3In return for making his textual journey across the landscape of his suffering, the lover comes to comprehend both the right action and right motivation which will lead him to a proper, Christian union. Naturally in such a case, images of the body abound: they provide an opportunity for the poet-lover to fashion a blazon of his beloved’s body, to locate on his body the points of his suffering, and to engage in complicated prosopopoeia/personification/ventriloquism. Rendering physical an emotion and mapping it onto a body or a text are again not concepts foreign to the early modern period, yet it seems that Spenser’s “labyrinths” pose these acts in such a way as to render the body – and, indeed, the book itself – less unified by the assent of the beloved. What we as readers receive are fragments, albeit powerful fragments, of the body; what we are left with at the end of the sequence, after the alleged mental union made possible by the lady’s acquiescence and just prior to the spiritual and physical union of the Epithalamion, is a profound sense of loss and emptiness and incompleteness.

4The Amoretti play upon the intertwined sensory and sensual pleasures of reading from their inception, emphasizing that reading, writing, and love are fundamentally embodied practices. The opening sonnet anatomizes the sequence itself, forcing its reader to consider the elements comprising the written collection. But it also simultaneously stages its own reading by a fragmented body, so that book parts mirror, read, and are read by body parts:

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might
shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, in which with starry light,
those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rhymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she derived is,
when ye behold that Angles blessed looke,
my soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.
Leaves, lines, and rhymes, seeke her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none. (Spencer 1595, A2r)

The image of the book can only emerge retroactively, after the leaves, lines, and rhymes are handled by, looked at by, and behold the lilly hands, lamping eyes, and blessed looke of the author’s lover. In the same way, the reader herself only coalesces after the act of reading. Yet in both cases the whole remains elusive: just as a book of poems is more than leaves, lines, and rhymes, so, too, is a body more than hands, eyes, and looke. The absence of a whole, either book or lover, is not necessarily problematic in the opening sonnet of this particular love sequence, for the remainder of the sonnets will play out the search for an attainment of the lover even as they cohere into the book the lady is presumably reading here. Absence and fragmentation drive the Amoretti as much as they do any other sonnet sequence in the period, but the problem here is that a whole reader and book are both at least projected before either could properly be said to exist. The owner of the hands, eyes, and looke must exist in order to read leaves, lines, and rhymes.

  • 3 “lamping,” adj., and “lamp,” v. 1, The Oxford English Dictionary.

5Such a projection of an illusory whole is further complicated by the order in which the fragments of the book and the lover emerge. In both cases, the progression is from more to less literal, from that which can be accessed by the senses to that which must be grasped by the mind. Leaves suggest the pages of the book, which are to be handled physically; lines straddle the physical and the immaterial, as they mark the lines of ink or print on the page, but they also mark the less tangible notion of the line of poetry, a measurement rooted in metaphor; rhymes cannot be touched at all. Meanwhile, lilly indicates the color of hands, and as such is a quality that can be sensed visually; lamping eyes again bridge a physical realm in which eyes exist and a metaphorical realm in which the shining of a lamp must be imagined in order to describe said eyes; finally, a blessed looke involves action in both elements, both in the blessing and the look itself.3 That the verbs involved point to a contingent future further emphasizes the tension between imagined and projected unity and the more tangible and realized but ultimately fragmented present sensory experience.

6At the same time, the role of the reader is not itself stable – as, in fact, she is not actually reading the leaves, lines, and rhymes themselves. When the word reade occurs it is linked not to an act the lover performs upon the poem(s) but to the one instance of book that paradoxically calls attention to both the physical object and its metaphorical correlate: she will “reade the sorrowes of [the poet’s] dying spright, / written with teares in harts close bleeding book.” Book here refers not to the presumed book of the Amoretti but to the emotions which prompt its creation.

7All of this is to point to the fact that, though the first sonnet seems at first pass to present a fairly straightforward act of reading – a collection of sonnets by the beloved – this act and its necessary unity become more convoluted as their components are fragmented. The Amoretti complicate the act of reading by embodying it – binding it, that is, to the physical body of the reader, thereby rendering the fact of the book contingent upon its reader. Yet this embodiment is neither simple nor straightforward. As the poems themselves document the union of the two lovers, this union occurs at the expense of unity, both in terms of the body and in terms of the book. Fragments of the bodies of both lovers will occur across the sonnet sequence, resisting the sense of emotional connection that their love would encourage. Similarly, writing, poetry, and books will all be subject to various forms of disintegration, even to the point of violence. Reading, in and of the Amoretti, will be an uneasy action, as the poems acknowledge their inability to capture adequately both themselves and the bodies that create and consume them.

8Themes of unity and disparity thus form the metaphorical backbone of the sonnets. Indeed, the way the Amoretti are presented in early modern printing mimics the way the sonnets themselves displace and parcel the body. In the 1596 edition of the Amoretti and Epithalamion, each of the sonnets in the Amoretti rests on its own page and is set off by two sets of decorative flower-borders, one above and another below the poem:

Figure 1: Sonnet 1, Amoretti

Figure 1: Sonnet 1, Amoretti

Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion: sig. A2r. STC 23076; image 94481, Folger Shakespeare Library.

  • 4 Whereas Oram et al., The Yale edition editors, suggest that these borders imply unity by visually l (...)
  • 5 See, for example, Barnes, Constable and Percy. Percy’s collection of sonnets was also likely publis (...)

9This practice was not uncommon in early modern printing and decorative borders were often utilized to mark, for example, the first chapter of a book, or the first poem in a sequence. 4Yet what is peculiar about certain editions of sonnets or poem sequences5 rests in the manner in which these borders function to keep the poems distinct from one another. Again, we run into the difficulty of whole versus part, only this time it is one grounded in visual readerly aesthetics. The division of the poems impacts the way we read them, just as the presentation of any text on a page will of necessity influence our perception of it, whatever the degree of consciousness with which we experience this inflection. The sonnets become a kind of body (that is, the body of the lover is inscribed in the sonnets). For them to be both unified and divided by the way they were presented on the page marks out and perhaps magnifies the tension between whole and parts. The body, and the body of the text, thus attain a special status: by being unified and divided even from the point when we come to read them, the Amoretti call for the calming, “framing” hand of the lady.

10In fashioning the first sonnet from his bodily anguish and inviting the beloved to use hands and eyes to read physically his “sorrowes,” the poet calls attention to the very liquid relation amongst parts of the body and the emotions. For the lover, as for others in the early modern period, body, soul, spirit, heart, and mind were distinct but often unfixed. By observing minute differences among the faculties of spirit, heart, and soul, Spenser draws at least partly on the tenets of Galenic medicine, which, Michael Schoenfeldt points out, “provided a range of writers with a rich and malleable discourse able to articulate and explain the vagaries of human emotion in corporeal terms” (6). Beyond simply playing with established medical literature, Spenser in the Amoretti moves as close as one could get to associating the mind with, alternately, the spirit, the heart, and the soul. To be more specific, in the Amoretti, the locus of thought, poetic imagination, and love (among other faculties) rests sometimes with the spirit, sometimes with the heart, and sometimes with the soul. Because of this tendency for the mind to adhere selectively to the three different faculties, the faculties themselves might well not be so fixed as Spenser might have liked. Indeed, what happens in the body is simultaneously laid achingly bare and obfuscated behind an impenetrable fortress; much like the sonnets themselves, the faculties inside the body exist in an uneasy tension, neither fully distinct nor fully unified, compounded by the fact that these faculties are necessary for both reading and writing.

  • 6 For more sustained discussions on the tensions amongst different forms of time-telling in the Amore (...)
  • 7 Judson makes an interesting rebuttal to the somewhat spurious claim of Sir Israel Gollancz that a c (...)

11The Amoretti progress linearly through time, so that as the lover’s acceptance of what the beloved can teach him grows, so too does he come to a place of comfort and peace from the tempestuous tumult of the earlier sonnets. We could read the Amoretti, then, as a cathartic movement through time and courtship, and we can count off the days as the lover refers to them, and even have a sense of the year(s) in which the Amoretti are meant to be taking place. Yet at the same time, there remains something cyclical about the sequence. Much like The Shepheardes Calender, we have both a linear narrative and a repeatable temporal construct: each year you move closer to the end of your life, but the months, weeks, days, hours and so forth repeat themselves fairly reliably every year. Thus the opening of the Amoretti presents a paradox, for it marks the very moment when these two systems of time collide.6 The book of the Amoretti has already been written, it exists in material form, before the lover embarks on his journey towards peace with his beloved.7 Indeed, while the poet’s description of the lady as “my soules long lacked food” could refer to an abstract sense of objectless desire, it seems more likely that this line articulates the soul’s desire for reunion with the lady (1.12). That is, to incur a lack, the object of desire must first be present. Again we face the paradox that the first sonnet in a sequence about the progression of love and the wooing of a lady gives us a picture of a book already completed and a love already close enough to be missing (rather than simply cruelly aloof).

  • 8 For the importance of consuming food (earthly or spiritual) to keep the body’s stomach happy, see S (...)
  • 9 See Johnson, who argues that, so far as comparisons to Ovid’s ill-fated hunter are concerned, “Narc (...)

12A form of the word lack only occurs four other times throughout the Amoretti, and always in places that build on this idea of something which had been present now missing. In sonnets 35 and 83 (almost the same sonnet, repeated with a difference because of its placement in the sequence), the lack occurs because the lover has seen his beloved and his “hungry eyes” cannot get their fill of her form (35.1). In the first instance, the lover transcends his own physicality to exist, Narcissus-like, as all eyes; thus when his object of vision disappears, “lacking it” his eyes “cannot lyfe systane” (35.5).8 By the time we get to the next instance of lack in sonnet 78, however, we should not be so certain, for the poet feels the lack all the more deeply for having had (ostensibly) the lady, and once she is gone his eyes can only “ydly back returne to me agayne” (78.10). Thus, even by the first third of the sonnets, we rest on grounds less relative than they first appear: the lover seems to be in love with the lady, and the reference to Narcissus both affirms and undermines this notion. Of course, the lover is nothing like Narcissus – and yet, when we reach lack again, he is everything like Narcissus.9

  • 10 Oram et al. cite this in their note to 78.1; Larsen also notes it.

13The second appearance of sonnet 35 is rendered all the more poignant for its position after the first instance, after the lady’s apparent acquiescence in sonnet 58, and after sonnet 78, which builds upon the idea of eyes sustained only by their vision of the beloved object. “Lackyng my love I go from place to place,” the poet writes in sonnet 78, as her “ymage yet I carry fresh in mynd” (78.1, 4). He sees fields “synd” by her “late footing” and her “bowre with her late presence deckt,” yet he finds her in neither though both “are full of her aspect” (78.5-8). He ceases looking for her only once he realizes that his own eyes, which he has been casting about in search of her, “ydly back returne to me agayne” (78.10). The “trew object” lies within himself: “let my thoughts behold her selfe in mee” (78.11, 14). All he needs to do, he must remind himself, is turn his gaze inward to reveal the truth and temperance the lady has taught him. Castiglione, in the Book of the Courtier, urges a similar movement from outward appreciation of beauty to internal love: “The Courtier by the helpe of reason must full and wholly call backe againe the coveting of the bodie to beautie alone […] and frame it within his imagination sundred from all matter” (316-17).10 This turning away from the physical matter “by the helpe of reason” becomes ever more important upon the next instance of lack.

14The peculiar thing about the repetition of sonnet 35 at 83 is the one word (apart from some punctuation and spelling) that gets changed: in 35 the sixth line reads “and having it they net in the sequence cements this disunion, and while it does not contain some form of the word lack, it holds enough lack to justify lack’s lack. Sonnet 89, “Lyke as the Culver on the bared bough,” speaks of absence: the lover is “now left disconsolate” without his beloved (89.1, 5). “Dark is my day,” he complains, “whyles her fayre light I mis, / and dead my life that wants such lively blis” (89.13-14). The beloved has become both light and life for the lover, and now, were we to read this final sonnet in isolation from the other sonnets, we might be tricked into thinking that Spenser is here following Petrarchan convention in denying the lover union with the beloved. Yet such is certainly not the case. In the anti-Petrarchan sonnet 63, the lover does “at length descry the happy shore”; he kisses the lady’s lips in the next sonnet; and in sonnet 67 we witness his wonder at seeing the “strange thing” of a “beast so wyld / so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyled” (63.5, 67.13-14). The hoped-for union has occurred; in a sense, it has already occurred, as we know from reading the title page, which links wooing-poems to marriage-poem, before we come to the sonnets. We know the ending already, and the opening sonnet seems to presume that we are aware of that fact – yet the final sonnet undermines this security and calls into question the very possibility of a linear progression even as the specific references to dates, works, people, and places seem to demand such a calendrical system of reference. We have in place a kind of Möbius strip, where beginning and end are linked but still manage to bend back upon themselves.

  • 11 See Casady 288 and Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets, xcviii.

15Keeping this tension in mind, let us turn back to the second-to-last sonnet, which marks our final instance of the poet’s use of the lack: “Since I have lackt the comfort of that light, / The which was wont to lead my thoughts astray: / I wander as in darkenesse of the night, / affrayd of every dangers least dismay” (88.1-4). As Larsen argues, Spenser has here “turned Plato’s terminology into a conceit of his own devising. The poet’s mind may be sustained by contemplating the image of the heavenly ray as revealed in the lady, the true Idea of beauty itself, but the paradoxical starving of his body is insisted upon with down-to-earth reality” (Amoretti, Larsen ed, 223). The Idœa playne of the lady, which the poet beholds “through contemplation of my purest part,” leads him to be able to “sustayne” himself (88.9-11). The internal representation of the lady, which the poet develops in 78 and allows to feed him in 83, here however reaches its limit. The poet realizes that, while the lady’s absence exercises his memory, it also portends a hideous suffering of his body: “But with such brightnesse whylest I fill my mind, / I starve my body and mine eyes doe blynd” (88.13-14). This marks an antithetical move against Platonic doctrine, which would emphasize the soul’s concerns rather than earthly, bodily concerns. 11The Yale editors note that the last three sonnets of the Amoretti suggest that Spenser “felt that human nature imposed a definite limitation on the Neoplatonic concept of spiritualized love. The lover is not pure spirit; he misses the physical presence of the lady and longs for reunion with her, as, on another level, the Christian longs for reunion with Christ” (Oram et al. 653). The Protestant soul could suffer similarly, as Calvin’s description of a soul who has strayed from God makes plain:

since it is so that there is no light without God, which lighteneth our night: it is most certayne that the soule being buried in her darckenesses, must needes be blinde. And then is she domb, seing she cannot confesse that vnto saluation, which she beleued to righteousnesse. [...] Lame likewise she is, and that which is worsse, she is not able to stand vpright [...] and finally she doth nothing wherein is life. (Calvin C, E9v-E10r )

After death, the Calvinist immortal soul in “darckenesses” suffers a remarkably corporeal death: unseeing, unable to speak, crippled, it experiences negation corporeally, as a deprivation of the senses and the body. The gradual falling-off of what seem to be the physical powers of the disembodied soul mirrors the suffering of the lover in the absence of his beloved in the Amoretti. Spenser is here recognizing the simultaneous independence and interdependency of soul, spirit, and heart with the body. While the first three may be sustained by work of the inner mind, the body, which the others require for physical sustenance, cannot live by mental or spiritual “brightnesse” alone. Indeed, the body exists here in a bizarre tension with the lover’s heart and mind and his conception of the beloved: “through contemplation” of his “purest part,” he keeps the idea of his beloved in his mind, and so feeds his “love-affamisht hart,” yet he allows both heart and mind to be nourished by a mental process both foreign and detrimental to the body. Heart and mind are housed in the body, yet they take on here and elsewhere in the Amoretti a separate existence.

  • 12 Because of the enjambment from the first line to the second, it is unclear what the poet is getting (...)

16Curiously, the lover has chosen to depict the light of the lady as that “which was wont to lead my thoughts astray,” suggesting that she has diverted his mind from (perhaps) its more rightful writerly action (88.2). In sonnet 72 he has explored the ways in which this leading astray might take place. There, his soul sometimes spreads her “bolder winges, / In mind to mount up to the purest sky”12 when she “down is weighd with thought of earthly things” because she is “clogd with burden of mortality” (72.1-4). This burden attains relief once the lover (and/or his soul) “doth spy” the “soverayne beauty” of the beloved” (72.5). The lover and his soul then exist in a kind of stasis or liminality, for while the soul desires to rise to the heavens, it is pulled back to the earth because of the mortal body; the earthward pull becomes stronger once the beloved comes into view, yet the beloved herself resembles “heavens glory in her light” (72.6). The earthly love both incorporates and reflects the divine, as a mirror, and so even as the poet’s soul dives earthward he may deceive himself that he flies back to heaven. The language of spiritual betrayal is in play here – his soul “unto heaven forgets her former flight,” and his “fraile fancy fed with full delight” only desires his heart’s contentment – yet the lover basks in a willful ignorance of the actual heaven. Here he undermines both classical and contemporary religious notions that the good soul should always strive for reunion with the heavenly figures.

17The lady holds, willingly or unwillingly, the power to move the lover’s soul from what most in the late sixteenth century would perceive to be its rightful course. Having a secular “hevens blisse” on earth, and lacking the desire for any “other happinesse,” the soul would not apparently consider rising towards heaven – and would, in theory, become ruggedly physical on the earth. Indeed, the power the lady wields manifests itself quite clearly in sonnet 43, where the lover must disrupt the actions of his senses one by one in a manner reminiscent of Calvin’s depiction of the dying soul. “Shall I then silent be or shall I speake?” wonders the lover (43.1). His conundrum is a painful one, for if he speaks, “her wrath renew I shall,” yet if he stays silent, “my hart will breake, / or choked be with overflowing gall” (43.2-4). With his heart in thrall and his tongue restrained, the lover fears (for neither the first nor the last time) that he shall die “like a stupid stock in silence” (43.8). His heart and tongue have been operating in excess, but to stop them entirely does not seem a viable option; the only solution is balance:

Yet I my hart with silence secretly
will teach to speak, and my just cause to plead:
and eke mine eies with meeke humility,
love learned letters to her eyes to read. (43.9-12)

  • 13 Sonnet 50 takes this division even further, rending the heart from the body: “Long languishing in d (...)

18The lover plots to tame both his heart and tongue, and in so doing, he fragments himself. The “I” comprises not a unified totality but a sum of parts. The overarching (or underlying) identity dissociates itself to such a degree that it can train his heart to speak in secret silence (recalling the “harts close bleeding book” of sonnet 1) and his eyes to “read” to her (again, presumably the “harts close bleeding book” will be read as the “learned letters”). The lover, by making his self and body distinct, wields the power and control to construct a balanced hermeneutics of his body-language. The lady, with her “deep wit, that true harts thought can spel,” already possesses the key to explicate this secret language of the “true harts” (43.13). If ever we needed a signal that something deeper was afoot in these sonnets, this provides it for us: the lover has devised an entire language written by, on, and with his body, which the mind may conceive if it can properly read the text of eyes and heart.13

19Vision, as we have seen, attains a special status in the sonnets as the lover uses it to represent his beloved, while she uses it primarily, it would seem, to fend off his advances. Sonnets 12, 37, and 49 each deal with the lady’s eyes’ (or her image’s) ability to enact certain violences upon the poet: in 12, the lady’s “hart-thralling” and “guilefull” eyes disarm the poet so that he sues for justice “against [her] eies” (12.1, 7, 14); in 37 the poet warns his eyes not to be taken in by her “sly skill” in “cunningly” dressing herself so that she presents a “golden snare” (37.3, 6); and in 49 the poet answers his own rhetorical query as to why the lady is so “fierce and cruell” by wondering, “Is it because your eyes have the powre to kill?” (49.1-2). Her eyes can be compared, the lover claims, to “nought on earth”: sun, moon, stars, fire, lightning, diamond, crystal, and glass hold no candle to the “ymage of their goodly light” (9.3-4). The only thing he can compare them to is “the Maker selfe,” and in so doing he effectively removes the lady and her eyes from any earthly discourse (9.13).

20Other sonnets, like 35 and 83, similarly deal with the transformative ability of vision to transcend the physical and bleed into the spiritual. Sonnets 7 and 45 make up another pair concerning vision, but this time the poet deals in the standard Petrarchan trope of mirrors. The lady, as we know from 72, can reflect the heavens to such a degree as to divert the lover’s soul from its “natural” course. In sonnet 7, her eyes become a mirror of the lover and the poet first sets in place the association of the quasi-divine light with the lady herself. “Fayre eyes, the myrror of my mazed hart,” the lover begins, “what wondrous virtue is contaynd in you / the which both lyfe and death forth from you dart” (7.1-3). Spenser here plays on the various optical theories circulating at the time he was writing. For example, in medieval and early modern optical theory, one of the most popular was that of extramission, or the notion (following such writers as Galen) that the eye sent out visual rays via a kind of humor, which allowed for the intaking of the visual object's impression (Gilson). Taken to the extreme, the lady’s eyes here send forth both life and death (metaphorical, we must hope). The second half of the sonnet reverses the order of visual sending-forth and taking-up by playing on the word “looke”: “looke ever lovely, as becomes you best, / that your bright beams of my weak eies admyred, / may kindle living fire within my brest” (7.10-12). He asks her both to look or send forth life with her eyes and to appear or make herself lovely; his “weak eies” then receive the visual impression (either of lovely life or of a lovely lady) rather than being the impotent targets of the lady’s eyes.

21Sonnet 45 takes this reversal to its logical limits by offering the lover as the appropriate mirror for the beloved. He asks her to forsake her glass, “and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane, / most lively like behold your semblant trew” (45.2-3). The lover asks here for the kind of interpretative vision that he trusts the lady’s deep wit possesses in sonnet 43. The lover’s internal representation lays claim to a greater and deeper truth, yet at the same time this truth is by its nature more inaccessible. “Within my hart,” he explains, “though it can hardly shew / thing so divine to vew of earthly eye: / the fayre Idea of your celestiall hew, / and every part remains immortally” (45.5-8). We recall again this Idea in sonnet 88, though here, while it resides within the heart, which has a fraught relation to the body as a whole, it may still be corrupted by the workings of the beloved’s refusals upon the lover’s mind.

22We might want to ask, at this point, how the lover formed this idea of the lady in the first place. We can place the idea of sonnets 45 and 88 within the Platonic (or even neo-Platonic) spectrum of thought, and yet, as sonnet 45 demonstrates, this idea is not immune to the physical effects wrought upon it by the corporeal world. Thus the idea is poised, like the lover himself in sonnet 72, between the spiritual and earthly realms. The lady, we are told, possesses a beauty containing “all this worlds riches that may farre be found” and “a gardin of sweet flowres” – all of them, in fact, and surpassing in quality every one (15.6, 64.1). However, a more important distinction remains to be drawn, for the lover does not content himself with admiring the lady’s physical beauty. We know he has developed his idea of her from contemplation of her external qualities, yet the sonnets constantly reach towards something ineffable and inscrutable, something beyond description and fit only for contemplation, like Christ’s glory. In sonnet 74, the lover describes his “three Elizabeths,” who have granted him “guifts of body, fortune, and of mind” (74.13, 4). His mother provided him with the first gift, the Queen with the second – and, strikingly (but perhaps not surprisingly at this point) the lady willed him the gift of mind. The lady thus creates the lover, in a sense, by directing his passions towards her guiding light. But how does she do this?

23Sonnet 22 provides something of an answer as it seems to render material the immaterial thing for (and with) which the lover has been striving. During a “holy season fit to fast and pray,” which the Yale editors identify as the start of the “Lenten group” of sonnets (613) and which Larsen explains was written “to celebrate Ash Wednesday” and references the Book of Common Prayer’s “Commination against Sinners” (152), the lover turns his thoughts to devotion (22.1). Yet this is not the wholly heavenly devotion to which “men […] ought to be inclynd,” but the devotion to his “sweet Saynt […] th’author of my blisse” (22.2, 9). As part of the seasonal purgation, the lover pledges to “builde an altar to appease her yre: / and on the same my hart will sacrifise,” thus brining to the fore a clever pun on heart-hart, the animal (22.10-11). The altar he speaks of resides in “her temple fayre […] built within my mind,” where he has placed her “glorious ymage,” in a curious subversion of Protestant doctrine – for while image, altar, sacrifice, temple, and relics all reference the Catholic liturgy and thus resist Protestant iconoclasm, they nevertheless only exist in the lover’s mind and so have no physical referent. It is not, then, physical possession that the lover strives most for, but a mental representation, a “glorious ymage” or idea that appeals to him most.

24In this context, we can return to the blazon of sonnet 15 and read the comparisons – “if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine,” “if Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground,” and so forth – as empty and even dismissive qualities only of interest to those “tradefull Merchants that with weary toyle / do seeke most pretious things to make [their] gaine” (15.7, 11, 1-2). Certainly, go forth and read the new world onto the body, the lover says mockingly, but I prefer something less marketable, albeit far more valuable: “But that which fairest is, but few behold, / her mind adornd with vertues manifold” (15.13-14). The lover, in a sense, sees the body as supplemental to the mind, and the ensuing sonnets represent the struggle to see past the external beauty to the mind which “but few behold” (probably because the lady’s effective defense mechanisms, her eyes, put off all but the most devoted of her followers).

  • 14 This is not uncommon poetic practice in the period. See, for example, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Luc (...)
  • 15 Larsen glosses endite as arising from indictus (in+dicere), meaning “put into words […] especially (...)

25The motivation for the lover’s persistence in pursuing the lady’s light, mind, and image/idea rests in easily the most central concept of the Amoretti. “Is not the hart of all the body chiefe?” asks the lover in sonnet 50, “and rules the members as it selfe doth please?” (50.7-8). Indeed, the heart attains so central a role that, as we have seen elsewhere in the sonnets, it can distinguish itself from the rest of the body. The poet here complains he has been “long languishing in double malady, / of my harts wound and of my bodies griefe” (50.1-2, emphasis mine). This gives the lie (somewhat) to the Yale editors’ claim that, while the lover does observe “fine distinctions among” the spirit, heart, and soul, “the heart is considered part of the body” (600). Here and elsewhere in the sonnets, heart and body are in fact rendered distinct by the suffering the poet undergoes, such that, in the confusion of the chase, the body begins as a fragmented disunity.14 The lady then represents the unifying salve that “both hart and body” heals (50.14). In sonnets 2 and 3 the poet introduces the heart as the site of creative generation. He addresses his complaints to his “unquiet thought, whom at the first I bred / Of th’inward bale of my love pined hart,” and begs this heart-thought to, like the proverbial viper of bestiaries, burst forth from its womb and die with him (or, the more pleasant alternative, to “fall lowly” at the feet of the lady) (2.1-2, 10). Sonnet 3 complicates the role of the heart by giving it powers superior to both tongue and pen. The harmonic concordance of prayzed-raysed-dazed-amazed all speak to the astonishment-wonderment of the lover: in the presence of his lady, he finds his hand and mouth frozen, so he does what he later repeats in sonnet 43 when he pledges “my hart with silence secretly / will teach to speak […] and mine eies with meeke humility, / love learned letters to her eyes to read” (43.9-12). In sonnet 3 he explains that “yet in my hart I then both speake and write / the wonder that my wit cannot endite” (3.13-14).15 Johnson describes the process which occurs here more fully: “Though the narrator cannot speak aloud or write ‘her titles true,’” he explains, “he is at least able to write of the wonder it is that he cannot endite. […] The process of transforming oral presentation into a revised literary mode is clearly part of the fiction, as is the narrator’s final act: speaking and writing in his heart” (72). The “act” of being able to endite within his heart speaks again to the complex bodily hermeneutics the lover creates across the sonnets. His ability to render this literal body-language readable to the lady rests on his movement, as Johnson puts it, “outside his ‘inner part,’” but of course this “inner part” forms the basis for the entire sequence and for his conception of the lady at all (72).

26The key to this process, of writing into the body the text the lady eventually reads as the Amoretti, the “harts close bleeding book,” lies in sonnet 8. This sonnet, for me at least, presents the most simple, most complex, and most stunning of all the lover’s work:

More then most faire, full of the living fire,
Kindled above unto the maker neere:
no eies but joyes, in which al powers conspire,
that to the world naught else be counted deare.
Thrugh your bright beams doth not the blinded guest
shoot out his darts to base affections wound:
but Angels come to lead fraile minds to rest
in chast desire 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.
Dark is the world, where your light shined never,
well is he borne, that may behold you ever.

Here we begin again in the balance between heaven and earth: the lady is full of “living fire” even as she is “kindled above unto the maker neere.” The various paradoxes come to rest before the turbulence which precedes the lady’s acquiescence in 58, for while she seems to possess the power to “base affections wound,” the correct reader of the lady will see that, really, she means to lead “fraile minds to rest.” The lover here identifies the lady’s overarching project as well as his own final hope, for he seeks urgently this rest, peace, and balance. While his body, spirit, soul, heart, and mind all vie for control and separate themselves each from other, and while the sonnets themselves feel slightly schizophrenic in both struggling for unity and maintaining distinction, and while the end and beginning of the Amoretti feel reversed and worlds distant – here, before his harder project really begins, the lover grasps a sense of the rest “on heavenly beauty bound” that can be his if he finds the right way to master his desires and present them, in readable form, to the master-reader, the lady.

  • 16 As I mentioned earlier, sonnet 1 suggests the work has already been completed, hence his realizatio (...)

27He sees here, too, that he will not be in ultimate control over his own body, and that his project of inscription depends ultimately on her: “you stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake.” He must give himself fully to her in order to create the language only she can read correctly. Perhaps in a sense this sonnet feels as out of place, near the beginning, as the first sonnet does, for his realization occurs both before and after his project begins and ends.16 What occurs is here nothing less than the nexus and mise en abyme of the entire set of sonnets. Thus I agree with Johnson, who finds in the third quatrain that the verbs frame, fashion, stop, teach, calm

provide a miniature version of the lady’s actions throughout a larger part of the sequence.[…T]he lady becomes the architect of the poet’s soul, providing for it a “goodly frame.” In the sequence the framing occurs, from start to finish, in the poems themselves; for the poet the “frame” is a necessity, and without it he could not be a poet. Throughout the sequence, the lady is both his inspiration as well as the techne, the framing craft through which the poet gives shape to his work. For the lover, the “framing” provides the image of the lady. (Johnson 85)

Johnson here touches on the most central line of the sonnet, if not of the Amoretti as a whole: the poet’s realization that “you frame my thoughts and fashion me within.” The lady thus crafts him totally, utterly, working inside and outside of him, providing both the limits of his imagination and the generative power that births it in the first place. This is what we should have been assured of all along: the lady was always already there, at his core and at the edges of his mind, framing and fashioning him within.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Primary Sources

Barnes, Barnabe. A divine centurie of spirituall sonnets. London, 1595.

Calvin, Jean. An excellent treatise of the Immortalytie of the Soule. T. Stocker, trans. London, 1581.

Castiglione, Baldasare. The Courtier. 1528. Sir Thomas Hoby, trans. London: Everyman’s Library, 1928.

Constable, Henry. Diana. The praises of his Mistres, in certaine sweete Sonnets. By H.C. London. 1592.

Percy, William. Sonnets to the fairest Coelia. London, 1594.

Shakespeare, William. The Rape of Lucrece. 1594. Complete Sonnets and Poems. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti and Epithalamion. London, 1595.

Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti and Epithalamion. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. William Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti and Epithalamion. A Critical Edition. Ed. Kenneth J. Larsen. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997.

Secondary Sources

Casady, Edwin. “The Neo-Platonic Ladder in Spenser’s Amoretti.” Philological Quarterly 20 (1941). 184-95.

Dunlop, Alexander. “The Unity of Spenser’s Amoretti.” Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis. Ed. Alastair Fowler. New York: Barnes and Noble. 1970. 153-58.

Gibbs, Donna. Spenser’s Amoretti: A Critical Study. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990.

Gilson, Simon. Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.

Gold, Eva. “‘Trembling leaves’: Manuscript and Print in the Amoretti.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 1.2 (2001): 1-41.

Johnson, William. Spenser’s Amoretti: Analogies of Love. London: Associated University Presses, 1990.

Judson, A.C. “Amoretti, Sonnet I.” Modern Language Notes 58 (1943): 548-50.

Lee, John. “Refrains and Echoes: Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion.” Poetica 63 (2005): 37-47.

Lee, Sidney. Elizabethan Sonnets. London: Archibald Constable, 1904.

Loewenstein, Joseph. “A Note on the Structure of Spenser’s Amoretti: Viper Thoughts.” Spenser Studies 8 (1987): 311-323.

Prescott, Anne Lake. “The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67-70.” Spenser Studies 6 (1985): 33-76.

Quitslund, Jon. “Spenser’s Amoretti VIII and Platonic Commentaries on Petrarch.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 256-76.

Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion, in The Yale Edition: 1.7-8. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the Amoretti will be to this edition and will be noted in the body of the text.

2 See, for example Dunlop, Gibbs, Prescott, Quitslund. See, too, Johnson, who complains that, while critical studies of the Amoretti have made “good inroads” into Spenser’s inscrutable text, “None applies its methodologies in sufficient detail to reveal the magnitude of Spenser’s accomplishment, and none has entered the sequence’s labyrinths in such a manner to suggest more than a single way of penetrating the Amoretti’s core” (41).

3 “lamping,” adj., and “lamp,” v. 1, The Oxford English Dictionary.

4 Whereas Oram et al., The Yale edition editors, suggest that these borders imply unity by visually linking one page with the next, I argue that they only further compartmentalize the sonnets by keeping one separate from the next. See, too, Gold’s discussion of the front matter of the Amoretti and Epithalamion, as well as the borders between the poems, in the context of the period’s debate about the primacy of print versus manuscript (esp. 2-12).

5 See, for example, Barnes, Constable and Percy. Percy’s collection of sonnets was also likely published by William Ponsonby and contains a page layout strikingly similar to that of the Amoretti.

6 For more sustained discussions on the tensions amongst different forms of time-telling in the Amoretti and Epithalamion, see Lee, “Refrains,” and Loewenstein.

7 Judson makes an interesting rebuttal to the somewhat spurious claim of Sir Israel Gollancz that a copy of the Faerie Queene owned by Gollancz was previously the property of Spenser himself; Gollancz’s evidence that this was the case involved a hand-written copy of the first sonnet of the Amoretti on the title-page.

8 For the importance of consuming food (earthly or spiritual) to keep the body’s stomach happy, see Schoenfeldt 19-22. Johnson points out that “Added to the sight motif” of this sonnet “is the hunger theme, which, at the very start, is interconnected with seeing: ‘hungry eyes’ and ‘greedy covetize’ relate not only by rhyme but by parallel structuring” (135).

9 See Johnson, who argues that, so far as comparisons to Ovid’s ill-fated hunter are concerned, “Narcissus is held fast by an empty image […] the lover, however […] at least is not really in love with only a shade” (135-38).

10 Oram et al. cite this in their note to 78.1; Larsen also notes it.

11 See Casady 288 and Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets, xcviii.

12 Because of the enjambment from the first line to the second, it is unclear what the poet is getting at here. The more obvious reading would be that, by “in mind to mount up,” he means his soul desires or plans to fly up to the heavens. Yet we might also argue that the poet is here implying that his soul plans in his (or her, if the subject is the soul) mind, that is, in imagination, to fly up to the heavens.

13 Sonnet 50 takes this division even further, rending the heart from the body: “Long languishing in double malady, / of my harts wound and of my bodies griefe” (50.1-2).

14 This is not uncommon poetic practice in the period. See, for example, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece for a stunning description of heart and nerves rallying to wake their mistress (when Tarquin encounters the sleeping Lucrece).

15 Larsen glosses endite as arising from indictus (in+dicere), meaning “put into words […] especially give a literary form to words […] even more specifically, write words down with a pen (in contrast to his attempts to write)” (127).

16 As I mentioned earlier, sonnet 1 suggests the work has already been completed, hence his realization in sonnet 8 comes after his project ends; yet as sonnet 8 comes later in the sequence, it also falls after his project begins (as it begins ostensibly in sonnet 1). This sonnet comes before his project begins for he does not yet understand the movement-outwards that the lady and Johnson both prescribe for him; it comes before his project ends insofar as the true end, outside the Amoretti lies in the spiritual and physical union of the Epithalamion. This is reminiscent of nothing so much as Shakespeare’s dedication, to the Earl of Southampton, for Lucrece: “The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety” (Dedication, 4-6). The without-end-without-beginning finds a correspondence in Spenser’s lovely coupling of never and ever in the final lines of this sonnet.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Sonnet 1, Amoretti
Crédits Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion: sig. A2r. STC 23076; image 94481, Folger Shakespeare Library.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/11936/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 322k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Lianne Habinek, « “Written with teares in harts close bleeding book”: Reading the embodied page in Spenser’s poetry »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 80 | 2023, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2023, consulté le 03 novembre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/11936 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1718.11936

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search