More reading.

Spenser--Epithalamium (Wedding Song)

Edmund Spenser is surely one of the four or five most beautiful poets ever to write in the English language, and probably the most committed to a pure beauty of line above any other consideration, for this purpose is never interrupted or sacrificed in his work. He is not overflowing with particularly fresh ideas or images even in the context of his own age. However the formation and flow of his words when read aloud seems so natural, so obvious as to be quite remarkable when one considers that approximately 450 million people speak English now as a first tongue, and virtually none employ it in this manner either in writing or speech.

"Early before the worlds light giving lampe,
His golden beame upon the hills doth spred,
Having disperst the nights unchearefull dampe,
Doe ye awake, and with fresh lustyhed
Go to the bowre of my beloved love,
My truest turtle dove,
Bid her awake; for Hymen is awake,
And long since ready forth his maske to move,
With his bright Tead that flames with many a flake,
And many a bachelor to waite on him,
In theyr fresh garments trim."

There are no earth-shattering intellectual gymnastics here. All the rituals of the poem are utterly conventional, the actions and personalities of the participants artificial and contrived, most of the descriptions and classical allusions border on being hackneyed, and the pagan gods invoked have the air of long refrigeration about them, at best. The exuberance is all in the writing, and that is genuine, that is the new, alive wondrous object of love, and certainly the poem takes on a much added dimension if we think of the English language in its youthful bloom as the maiden about to be cultivated, ravished and loved by an enthusiastic and virile practitioner.

"Never had man more joyfull day than this,
Whom heaven would heape with blis.
Make feast therefore now all this live long day,
This day for ever to me holy is,
Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full,
Poure out to all that wull,
And sprinkle all the posts and wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be withall.
Crown ye God Bacchus with a coronall..."

The consummation of the marriage, which lasts much of the night and culminates most happily in the bliss of the groom and the impregnation of the bride, takes about 100 lines to recount, most of them imploring the night to be extra dark and quiet during the poet's business, but there are some good ones which I will try to cull:

"Now day is doen, and night is nighing fast:
Now bring the Bryde into the brydall boures.
Now night is come, now soone her disaray,
And in her bed her lay;"

Addressing the moon:

"and sith of wemens labours thou hast charge,
And generation goodly doth enlarge,
Encline thy will t'effect our wishfull vow,
And the chast wombe informe with timely seed..."

His description of his lady gives us a heavy dose of ivory forehead, apple cheeks, cherry lips, etc, though it is not every day one hears this satisfying image spoken anymore:

"Her brest like to a bowl of creame uncrudded,
Her paps lyke lillies budded..."

Among Spenser's poems that I have read I would rate this behind the Amoretti (exquisite love sonnets) and The Shephearde's Calendar, which is what it sounds like, a tour of the pastoral year. These other things are a little more interesting to read and have slightly more pungency to them. Still, the essential quality of this author is that he unites one of the highest poetic sensibilities of all time to a vision of existence that is, or at least aspires to be, almost willfully happy and, what is most rare among artists of high talent, innocent. That this quality is not easy to attain is shown in the work of the major author below, born 218 years after Spenser and committed as well to the pastoral, the lyrical, the beautiful, the traditional, the authentic, in a world and a literary culture in which it had already become more difficult to believe wholly in the reality of these things than it had been in Spenser's day.

Wordsworth--"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways"/Hartley Coleridge--"He lived amidst th'untrodden ways"

I have been slow in gaining an appreciation of the poems of Wordsworth, of which I have not read more than a handful, and even those at long intervals from each other. To begin with, his authorial personality has something about it that reminds me of those earnest, bearded old men of the generation of the 50s and early 60s who one still always sees hanging around used book stores and who have always annoyed me, probably because if I had happened to grow up at that time I would doubtless be exactly like them; they are neither particularly cool nor talented nor interesting, though they have been aspiring for half a century to be these things above all else, a whole mass of failed Beatnik Robert Bly types still trying to define what it is to be a man, an artist, an American, an American man artist, not very absorbingly and completely innocent of humor (the real Beatniks at least were often very funny). I have to turn tail at the sight of them. To the modern raw reader of poetry, Wordsworth comes off initially as partaking of some of these traits. There is nothing in his lines or thoughts that particularly grabs one by the throat and stamps an indelible image on the mind the way that say, Byron's or Edgar Allen Poe's poems can still do. All of the poems seem at first to be similar meditations upon the same handful of subjects. The titles themselves are very plain and somewhat hard to keep straight in one's mind, apart from "Tintern Abbey". Judging by the notes I have made in my Norton Anthology I appear to have at least read over at various times "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", "It is a Beauteous Evening" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", yet I could not have named these from memory if asked. It is not that I did not like them; however they obviously lacked for me a certain force that I had come to associate as necessary for being memorable.

Nonetheless I have come over time to a certain respect for Wordsworth's work because of the intelligent and humane manner in which so many notable, energetic and thoughtful men of the 19th century responded to these on the surface rather plain and intellectually uninvestigative musings on natural beauty. Mill in particular, who had been educated to shun poetry, Shakespeare included, as insubstantial, credited them with helping to restore his interest in life after he had suffered a nervous breakdown at age twenty, traditionally attributed to an overpreponderance of pure logical thought. Any man whose work is capable of this I consider to merit my attention more than the general run of poets. Mill attributed their power to the expression of "states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty." This strikes me as reasonable, as well as being pleasingly without being overly subtle writing on the part of the poet. Still, one has to experience something of the effect oneself to really understand what the hubbub is about.

"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" read aloud or looked at on the page, consists of 67 words that can be disposed of in a crisp 20 seconds or so either way. As far as initial time commitment goes for the student of literature, it is not Remembrance of Things Past. It is about a maid named Lucy (many Wordsworth poems feature a girl named Lucy) who lived in a remote area, was deserving of a greater degree of praise and love than it was possible for her to get in those pre-MySpace days, and died, her death strongly affecting the poet though apparently no one else. There are 3 little stanzas, of which the first establishes her worldly condition in life and the 3rd the same in death. The 2nd contains the metaphors and, I assume, the poem's meaning:

"A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky."

It is a slight and delicate set of images, though in this instance it suits the subject matter very nicely and subtly, which I think the 19th century appreciated more than we do, who think slightness and delicacy, even where that is the state of life or the form of idea being taken up by the poet, the exclusive province of wimps. One can extrapolate in a number of directions from the images given, which is a benefit of writing about nature and "general" subjects. The maid's beauty is, while she lives, continually in some state of fragility. First there is the matter of its being generally unseen, then there is the suggestion that it is beautiful because there is nothing else--no competing star--with which to compare it. The poet seems to have known her only at a distance--not well at all. Perhaps this is all a small but well-wrought metaphor for life. There is in a small space much suggested, all of which, however is manageable--the poet only requires the reader to recognize the suggestions, not learn a foreign manner of thinking. Perhaps I am starting to get at something of the appeal of Wordsworth.

I am not quite sure exactly what to make of Hartley Coleridge's parody. The same three-stanza setup is used, the first referring to a poet who lived in unread and unloved obscurity, and the third to the poet's book gathering dust in the shop. However if Wordsworth is the author invoked, this is all obviously opposite to his actual situation; his house and neighborhood in the Lake District were already attracting tourists while he was still living in them. Coleridge's second stanza has possibly a little edge to it:

"Behind a cloud his mystic sense,
Deep-hidden, who can spy?
Bright as the night, when not a star
Is shining in the sky."

Coleridge was the son of Samuel T Coleridge, and a minor poet himself. Basic biographical information on him is a bit of a chore to hustle up, but he appears to have been intimate and on reasonably good terms with Wordsworth all his life. It may not mean anything, but he and Wordsworth are buried right next to each other in Grasmere churchyard. I assume the parody was intended to be good-natured.