Spenser's October

Question 1

What Are Edmund Spenser’s Two Works?

Answer 1

• The Sheepheards Calender (1579)
• The Faerie Queene (book 1-3, 1580 and book 4-6, 1596)

Question 2

Notable things about Spenser’s “The Sheepheards Calender”

Answer 2

• The deliberate use of archaic language, which goes back to Chaucer and is meant to be rustic.
• Features annotations (footnotes) by the still mysterious “E. K.”
• 12 pastoral poems in total, w/ 1 poem for each month of the calendar

Question 3

Stanza One

Answer 3

Piers notes Cuddie’s downcast ways, tries to rouse him; notes how he was once the best of poets, admired by all; but now his lute is asleep, & so is poetry in the land.

Question 4

Stanza Two and Three

Answer 4

Cuddie complains he has piped & sang (i.e., created poetry) so long, but w/o any gain; such neglect leaves him downcast; others benefit, but not him.

Question 5

Stanza Four and Five

Answer 5

Piers encourages Cuddie; the praise & glory he earns is far better than any money or material comforts; it is a great honour to instruct youth; reminds him of the great power poetry gives him over people, almost hypnotic.

Question 6

Stanza Six

Answer 6

Cuddie argues that praise, glory, honour—all are insubstantial; they don’t reward or feed him; praise is smoke blown away in the wind.

Question 7

Stanzas Seven, Eight and Nine

Answer 7

Piers instructs Cuddie to abandon pastoral for epic; tells him to depict monarchs & knights (whether Elizabeth or her favourite, the Earl of Leicester), & he will earn patronage. (Note the rusty armour of England’s knights—they are static & un-warrior-like.) And if he should grow weary of the epic, he can still turn to love poetry to earn still more patronage.

Question 8

Stanzas Ten, Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen

Answer 8

• Cuddie notes that he has heard that Mecaenas (great patron to the poets) instructed Virgil to leave pastoral & georgic for the epic; but Macaenas, patron to the poets, & Augustus, whose reign saw a flourishing in Latin poetry (Virgil, Horace, Ovid), are both dead; & the people (“worthies”) of whom they sung are also dead.
• The epic thrives, he argues, in a culture in which its people are heroic; but his own age is a fallen & degraded one; the once mighty man lies in a bed of luxury & ease; the poets are silent b/c there is nothing, no one worthy to write about; poetry & honour are tied together, & both are fading.
• If any poetry of the old stock rises again, he concludes, it must either represent the follies of its age or revert to lowly, rhyming ribaldry.

Question 9

Stanza Fourteen

Answer 9

Piers shares in Cuddie’s despair, asking where is poetry’s place in our world then? It ought to hold a prominent place at court, but it does not; nor does it find a home in the lower classes; he advises poetry to grow wings & return to heaven from whence it came.

Question 10

Stanza Fifteen

Answer 10

Cuddie confesses his own poetic is too weak to provide poetry with such wings; Colin, indeed, has the power to do so, but his is too afflicted with love to do so.

Question 11

Stanza Sixteen

Answer 11

Piers argues that there is much virtue in the sort of love that overcomes Colin; it encourages him to reach higher, to move past the earthly & aspire for the ideal.

Question 12

Stanza Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen and Twenty

Answer 12

• Love is too tyrannical a force to foster poetry, Cuddie argues; where it rules, it overwhelms all other things; poetry requires a ‘vacant head’—i.e., one not distracted by love.
• Whoever wants to be a good poet & to earn praise & patronage, he argues, requires wine; under the influence of wine, he says, he could write fine tragedy.
• Cuddie suddenly withdraws from this line of thought; he has no wine; he instructs Piers to retire to the shade w/ him, which is far from the world’s troubles, & where they can sing their poetry; Piers promises Cuddie a kid when his goats bear their young.