Green Thoughts in a Green Shade

Abstract

Spenser’s Garden of Adonis, while clearly a cosmological fiction and a picture of the hidden processes of nature, is also a garden of mind, a garden of thought. It is an image of the life and motions of human thought, thought’s modes of continuity, change, and survival. It reflects the poet’s sense of the ontology of mental phenomena like memories, dreams, and phantasms; it shows us the human mind in its generativity, its pleasure, as well as its violence, its way of inhabiting loss. In broad terms, Spenser’s vision of this place (or collection of places) reflects profound shifts in Renaissance ideas about the mind, about the space of thinking, specifically in its freedom of play and its intensely secular, time-bound character; for all that it speaks of hidden, even quasi-divine energies, it presents a moving order that remains cut off from any clear transcendental grounds of meaning. In its ambiguity as well as its radical opacity, the Garden also offers a fiction of mind that anticipates more modern pictures of mental process.