Imitation and Metamorphosis: The Golden-Age Eclogue in Spenser, Milton, and Marvell

Abstract

If the neo-classical aesthetic of imitation could lead to poetic photocopies, it could also stimulate a remarkable variety of invention, as Spenser's “April“, Milton s Nativity Ode, and Marvell's “The Picture of Little T. C.“ demonstrate. All are imitations of the golden-age or messianic eclogue, and cannot really be understood outside of their genre; but at the same time they completely metamorphose the conventional generic pattern. Spenser's “April” employs the golden-age conventions not only to celebrate Elizabeth I but also, and more importantly, to portray symbolically, in the identification of Elisa with Song, the Orphic ordering power of art, the interrelation of the order of art and the order of the body politic, and the new golden age of poetry heralded by his work. Milton's Nativity Ode uses the same formulas (but remolded by Christian truth and the procedures of divine meditation) to praise the true messiah, Christ, and to celebrate the new golden age, the new Eden, which His birth begins. And Marvell's “Little T. C.” uses the golden-age formulas to assert wittily the Renaissance longing for a new golden age of free love, when Honor ceases to restrict the natural flowering of the human bud.