Interpreting Spenser’s February Eclogue: Some Contexts and Implications

Abstract

This commentary on the preceding essay by Professor Ronald Bond summarizes the essentials of his argument; questions some of his conclusions and their implications; and presents another perspective on “Februarie,” its place in the Calender and in the context of Spenser’s career. Clashes between generations and between ideologies of quiescence and ambition characterize not only “Februarie” but most of the other eclogues, the autobiographical fiction that frames the whole poem, and the social milieu of scholars and courtiers in which Spenser worked and hoped to advance himself. The “meaning” of The Shepheardes Calender is generated in the dialectic between the divergent experiences, attitudes, and achievements of Colin and Immerito. The paradoxical combination of humility and self-assertion that characterizes the whole poem reveals Spenser as neither a detached ironist nor an orthodox moralist but as a new poet and a young man with an acute sense of the contradictions in his social world and a profound concern to find his way among them. In The Shepheardes Calender, his way is through the elaborate strategies of poetic discourse. From this perspective, the workings of “Februarie” mirror in little the workings of the whole poem.