Laughing at Spenser’s Daphnaida

Abstract

How could Spenser have written a poem as inexplicably bad as Daphnaida, and why did he publish it? Having done so once, in 1591, why did he then republish the poem, unrevised, in 1596? And having published it the first time solus, why in 1596 did he republish it as a companion piece to the highly accomplished Fowre Hymnes? This essay proposes speculative answers to all three questions. Daphnaida is deliberately bad and indeed advertises itself as such, explicitly banishing the Horatian pair utile et dulce in its opening stanzas. This may be the form Spenser’s resistance took if he was prevailed upon by Sir Walter Ralegh to write an elegy proclaiming Arthur Gorges’s inconsolable grief for his young wife as part of a campaign to gain control over her estate. This explanation holds for the republication in 1596, when Ralegh had been rehabilitated at court and Gorges was pursuing the wardship of his daughter Ambrosia, but it fails to explain the pairing of Daphnaidai with Fowre Hymnes. That is explained by reading Fowre Hymnes as a revisionary take on Petrarch’s Trionfi: a generalized work of mourning for all created things, but one from which the motivating event of Laura’s death has been elided. Daphnaida, written in the same stanza as the Hymnes, offers their precise reverse: a death so particularized and definitive that all mourning for it is summarily refused. Together the poems complicate and resituate each other as radically alternative versions of the same underlying recognition, namely that hatred for the world is ultimately a false posture.