Spenserian Pastoral and the Amoretti

Abstract

The plays a conspicuous, if not always well understood, role in Spenser's poetry. The Shepheardes Calender, in which the poet was ceremoniously introduced to the reading public as our new Poete, is a deliberate adaptation of the classical eclogue-book to occasions both cultural and personal. But the greater enterprise adumbrated in October also incorporates images, situations, and themes at many levels and in diverse ways. Pastoral seems to have been a vehicle by which Spenser expressed some of his deepest concerns. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in the love poetry written in what he thought to be a pause in his great labor and designed to celebrate his courtship and second marriage, the is a major factor shaping Spenser's imagination of his subject.1 A common device in the Faerie Queene is the use of places as havens, often illusory, away from the active life. For the hero in hot pursuit of glory the locus amoenus furnishes a welcome refuge, or what Renato Poggioli calls a pastoral oasis, from the stresses of heroic virtue.2 In Spenser, whose landscape is so fraught with sensual lures and magical delusions, the motif naturally falls into the service of a lurking paranoia about rest and pleasure and the drowning warmth of night. Redcrosse, in this as in other things exemplary, is always falling on his face in such places. In his maiden battle with Errour among the Ovidian trees, and in his later encounters with Fradubio, Orgoglio, and even Despair, Redcrosse typifies the Spenserian hero who wanders from virtue's straight and