The Indescribable Landscape: Water, Shade, and Land in the Bower of Bliss

Abstract

We need not look past natural, but we should a sense look through it.Piet Mondrian1IN THE PROEM TO BOOK II of The Faerie Queene, Spenser describes poem as a faire mirrhour which Elizabeth might see herself, her kingdom, and her great auncestry (Proem 4.7-9).2 He explains, though, that he must cover mirror in couert vele, and wrap shadowes (5.2): a metaphor for ways which allegory both does and does not represent reality. Shadowes works two ways-shadows' light or light shadows-which suggests itself difficulty allegory presents; reader can look through veil at mirror, but is still never quite sure what shows. Spenser critics have sometimes had trouble making up their collective mind whether their role is to delineate figures mirror or to describe art with which veil is constructed. On one hand, there is some feeling that allegorized reality-that is, allegorized account of history-is what really matters, but critics have also felt that Spenser himself seems, as poem goes on, to become more interested his own elaborate construction then his original historical points, or to put another way, nonallegorical ways of representing history. ' But Spenser suggests that dichotomy cannot be so simple. The description of veiled mirror implies two different sets of eyes: Elizabeth's, which can see queen's own face mirror, and those feeble eyes which must be protected by veil, Which else could not endure those beanies bright. The veil functions differently to different viewers depending on their own inherent qualities, not necessarily on their approach. At same time, asks viewers to acknowledge someone else's perspective. If poem is not a window but a mirror showing someone else's face, then to read is to imagine seeing through someone else's eyes.The metaphor of veil, then, does not explain Spenser's art, but experience of reader. It gives reader a kind of permission to look through as well as at narratives and images of The Faerie Queene. The differing perspective suggests both a particular way of thinking about reading and a distinct account of mimesis. In Sidney's familiar definition poetry is mimetic a fairly simple way:Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth m word mimesis-that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth (to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture), with this end, to teach and delight.4If mimesis is a speaking picture, then Spenser's veiled mirror is one step removed from mimesis. It is a reminder that role of reader that representing is neither passive nor static, and that task of writer relation to history is not, fact, representation. Spenser's veil is intervening layer awkward relationship between fiction and which both depend on and undermine each other. Luiz Costa Lima, his attempt to revivify concept of mimesis, has argued that evaluation of mimesis must address not what is represented but image that is ultimately created; he says that it is proper to fictional discourse, be aesthetic or other, that be perceived as an articulation of images, that be thematized by imagination.3 Even when fiction serves, some way or other, to represent history, still must be understood first relation to imagination which appears rather than history that putatively figures/' Following on Costa Lima's metaphor suggested by word revivify, we can say that looking at mimesis from perspective of imagination is necessary for mimetic representation to have life. Without we get history as the chronological ordering of facts and results, which will never, Costa Lima says with Claude Levi-Strauss background, be intellectually sufficient. Spenser, I will argue this essay, uses mechanics of looking at something deceptive to shift emphasis of mimesis from what is represented to perceived image. …