A short note [Summary] on Epithalamion by Edmund Spenser.
According to
Mutter Epithalamion is one of the
greatest formal lyrics in English.
Legouis praises it as a great ode without a rival. It exceeds in richness and splendour all
compositions of the same kind. It is the
most gorgeous jewel in the treasure-house of the Renaissance. J.W. Mackail assigns to it the first place
not only among spenser’s lyrics but also among all English odes. It celebrates the marriage of Spenser with
Elizabeth Boyle.
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The ode adopts
the Italian Canzone. It has twenty three
stanzas of usually seventeen lines which are of unequal length and intricate
rhyme pattern, each stanza ending in a fourteen syllable line which forms a
varied refrain. The last seven lines are
tornata, an envoi, that expresses the poet’s desire to offer the poem as a gift
in lieu of the ornaments that have not reached her because of some accident. It bears the influence of Sappho,
Theocritus’s Epithalamium of Helen, Catallus’s The Wedding of Manlius and Vinia
and the epithalamia of the French Pleiade, Ronsard and Du Bellay. Its novelty lies in the narrator being the
poet who is also the bridegroom.
The poem unfolds
a canvas where mythological and Christian elements, literary reminiscence and
natural description blend harmoniously
to intensify the expression of the poet’s personal emotions. It radiates an aura of a pageant about
it. Its chief features are the invocation
of the Muse, the procession, feasting, the decoration of the bride, the praise
of her beauty, the bride’s arrival at the church, the marriage ceremony, the
preparation of the bridal chamber and prayer for their fruitful union.
Spenser’s
Platonic conception that the outward beauty is a reflection of the inner virtue
and purity, manifests itself in the description of the bride who is adorn’d
with beauty’s grace and virtue’s store.
The beauty of her body like a palace fair leads the mind with many a
stately stair to honour’s seat, to the seat of perfect virtue. Spenser’s celebration of ideal beauty, and
the Petrarchan deification of the lady
are conventional. Though the poem is
personal, it universalies the experience of love. The narration of events covering one day,
from morning to midnight imposes on the poem a unity in respect of the
subject-matter and of its emotional content.
As Mutter observes, the wealth of imagery is allied to the often
remarked musical quality of the poem to produce a total effect of strength and
controlled luxuriance which earns for it Coleridge’s praise of truly sublime.