00600--Write a short note on Prothalamion by Edmund Spenser.

Write a short note on Prothalamion by Edmund Spenser.

Prothalamion is a spousal verse, composed on the occasion of the wedding of Lady Elizabeth and Lady Katherine Somerset to Henry Gilford and William Peter.  Though it does not reach the poetic excellence and richness of Epithalamion it is undeniably a fine lyric exhibiting the same mastery of rhythmical and musical effect and marked by a more evocative refrain. 

David Daiches claims for the poem a tapestry quality, an almost heraldic tone.  It falls short of Epithalamion in personal intensity in concentration of effect and in unity of design.  The glaring weaknesses of the poem that mar its unity, are the intrusion of the personal reminiscences, expression of his frustration, his tribute to Leicester and Essex, and his nostalgic love of London, his most kindly nurse. 

At the linguistic level the defects are the use of vague clichés like fair, gentle and fine, and the tedious wordplay in the description of the whiteness of the swans in the lines 40-45.  However, it is an exquisite lyric presenting a stylised picture with sensuous and mythological imagery.

00573--A note [Summary] on Epithalamion by Edmund Spenser.

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. 

00507-- Muiopotmos or The Fate of the Butterfly /Edmund Spenser

 

Muiopotmos or The Fate of the Butterfly /Edmund Spenser/poetry

   

The Fate of the Butterflie is a mock-heroic poem or epyllion of 440 lines.  Spenser used allegory, mythology, fable,and symbol as an indirect means of expressing his thoughts and feelings in order to avoid a brush with authorities and aristocrats.  His Mother Hubberd’s Tale embodies a political satire in the guise of the fable of The Fox and the Ape. 

Muiopotmos narrates the fable of the fight between the Butterfly Clarion and the Spider Archanol.  It is supposed to allude to the animosity between Essex and Raliegh or between Sidney and Oxford. The first stanza of the prescribed piece portrays the butterfly as being endowed with a delicate aesthetic sensitivity.  He tastes every flower and every herb in the garden without upsetting their order or disfiguring them. 

The second stanza shows the butterfly as an Epicurean with a refined sensibility.  He seems to believe in the dictum that variety is the spice of life.  Spenser’s humour comes out in the aphoristic utterance; for all change is sweete.