March is unusual for its attempt to ‘English’ the classical (and continental) pastoral of Cupid: the eclogue brings an ancient tradition of eros home to the English countryside. In particular, the eclogue divides its fiction into two symmetrical parts: in lines 1-60, two young shepherds, Willye and Thomalin, discuss the nature of erotic desire; and in lines 61-117 Thomalin tells the story of his encounter with Cupid, god of love, who has wounded him in the Achilles’ heel, while Willye recalls the story of his father, who also encounters the deity.

The topic of the eclogue, adolescent boys awakening to sexual desire, conjoins with Januarye, the story of Colin Clout’s youthful unrequited love for Rosalind, and with Februarie, divided between a dialogue and a fable. March also anticipates Aprill, with its springtime topicality evoking the predicament of Queen Elizabeth contemplating a marriage with the French Duc d’Alençon.

Spenser’s attempt to naturalize the originary erotic classical myth on English soil shows him engaging a venerable topic, however successful artistically (cf. Bush, Var 7: 268 versus Palgrave, Var 7: 266-7). Specifically, Spenser rewrites Bion’s Idylls 4 and Ronsard’s 1556 ode, L’Amour oiseau (Spitzer 1950), the two key precursor texts (Spenser may have known Bion through Angelo Poliziano’s 1512 Latin translation). Bion tells how, one day, the boy Ixeutas goes out hunting for birds, only to encounter Eros. Shooting all his arrows but missing the god, the boy turns to an old ploughman, who had taught him the art of hunting in the first place: the tutor counsels patience, for one day the god will return to hunt him. Ronsard adapts the story to emphasize both the beauty of the winged god and the pessimism of the tutor, an old fortuneteller, in a narrative design that features the simple disparity between innocence and experience. Spenser, in contrast, shows two boys actually experiencing desire, and talking about it, free of the interference of adult wisdom.

March thus constitutes ‘an inimitable poetic description of puberty’ (Spitzer 1950: 499), a phrase that usefully sustains both erotic and poetic valence. On the one hand, the eclogue offers ‘a comic portrayal of man’s initiation and perennial re-initiation into the sexual rites of spring’ (Cullen 1970: 100), in which ‘Adolescent psychology and budding eroticism are Spenser’s interests’ (Hoffman 1977: 82). On the other, the eclogue’s spring landscape refers ‘primarily to the topoi and symbols of previous literature and only secondarily to objects and figures in “nature”’: ‘the intent is to imitate and signify poetry’—specifically, to undercut ‘the wisdom of the literary elders, their vision of love as folly’, and to ‘show . . . what is wrong with it’ (Berger 1988: 364, 370).

The seemingly light-hearted eclogue also has political significance, exposed briefly in the curious reference to the shepherdess ‘Lettice’ in line 20, alluding to the earl of Leicester’s secret marriage to Lettice Knollys, which angered the queen (see Hadfield 2012: 128-31); and in the spelling of ‘gall’ in Thomalin’s emblem, ‘Gaule’ (France), punning on the bitterness of her proposed French marriage. Perhaps the eclogue also evokes the politics of desire in lines 49-50 in the image of an ‘Unhappye Ewe’ wearing a ‘clout’ (or bandage) on her ‘legge’ and falling ‘headlong into a dell’ (see comment below on line 50). Using such ‘markes and tokens’ (as E.K. calls them in the Argument), the eclogue creates a tension between a simple narrative surface in which boys talk about sex and the depth of an intertext that analyzes an entire tradition of love—all situated within international court politics. Yet the handling of the allusions in this eclogue is especially deft: the reader is constantly being made aware of contexts that remain outside the awareness of the speakers, teased by a sense that their topic exceeds their still childish grasp. The deliberately naive and toylike quality of the verse and fable do much to exclude the contexts that the allusions evoke.

To accomplish this maneuver, Spenser uses a version of ‘tail-rhyme’: a six-line stanza, rhyming aabccb, which divides into two units, each consisting of three lines (a tetrameter couplet followed by a single trimeter line), with both units using the same ‘b’ rhyme. Although Spenser begins by assigning each shepherd a six-line speech, he goes on to efface this stanzaic design. Willye’s second speech, for instance, consists of a single twelve-line stanza, while Thomalin’s second speech consists of just three lines, with his tale being a single forty-two line stanza. Paradoxically, March uses an idyllic-sounding representation of youthful spring desire to present a ‘somewhat sour’ attitude toward ‘love’ (McCabe 1999: 527).

Hence, the woodcut ominously shows the boys standing in the center flanked by images of Cupid. Behind them on the left is an image of Cupid caught in a fowler’s net from Willye’s story of his father, which evokes the Homeric myth of Ares (the Roman Mars) and Aphrodite (Venus) displayed in the act of adultery before the gods on Mt. Olympus. (March is named after Mars; hence Aries or the Ram is its zodiacal sign, centered at the top of the woodcut.) On the right is the image from Thomalin’s story of his encounter with Cupid. ‘Maybe one of the points of the woodcut is that harmony is the opposite of what Protestants expected from the union of Elizabeth and Alençon’ (Brooks-Davies 1995: 55).

Of all the eclogues, March best displays Spenser’s skill at lading a simple and ancient classical myth with wide and fresh import for England.

The speciall meaning . . . the Poets God of Loue: E.K.'s phrasing suggests a story about the love-inflected art of the youthful poet (not simply love itself). E.K.'s preoccupation with the 'speciall meaning' of Spenser's poetry continues in his subsequent glossses, which recurrently translate the poet's metaphors for the reader, providing an early cue for modern interpretations (sometimes of E.K. himself). Whereas Cupid is certainly 'a supernatural ancient source' (Spitzer 1950: 500), the god is also 'an even more ancient psychological force subsequently externalized and apotheosized by classical tradition' (Berger 1988: 362).