E.K. is the first to assign special status to November, saying in the Argument that Spenser ‘farre pass[es] . . . his reach, and in myne opinion all other the Eglogues of this booke’. November is indeed ‘the grandest poem in the sequence’ (Alpers 1972: 367): it features the ‘sacred mystery of death and rebirth’, as Spenser ‘reevaluat[es] . . . the whole enterprise [the poet’s career] in the light of eternity’ (Montrose 1979: 51-2).

Structurally, the eclogue divides into three parts. In lines 1-52, the shepherd Thenot asks Colin Clout to sing one of his famous songs, whether a love song to Rosalind or a hymn to Pan; but Colin refuses because the autumnal season ‘nis the time of merimake’ (9); Thenot agrees, and requests a song on the death of the recently deceased Queen Dido--a request that Colin grants. In lines 53-202, Colin then delivers a fifteen-stanza funeral elegy, in which he mourns the tragedy of Dido’s death but then suddenly witnesses her ascent into the afterlife: ‘I see thee blessed soule, I see, / Walke in the Elisian fieldes so free’ (178-9). Finally, in lines 203-8 Thenot praises the ‘doolfull pleasaunce’ of Colin’s song (204), and awards Colin a lamb.

November relates to previous Colin Clout eclogues: to Januarye and August, for reprising a song about desire, thereby connecting Dido with Rosalind; to Aprill, for presenting a tragic version of the epideictic celebration of a maiden queen, connecting Dido with Elisa; and to June, for offering a heightened meditation on the poet’s career. Yet November also joins October and December in forming a three-eclogue conclusion to the Calender; together, they present ‘Spenser’s trilogy . . . on poetry and its present state’ (Bernard 1989: 75).

In particular, November shows Spenser writing in the pastoral tradition of funeral elegy. This tradition begins with Theocritus, Idylls 1, an elegy on the dead shepherd Daphnis, in a tradition that goes on to include both Bion’s elegy on the dying Adonis and Moschus’ elegy on Bion. But Spenser’s two key source-texts are Virgil, Eclogues 5, and especially Marot’s elegy on the death of Queen Louise of France, mother to Marot’s patron, Francis I, Eglogue sur le Trespas de ma Dame Loyse de Savoye (1531) (Hoffman 1977: 53-61; for details on Marot, see Reamer 1969). Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Sannazaro had all written elegies as part of their pastorals, helping to Christianize the form that Marot and Spenser inherit. As a tradition, these elegies combine a rich philosophical and religious mythology of pastoral, poetry, and politics, and they follow a similar two-part structure: initial grief over loss of a beloved person, followed by consolation through the person’s apotheosis (Sacks 1985; Pigman 1985; Kay 1990; see P. Cheney 2003).

To accomplish his ‘grand’ goals, Spenser uses three sets of verse forms: for the opening dialogue, an eight-line stanza rhyming ababbcbc; for Colin’s song, a ten-line stanza alternating four kinds of lines—alexandrine, pentameter, tetrameter, dimeter—with four interlocking rhymes, ababbccdbd; and for Thenot’s coda, a sixain, rhyming ababcc. Of the most spectacular of the three forms, Colin’s song, Herford writes, this ‘admirable strophe of his own invention . . . conveys the expression of a recurring access or wave of emotion, marked at the outset (in a highly original manner) by the energetic and resonant Alexandrine, then gradually subsiding through verses of diminishing compass, until just before the close it rises in one expiring palpitation’ (Var 7: 397).

Despite this tour de force—or perhaps because of it—November is difficult to gauge. Does Spenser’s commitment to ‘transcendence’ substantiate the Christian poet’s wisdom—his use of art to express faith in the truth of a scriptural heaven (MacCaffrey 1969: 127-9, 132-3; Moore 1982: 113-4)—or does the commitment to transcendence appear as ‘escapist’ (Montrose 1979: 50-4; Berger 1988: 399, 409, 414-5)? Alternatively, does the center of November lie elsewhere, not in the transcendent ‘image’ of ‘Dido in heaven’ but rather in ‘Thenot’s words of thanks to Colin’ at the end—that is to say, in a worldly community, in contingency and song, as the poet directs his gaze to this world, not the next (Alpers 1972: 363)? To the extent that the eclogue valorizes transcendence, it serves the ‘Augustinian’ goal of a ‘celestial pastoral’, fulfilling ‘the function of funeral rites’ in society (Cain in Oram 1989: 185-6); but to the extent that November pursues a ‘pastoral of power’, it advertises political contingency as organizing Spenser’s unfolding career (Montrose 1979: 51).

Significantly, the woodcut supports the latter possibility, for it pushes the funeral procession marching to the church bearing the bier of Dido into the background, and centers rather on Thenot’s crowning of Colin with the laurel garland. Hence, the poet plays his pipe, with his sheep grazing before him, while behind him stands a building representing the court.

In such a courtly, vocational setting, who is Dido? The name derives from the tragic Carthaginian queen of Virgil’s Aeneid. While Spenser’s Dido may represent someone in the family of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, as evoked through reference to ‘the greate shepheard Lobbin, how great is thy griefe’ (113) (Var 7: 395-402), inescapably the ‘mayden of greate bloud’ (Arg 1-2) evokes Queen Elizabeth: in this veiled political allegory, she would be dead to Leicester and Protestant England if she married the Catholic Duc d’Alençon (Parmenter, Var 7: 402; McLane 1961: 47-60; McCabe 1999: 565-6; Prescott 2010: 620-2; Pugh 2016: 145). The allegory about the death of a queen may also gesture to violations of the 1571 statute that illegalizes attempts on the queen’s life: Elizabeth’s ‘divine status is subtly but definitively reserved for her death’ (Lane 1993: 24). Yet the elegy’s ‘celebration of Dido’s life’ (Cullen 1970: 92n29) does not square with such a grim political critique. Dido may refer less to Virgil’s tragically passionate heroine than to an alternate tradition of a chaste queen devoted to her dead husband’s memory (Bono 1984: 67-9; see D. Cheney 1989: 155): ‘Spenser’s interest [is] in recuperative interpretations of Virgil’s female characters. He introduces Dido in “November” not to subvert his earlier tributes to Elizabeth but to suggest another way of representing relationships between the sexes in Virgilian poetry’ (Watkins 1995: 79-80).

What is striking about November, then, is its interplay between the ominous political allegory, on the one hand, and, on the other, its sublime intertextual fiction of both chaste communal desire in this life and Christian transcendence in the next—as well as one inescapable fact: in 1579, Spenser boldly presents his pastoral persona as the creator of this interplay.