v.1.1

st. 1-2

The sharp antithesis between lust and idealizing worship is qualified by the narrative context (see notes to i.18-19, iii.1, and iv.48-51), even as the stanzas assert, problematically, that Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell is motivated by love. See iv.54.4-8, where Arthur, assailed by fantasies that keep him awake, blurs the distinction between Florimell and Gloriana.

v.1.2 his pageaunts play: ‘Perform his scenes’, implying that with respect to love, ‘diverse mindes’ are so many theatrical spectacles.

v.1.5 clay: Echoing Job 10:9, ‘Remember, I pray thee, that thou hast made me as the clay’, and 13:12, ‘Your memories may be compared unto ashes, and your bodyes to bodyes of clay’. Also the element of earth in contrast to that of fire.

v.1.7 lewd: vile

v.2.1 it: Either ‘noble brest’ or ‘free thought’.

v.2.7–v.2.9 2.7-9 The driving force of love is conveyed by the accelerating repetition of the verb clause as the sententiae of the opening stanzas return upon the narrative; at the same time, the ironies qualifying these sententiae return both in the note of amused sympathy (love barely lets Arthur catch his breath) and in the ambiguity of the reference to ‘his first poursuit’, which strategically confuses the chase of chaste Florimell with the quest for Gloriana (echoing iv.54.6-8).

v.2.7 It . . . it . . . it: Love . . . love . . . the ‘noble brest’ or ‘free thought’.

v.2.9 2.9 In juxtaposing the prefixes pour- and for-, as Arthur’s suing ‘for’ (after) Florimell calls him onward (to the ‘fore’), this line introduces the canto’s preoccupation with senses of for-, and may also recall the narrator’s observation at iv.47.2 that Timias ‘Ladies love unto his Lord forlent’. The reference to his ‘first poursuit’ suggests that he has, for the moment, given up the chase of Florimell and resumed his quest for Gloriana, but it also anticipates the recurrent emphasis in the canto on hysteron proteron reversals.

v.3.1 3.1 The contrast with 2.9 encapsulates Arthur’s predicament: love calls him ever forward, but in so doing it calls him in into the forest, a setting characterized by the lust and violence personified in the ‘fosters’ (foresters) who inhabit it.

v.3.8 sore he swat: The Dwarf’s frantic haste—running, sweaty, scratched, lame, and (like Arthur at 2.8) out of breath—offers a sadly comic analogue both to Florimell’s speedy flight and to Arthur’s hapless pursuit of her.

v.4.1 out of hart: With a punning suggestion that the dwarf has failed to recover the quarry (‘hart’ as stag) he is pursuing.

v.4.9 out of hand: Echoing ‘out of hart’ from the stanza’s first line, this phrase punningly answers the Dwarf’s question: ‘out of hand’ is where Florimell has gone.

v.5.1 5.2 Cf. i.15.6, ‘Her garments all were wrought of beaten gold’.

v.5.4 5.4 Florimell’s ‘faire lockes’ are featured in her initial description at i.16.3, but there they fly behind her in the wind like the tail of a comet, rather than being ‘enrold’, or coiled, into a ‘rich circlet’.

v.5.5 5.5 At I.ix.13.9 Arthur says of the ‘royall Mayd’ who appeared in his dream, ‘So fayre a creature yet saw never sunny day’, implying that she may not exist in the waking world. Florimell does exist by daylight, but her fleeting elusiveness approximates the inaccessibility of the Fairy queen.

v.5.6–v.5.7 5.6-7 Echoing the initial description of Florimell at i.15.2-5.

v.5.8–v.5.9 5.8-9 Cf. i.18.8, ‘the fairest Dame alive’. At once serious and playful, these lines suggest that allegorically Florimell is the personification of earthly beauty, even as they tease the conventional chivalric rhetoric according to which every knight is the most valiant and every damsell the fairest of them all. The difficulty of actually reading this ‘surest signe’ will be implied in canto viii and elaborated with considerable irony in Book IV, canto v.

v.5.9 trow: A subtly anticlimactic flourish that qualifies the surety of the surest sign by re-introducing the subjective element informing such judgments. Rhyming ‘I trow’ with ‘ye may . . . know’ is a nice touch.

v.6.5 foregoe: The alternative sense ‘precede in time’ will be activated—retroactively, of course—in st. 9-10.

v.7.1 7.1 ‘By god I’d rather know that [than have]’.

v.7.4 froward . . . forward: A common rhetorical pair, personified in II.ii by the sisters Elissa and Perissa. The contrast between stubborn backwardness (‘froward’) and eager or presumptuous forwardness harks back to the Redcrosse knight’s first appearance in the poem’s opening canto (see I.i.1 and notes); this motif takes on added significance in the context of the narrative’s self-conscious play in this episode with hysteron proteron, and its growing preoccupation with the prefix for-.

v.7.9 errour straunge: The context activates additional senses: Florimell’s wandering is erroneous in preceding its cause, and strange for the same reason; ‘straunge’ also suggests that she is out of place, both in not belonging to the forest and in being so ‘Carried away’ (6.6) with fear that she cannot stay or be stayed (6.5) in one spot.

v.8.3 eye I weene: Cf. ‘I trow’ (5.9 and note).

v.8.7–v.8.9 8.7-9.4 The elaborately repetitive patterning of these lines plays Florimell’s singular devotion (‘none but one’) against Marinell’s devotion to singularity.

v.9.1–v.9.4 8.7-9.4 The elaborately repetitive patterning of these lines plays Florimell’s singular devotion (‘none but one’) against Marinell’s devotion to singularity.

v.9.6–v.9.7 9.6-7 See iv.25-27 for Cymoent’s recourse to the ‘mighty spell’ of Proteus. These lines extend the episode’s increasing emphasis on the prefix for-: her maternal protectiveness gets ahead of itself in the effort to ‘forwarne’ her son through the ‘foresight’ (iv.25.6) of the sea-god. Syntactically, ‘forwarne’ operates as a transitive verb meaning ‘forbid’.

v.9.8 9.8 Continuing the play on for-, ‘forreine’ refers to Britomart’s origins outside Faeryland (‘a virgin straunge’, iv.25.9), but also echoes the ‘womans force’ (iv.27.8) that Cymoent neglects to fear, and evokes Marinell’s sense that all women are foreign.

v.9.9 9.9 Fame (like Cymoent at iv.36.6-9) gets ahead of events in reporting that Marinell is slain.

v.10.1–v.10.2 10.1-2 The uncharacteristic precision with which the Dwarf calculates elapsed time calls attention to sequence in which Florimell’s flight turns out to have preceded its cause: she rides so fast that she arrives in canto i before she has left the court. The echo of ‘foregoe’ (see 6.5n) in ‘forwent’ links the speed of her flight to its prematurity, and the continued play on the prefix (fowre days since she forwent the Court) reinforces this suggestion: the elapsed time can be four days only if she foregoes (precedes in time) her foregoing (going away from) Faery court.

v.10.4 inuent: With the added suggestion, in context, that she has invented (contrived, created) his wounding before it happens.

v.10.7 good counsell, or bold hardiment: A conventional pair that echoes in a more positive register the ‘open force or hidden guyle’ with which Maleger’s force assail the bulwarks of Alma’s castle (see II.xi.7.4n).

v.11.3–v.11.4 11.3-4 Reminding Arthur of ‘his first poursuit’ (see 2.9n), these lines call him at once backward to a prior commitment (Gloriana) and ‘forward’ in pursuit of Florimell.

v.11.5 At least eternall meede: Reward in at least heaven, even if not (‘haply’) on earth.

v.12.1–v.12.2 12.1-2 backe retourn’d . . . his Lady: Sustaining the extended play in this episode on Arthur’s confusion between going forward and going backward, seeking Gloriana and seeking Florimell.

v.12.3–v.12.4 12.3-4 Arthur’s belated concern for Timias (‘late left behinde’, echoing ‘backe retourn’d’) supplies a transition to the next episode in the canto, but also recalls the ironies attending their separation (see i.18-19 and notes), and plays into the forward/froward motif running through the canto (see 7.4n).

v.12.5–v.12.7 12.5-7 The repetition of ‘For’ plays into the canto’s concern with various senses of the prefix (see 2.9n), unpacking the latent pun in ‘forest’ as the superlative degree of ‘for’-ness.

v.13.4–v.13.9 13.4-9 As Timias’s hot pursuit of the foster extends through nine masculine pronouns over six lines, the distinction between the pursuer and the pursued begins to blur.

v.14.5–v.14.6 14.5-6 The villain ‘escaped . . . Yet not escaped’ offers yet another version of the conflicted directionality and temporality of the canto: seeming to have outrun danger, he will turn back to seek revenge and find instead the ‘dew reward’ that has been ‘prepard’ for him (in advance). Planning to ambush Timias, he is himself ambushed by Providence.

v.15.5–v.15.6 15.5-6 The emphasis on lack of grace suggests an allusion to the threefold lust of 1 John 2:16: ‘For all that is in the worlde (as the luste of the flesh, the luste of the eyes, and the pride of life) is not of the Father’.

v.16.1

st. 16

Continuing the canto’s verbal for- play, the brothers’ impetuousness is emphasized by the repetition in ‘Forthwith . . . foorth . . . forrest’ (picked up again in lines 7-8, ‘For . . . forest’). The effect carries through the enjambments of lines 4-5, complete with verbs that ‘drive’ the rhythm across the line-breaks.

v.17.1

st. 17

At A Vewe 98, Irenius describes a ‘perilous ford’ where Irish rebels would often attack English troops. In 1581 Ralegh, ambushed in this fashion by men loyal to the earl of Desmond and his brother, Sir John of Desmond, killed his attackers. The earl of Desmond and his brother were later killed as part of the New English suppression of their Munster-wide revolt. In the ensuing division and plantation of Desmond’s vast estates, Spenser secured the grant of Kilcolman castle and a ‘seignory’ of about 3,000 acres.

v.17.2–v.17.4 Foreby . . . foord . . . fortune: See st. 16n.

v.17.5–v.17.6 17.5-6 ‘they knew that the Squire [must pass] by that same unknown [to him] way’.

v.18.1

st. 18-19

fortuned . . . ford . . . fo[r]ster . . . foorth . . . further . . . afore . . . force . . . forkehead . . . For . . . ford: See st. 16n: here the impulsion previously associated with for- opposes Squire’s progress.

v.19.2 19.2 The extended play on for- in stanzas 16-18 prepares for the pun that concentrates the episode’s excess of ‘for’-ness into the ‘force’ that wounds Timias.

v.19.3 habericon: A sleeveless coat of mail (probably trisyllabic, ‘há - ber- con’; cf. the related form ‘hauberk’).

v.19.7 19.7 ‘It displeased him even more he could not get close enough to strike the foster’.

v.19.8 sease: Echoing legal usage; see st. 17n.

v.20.1 bore-speare: At II.iii.29.1 Belphoebe carries ‘a sharpe bore-speare’ used to slay the forest animal traditionally associated with lust; here wielded against Timias.

v.20.7 20.7 The thigh-wound associates Timias with Ovid’s Adonis, slain by the boar he was hunting: tuta petentem / trux aper insequitur totosque sub inguine dentes / abdidit et fulva moribundum stravit harena (‘deep in the groin [the fierce boar] sank his long tusks, and stretched the dying boy upon the yellow sand’; Met 10.714-16). Timias, like Adonis, is a hunter whose prey has turned upon him. The wound to the groin or thigh is allegorically sexual, and thus tends to identify the hunter with his predator/prey; the implication is that Timias partakes of the lustful nature of his opponents. See Robertson’s discussion of the thigh-wound suffered by Launcelot in Chretien’s Chevalier de la charrete (1961: 450-51), quoting St. Jerome on the use of ‘thigh’ as a genital euphemism.

v.20.9 20.9 Echoing 19.7, the repetition reinforces the suggestion (see 20.7n) that Timias cannot ‘come to fight’ with his foes because he partakes of their nature.

v.21.1 21.1 Compare the motives of vengeance and ‘bloodie yre’ that stir the three fosters in st. 15.

v.21.5 forest bill: ‘An implement used for pruning, cutting wood, lopping trees, hedges, etc., having a long blade with a concave edge, often ending in a sharp hook . . . and a wooden handle in line with the blade’ (OED).

v.22.1–v.22.2 22.1-2 Dying warriors in classical epic often ‘bite the dust’ quite literally (see Homer, Il 2.418; Virgil, Aen 11.418, 11.669; Silius Italicus, Pun 9.383-4). For Spenser the expression gains resonance as an echo of God’s curse upon the serpent in Eden: ‘upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the dayes of thy life’ (Gen 3:14).

v.22.6 spectacle: Accented on the second syllable.

v.23.9 ferme: See Upton 711-12. The word’s etymology connects it to both ‘firm’ and ‘farm’, the latter sometimes spelled ‘ferme’; the Foster has, in modern parlance, ‘bought the ferme’.

v.24.1 24.1 ‘Seeing now [his brother's death], the last remaining foster’.

v.25.8 25.8 As the foster’s severed head fell backward onto the riverbank, so the harm that he (‘the meaner’) intended ‘fel’ upon his own head (‘crowne’).

v.26.5 26.5 Echoing the description of Marinell at iv.16.9.

v.27.1

st. 27-54

This episode is based on Angelica’s nursing of Medoro in OF 19.17-42.

v.27.1 27.1 Echoing I.vi.7.1.

v.27.3 27.3 ‘For loe’ suggests that we are being directed to witness a miracle of providence, but the line backs off this assertion with the equivocation ‘great grace or fortune’.

v.27.5–v.27.8 27.5-8 Belphoebe’s encounter with Braggadocchio (II.iii.21-45) contrasts pointedly with the present episode. Cf. Ariosto: Tanto è ch’io non ne dissi più novella, / ch’a pena riconoscher la dovreste: / questa, se non sapete, Angelica era (‘It is so long now since I last spoke of her, you may scarcely be able to recognize her: in case you do not know, she is Angelica’; OF 19.17.5-7).

v.27.9 27.9 Belphoebe’s name links her to the moon (see II.iii.arg.4n). This line, playing on Phoebus (Apollo) and Phoebe (Diana), anticipates events in canto vi.

v.28.1

st. 28

That the trail of blood leads to Timias associates him with the beast Belphoebe was hunting (see 20.7n). For tracking as a trope of interpretation, see II.pr.4.1-5 and note. Belphoebe’s arrival in this stanza divides the canto into halves of twenty-seven stanzas each; cf. vi.28n.

v.28.6 the great persue: A nonce-usage, taking the verb as a noun in apparent reference to the ‘tract of blood’.

v.30.1

st. 30

Belphoebe’s ‘melting eies’ and sudden pallor link her to Timias; her twofold response, first starting back and then pierced with pity, echoes Guyon’s response at II.i.42 on beholding the ‘Pitifull spectacle of deadly smart’ (40.1) presented by Mordant, Amavia, and the bloody babe.

v.30.4 Besides all hope: The syntax is interestingly ambiguous, with the phrase either modifying ‘Lady’ or describing what her ‘melting eies did vew’.

v.30.8–v.30.9 30.8-9 Cf. Ariosto: insolita pietade in mezzo al petto / si sentì entrar per disuaste porte, / che le fe’ il duro cor tenero e molle (‘an unaccustomed sense of pity stole into her breast by some unused door, softening her hard heart’; OF 19.20.5-7).

v.31.8 habericon: See 19.3n on this form of ‘habergeon’.

v.32.6–v.32.7 32.6-7 On the medicinal properties of the herbs mentioned in these lines see SpE s.v. ‘plants, herbs’, but note that Belphoebe searches out only one ‘souveraine weede’ (33.1)—not all three—and that it may or may not have been one of those named by Spenser’s carefully equivocal narrator.

v.32.6 diuine Tobacco: From the name Sacra herba or Sancta herba; Sir Walter Ralegh played a central role in popularizing the use of tobacco in England upon its introduction in 1584.

v.32.7 Panachæa: From Gk πανακος panachos (‘all-healing’) the name of a plant reputed to possess universal healing power. Along with dittany (mentioned by Ariosto but replaced in Spenser with Tobacco) and ambrosia (the nectar of the gods), odoriferam panaceam (‘fragrant panacea’) is provided by Venus to treat Aeneas’s wound (Aen 12.419).

v.32.7 Polygony: Specially used for treating ‘greene’ (i.e., fresh) wounds.

v.33.4 scruze: Cf. II.xii.56.4, where we are told that Excesse ‘scruzd’ the ‘riper fruit’ into her cup, and 35.3 in this canto, which associates Belphoebe with a very different ‘bowre of blis’.

v.34.2–v.34.8 34.2-8 Timias lifts his gaze first ‘toward the azure skies’, but finds ‘divinities / And gifts of heavenly grace’ at his side, in the person of Belphoebe.

v.34.3 34.3 Contrast 29.3-4, where the congealing of moisture in the eyes is a sign of fading life.

v.35.5 35.5 A recurrent motif in Spenser, the surmise of divinity is taken from Homer by way of Virgil (see II.iii.33n). In context, it contrasts with the surmise of bestiality hinted at in Belphoebe’s confusion of Timias with the prey she hunts, a confusion repeated by her retinue (37.4-6).

v.35.7 35.7 Echoing 1 Pet 2:9, ‘him that hathe called you out of darnekes into his marveilous light’. If there is also an echo of John 1:5 (‘And the light shineth in the darkenes, and the darkenes comprehended it not’), then the allusion anticipates Timias’s backsliding into infatuation with Belphoebe in yet another of the canto’s reversals of direction.

v.35.9 sinfull wounds: See notes to st. 20 and 28.

v.36.3 woody Nymphe: The Nymph is Belphoebe’s nurse (32.4-5), not her birth mother.

v.37.1–v.37.2 former . . . after her: The wordplay extends the canto’s preoccupation with the trope of hysteron proteron and with the implications of the prefix for- (see 2.9n). Accordingly, this opening to the stanza is matched by a close in which the two swiftest nymphs ‘arrived at the last’.

v.38.1 boy: The office of squire to a knight is appropriate for a youth; ‘boy’ links Timias to Cupid and Adonis, the other wounded young men prominent in Book III.

v.39.1

st. 39-40

Spenser’s description of Belphoebe’s ‘Pavilion’ echoes Ovid’s account of Gargaphie succinctae sacra Dianae (‘Gargaphie, the sacred haunt of high-girt Diana’; Met 3.155-63), the retreat where Actaeon spies the goddess bathing and is then torn apart by his hounds. Spenser alludes to an earlier version of the Belphoebe story at Time 519-32, where the ‘pleasant Paradize’ whose destruction the speaker laments is compared to one made by Merlin ‘for the gentle squire, to entertaine / His fayre Belphoebe’. As this ‘gardin wasted quite’ anticipates the destruction of the Bower of Bliss in II.xii, so too the description of Belphoebe’s ‘Pavilion’ echoes the poem’s earlier, more heavily eroticized versions of the locus amoenus, e.g. II.v.27-35, II.xii.50-52, and III.i.20.4-7.

v.39.8–v.39.9 39.8-9 At II.v.30.1-4, the water playing over ‘pumy stones’ in the Bower of Bliss lulls the listener to sleep; in this more chaste locus, the river-currents complain at being restrained.

v.40.2 40.2 Virgil’s Corydon reports that formosae myrtus [gratissima] Veneri, sua laurea Phoebo (‘the myrtle [is most dear] to lovely Venus, and his own laurel to Phoebus’; Ecl 7.62). Ovid explains Venus’s preference for myrtle with a surprised-while-bathing story reminiscent of the Actaeon myth (Fasti 4.139-44; see st. 39-40n), and he describes Daphne’s transformation into a laurel (Gk 𝛿αϕν daphne ‘laurel’) to avoid rape by Apollo (Met 1.548-52). Allusions to Phoebus in this episode (cf. 27.9n) look forward to canto vi.

v.40.3–v.40.4 40.3-4 Cf. the description of the Bower at II.v.31.6-9 and xii.70-71, where the song of the birds gives pleasure only; here their love songs seem to alternate with sacred hymns.

v.41.7 redrest: Punning on the rhyme-word ‘drest’, since Belphoebe has just re-dressed the wound.

v.42.1

st. 42-43

Spenser reverses the situation in Ariosto, where it is Angelica rather than the wounded youth who suffers (see st. 27-54n). The contrast between Timias’s two wounds participates in a sustained and complex exploration in Book III of the conventional metaphor that characterizes love as a wound. This exploration begins with the tapestry image of Adonis ‘Deadly engored of a great wilde Bore’ (i.38.2); it continues in Britomart’s wounding by Gardante, in the subsequent account of her wounding by ‘the false Archer’ when she sees Artegall in her father’s mirror, and in the wound she inflicts on Marinell.

v.42.9 aleggeaunce: Also suggests ‘allegiance’, since this is what Timias is in the midst of transferring from Arthur to Belphoebe. And while it wouldn’t be heard in the word, the visual pun on ‘leg’ is hard to miss (no relief for Timias’s ‘thigh’).

v.43.1 43.1 The contrariety between the two wounds—one healing while a second is inflicted by that which heals the first—is here concentrated into the language describing the healing of the first wound: it ‘gathers’ in the sense of growing together, but also in the sense specific to wounds of becoming infected and swelling with pus; it grows ‘whole’, or healthy, but also ‘hole’, opening rather than closing up. The opening/closing wound presents yet another version of the pervasive conflicts of directionality in this canto.

v.44.2 44.2 The repetition of ‘dew’ sets up the terms of the lament in the next three stanzas: what is Belphoebe’s ‘dew reward’ (46.5) from Timias? And, though the question is vehemently disavowed, what is due to him for loving her?

v.44.5 soueraine bountie: supreme goodness (or generosity)

v.44.6 constraynd: The narrator obligingly endorses Timias’s portrayal of himself as a hapless victim of Belphoebe’s beauty.

v.45.1

st. 45-47

Timias’s lament in these stanzas echoes the three matched complaints in canto iv (see iv.55-60n).

v.45.1

st. 45

In accusing himself of ‘villeinous despight’, Timias declares the sexual nature of his desire for Belphoebe, albeit in the mode of a self-reproach bordering on the suicidal.

v.45.2 souerain mercy: Appearing for the third time in this episode, the word ‘sovereign’ accumulates resonance from Belphoebe’s allegorical link to Elizabeth I. Spenser says in FQ Letter 35-37 that the queen’s royal person is represented by Gloriana, whereas her private personage as ‘a most vertuous and beautifull Lady . . . in some places I do expresse in Belphœbe, fashioning her name after your own excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phœbe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.)’ He recurs to Ralegh’s poetic ‘worship’ of Elizabeth as a goddess in stanzas 3-5 of the proem to Book III (see notes). Spenser is careful to use ‘sovereign’ in this episode in its generalized sense of ‘preeminent’, but the insistent trace of royal status in this word points to the terms of the dilemma Timias shares with Ralegh: the queen’s ‘two persons’ cannot really be separated, and so the erotic devotion she is said to inspire in her private capacity as a beautiful woman must be restrained by the awe due to her royal majesty. Timias (again, like Ralegh) enacts the relation between the queen’s two bodies in a histrionics of desire at once ‘constraynd’ and proscribed.

v.46.3–v.46.4 46.3-4 The contrast between ‘fro me’ and ‘therefore’ participates in the canto’s sustained wordplay on for-.

v.46.6–v.46.9 46.6-9 In early modern usage ‘dye’, ‘serve’, and ‘service’ refer to sexual intercourse.

v.48.1 warreid: With overlapping puns on the homonyms ‘worried’ (in the early modern sense ‘harass, assail’) and ‘wearied’.

v.48.1 against his will: At 44.9 Timias is said to complain ‘of his lucklesse lott and cruell love’; here he is said to be at war with himself, and specifically with his own sexual urges (OED ‘will’ n.2, ‘carnal desire or appetite’).

v.48.9 calcineth by art: ‘Calcine’ is an alchemical term meaning ‘burn to a powder’, applied metaphorically to the metaphorical lightning that consumes Timias ‘by art’.

v.49.5–v.49.6 49.5-6 Another glance at Ariosto (see st. 27-54n, 42-43n), transferring the figure of melting snow from Angelica to Timias: la misera si strugge, come falda / strugger di nieve intempestiva suole, / ch’in loco aprico abbia scoperta il sole (‘the poor damsel wasted away, as a patch of snow out of season will waste when exposed on open ground to the sun’; OF 19.29.6-8).

v.50.4–v.50.6 Cordialles . . . Cordiall: from L cor heart, medicines that are good for the heart

v.50.9 that soueraine salue: See 45.2n. Here the veil of allegory thins, briefly, as the latent political meaning of ‘soveraine’ comes closer to the surface. Elizabeth’s royal status is allegorized as a kind of figurative divinity (cf. 35.5, 47.1-2), in which context her virginity appears as sacred, like Diana’s.

v.51.1

st. 51

Imitated from Catullus 62.39-47:

ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis, ignotus pecori, nullo convulsus aratro, quen mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber, iam iam se expandit suavesque expirat odores;* multi illum pueri, multae optavere puellae: idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui, nulli illum pueri, nullae optavere puellae: sic virgo dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est; cum castum amisit polluto corpore florem, nec pueris iucunda manet nec cara puellis.

(*missing line supplied by editorial conjecture)

As a flower springs up secretly in a fenced garden, unknown to the cattle, torn up by no plough, which the winds caress, the sun strengthens, the shower draws forth, and even now it unfolds and exhales sweet fragrance, many boys, many girls, desire it; when the same flower fades, nipped by a sharp nail, no boys, no girls desire it: so a maiden, while she remains untouched, the while she is dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.

Spenser’s echo of Catullus in the present episode is especially pointed in the way it plays against the Ariostan allusion: Angelica a Medoro la prima rosa / coglier lasciò, non ancor tocca inante: / né persona fu mai sì aventurosa, / ch’in quel giardin potesse por le piante (‘Angelica let Medoro pluck the first rose, hitherto untouched—no one had yet enjoyed the good fortune of setting foot in this garden’; OF 19.33.1-4).

The decorum of this stanza is at once risky and delicate, since Spenser as poet is venturing into the ‘secret store’ (50.9) where neither Ralegh nor Timias dares to tread (see pr.3.9n, pr.5.6-9n, and cf. II.iii.26.9n, II.iii.27.7-9n). The phrase ‘daughter of her Morne’ evokes Belphoebe’s youth but does so in a catachrestic figure that represents her virginity as precisely that which it prevents, offspring. The phrase ‘More deare than life’ reinforces this suggestion, implying that Belphoebe cherishes her own intactness more than Timias’s survival or the need to propagate. ‘The girlond of her honor did adorne’ implies a sense of display that runs counter to the privacy of ‘secret store’ (50.9), and the following lines play out these implications as the weather changes and Belphoebe allows her rose to spread its petals and ‘florish fayre’.

This doubleness runs through the diction of the lines as well: ‘lapped up’ means ‘wrapped’ or ‘folded’, but ‘lap’ is also a common early modern term for the genitals; ‘chayre’ describes how the petals are ‘lapped’ (dearly, from Fr cher), but also says what they are (Fr chaire flesh). In this diction and imagery the tensions surrounding the royal body natural are wrought to a fine pitch: at one extreme, the trope of catachresis respects the inexpressibility of the royal genitals, while at the other extreme the mimetic likeness of the opening rose to that which must not be named is no less unmistakable.

v.52.1

st. 52

The mythmaking in this stanza sustains the precarious ambiguities of st. 51. God and Paradise evoke the memory of Gen 1:28, ‘Bring forthe frute and multiplie, and fil the earth’; God’s act ‘enrace[s]’ the transplanted flower but also embodies it in a line of descent through ‘earthly flesh’. It inhabits a ‘race / Of woman kind’, where the line-break restricts the word for ‘house or family’ to a single sex whose relation to ‘kind’ (nature) is in question, and it ‘beareth fruit’ in a resonant reassertion of the catachresis that opens st. 51.

v.53.1 53.1 Sustaining the catachrestic plant metaphor, the ladies addressed directly in this stanza are called ‘ympes’, i.e. offshoots.

v.54.1 54.1 The framing of an example is the only way virginity can propagate, and is thus metaphorically a kind of asexual procreation.

v.54.5 Enuy: the modern sense predominates but may be colored by the proximate repetition of ‘envy’ as ‘deny’ at 50.7, 9.

v.54.9 her ensample dead: Cf. ‘his ymage dead’ at iii.29.2. The phrase may be construed ‘her example [which will live on] when she has died’, but in its compressed ambiguity it also recalls line 4, ‘none living may compayre’, and 51.2, ‘More deare than life’, reasserting the catachresis of the preceding stanzas and implying that Belphoebe’s example, however ‘fresh flowring’ it may be in the rhetoric of poetic ‘prayse’, cannot survive its own refusal of procreativity.

v.55.1 prayse: This usage condenses the poet’s celebration of Belphoebe with the virtuous conduct it celebrates, allying the two as forms of asexual reproduction.

v.55.4 those two vertues: Presumably chastity and courtesy, although the corollary presence of kindness, grace, and modesty does crowd the field.

v.55.6–v.55.9 55.6-9 Contrast the rivalry of Art and Nature at II.xii.59.5-6: ‘So striving each th’other to undermine, / Each did the others worke more beautify’.

v.55.7 encreast: A verb of precreation, often used to translate the Biblical commandment at Gen 1:22 (see st. 52n), and so used by Spenser at vi.34.6.