1.11: Spenser is translating Marot’s translation of Petrarch’s canzone 323, the so-called ‘Canzone of Visions’. The source canzone is constructed in twelve-line stanzas with a regular, if complex rhyme scheme, with a three-line tornata at the conclusion; Marot’s translation preserves the organization of the poem in twelve-line units, but changes the rhyme scheme. As to format, all editions of the Theatre follow the layout of illustrated manuscript editions of Marot’s translation from the 1560s, which display only one twelve-line unit per opening.

1.11: One of two of the epigrams that Spenser has translated in sonnet form, expanding Marot’s twelve lines to fourteen.

1.1–1.31.1-3: Spenser’s syntax in these opening lines supports the general theme of the vain and transitory character of the world. No visionary ‘I’ organizes the lines; the first person leaves only traces—on my window and in the two objects (me) of hapned (indirect) and grieved (direct). Instead, Spenser gives us an absolute construction in the first line, the participle in which (being) can be attached only to an ‘I’ that appears nowhere in the sentence, and is followed by two impersonal constructions, [it] hapned and it grieveth. Indeed, these opening lines are remarkable for a dreamlike ellipsis of specific subjects: if the visionary ‘I’ does not securely manifest its presence, the things seen are not much more syntactically assertive, at least within this three-line introduction to the sequence. (Things appears at first to be the subject of hapned, but is, in fact, the object of to see.)

1.41.4-8: Van der Noot glosses this vision as an allegory for the death of Petrarch’s Laura, pursued by the dogs of destiny or appointed time (‘by the houndes white and black he understode the daye and nyght’; 382-3).

1.5 the greatest God: the adjective can function as a superlative (‘the greatest of the Gods’) or as an absolute superlative; the phrase in the French source, souverain des Dieux (B1v), cannot be understood as absolute.

1.8–1.9 With deadly force so . . . pinchte: So can modify either deadly force (i.e. ‘with such deadly force’) or pinchte in 9. Spenser’s sources -- mordean sì forte (Petrarch) and mordoint si fort (Marot) -- would authorize either construction.

1.12 vntimely dide: Possibly influenced by van der Noot’s interpretation of the sonnet as an allegory of the depredations of time, and certainly responding to his own formulation two lines earlier, ‘in shorte time, I spied’, Spenser has introduced this characterization of the death of the hind, which is not to be found in Petrarch’s original or Marot’s translation.

1.13 1.13-14: Spenser here introduces a temporal idea not present in his sources. Marot follows Petrarch closely, using a past tense to describe how the cruelty of death vanquished (vanquit, B1v) beauty and how destiny makes the speaker sigh (souspirer me feit); Spenser’s absolute construction (death vanquishing) and his Oft makes me waile suggests that the experience of the vision takes place in a grievous, perpetually renewed present.

2.1 2.1-6: Again van der Noot will construe the vulnerable thing at the center of the vision as a figure for Laura: the ebony of the ship as her black brows, its ivory, her skin; the ship’s gold sails and silk tackle are said to stand both for her clothing and for her precious virtues; see 385-9.

2.7 turmoyle: The verb is often used to describe the effect of storms on the sea. The slightly unusual transfer to the air evokes an abnormal turbulence.

2.12 riches: probably to be construed as ‘wealth, richesse’ rather than as ‘valuable things’: with metrical stress falling on the second syllable, it is closely allied to the abstract term richesse in Marot’s version.

3.1 3: Of the Epigrams, only the first and this third poem are sonnets. Making this formal shift, Spenser may simply be succumbing to the difficulty of rendering Marot’s douzaine in twelve English lines; he may also have adopted the sonnet form as an homage to Petrarch, widely felt to be the master of the form, for this particular poem takes up one of the central images of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, the laurel tree. In this poem and elsewhere in Petrarch’s collection, the image of the flourishing laurel effects a congruence between the apparently divergent objects of Petrarch’s longing, the beloved Laura and the fame that might accrue to poetic achievement, an achievement that might be recognized by the award of a laurel crown.

3.2 fresh and lusty: Since the phrasing here is closer to Petrarch’s ‘giovenetto e schietto’ than to Marot’s simple ‘jeune’ (E2v), one might conclude that Spenser had consulted Petrarch’s original. But the lines immediately following track Marot in a firm departure from his Petrarchan source.

3.3 3.3-6: The full stop after ‘melodie’ clarifies the syntax of a sentence left uncertain in Le Theatre. Marot’s translation had departed from the logic of the Petrarchan original in which the speaker’s sense of the paradisiacal nature of the tree derives from its freshness and lustiness; in Marot’s poem and Spenser’s translation, the speaker derives this sense of the tree’s paradisiacal nature from the plenitude of birds in its branches. (When Spenser revised the translation for VP, he worked to recover the fundamental logic of Petrarch’s lines.)

3.4 noble: Spenser departs from his sources here, as he will at line 12 below, where he describes the tree as royall. He may have been inspired to this diction by Roest’s translation of Van der Noot’s commentary on the previous poem, where Laura’s virtues are described as ‘noble and excellent’ ( 390).

3.6 melodie: Van der Noot comments that the birds’ song represents Laura’s conversation and song (F4v).

3.14 shadow: The word manages to refer at once to the tree, its shadow, and the visionary experience at the moment of their combined passing-away.

4.4 homely . . . ruder: The adjectives insist on a rusticity not emphasized in Petrarch or Marot. For a similar non-comparative use of ‘ruder’, see the ‘ruder clowne’ of FQ VI.x.7.4, and cf. the ‘viler clowne’ of Oct 97.

4.6–4.7 That sweetely . . . fall.: Spenser’s subsequent poetry recurs frequently to this accord of song and the sound of falling water, which he came to treat as the sign of a poetry that, while rural, could also claim, perhaps by virtue of its harmony with the natural order, the right to speak of higher things. In April, Colin is said to have made his song in praise of Elisa, Queene of shepheardes while lying beside a spring and to have tuned it unto the Waters fall (35-6; and see also the lament in June, 155-6). The laments of The Teares of the Muses are similarly powred forth . . . Beside the silver Springs of Helicone (4-5) and there the Muses teach the trembling streames . . . to beare . . . A Bases part (25-8). Again, in FQ, the Nymphes and Faeries at the base of Mt. Acidale are found sitting by the banks of a gentle flud . . . And to the waters fall tuning their accents fit (VI.x.7.1 and 9). Noting the shift in this line, possibly inadvertent, from the pentameter norm of the rest of the Epigrams to an alexandrine, John Hollander remarks (1988, 173-6) on the important congruence of this ‘scene’ of acoustic concord with Spenser’s first use of that metrical extension which would be one of the distinguishing features of the FQ stanza. For more on this attunement, see P. Cheney, 1997, 72-3.

4.9 chiefe: As in Marot, no lesser delights are explicitly named, although Spenser’s line suggests that the pleasure of the sight may exceed the pleasure of the accorde of voice and waters. In Petrarch there is no competition between sight and sound, instead, they collaborate to produce a sweetness that by its very increase seems to trigger the onset of loss—quando / più dolcezza prendea . . . / . . . aprir vidi uno speco (‘when / I took more sweetness . . . / . . . I saw a chasm open’).

5.1 Phœnix: In Epigrams 5.7, Martial compares the longevity and resilience of Rome to that of the phoenix. Petrarch emphasizes the self-destruction of the phoenix, suppressing its capacity for self-renewal. On the singularity of the Phoenix, see above, Epistle 29.

5.5 Vntill: The speaker relinquishes the thought that the bird is some heauenly wight upon witnessing its arrival at the scenes of prior desolation described in the previous two Epigrams. This changing-of-mind is somewhat more explicit in Marot (don pensay . . . jusque à tant / Qu’il vint à; ‘wherefore I thought . . . until / it arrived at’) and Petrarch (prima pensai, fin ch’ . . . giunse; ‘at first I thought, until . . . it reached’).

5.7 we see: The characterization of the transitory things as transitory visibilia is Spenser’s own invention, and it throws emphasis on the importance of viewing to the sensation of loss. The detail is especially fitting since, in this poem, the phoenix is at once the object of the speaker’s gaze and, itself, a gazer, looking on the same broken tree and spring late devoured that the speaker earlier viewed. Whereas the speaker of the prior poems responds to the vision of loss with grief, the Phoenix responds with disdaine.

5.11 dide: In Spenser’s sources, the Phoenix disappears.

5.12 pitie and loue: The Phoenix’s death excites emotions not evinced by the prior visions.

6.1 At last: Perhaps suggesting that the appearance of a Lady in this sixth and final vision has been elicited by the new depth and generosity of the speaker’s response to the death of the Phoenix in the fifth vision, his pitie and love. In both poems, the speaker is said to respond with burning.

6.2 thinking: Whereas Marot’s songeant suggests some continuity between the vision of the Lady and the ruminative experience that makes the speaker burne and quake, Spenser’s thinking recurs to Petrarch’s phrasing—che mai nol penso ch’i’non arda et treme (‘of which I never think without burning and trembling’)—which marks a sharper rift between the vision and the emotional reflection on that vision. The phrasing here and the choice of proudely at line 4, which recovers the force of Petrarch’s superba (‘proud,’ which Marot has nearly lost in his contre amour rebelle, ‘rebel against Love’), suggest that Spenser has here consulted Marot’s Petrarchan source.

6.5 White seemed hir robes: Whereas in Petrarch, the weaving creates the effect of snow and gold combined, in Spenser’s version snow and gold seem to be the very constituents of the fabric. Spenser’s slight invention here is perhaps inspired by the dense verbal texture in the French version, for Marot describes the fabric as made with such art that gold and snow ensemble / sembloient meslez (‘seem commingled together’; B6v).

6.8 6.8: Recalling the death of Eurydice, stung by a snake on the occasion of her marriage (Virgil, Georgics, 4.457-9; Ovid, Met 10.30).

6.11 in earth: Although the Lady of this douzaine mounts up to joy, in sustains the idea of Eurydicean entombment, an idea reinforced by the phrasing of Marot’s envoy, which concludes with a longing for a conspicuously subterranean death (soubz la terre gesir).

7.3 yelde . . . a sweete request: Spenser seems to be straining to secure a rhyme for rest; the phrase very imperfectly renders Marot’s donne ung doulx plaisir (‘gives a sweet pleasure’) and Petrarch’s àn fatto un dolce . . . desio (‘has produced a sweet desire’). The substantial revision of the envoy for Bellay may well stem from Spenser’s dissatisfaction with this particular line.