st. 1
The question here ascribed to ‘faire Ladies’ echoes that of Braggadocchio upon Belphoebe’s first appearance in the poem (II.iii.39), although he sees the court as a palace of pleasure rather than as ‘The great schoolmaistresse of all courtesy’.
pierst into her wombe: Early modern paintings of the Annunciation often feature a ray of light penetrating an enclosed space, as in Fra Angelico’s altarpiece The Annunciation (c. 1426) in the Museo Del Prado, Madrid.
http://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/online-gallery/on-line-gallery/obra/the-annunciation/
st. 11-26
The birth of Chrysogonee’s twins is embedded in a digression based on Moschus’s pastoral idyll ‘The Fugitive Love’. In the gloss to SC March 79, E.K. mentions this poem as having been translated into Latin by Poliziano and into English by Spenser. Tasso in 1581 had based an epilogue to the Aminta, entitled ‘Amore Fuggitivo’, on the same poem, and Spenser now elaborates its incipient narrative still more fully.
In the process he continues to use the romance convention of interweaving storylines to create a sliding movement of displacement: thus the consummation denied Timias is attained in a different key and setting by Titan’s bright beams; Venus searching for Cupid (Amor) will find Amoret; and the sequence wounding-courtship-consummation-impregnation-parturition will lead to a garden where ‘the fruitfull seades / Of all things living’ (8.3-4) play out their life-cycle in the poem’s narrative.
st. 13-15
The progression from courts to the country appears in Tasso’s Prologue, where Cupid in pastoral disguise mentions that Venus would confine him tra le corti e tra corone e scettri (‘among the courts and among the crowns and sceptres’; line 18), and that he has escaped to dwell ne’ boschi e ne le case / de le genti minute (‘in the woods and in the houses of the humble folk’; lines 31-32).
st. 25
Given Diana’s snide reference to Venus’s affair with Mars at 24.3, it is ironic that Venus now uses the same wiles to ‘disarm’ Diana; on the love of Venus and Mars as an allegory of concord, see Wind (1968: 85-96) and the prayer to Venus in Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.29-49.
27.1-3 See Gen 3:16, ‘In sorrowe shalt thou bring forthe children’, and the notes to st. 3. The birth is ‘wondrous’ because it bypasses the effects of the fall and of original sin. See Aquinas, Summa III, q. 35, art. 6, ‘Whether Christ was born without His mother suffering?’:
The pains of childbirth in the woman follow from the mingling of the sexes. Wherefore (Genesis 3:16) after the words, ‘in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’, the following are added: ‘and thou shalt be under thy husband’s power’. But, as Augustine says (Serm. de Assumpt. B. Virg., Supposititious), from this sentence we must exclude the Virgin-Mother of God; who, ‘because she conceived Christ without the defilement of sin, and without the stain of sexual mingling, therefore did she bring Him forth without pain, without violation of her virginal integrity, without detriment to the purity of her maidenhood’.
st. 28
This stanza dividing the twins at birth also separates the canto into halves of twenty-seven stanzas each, just as Belphoebe’s arrival on the scene (st. 28) did in canto v.
st. 29-50
See note to arg. 3. In the architecture of the 1590 poem, Spenser’s Garden of Adonis is poised in contrast to both the Bower of Bliss at II.xii and the House of Busyrane at III.xii; it has clear links as well to the story of Venus and Adonis portrayed in Malecasta’s tapestries (III.i.34-38). As part of an ongoing engagement with Ovid in Book III, Spenser’s description of the Garden elevates and transforms the concept of metamorphosis much as the visionary speech of Pythagoras does in the final book of Metamorphoses (esp. 15.176-258). For the influence of Virgil (Aen 6.724-51) and Virgilian commentaries in mediating the Platonic doctrine of reincarnation to the Renaissance, see Wilson-Okamura (2010: 178-87).
In the critical tradition, this passage has provoked a series of either/or questions that it does not resolve: Is the Garden singular or plural? Does it exist inside or outside of the sublunary world? Are its most important philosophical debts to Plato and Neoplatonism or to Epicurus and Lucretian materialism? Does the grim reaper Time, described in stanzas 39-40, operate inside or outside of the Garden? Is the ‘wide wombe of the world’, said in st. 36 to contain ‘An huge eternal Chaos’, located inside or outside of the Garden? The persistence of such questions suggests that the signature trope for the Garden may well be amphibole (see 4.2n): the language of the Garden is itself generative.
The Garden is said to be ‘the first seminary / Of all things’ (30.4-5, emphasis added), but is bounded by ‘two walls’ with ‘double gates’, attended by a porter ‘the which a double nature has’ (st. 31), and characterized by ‘continuall Spring, and harvest there / Continuall, both meeting at one tyme’ (42.1-2). The implication is that the origin and continuity of the created universe depend upon a primordial coupling of opposites, including matter and form, life and death, nature and art. This coupling is figured by heterosexual copulation, although sexuality in the Garden is not specifically human but rather polymorphous and coextensive with the material world of natura naturans (nature as process).
The Gardin of Adonis: See arg.3n. Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus (276b) compares the writing down of ideas—as opposed to developing them through dialogue—to the planting of seeds in a small ‘forcing’ garden, i.e. one that uses artificial means to hasten the maturity of seedlings. Erasmus, citing Plato, Plutarch, and Theocritus, gives the proverb ‘more fruitless than gardens of Adonis’ (Adages 1.1.14). Spenser retains the association with fertility but not the disparaging tone of these references, perhaps following Conti, who reports that Athenians in ancient times ‘used to sow wheat and barley in fields near the city, and they called those places (that were sown with fruit-bearing trees) the Gardens of Adonis. Theocritus, in his discussion of the Adonia celebrants [participants in the rites sacred to Adonis], recalls those fruits that they offered to Adonis: “For there’s not a fruit the orchard bears but is here for his hand to take” (15.112)’ (Myth 439).
Other literary sources for Spenser’s Garden include the description in Lucretius of the mundi novitatem, ‘the world’s infancy’ (De rerum natura 5.780-924); the paradisal garden ‘consecrate to pleasure and to Venus’ in Claudian, ‘Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria’ (49-96); and the garden of Nature in Chaucer, PF 171-294. See SpE s.v. ‘Adonis, gardens of’.
30.1-6 The movement from ‘goodly flowres’ to ‘all things’ turns flowers into figures of all living things understood according to their species. (Flowers are also a conventional figure for rhetorical devices—a trope for tropes.)
The qualification ‘According to their kynds’ echoes Gen 1:24-25; it is also given special weight in Lucretius, who argues that ‘because every kind is produced from fixed seeds, the source of everything that is born and comes forth into the borders of light is that wherein is the material of it and its first bodies’ (De rerum natura 1.169-71: seminubus quia certis quaeque creantur, / inde enascitur atque oras in liminis exit, / materies ubi inest cuiusque et corpora prima). In other words, for Lucretius the fact that things grow from seeds, not randomly or ex nihilo, means that the ‘first seminary’ of each species is ‘its own proper material’ (1.191: sua de materia). This account contrasts with that of the soul’s afterlife and its reincarnation offered by Socrates in the Phaedo (70-72) and the Republic (617e-620e).
31.5-7 See st. 29-50n; also Plato, Phaedo 71e-72a on reincarnation, as well as Job 3:10 (‘the dores of my mothers wombe’) and Ps 9:13 (‘the gates of death’).
The combination of doubling and ambiguity in these lines lends itself to many construals. Comparison to the double gates of Alma’s house (II.ix.23 and 32) suggests that the Garden may reverse the bodily processes of ingestion, digestion, and excretion. The ‘Doubly disparted’ gate through which the knights enter Alma’s castle is framed ‘of more worthy substance’, and is the way ‘by which all in did pass’; through the contrasting ‘backgate’, excrement is ‘avoided quite, and throwne out privily’. The Garden, by contrast, has ‘double gates’ through which ‘both in and out men moten pas; / Th’one faire and fresh, the other old and dride’. This ambiguous syntax either breaks down the distinction between Alma’s entrance and exit or reverses the analogy, yielding a golden wall with a gate through which fair and fresh ‘men’ exit, and an iron wall with a gate through which old and dried ‘men’ enter.
st. 34
Here again Spenser fuses the Epicurean teaching that living things grow according to their species with echoes from the account of Eden in Genesis (1:22-25), although as L. Silberman observes with respect to the first line, ‘this is an Eden without Adam’ (1995: 45).
st. 36
Spenser’s account of Chaos fuses classical with scriptural precedents. The most important classical description of Chaos is that of Ovid, Met 1.5-20. Arthur Golding, in the Epistle to his 1567 translation, proposes that Ovid’s account is based on scripture (342-49). In 1596, Spenser will locate Chaos ‘Downe in the bottome of the deepe Abysse’ (IV.ii.47.6), echoing the Vulgate’s translation of Gen 1:2, Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi (‘And the earth was without forme and voyde, and darknes was upon the depe’).
Spenser’s stanza echoes classical arguments that the sum total of matter in the created universe never changes (Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.215-64; Ovid, Met 15.251-58), but it does so in support of the hexameral argument that new matter is produced out of Chaos. This matter has been identified with Augustine’s prima materia, although the plural ‘substaunces’ might seem rather to imply the Lucretian idea that each species possesses a kind of matter proper to itself (see 30.1-6n and 35.5-7n).
This may in turn suggest that Spenser identifies Chaos not only with the abyss out of which God created the universe, but also with the state into which matter returns when it loses its form in death. So in Rome 307-8, ‘The seedes, of which all things at first were bred, / Shall in great Chaos wombe againe be hid’. On this reading Chaos would be ‘inside’ the Garden insofar it refigures the transition elsewhere associated with the return through ‘the hinder Gate’ (32.9; see notes to st. 31-33).
38.1-7 See Lucretius, De rerum natura 2.1002-06:
nec sit interemit mors res ut meteriai corpora conficat, sed coetum dissupat ollis, inde aliis aliud coniugit; et effit ut omnes res ita convertant formas mutentque colores et capiant snesus et puncto tempore reddant;
Nor does death so destroy as to annihilate the bodies of matter, but it disperses their combination abroad, and then conjoins others with others; and its effect is that thus all things turn their shapes and change their colours and receive sensation and at a given time yield it up again;
st. 39-40
As W. Hyman observes of st. 39, ‘The first thing this description of time should recall to the reader is Guyon’s own handiwork in the Bower’ (2007: 212).
Since Time as the grim reaper Saturn is an enemy only to individual creatures, not to the ‘shapes’ or species-forms that are ‘bred’ in the Garden (35.1), the suggestion that Time may be cutting down ‘all . . . That in the Gardin of Adonis springs’ while it is still growing in the Garden has proven confusing to readers and commentators. If, however, ‘it’ in 39.1 refers to the lilly of 38.9, then ‘all the rest’ must designate the host of embodied creatures who take their origin from the Garden but live and die in the world. At the same time, the ‘mowing’ of these creatures may be viewed either as passage out of the world or as re-entry into the Garden. In this sense the process lamented in these stanzas as destruction corresponds to that described from the opposite perspective at 33.1-4: ‘After that they againe retourned beene, / They in that Gardin planted bee agayne; / And grow afresh, as they had never seene / Fleshly corruption, nor mortall payne’. See 40.6n; for a similar doubling of perspectives, see II.xii.1.4n and the discussion of fomes peccati in the introduction to Book II (p. 000). Spenser’s description of the Garden repeatedly telescopes opposed perspectives into a single phrase or image (see st. 48n); in this sense the locus is always both singular and plural at the same time (see arg.3n)
spyde: Breaks the rhyme-scheme; Church (1758) points out that ‘saw’ would fit.
Presumably Venus is viewing the old and dried forms that have returned to the Garden for replanting. Spenser’s narrative fictionalizes different perspectives on a single event (death) as successive stages in a process (being mowed down, returning to the Garden, being replanted there).
st. 41
This description of gratification untroubled by hostility, jealousy, or censure suggests that the Garden is a locus of sexuality viewed as a natural function rather than as a human experience fraught with emotional complexity, regulated by social custom, law, and religious or ethical principles. This does not mean human sexuality is excluded from the Garden, only that it is represented there under the aspect of generative nature personified by Venus genetrix. Hence the blurring of distinctions in lines 7-8, where the terms ‘Paramor’ and ‘leman’ initially suggest human sexual partners, but then give way to ‘Each bird his mate’ without distinguishing whether the phrases are offered as alternatives or equivalents.
st. 42-45
Spenser’s description of the Garden as a locus amoenus should be compared to the equivalent stanzas in his description of the Bower of Bliss. Both passages echo descriptions of paradisal gardens in Homer, Genesis and the Song of Songs, Ovid, Ariosto, and Tasso (see II.xii.42, 51-52 and notes).
st. 43-44
This description of Venus’s bower (46.1) represents an anamorphic mons veneris.
st. 45
The shift in this stanza from natural vegetation (sweet-briar and honeysuckle) to an anthology of metamorphoses signals the return of an allegory of poesis and an engagement with Ovid that recur throughout the canto. This resurgence of literariness within the garden of natural reproduction is accompanied by a clustering of allusions to contemporary writers, detailed in the notes below. There may even be a witty play with form in a stanza of only eight lines whose subject is ‘sad lovers’ cut off in youth; 1609 adds a half-line—‘And dearest love’, following ‘paramoure’ (line 3)—whose effect is only to heighten the sense of formal incompletion.
47.8-9 Cf. 9.1-2, ‘Great father he [the sun] of generation / Is rightly cald, th’authour of life and light’. Adonis becomes ‘the Father of all formes’ specifically in copulating with Venus. On heterosexual coupling as an imaginative solution to the philosophical problem of how forms can be joined with matter—unresolvable within the terms of Platonic metaphysics—see Teskey (1994 and 1996). The ‘copula’ Spenser here envisions is at once sexual (although it reverses Plato’s vertical positioning of the partners within the coupling) and grammatical: unless forms can be embodied in matter, it becomes impossible to predicate the existence of things.
Hamilton follows Lewis (1966) in proposing that Spenser identifies Adonis with matter and Venus with form, but Spenser’s Adonis may be better explained by the Epicurean notion that different kinds of matter contain ‘seeds’ (primordia or semina) out of which forms grow. Forms come and go as creatures live and die, but Lucretius argues that the principle of continuity that enables natural forms to recur must inhere within matter, since otherwise anything could arise from anything else, whereas we see in nature that oaks grow only from acorns, and acorns grow only from oaks. Spenser’s Adonis is ‘lapped’ within the anamorphic pudendum of the Garden like a Lucretian seed-principle harbored within matter: not separable from matter, but certainly not coextensive with it, especially when matter is thought of, contra Lucretius, as opposed to form.
st. 48
In line 4, ‘cloyd’ means both ‘pierced’ and ‘surfeited’, and as such offers an exemplary moment in this stanza’s doubling of its cast, insinuating an identity between the boar that gores Adonis and the lover who satiates him. The logic of this identification would seem to be that of 42.1-2 (see note), with spring and harvest, or birth and death, ‘both meeting at one tyme’, or of 46.5, where ‘flowres and pretious spycery’ lap Adonis in connotations at once of blossoming and of embalming. This doubling of Venus and the boar is reinforced by the fact that the wounding of Adonis was proverbially genital; Golding’s Ovid goes so far as to specify ‘his codds’ as the location of the wound (10.839).
These doublings, difficult to hold in mind, are at once complicated and reenforced by the parallel between Venus and Adonis in the Garden and the wounding of Timias in the preceding canto. There, Belphoebe pursues a wounded beast whose trail leads her to Timias, implying the possibility of a supplementary identification between the wounded boy and the boar. She then heals his thigh-wound (as Venus preserves Adonis), but in doing so wounds his heart (as if reviving the role of boar, or Foster-with-boarspear, on another level). Similarly, the language of the present stanza not only hints at an identification of the Venus who preserves Adonis with the boar that wounds him, but also suggests a supplementary analogy between Adonis ‘lapped’ in her genital arbor and the boar ‘emprisoned’ in her cave: in the logic of the allegory, it is precisely by harboring Adonis ‘from the skill / Of Stygian Gods’ (46.6-7), perpetually enclosed within Nature’s vagina, that she can shut the boar away from him ‘for ay’.
st. 49-51
These stanzas begin to isolate within the Garden a specifically human domain of erotic experience, represented by the suffering of Psyche and her eventual reconciliation with Cupid.
st. 51
The narrative here returns to the preceding episode, which served to induct us into the Garden. This return is anticipated in st. 49 (see 49.5-9n).
st. 54
In returning us to the adventures of Florimell, the narrative closes off a digressive loop that began with Timias’s decision to pursue the Foster, leaving the pursuit of Florimell to Arthur and Guyon (iv.47.1-4).
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