Edmund Spenser's Pictorial Power

Bloggers Community

Spenser’s masterpiece Fairy Queen is an exraordinary allegory. Dryden aptly remarks about Spenser: “ No man was ever born with a greater genius or more knowledge to support it”. He has been rightly described as the ‘poets’ poet’ as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites, and other numberless poets were immensely influenced by him. Spenser was able to finish only six books of the epic, though his aim was to write twelve books.

Spenser’s ‘sweet melodious sound’ was admired even by Shakespeare. Wordsworth aptly described him “Sweet Spenser, moving, through his clouded heaven / With the moon’s beauty and moon’s soft pace”.

Spenser was aware of twelve virtues described by Aristotle that are indispensable to make an ideal person. By what means is this attainable? This incredible task was done by Spenser in his timeless nd comprehesive creation Fairy Queen. He decided to write twelve books devoted to these ideal virtues. What a great and noble mission! This quest for the best in human natore, and to write 36,000 lines is a moral for all contemporay modern and postmodern authors.  But only six books of the epic Fairy Queen are available. These six virtues are Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy.

    Each book of the Fairy Queen describes a single virtue manifested by a Knight or a lady who succeeds in destroying the Evil. Spenser exemplifies each virtue. This reveals the remarkable and splendid structure of the epic. There are other very apt and powerful symbols. Lady Una is the symbol of true religion, and King Arthur is the symbol of moral perfection and magnificence.

The pictorial power of Spenser, the greatest poet-painter in the world of poetry, is quite evident in the following lines about Queen Elizabeth’s face:

Her face so fair, as flesh it seemëd not,
But heavenly portrait of bright angel’s hue,
Clear as the sky, without blame or blot,
Through goodly mixture of complexions due;
And in her cheek the vermeil red did show
Like roses in a bed of lilies shed,
 Which ambrosial odours from them threw
And gazers’ sense with double pleasure fed,
Able to heal the sick and to revive the dead.

    While reading the Fairy Queen, we see most attractive pictures of forests, lakes, caves and palaces, knights and ladies. The images are very concrete, vivid and pictorial. “Of the colour, the savour, the music of life, Spenser’s poem is full-only the colour is brighter, the taste sweeter, the music grander than any which mortal senses know” (Moody & Lovett).

     Renwick aptly comments: “Shakespeare himself might not have achieved so much, if Spenser had not lived and laboured.”