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XX
INTRODUCTION
of Spenser For this strange pastoral country, with its ideal atmosphere
that gives to Intimate personal allusion the remoteness of romance , with
its unilque Blending of artifice and simplicity, of nature and convention,
of deep moral earnestness and tender delicacy of feeling, is, in spite of
alt that it has borrowed, a world of Spenser's own It lies along the
high-road that leads him to Faery land
Though the Shepheardes Calender was the only work published by
Spenser at this period, he was already known in his own circle as a prolific
writer E K speaks of ' his Dreames, his Legendes, his Court of Cupid,
and sondry others', and alludes in the Gloss to Pageants, a translation of
Moscbus' Idyllion of Wandering Love, and a * sonett', in the Harvey
correspondence of 1579-80 there is reference again to the Dreames,
and to a Dying Pellcane, an Epithalamion Thamesis, My Slomber, Stemmata
Dudleiana, to ' Nine Comedies named after the nine Muses \ and to
parcels of the Faerie Queene We may also safely conjecture that at
least the first draft of several of the poems published in 1591 was written
by 1580, as well as the bulk of those mentioned in Ponsonby's preface 1
to the volume It is a formidable list, and even if it contains much that
was in part at least composed at an earlier date, in Cambridge or the
North, it is proof enough that Spenser was busily occupied Some of this
work is irrecoverably lost, but not a little seems to have been revised and
adapted for incorporation into later poems The Dreames, of which
Spenser speaks as * presently to be imprinted, and growen by meanes of
a Gloss full as great as my Calendar', may have found a place among the
Visions of the Complaints, the Latin Stemmata Dudleiana may well
have been utilized in The Ruines of Ttme , and other poems adapted
to embellish the decorative episodes of the Faerie Queene—the Court of
Cupid, for the Masque of Cupid in the third book and the Court in
the sixth, the Epithalamion Thamesis for the marriage of the Thames and
the Medway in the fourth, and the Legendes and Pageants, for some of the
incidental and masque-like allegories, such as the seven deadly sins, or the
procession of the'months and seasons But this is mere conjecture,
however probable , and in adapting his early poetry to its new surroundings
Spenser must often have practically rewritten it A good deal of it
was certainly tentative and experimental, both in form and language
The elaborate artificiality of style which delighted Harvey in the Dreames
must have afforded a bold contrast with the Sbepbeardes Calender, and
though it is probable that Spenser wrote chiefly in those different decasyllabic
stanza forms of which he was already a master, his metrical range
was from the homely ' sonett' in verse of six accents 2 to the classical
experiments exploited by Sidney and the Areopagus Of that ' unhappie
verse, the witnesse of his unhappie state,3 it is safe to surmise that little
1 Vide p 470
2 Vide Gloss to October ' as soote as Swanne', &c , p 459
3 Vide Iambi cum Trimetrum, p 636