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COMPLAINTS (1591) XXXI
beauties revealed to his imagination had power to drive away the sullea
care which afflicted him
Through discontent of his long fruitlesse staye
In princes court, and expectation vavne
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away
At Kilcolman, by the side of the Mulla, in the country whose beauty he
had come to love, he was content It is as fatal to high poetic achievement
to live in the strenuous pursuit of fortune as to be condemned to uninterrupted
distance from the kind . In truth, life in Ireland, with
occasional visits to England, to quicken and to feed his interest in affairs,
and at the same time to make him appreciate more fully the peace that
awaited him at home, was a good life for the poet, and he knew it
To Ireland he returned, probably in the spring of 1591, 1 leaving behind
him, ready for publication, his volume of Complaints
This volume, as we have seen, contains work completed during his
stay in London, but it takes us back to his earliest years of authorship
We can safely attribute to his undergraduate days the Visions of du Bellay
and the Visions of Petrarch, a mere rehandling of the versions he had
written for Van der Noodt The former are turned with as little change
as possible from blank verse to sonnets of Shakespearian form, and a few
poems omitted by Van der Noodt are added to the series (6, 8, 13, 14)
The latter needed less manipulation, for he had rhymed them in his
earlier version , but in four of the first six he had originally kept to the
twelve lines of Marot's rendering, and these he expanded to sonnet form, m
place of the quatrain which in 1569 closed the series he now added a sonnet
of his own rhyme system (abab bcbc cdcd ee) To the same period belongs
1 The exact time at which Spenser returned to Ireland cannot be determined with
certainty He dated Daphnaida from London * this first of Jan 1591', which
according to the old style of reckoning, by which the year began with March 25,
would mean 1592 On the other hand, Colin Clout is dated from Kilcolman, December
27, 1591. A journey from Ireland could hardly have been made m three days,
and we have to choose between regarding either (1) one or other of the dates as a misprint,
or (2) the dating of Daphnaida as intentionally according to the new style,
or (3) the dating of Colin Clout from Kilcolman as a ruse to fit in with the general
conception of the poem Mr P Long has argued ably for the last alternative, but
I cannot bring myself to accept it Though much of the detail and the setting of
the poem is undeniably fictitious, its whole spirit suggests to my mind that Spenser
had actually returned to Ireland when he wrote it, and was reviewing for Ralegh's
pleasure and his own satisfaction his visit to London, its disappointments and consolations
But in any case, Spenser was in London in December 1590, when his
Complaints was entered at the Stationers' Hall The statement, therefore, in my
preface to the Minor Poems of Spenser, Clarendon Press, 1910 (p xvII), that the
venture of the publisher was undertaken after Spenser's departure over sea, and that
therefore he had no opportunity of correcting the proofs, is justly pointed out by
Mr Long as untenable It is indeed quite likely that he did not see the proofs,
but he cannot have been innocent of the publication of the volume, though its
contents suggest reasons why he might wish to appear so, and the Preface contributed
by Ponsonby must have been a piece of intentional mystification
SPENSER b