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XXXIV INTRODUCTION
express the spirit in which Spenser wrote it It is surely a mistake to
read into this delicious jeu d? esprit a moral or satirical intention. For
once Spenser was not sage nor serious, but simply a poet, spinning for
sheer delight in his craft a web of verse as delicate as Arachne's The
fineness of Spenser's art is often shown m his delineation of insects,1
here his butterfly is Exquisitely painted, and so lovely is the garden
into which he strays that Milton drew hints from it for his Paradise
Muiopotmos stands with Nymphidta and the fairy scenes of A Midsummer
Night's Dream as the most charming of Elizabethan fantasies
Here and there in Muiopotmos are lines which show that Spenser's
love of Chaucer had not waned , and this is still clearer from Daphnatda,
which celebrates the mourning of Sir Arthur Gorges for his lost wife
In writing this lament for a lady with whom he had no personal acquaintance
he turned to the Boke of the Duckesse, where Chaucer was engaged
upon a similar task , and both in his general design and in many details
he is indebted to his master 2 But Chaucer's octosyllabics he felt to
be unsuited both to the subject and to his own genius All through
the volume of Complaints he had been experimenting in different
combinations of the five-foot line 3 here, in Daphnaida, by transposing
the fifth and sixth lines of the verse royal and thus avoiding the couplet
ending, he invents a new stanza of singular sweetness and beauty
Back in Ireland, Spenser settled down once more to the duties of his
clerkship, and to the management of his estate A quarrel with his
neighbour, Lord Roche, had troubled him before his departure, and though
this was settled, apparently in his favour, at the English courts, another
dispute with Roche over three plough-lands, which Spenser was accused of
appropriating, converting * a grete deale of corne growinge thereuppon
to his proper use, to the damage of the complainant of two hundred
pounds sterling', seems to have gone against him On the slender evidence
before us it is unnecessary to take sides between the disputants As an
Englishman and an uncompromising friend of Grey's Spenser is certain
to have been disliked by his more powerful Irish neighbours, and he is not
likely to have concealed his own feelings with regard to them But it is
easy to make too much of these petty worries , for it is clear enough that
they did not seriously disturb his happiness and peace of mind The years
into which he had now entered show great poetic productiveness His
1 Cf e g his description of the gnat as ' alitle nourshng of the humid ayre '
(Virgils Gnat, 283), and the simile of the shepherd annoyed by gnats {Faerie Queene,
1 1 33), where his sympathy is all on the side of the insects
2 Vide Nadal, Daphnaida and the Boke of the Duchesse (Mod Lang Assoc Am ,
vol xxiii, 1908), where the analogy is elaborately worked out
' In Mother Hubberds Tale the heroic couplet, in Rutnes of Time the rhyme
royal, in The Teares of the Muses the six line decasyllabic (ababcc) (of Shepheardes
Calender, June and December), in Virgils Gnat and Muiopotmos the otlava rima,
in the different sonnet sequences the Shakespearian and the Spenserian sonnet
forms-