The Poetical Works of - OUDL Home

e INTRODUCTION.
teams from the Red Cross Knight that Sir Artegall is worthy of her
secret devotion
The louing mother, that nine monethes did beare,
In the deare closet of her painefull side,
Her tender babe, it seeing safe appeare,
Doth not so much reroyce as she reioyced theare (III II II.)
Satyrane's mother finds ' her sweete boy' playing with the cubs of an
angry lioness Her first emotion is a paralysing terror , then her maternal
instinct makes the tender natural appeal For love of me leave off this
dreadfull play.' Sir Calepine rescues a baby from the clutches of a wild
bear. He examines it tenderly but cannot allay its irritating cries, and
m his well-meaning incompetence he is glad to entrust it to the chidless
Matilda. No amount of psychological analybis could reveal her strange
conflict of emotions as fully as does Spenser's simple dramatic touch
And bautng ouer it a title wept,
She bore it thence, and euer as her owne it kept (vi IV 37 )
The romantic, often impossible, situations in which his characters are
found only throws into stronger relief the exquisite delicacy of the
sentiment and its essential truth to human nature
In all this is revealed a side of Spenser's genius which finds too little
recognition, his knowledge of the simple emotions of life, and the relation
of his world of magnificence and pageant to the sources of human joy and
tears. We have already dwelt upon the ornate description of Sir Guyon's
guardian angel, who is like ' to Cupido on Idaean hill . But the angels
seen in vision by the Red Cross Knight
into that Citie wend,
As commonly as friend does with bis frend, (i x 56)
and the saints of his New Jerusalem are
More deare vnto their God, then younglings to their dam
1x 57)
As he brings down heaven to earth so the humblest of earth's creatures
can be irradiated with the light of their celestial home The * bare naked
wretches ' who are clothed by the Almoner of the House of Holiness are
enshrined in one of Spenser's most beautiful lines as
The images of God in earthly clay. (1 x 39)
His art varies from homeliness to splendour, from the remoteness of
romance to the realistic suggestion of common life His greatness as an
artist lies not in the one sphere or in the other, but in the fusion of the two
In this lies the secret of his style, which easily adapts itself to his mood,
and is the String expression of his unique and graceful personality. His
1 Compare, too, his account of the emotion of Pastorella's mother on the recovery
of her lost child (vi xII. 21)