Spenser Virgil Poetic

Spenser, Virgil, and the Politics of Poetic Labor
Author(s): Jane Tylus

Source: ELH, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 53-77
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2873111
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SPENSER, VIRGIL, AND THE POLITICS OF
POETIC LABOR
BY JANE TYLUS
Colin Clout's elegiac plaints in The Shepheardes Calender have

recently been read as poetic failures by Spenser critics anxious to
separate the lovesick shepherd from his more worldly maker, as
well as from the world of the calendar itself. David Miller speaks of
Colin's pathetic inability "to master his own nature in the season of
labor and growth," and Harry Berger, Jr., points to the "folly of
instant senescence" exemplified in "January": "And yet alas, but
now my spring begonne, / And yet alas, yt is already donne."''
While these arguments are by and large persuasive, the natu-
ralizing metaphors with which critics arm themselves in coming to
Spenser's first major poem suggest that it is difficult not to align the
calendar and its maker with a universal "nature" from which only
Colin, morbidly fascinated by prematurity, foolishly alienates him-
self. Yet Immerito calls attention to the artificial status of his cal-
endar in the "Envoy" ("Loe I have made a calender"), and his
opening remarks "To his Booke" make it clear that, like Colin, he is
engaged in foreclosing temporal processes by imagining that his
book is already envied by its readers and protected by its would-be
patron, Sidney: "And if that Envie barke at thee, I As sure it will,
for succoure flee / Under the shadow of his wing /... And when his
honor has thee redde, / Crave pardon for my hardyhedde" (5-6,
11-12). Regardless of the book's success (or lack thereof), Im-
merito "will send more after thee,"? a claim that bypasses the ver-
dict of a patron and collapses the process of reception. Moreover,
the massive gloss surrounding Spenser's poem, designed to protect
its author against misinterpretation and, perhaps, to prevent the
publication of the poem from appearing premature, ensures the
monumentality of a text which, like Virgil's Eclogues or Ovid's
Metamorphoses, has necessarily generated a supplemental
reading.2 E. K.'s assiduous notes create a text that has already been
read-a text which, like Colin's spring, is not only "begonne," but
"<already donne."
53
Such an urge to distort time in the interest of poetic production
suggests an affinity among the poetic makers in and of the calendar.
But it also suggests a fundamental conflict between a poetic
making which is identified as temporal rupture or collapse, and the
organic cycle of agrarian labor implicit in the calendar's framework
and identified on several of the woodcuts. The elusive ploughman
Immerito invokes in the "Envoy," Cuddie's desires to be rewarded
for his "<payne" and "sweate" in the harvest month of "October,"
and the retreating husbandmen of the woodcuts for "June,"
"Julye," and "August," whose presence might have reminded the
reader of the popular Calendrier des Bergers where laborer and
shepherd were one: these figures of and allusions to work make it
clear that Spenser is creating a rigorous divorce between poetic
and georgic economies, between a system that defies organic pro-
cess and one that depends on it.3 One may be tempted to read into
this separation either Isabel MacCaffrey's poetics of transcendence
founded on the assumption that life is short and art is long, or Louis
Montrose's subtle argument for a courtly pastoral that marginalizes
the husbandman in order to legitimize the "idle," gentlemanly
shepherd.4 But Colin's own regrets, expressed most poignantly in
"December" when he mourns his distance from a georgic norm,
indicate that the separation of poet from "productive" husbandman
is neither straightforward nor, perhaps, even desirable.5 Rather like
Wyatt's narrator, who complained in Tottel's Miscellany, "I sowe
the sede, they reape the corne. / I waste, they winne, I draw, they
drive," Colin and his makers invoke the images of successful labor
only to ascertain their distance from them.6
It is a strategy-or in Colin's case, it would seem, an inevita-
bility-that may have less to do with courtly or universalizing
norms than with the attempt to articulate a vocabulary for poetic
process independent of the demands imposed by a system of pa-
tronage almost feudal in nature. This patronage system, moreover,
was frequently invoked throughout the period by metaphors per-
taining to the activity of husbandry. From Wyatt's complaint that
others "have the frutes of his service" to Shakespeare's ironic
promise to Southampton that if Venus and Adonis "prove de-
formed," he would "never after ear so barren a land, for fear it y
me still so bad a harvest," the language of patronage regularly
coincided with the language of agrarian labor and organic process.8
To attempt to chart either the genesis or the magnitude of this min-
gling of vocabularies is beyond the scope of this essay. But it is
54 The Politics of Poetic Labor
possible to argue for the importance during the Renaissance of one
particular text which explored the contrived affinity between
agrarian and poetic labor, and which can thereby be seen as a ten-
tative model for poets who also aspired to the status of one who
"laboured lands to yield the timely eare" ("October," 58). The
"eare" of corn is also the ear of a patron, a Maecenas or Augustus;
the laborer is the creator of the literary hierarchy that cast its
shadow over so much of Spenser's work, Virgil. And the poem of
labor that found its ultimate fruits in a human nature as receptive as
the husbandman's soil-and that was therefore both economically
and sexually potent-was, of course, the Georgics.9
On the surface, the georgic might appear to be an ideal model for
Spenser to follow, because it naturalizes-and thereby institution-
alizes-not only the process of poetic creation, but the process of
an empire's creation. These are precisely the terms with which a
number of critics, including William Sessions, Richard Neuse, and
Anthony Low, have recently defined Spenser's relationship to
Virgil's poem of labor. For the most part, their readings have been
confined to the Faerie Queene and to a vision of Spenser as the
benevolent, almost self-effacing poet who trains his readers in the
labors necessary for the creation of English empire.10 Yet although
Spenser's engagement in the making of empire is especially ap-
parent in "Aprill," such an account clearly cannot do justice to
"that most self-conscious of poetic debuts," a poem that raises
more questions about its relationship to Virgil's work than it an-
swers.11 For one thing, in his first major poem, Spenser is just as
dependent on another Roman writer of calendars, Ovid, as he is on
the humble and more politic Virgil-a tension that suggests
Spenser is by no means simply endorsing Virgilian practices. And
for another, the moment in the Georgics which is dwelled on at
greatest length in Spenser's early poetry is one which questions
the relationship between patronage and poetic labor that is so crit-
ical to Virgil's poem: the story of Orpheus. For while the Georgics
was conceived by at least one Renaissance humanist, Juan Luis
Vives, as the "most fruitful" of literary forms, Virgil closes his
poem with an uneasy meditation on literary sterility, with the tale
of a poet who is outside of the georgic cycle in which Virgil's own
narrator willingly participates.'2 Orpheus's alienation is conse-
quently articulated in the only genre allotted to him-and, it
would appear, to Colin: the elegy, which collapses temporal pro-
cess by interfering with more "organic" labors. Like Colin, Or-
Jane Tylus 55
pheus exposes the georgic myth as myth, as construct, as unnatural.
At the same time, his own powers to expose that myth can only be
expressed negatively within the terms of Virgil's frankly propagan-
distic poem.13
Spenser embraces a similar negative poetics in his early poetry,
largely through the Orphic voices of his Colins, Cuddies, and Im-
meritos. Unable to wholly adopt Virgil's model for poetic work in a
period during which the clashing claims of capitalism and pa-
tronage forced more thoughtful poets to reappraise their value to
society, Spenser had to interact dialectically with that model in a
fashion which Virgil himself already anticipated.14 But in Virgil's
poem, Orpheus's impatience with the georgic mythology is ulti-
mately silenced. In the case of The Shepheardes Calender, the
status of Orpheus and of the elegiac posture that constitutes both
his transgression and, it may be argued, his only triumph, is more
open to question.'5 The danger, however, is that the poet who vio-
lates the boundaries within which and only within which his labor
has meaning and sufficient reward may find himself without a
place in a poetic economy still georgic in nature.16 The extent to
which Virgil's and Spenser's poets attempt to rewrite that economy
and the prices they are forced to pay will be addressed in the fol-
lowing pages.
II
In his now classic reading of Jonson's "To Penshurst" and "To Sir
Robert Wroth," Raymond Williams argues that the country house
poem characteristically suppresses the glaring fact of lower class
labor in order to sanction the landowner, and thus the existing so-
cial order, as the guarantor of plenitude: "Jonson looks out over
Penshurst and sees, not work, but a land yielding of itself."''7 Wil-
liams has been our most eloquent spokesman for a criticism sensi-
tive to the mediations and mystifications of pastoral poetry, a po-
etry he claims is little more than a selective extraction from the full
working year portrayed in Hesiod's Works and Days and Virgil's
Georgics. And yet the beneficent overseer who ensures plenitude,
the "fat aged carps," the "orchard fruit," and "blushing apricot," is
defiantly present in the georgic from Hesiod on, and not simply a
seventeenth-century innovation as Williams suggests.18 Whereas
Williams sees the peasants' land of the Works and Days as an ex-
tension of the laborers themselves, Hesiod clearly defines this land
and its fruits in terms of the principle of dike, which has implica-
tions of both customary usage and legal right. It is dike" which en-
sures that a man will reap exactly what he has sown if he honors
the rules and taboos encoded within the Works and Days. If he
does not transgress his boundaries, he will be rewarded, and not by
the immediate landowner but by the ultimate landowners: the
gods.'9
This archaic economy, with its intricate link between work and
ethics, finds a home in Virgil's Georgics as well, where the myste-
rious but just deities of the earth have become Maecenas and Au-
gustus, invoked at the beginning of the first georgic: "Yea, and
thou, 0 Caesar, whom we know not what company of the gods shall
claim ere long; whether thou choose to watch over cities and care
for our lands, that so the mighty world may receive thee as the
giver of increase and lord of the seasons."20 But Virgil complicates
the dynamics of Hesiod's poem by casting himself as a laborer. Far
from lowering the poet's status, this innovation makes him part of
the same cycle as that of Hesiod's and Italy's farmers. As long as he
respects the boundaries separating him from the gods, he is to be
rewarded with the fruits of his labor, which the presiding deity
must willingly provide if justice is not to be violated. This cycle of
labor and fruit is broken only when the deity to whom the earth
belongs becomes the victim of a violent act of transgression, which
is precisely what happens at the close of the first georgic when
Virgil vividly recounts Julius Caesar's assassination.
Thus Virgil turns Hesiod's georgic into a poetics of patronage:
the patron is flattered by his status as god and is required to pro-
vide the poet with the gifts of patronage in order that he be worthy
of his continuing status as presiding deity. Whether Jonson was in-
voking this Virgilian dynamic when writing his poems to potential
patrons is difficult to tell; at the very least, the numerous refer-
ences to the Georgics in "To Sir Robert Wroth" should alert us to
the possibility that he was engaged in exposing the subtleties of
Virgil's poem, instead of simply falling prey to the insidious de-
mands of protocapitalism.21 But it is also true that if Jonson looks
back to the archaic economy of Hesiod or the deliberately archai-
cizing economy of Virgil, he also anticipates the solitary world oc-
cupied by the reader of Joseph Addison's version of the Georgics,
in which the poet is nowhere to be found. For only as long as the
poet identifies himself as the laboring ploughman or the navigator
"hard on the very close of my toils, furling my sails" (Georgics
4.116-17) does he ensure for himself a place within the system of
Jane Tylus 57
patronage. When in his seminal essay on the Georgics appended to
Dryden's translation of Virgil, Addison claims that the poet must
never speak with the voice of the husbandman, there is every indi-
cation of a breakdown in the identification on which Virgil was
careful to insist.22 For Addison's divorce between the world of the
worker and the world of the poet not surprisingly results in the
mandate that the georgic should appear as though it were written
without labor:
And if there be so much art in the choice of fit precepts, there is

much more required in the treating of them, that they may fall in
after each other by a natural, unforced method, and show them-
selves in the best and most advantageous light.
(2; italics mine)
Addison silences not only the voice of the laboring husbandman,

but the labors of the poetic voice. And yet he permits some traces
of work to enter his poem, by way of the engaged reader. While the
georgic is ideally a "seamlesse garment," the reader is apparently
moved to untangle some of its threads: "the mind, which is always
delighted with its own discoveries, only takes the hint from the
poet, and seems to work out the rest by the strength of her own
faculties" (3). The ultimate laborer in Addison's georgic economy
is its gentlemanly reader, discovering for himself what the poet
would impart without appearing to impart it, and thus becoming
both the benefactor and beneficiary of his own fruits. One might
say that there are two economies, two separate worlds in Addison's
Georgics: the silenced, but self-contained world of the laborer, and
the self-sufficient world of the privileged reader. The poet is effec-
tively disenfranchised, caught between two enclosed systems char-
acterized by work and fruitfulness while belonging to neither.23
This is precisely the dilemma with which Spenser and his poets
struggle in their attempt to secure for themselves a legitimate place
in the world of the Calender. But in a sense, Virgil's ethos is also a
defense against the silence Addison would impose upon the poet,
and the Englishman's reading only confirms a contrary reality
present in the early years of the Roman empire: the mythical ho-
rizons of Hesiod's poem were already vanishing, and for all his de-
pendence on the Roman "Cgods," whether Octavian or Bacchus, the
Italian farmer was ultimately a self-sufficient entity whose surplus
supported the state. Or as John Heywood's Plowman argues to the
Merchant and the Knight some fifteen hundred years after Virgil,
"For I have nede of no maner thyng / That ye can do to help of my
lyffyng, / For euery thyng whereby ye do lyf / I noryssh it and to
you both do gyf."24 At the same time that he creates the inclusive
cycle of georgic labor, Virgil is forced to contend with the obvious
alienation of the poet from that cycle because of the inorganic me-
dium in which he works and his dependence on another for eco-
nomic sufficiency. In what is essentially a conservative gesture,
Virgil must deny the laborer's autonomy by insisting on an archaic,
"good faith" economy rather than one based on self-interest.25 But
there is another form of autonomy that Virgil must deny as well,
one which will have a good deal to do with Spenser: the self-au-
thenticating furor of poetic inspiration, the act of transgressive
consciousness that places the poet among the gods and therefore
threatens to violate the very boundaries and taboos necessary to
ensure and preserve archaic justice. The dynamics of Virgil's poem
insist that the patron-reader validate and legitimize the poet's
labors; should the poet acknowledge the source of validation
within himself, he also admits to the intrusive act of self-conscious-
ness that sharply distinguishes him from the husbandman.26 In
striving to minimize the poet's own intrusion into an organic cycle
of labor which finally is not his, Virgil must clearly avoid empha-
sizing an act which strives not for economic self-sufficiency but for
a Stoic autonomy that challenges the relationship of interdepen-
dence the poet has been careful to create.27
Such a challenge is hinted at in the midst of the famous passage
beginning "O fortunatos nimium" in the second georgic when the
narrator becomes uncharacteristically explicit about his poetic
method. After praising the farmer for his pacifism and lack of self-
consciousness, the speaker suddenly intrudes with:
But as for me-first above all, may the sweet Muses whose holy
emblems . .. I bear, take me to themselves, and show me
heaven's pathways, the moon's many labours; whence come
tremblings of the earth, the force to make deep seas swell and
burst their barriers, then sink back upon themselves; why winter
suns hasten so fast to dip in Ocean, or what delays clog the lin-
gering nights.
(2.475-82)
Yet in a move that will be repeated by Cuddie in "October," this
Jane Tylus 59
quest which would take the speaker to the boundaries of the uni-
verse is abruptly reversed:
But if the chill blood about my heart bar me from reaching those
realms of nature, let my delight be the country, and the running
streams amid the dells-may I love the waters and woods,
though fame be lost. 0 for those plains, and Spercheus, and Tay-
getus, where Spartan girls hold Bacchic rites! 0 for one to set me
in the cool glens of Haemus, and shield me under the branches'
mighty shade!
(2.483-89)
As Michael Putnam has observed in his stunning commentary on

the Georgics, Virgil's initial quest for primacy becomes a with-
drawal to the "safe enclosure on enclosure" provided by Greece
and its consoling mythologies.28 Thus the breathtaking ascent into
the sublime becomes a rapid descent into the familiar and the
"pleasing," an attempted but ultimately false bravura followed by
self-effacement and doubt. Even in his desired pursuit of the
causus rerum, the narrator asks that he be led by the Muses: 'may
the Muses take me [me ... accipiant] to themselves." In not daring
to claim too much for himself, he transforms his poetry into the
product of another-either of the Muses or preferably (and less
dangerously) of the unnamed patron who will shield him "under
the branches' mighty shade" and so remains within the mythos of
umbrageous patronage he himself has created.29
The narrator's interruption thus virtually erases itself by modu-
lating from the intrusive, quasi-scientific tones of Lucretian epic to
the language of an enclosure sheltered by mystery, mythology, and
easeful toil; in resisting Lucretius's relentless process of demystifi-
cation, Virgil also resists the demystification of his own poem.30
This recusatio is repeated in the next passage, where Virgil con-
trasts the daring "felix" who has knowledge of "the howls of
hungry Acheron" with the "fortunatus" who safely "plucks the
fruits which his boughs . .. of their own free will, have borne"
(2.492-501). But the poet who not only heard the howls of Acheron
but momentarily silenced them is far from happy; and for a dif-
ferent theory of poetic labor than that entertained by Virgil's nar-
rator, one must turn to the episode at the close of the fourth
georgic, which tells of Aristaeus's journey to learn the reason for
his bees' sickness and Orpheus's failure to win his wife because of
a fatal, interdicted backward glance.
Orpheus's turn to face his beloved on the threshold of Hades has
been construed to mean many things, but Virgil is explicit about
what it signifies: wasted labor and a broken agreement ("effusus
labor ... rupta tyranni / foedera" [4.492-93]). This negative
reading of Orpheus's backward glance as the betrayal of his labor
and of his contract with the infernal gods blatantly distinguishes
the legendary singer from the poem's narrator as well as from the
anonymous farmers whose labors constitute the body of the poem.
If the Italian farmers are capable of harnessing or containing nat-
ural forces in order to produce, Orpheus's labor yields only exhaus-
tion and dispersal. Not only will Eurydice disperse into the
shadows ("She spake, and straightway from his sight, like smoke
mingling with thin air, vanished afar" [499-500]), but Orpheus's
song will be dispersed into the region of the nightingale ("4she
weeps all night long . . . filling the region round with sad laments"
[514-15]), and finally his own body will be dispersed by the fren-
zied worshippers of Bacchus, the very women in whom Virgil's
narrator had earlier delighted.3' Such dispersal moreover extends
to the rupture of the treaty or "leges" (487) that Proserpina, mis-
tress of both Pluto and the change of seasons, had ordained, and
therefore to a community that can only prosper if it is attentive both
to the laws of deity and the laws governing the year.
Orpheus's "fault" or as Eurydice describes it, his "furor"-was
to have interfered with, and thus to have interrupted, the process of
labor: to have stopped and then looked back ("restitit ... respixit">)
while on the threshold of Hades, a location that attests to Or-
pheus's own liminality in the poem. Between these two verbs that
signify Orpheus's intrusive glance is a telling phrase that suggests
that it is through such interruption that Eurydice becomes, briefly,
her husband's: "He stopped, and on his Eurydice, now on the
verge of light, unmindful-alas! and his heart conquered, he
looked back" (490-91). "Eurydicenque suam" signifies an appro-
priation that will be promptly undone only seven lines later: as she
fades from her husband into the shadows, Eurydice cries, "I am
swept off . . . and stretching out to you these strengthless hands
alas!-not yours" (497-98). "Tibi" (to you) and "non tua" charac-
terize a larger disjunction between Orpheus's attempted act of ap-
propriation and his failure to appropriate; in the eternal "9nowness"
(jam) of the interrupted movement, Eurydice is both Orpheus's
and not Orpheus's. For the act of poetic appropriation, which is
also an act of interruption, coincides with the moment of death. In
Jane Tylus 61
appropriating Eurydice, Orpheus also kills her, and ultimately
himself.
Yet this action must be related to the larger narrative of the final
georgic, in which Aristaeus also is to blame. Far from being en-
tirely innocent, the consummate husbandman Aristaeus is in fact
the catalyst of the epyllion's events, having chased the unsus-
pecting Eurydice through the deep grasses where a serpent bit her
and sent her to her death.32 Aristaeus's thoughtless action provokes
in the dead Orpheus a thoughtful, powerful one: it is Orpheus's
invocation of a curse that has led to the death of Aristaeus's bees.
Orpheus is capable of restoring life and taking it away, a dual func-
tion that he performs not only in the outer, framing episode about
Aristaeus's bees, but in his descent to Hades: his song restores
Eurydice to life, his gaze deprives her of it. Such a dual function
calls attention to the power of elegy as an act that compresses and
interrupts organic process and replaces it with its own version of
time and poetic labor.33 In casting furor only in negative terms, as
a symbol of "wasted labor," Virgil's narrator attempts to suppress
the elegiac. Indeed, it is possible to say that Virgil's entire career
was devoted to suppressing the elegiac; the fourth eclogue, for ex-
ample, radically turns the nostalgic pastoral vision towards the fu-
ture, not the past, obsessively endorsing the powers of Roman em-
pire. Such efforts, of course, are not always successful; the most
forward-looking moment of the Aeneid, Anchises' presentation of
future worthies of Rome to Aeneas in book 6, is muted by grief over
the younger Marcellus's death. The effect of such moments on
Virgil's corpus as a whole lies outside the scope of this essay, but
what is clear is the extent to which elegy reveals the fragility of the
supposedly organic myths of empire and patronage, myths that are
as much a part of "Aprill" as they are of the Georgics. And at least
in Virgil, the elegiac alternative becomes a force that must be reck-
oned with (and preferably dispersed in a "macabre fertility rite")
when it threatens the cyclic vitality of the georgic calendar.34 Or-
pheus's celibate, elegiac posture following Eurydice's second
death clearly does present such a threat; the participants in Virgil's
mythical cycle must attempt to disperse Orpheus's labors in order
to defend the existence of that order.
In his violent interruptions of the georgic cycle, Orpheus mani-
fests both power over that cycle and alienation from it, a power and
an alienation that the singer of empire cannot afford to entertain.
The narrator of the Georgics must disown Orpheus's attempts at
appropriation and differentiate himself from the poet who can
bring death as well as life by seeking instead a stability generated
by a self-effacing, nonappropriative labor, a labor that will bear
fruit beneath the reassuring shade of patronage. In a climactic line
that brings narrator and author together, the Georgics closes not
with an image of the poet nourishing others but of the poet being
nourished: "In those days, I, Virgil, was nursed of sweet Parth-
enope." Parthenope is another name for Naples, but also the name
of a once-dangerous Siren, now chastened by death. Thus Virgil
distances himself from the Orphic powers of which he has just
sung. Within Addison's georgic framework, Orpheus becomes the
poet who is forcibly disenfranchised by none other than Virgil's
narrator himself.
III
This tension between Virgil's conservative narrator and the

disruptive Orpheus becomes, in early Spenser, a tension between
the desire to invoke a myth of benevolent social and poetic pro-
cess, and an impatience with that process, coupled with the suspi-
cion that its existence is only a myth that cannot be sustained.
Spenser's most extensive treatment of the Orpheus myth is in
"Virgils Gnat," written during the same period as The Shepheardes
Calender. Spenser opens the poem with "Virgil" 's assurance to his
"patron" Augustus that "season more secure / Shall bring forth
fruit" (9-10), therefore including himself within the georgic pro-
cess by alluding to the gradual development and perfection of his
own season. Following the gnat's descent into Hades after his
sudden death, the figure and myth of Orpheus-an Orpheus who
is now explicitly censured for his transgressive act-receive pro-
longed attention: "But cruell Orpheus, thou much crueller, /
Seeking to kisse her, brok'st the Gods decree, / And thereby mad'st
her euer damn'd to be" (470-72). The interruption of Orpheus's
labor by his selfish desire, a desire of which Virgil makes no men-
tion, breaks the communal "decree" which gives meaning to the
poet's labors, thereby incurring the apparent wrath of Spenser's
narrator. But several lines later, Spenser includes something else
which is not found in Virgil, the reunion of Orpheus and his wife:
"Yet are ye both receiued into blis, / And to the seates of happie
soules admitted. / And you, beside the honourable band / Of great
heroes, doo in order stand" (477-80).
The abrupt and unaccounted for "Yet" allows Virgil's transgres-
Jane Tylus 63
sive Orpheus to become Ovid's Orpheus, who is ultimately re-
warded with his bride in the course of the Metamorphoses:
Already was the Ghost of Orphye gone

To Plutos realme, and there he all the places eft behind
The which he heretofore had seene. And as he sought the feeld
Of fayre Elysion (where the soules of godly folk do wonne,)
He found his wyfe Eurydicee, to whom he one whyle walks
Togither with hir cheeke hy cheeke: another whyle he stalks
Before hir, and another whyle he followeth her.35
Not only does Ovid unite the lovers, but he also introduces an irate
Bacchus into the episode to punish the women who dared to as-
sault the singer, thereby celebrating and protecting the dangerous
singer marginalized in Virgil's text. Spenser's departure from the
fourth georgic in a poem ironically named for the writer of the
Georgics suggests that Spenser is using Ovid against Virgil. The
entire poem, in fact, overturns Virgil's self-effacing poetic; the one
who is finally monumentalized, in a passage clearly dependent on
other Ovidian tags from the Metamorphoses, is not the shepherdly
patron who has failed to provide for his flock, but the poet: "To
thee, small Gnat, in lieu of his life saved, / The Shepheard hath thy
deaths record engraved" (687-88). As David Miller has observed a
propos of the poem's dedicatory sonnet to Leicester, "Virgils Gnat"
intimates that Spenser's own "season" has been "lamentably inse-
cure."36 To this extent, the poem itself constitutes an interruption
of the process of fruitfulness, an outcry against the cycle within
which the poet is supposedly the conscientious laborer passively
awaiting his reward for not transgressing his boundaries. And the
poem rewards that transgression by rewarding Virgil's Orpheus
with Ovid's Eurydice.
This tension between elegy and a georgic pattern of continuity
and self-effacement, between Ovid and Virgil, is even more
marked in "October," where the "perfect poet" Cuddie refers nos-
talgically to the Virgilian corpus and despairs over his own spent
store. His interlocutor Piers invokes a vision of Orpheus to en-
courage Cuddie to forego materialistic concerns and dwell on the
idealizing powers of poetry:
Soone as thou gynst to sette thy notes in frame,

O how the rurall routes to thee doe cleaue:
Seemeth thou dost their soule of sence bereaue,
All as the shepheard, that did fetch his dame
From Plutoes balefull bowre withouten leaue:
His musicks might the hellish hound did tame.
(25-30)
Anxious to domesticate Orpheus's powers to the pastoral bower,

Piers fails to call attention to Orpheus's failure and the image of the
poet as the bringer of sterility and death. At the same time, his own
choice of words betrays him: "withouten leave" refers just as much
to Eurydice (who never left "Plutoes balefull bowre") as it does to
Orpheus; and the act of taming in the final line can belong either to
the "musicks might" or to the "hellish hound." In omitting Or-
pheus's failure, a failure which nonetheless insinuates itself into
his vocabulary, Piers not only chooses to overlook the dangers of
Orphic transgression, but also removes Orpheus from the very
realm of exchange within which Cuddie desires to place himself.
The "shepheard" Orpheus, and by extension the shepherd
Cuddie, belong outside of a system of poetic compensation, and
this belief betrays Piers's complete miscomprehension of Cuddie's
desires that his labor be acknowledged as labor. By continually ad-
monishing Cuddie to concern himself with honor and shepherds'
delight, with praise, passion and the "winges of thine aspyring
wit" on which the poet might "flye back to heaven apace" (83, 84),
he creates a dichotomy between dazzling heights and Cuddie's
"heavye head" (1), and characterizes his supposed friend as overly
concerned with a materialism Piers is at pains to expunge from his
vision of a pristine world of shepherds and their poesy. The idle
gentleman in pastoral disguise, Piers's penchant for a courtly po-
etics threatens Cuddie's claims to poetic labor. In denying Or-
pheus's appropriative act and placing Orpheus outside a system of
labor and reward, Piers not only describes Cuddie's dilemma, he
creates it: Cuddie is effectively marginalized to an ethereal, ideal-
ized realm where he and Orpheus have neither the power to inter-
rupt nor the status of laborers who deserve to be rewarded.37
Such marginalization of the shepherd-poet returns us to Ad-
dison's Virgilian dynamics, and constitutes the greatest danger for
the poet who would rewrite the blueprint for patronage. Cuddie's
ideal poetic economy will be considered presently, but it can be
understood only by turning to the Mantuan eclogue on which "Oc-
tober" is modeled-a poem which also alienates the aspiring poet
from a productive cycle, if in less subtle fashion than that practiced
Jane Tylus 65
by Cuddie's "peers."38 On the whole, Mantuan's Eclogues are
abrupt departures from the idyll that is Virgilian pastoral. Man-
tuan's first eclogue begins pastorally enough, with the line later
bastardized by Shakespeare's Holoferness: "Faustus, come, as your
sheep graze beneath the cool shade, let us recite ancient loves."39
But the next line shatters the ambience of restful tranquility: "Lest,
if strong sleep seizes us, that beast should silently enter the sheep-
fold and feed on our sheep; better to keep watchful." The bucolic
space that usually doubles so suggestively as a poetic space in
which shepherds can sing if the urge seizes them has become a
locus where they must sing so they can protect their land and per-
form their shepherdly labors.40 But if the pastoral world is rigor-
ously redefined as a working world, it is untouched by the occa-
sional plenitude that rewards Virgil's farmers in the Georgics. The
defining characteristic of Mantuan's poems is a strange and op-
pressive sterility that transforms the pleasance into a no-man's land
whose inhabitants enjoy neither the otium of pastoral poetry nor
the rewards of georgic. Their efforts instead are almost entirely de-
voted to the maintaining of boundaries: either the boundaries of
the land, threatened by the invading floodwaters of the river Padus
in Eclogue 2, or the boundaries of the self, threatened by love in
Eclogue 3. Whereas in Virgil and Hesiod respect for boundaries
and the ability to labor within them results in reward by a just
deity, no such fertility characterizes Mantuan's economy.
"Arcadia" is thus nowhere to be found, but its mythic existence
is tellingly invoked in the fifth eclogue by the only figure in Man-
tuan's poems who is removed from the realities of shepherdly life:
the wealthy landowner Silvanus, who greets a slumbering Can-
didus with a request for a song. Silvanus's portrait of the shepherd
presents us with the glowing image of shepherds from Virgil's
Eclogues, and his desire to hear a song without offering anything in
return devalues poetry as work by insisting on its spontaneous,
"timeless," and therefore nondisruptive status.41 By refusing to ac-
knowledge Candidus's insistence that "A Verse it is a stately thing,
and craves a cruell paines," Silvanus condemns the poet to dwell
in the same ethereal realms in which Piers would have Cuddie
linger.42 But he also forces Candidus to use the only weapon he has
left: an image of his own sterility. Candidus utters the final lines in
the poem, and he employs them to memorable effect by calling
Silvanus a Midas, thereby associating him with the mythological
figure who was both a notoriously bad judge of song and an avari-
cious miser who turned everything he touched to an unnatural
gold.43 Silvanus's refusal to acknowledge Candidus as a laborer by
legitimizing the exemplary force of his words silences the inclu-
sive pattern of Virgilian georgic, as the poem's closing allusion
suggests: "aurum" refers not to the copious age of gold but to a
claustrophobic self-sufficiency which is crippling rather than life-
giving. If the poet cannot be part of a cycle of georgic fertility, then
his only defense is to translate Silvanus's fruits into sterility.
At the same time, while Candidus employs the vocabulary of
labor, he does not indulge in the vocabulary of deity: rather, he
launches a lengthy diatribe against those modern poets who de-
base themselves by flattering the powers in Rome. Candidus's fa-
miliar complaint about false flattery and the copious lies poets tell
in order to enter the georgic realm ultimately raises suspicion
about Virgil's poetic method, and it gradually becomes clear that
Candidus is as unwilling to endorse the dynamics of traditional
georgic as Silvanus. Such unwillingness reinstates the individual
boundaries that Candidus accused Silvanus of invading when the
landowner asked for a spontaneous song without offering anything
in return: "why do you seek my song and invade, Silvanus, the
share of another?" ("quid petis ergo / carmen et invadis partes,
Silvane, alienas" [47-48; italics mine]). Candidus's insistence on
his song as something defiantly his own-a gift, he claims, from
Apollo-suggests that the georgic exchange fails because he wants
to free his labor from dependence on a god, to validate it on its own
terms. But the economy of Mantuan's shepherds permits no such
validation, characterized as it is by the desire for-and in Sil-
vanus's case, the reality of-the self-sufficiency that Virgil sensed
as destructive to his own, fragile myth.
The absence of a positive vocabulary for an independent poetics
of labor thus attests to the difficulty in the early Renaissance of
authenticating the serious poetic voice outside of the georgic
framework. It is precisely this absence that forces the fifth eclogue
and Candidus himself to exist in a marginalized zone between a
"productive" georgic and an otiose pastoral in which song is not
the product of labor. Candidus's resistance to Virgil's georgic dy-
namics suggests that Mantuan's would-be independent poet who
seeks to legitimize his own labors is the prototype of the Renais-
sance poet who desires to appropriate discourse for his own pur-
poses. But Silvanus's uncompromising presence in the eclogue re-
veals the extent to which Virgil's dynamics of patronage still pre-
Jane Tylus 67
vail: dynamics which, as "Virgils Gnat" bears out, Spenser was
perhaps as unwilling to endorse as Candidus. The possible result,
however, is Cuddie's barrenness in the month of plenitude and
harvest: in entombing Virgil along with the other worthies who
"liggen in leade," Cuddie also entombs himself.
Nonetheless, it is a death from which he will vividly resurrect
himself at eclogue's end, in a moment that returns us to the inter-
ruption of the second georgic. In the midst of his despairing dis-
missal of the poetic options preferred by Piers-a Piers who, in his
anxiety to divert Cuddie's attention from the materialistic aspects
of poetic labor, is just as insidious a critic of the poetic enterprise as
Silvanus-Cuddie invades the world of labor and its rewards with
a sudden appeal to the product of October's harvest, the grape:
0 if my temples were distaind with wine,

And girt in girlonds of wild Yuie twine,
How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,
And teache her tread aloft in bus-kin fine,
With queint Bellona in her equipage.
(110-14)
The moment is of course imaginary, for it is only within the protec-

tion of the subjunctive "if" that Cuddie enters the world of labor
and reward, an "if" that serves to remind him and his readers that
he inhabits the marginal universe of Mantuan's shepherds. At the
same time, the manner in which Cuddie apparently strives to be
included in the cycle of Virgil's Georgics suggests that he is for-
going any chance to be included there at all. E. K.'s unease with a
poetic furor provoked by a patron's gift of wine and Bacchus him-
self is one indication that Cuddie is breaking boundaries rather
than attempting to labor within them: "He seemeth here to be ra-
vished with a Poetical furie. For (if one rightly mark) the numbers
rise so ful, and the verse groweth so big, that it seemeth he hath
forgot the meanenesse of shepheards state and stile" (255-57).44
But the real nature of Cuddie's intrusion has yet to be determined.
If Virgil's laboring poet included himself, like the husbandman,
within a process of labor that led to rewards of a just and generous
god, Spenser's poet seeks reward before labor, the "<wine" with
which "Ithe braine begins to sweate" (107) and therefore work.
Cuddie's utopian vision reverses the georgic cycle as traditionally
conceived, a cycle that cannot accommodate the poet desirous, like
Candidus, of an independent poetic. Cuddie seeks not the rewards
for labor, but the conditions of labor-a labor authenticated before
it is performed. If the value of Virgil's labor is conferred by the
presiding deity, the value of Cuddie's labor is conferred by him-
self; he will not be led by the Muse but will lead her onto the
"'stately stage" of sublime tragedy and teach her to "tread aloft in
bus-kin fine" (112, 113). In desiring to have his labors rewarded
before they are performed, Cuddie places his poet beyond the tra-
ditional boundaries of Virgil's poem.
This invasive moment in which Cuddie rewrites the georgic
cycle is just as abruptly retracted, in a manner again reminiscent
Virgil's narrator at the close of the second georgic:
But ah my corage cooles ere it be warme,

For thy; content us in thys hymble shade:
Where no such troublous tydes han us assayde,
Here we our slender pipes may safely charme.
(115-18)
Yet the retraction is not Virgilian, for whereas Virgil's narrator

quests the "mighty shade" of a patron beneath which he might
watch the comforting progress of the seasons, Cuddie asks for an
escape from "troublous tydes"-defined by E. K. as "seasons"-
and for only this "hymble shade." Much as Cuddie had privileged
himself rather than the Muses in his furious climbing to the heights
of Orphic inspiration, here he also privileges his own solitary,
seemingly sterile position, disowning Virgil's method. But the
poem, of course, does not end here. For when the retraction is
complete, Cuddie's emblem looks to another calendar, Ovid's
Fasti: "Agitante calescimus illo &c.": "A god lurks within us: when
he breathes, our bosom warms."
The phrase used as Cuddie's emblem occurs just prior to a daz-
zling moment of interiority in the Fasti. In the beginning of the
sixth and last book, Ovid portrays himself meditating on the origins
of the word "June." Declaring in a defiant vein that he will "sing
the truth" about the month's name ("[though] some will say I lied,
and think that no deities were ever seen by mortals"), he goes on to
create the grove of isolation so familiar to readers of the Metamor-
phoses, the "nemus arboribus densum" where he is visited by
three goddesses: "but not those whom the teacher of ploughing
beheld when he followed his Ascraean sheep; nor those whom
Priam's son compared in watery Ida's dells."45 Having differen-
tiated himself from Hesiod, who was visited by the Muses at the
Jane Tylus 69
beginning of his epic Theogony, and Paris, whose choice of Venus
launched another Greek epic, the Iliad, Ovid sanctions his new
epic by claiming that Juno addressed him as "yates, Romani con-
ditor anni" (poet, minstrel of the Roman year) who has "dared to
chronicle great things in slender couplets."
The dare of which Juno speaks is Ovid's appropriation of the
slender elegiac form for greater things than love poetry, but the
bigger risk taken by the poet is his celebration of the poetic yates
along with the Roman agricultural year. Far from mimicking Ti-
tyrus's panegyric in Virgil's first eclogue, Ovid privileges the poet,
who alone is granted the sacred truths of Rome's rustic origins; the
trespass from "deus nobis haec otia fecit" (a god has given us this
peace) to "est deus in nobis: agitante calescimus illo" puts poet
and song before emperor. Moreover, it is a poet who labors by cul-
tivating the sacred seeds sown by an inner god-a god who inter-
rupts Ovid in the midst of his more mundane labors and demands
that he replace a process of more traditional labor with one of in-
spiration.46
Thus Ovid would seem to offer one kind of option for Spenser's
would-be poet: to interrupt the georgic cycle and privilege the
workings of an inner god. Yet Ovid's hopeful calendar, the creation
of his own inspired visions, was left incomplete, ending shortly
after he wrote the passage about Juno's visitation, and Ovid's life
ended among the barbarians in the cold, northern climes. Self-au-
thentication is not only suicide, it is also a myth that cannot com-
plete itself. Cuddie's participation in Ovidian georgics is followed
by the elegy to a suicide: Dido, who tangled with Aeneas's and
Virgil's Roman gods by heeding the fire that burned within her
breast.
And it is the return to the Orphic pattern of interruption and ste-
rility on which the Calender finally insists. It is, of course, Colin
who sings Dido's elegy, just as it is Colin who closes the poem with
his admission of a wasted harvest. The georgic framework thus
creates a space for Colin's sterility, a space within which his si-
lence might be noted. Yet finally, as "Aprill" suggests, it is in fact
such sterility that motivates and defines Spenser's own poetic cre-
ation. E. K. himself speaks enthusiastically of Colin's labor in what
is supposedly the most celebrative month of the calendar: com-
menting on the closing lines of Colin's song, E. K. writes, "For
having so decked her [Elisa] with prayses and comparisons, he re-
turneth all the thanck of hys laboure to the excellencie of her
Maiestie" (324-26). The annotation defines Colin's supposedly
spontaneous song-which E. K. does not confuse with Hobbinol's
repetition of that song-as "laboure": as work, as process. And in-
deed, following a preamble about Colin's failure to make poems,
the entire song proceeds to focus on the temporal process of poetic
making-a making, moreover, which has an extraordinary amount
in common with another type of poem that also focuses on the pro-
cess of a poet's labor: the pastoral elegy.47 The invocation of dainty
nymphs, the call to Calliope and the graces to sing, the darkening
of Phoebus, the pregnant silence of the deceased in the midst of
the speaker's almost garrulous loquacity: all of these elements find
their way into Spenser's celebration of majesty, although the ele-
giac underpinnings give us a celebration curiously tainted with the
touch of death. Far from being the polar opposite of "November,"
"Aprill" is its mirror image, as Eliza is only another name for Dido.
The elegiac formulations which echo throughout the poem remind
us that it is the poet who makes, in the vacuum created by the
silence of the deceased.
On the one hand, Spenser may be using the formulas of elegy to
suggest that Elizabeth can conquer even death; but a darker inter-
pretation suggests that he is "killing" her to reinvest her with his
own meaning, to call attention to the elegiac process whereby the
dead person is displaced and reconstituted by the live poet. Eliza-
beth's rebirth as a symbolic entity thus comes to depend entirely
on the poet's powers of invocation; without that ongoing poetic
process of making and remaking, she remains dead. As a poten-
tially elegiac reconstitution, "Aprill" emerges, even without its
frame, as an unsettling example of the poet's perverse powers. But
within its frame, the concerned dialogue between Hobbinol and
Thenot about Colin's silence and the interruption of his labors, the
poem becomes an elegy to poet and queen alike, a testament to the
waste of Colin's skill to "make so excellent" (19)-and thus a
subtle reminder that in his silence he no longer acts as mediator
between queen and public by investing her with symbolic
meaning. Colin is not the only one who suffers from sterility: so do
those of whom he would write, if he could. Like Virgil's Georgics,
"Aprill" supposedly creates a "natural" vision of empire within
which and for which its poet labors. And yet this vision is consti-
tuted by a disruptive pattern of temporality, by the arbitrary act of a
poet who can take away as easily as he can give.
Such power of sterility leads us to what Jonathan Goldberg has
Jane Tylus 71
described as the "fantasy of having by not giving"> that not only
characterizes Spenser's first published poem but his last; Colin's
withdrawal to a world that no one else can enter in book 6 of The
Faerie Queene is as elegiac a posture as that of "December."48 But
in the epic, the tables are turned: whereas earlier it was Colin who
interrupted the enclosed world of labor and productivity, here it is
Calidore who interrupts a world from which economics and pa-
tronage alike have been excluded. As Calidore discovers and as
Colin already knows, to interrupt is also to destroy, to challenge the
fragility of myth, whether it is the myth of Virgilian georgic or the
myth of poetic self-sufficiency. Spenser's career lies, of course, be-
tween these two extremes, and it is a career that consistently ex-
plores the dynamics of labor in a society which, as Edwin Haviland
Miller and more recently Richard Helgerson have reminded us,
regarded poetic labor with both suspicion and skepticism.49
Spenser was to conquer neither the suspicion nor the skepticism
during his lifetime; nor was he to conquer his own misgivings
about his choice of a career. But his poetry represents a fascinating
attempt to validate the poet as an autonomous entity and to come to
terms with the place and value of imaginary labor in early modern
society.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
NOTES
1 David Miller, "Authorship, Anonymity, and The Shepheardes Calender,"

Modern Language Quarterly 40 (1979): 235; Harry Berger, Jr., "The Aging Boy:
Paradise and Parricide in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender," in Poetic Traditions of
the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 25. The Spenser citation is from "January," 29-30,
in Spenser's Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1970), 15. All subsequent references to Spenser's poetry are from this edition; line
numbers are cited parenthetically in the text,
2 On anxiety about misinterpretation, see Louis Adrian Montrose's comment
that Spenser tries to "direct and delimit the interpretative activity of that elite com-
munity of readers by whom he himself is authorized to write" ("The Elizabethan
Subject and the Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia
Parker and David Quint [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986] 329); and
Joseph Loewenstein, who hints suggestively of a Spenser who "came to find print
imperiled, not liberating; print exposes him to a censorious state, and then provides
him with a sphere of self-defense" ("The Script in the Marketplace," Representa-
tions 12 [Fall, 1985]: 109). On the question of premature publication, see Richard
Helgerson, who notes that in correspondence with Harvey during the period of The
Shepheardes Calender, Spenser worries about "whether he should publish at all"
(Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System
[Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983], 78-79). It would appear that Spenser,
like the Milton whose "Lycidas" opens with "I come to pluck your Berries harsh
and crude, / And with forc'd fingers rude, / Shatter your leaves before the mellowing
year," is articulating a fear intimately associated with pastoral as a genre of begin-
nings: that one is disseminating or publishing too soon.
3 Le Calendrier des Bergers was first published in 1497 and translated into Eng-
lish in 1503; the work went through many subsequent editions and revisions. See
Bernard Capp, English Almanacs 1500-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), for
an illuminating study of the genre to which the French calendar-and perhaps indi-
rectly Spenser's calendar-belonged. My thanks to Andrew Weiner for loaning me
his personal copy of the prints to Le Calendrier des Bergers. For discussions of the
labors of the months, see Rosemond Tuve's Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tra-
dition of Middle English Poetry (Paris: Libraire universitaire, 1933), and Mary Par-
menter's "Spenser's 12 Aeglogues Proportionable to the 12 Monthes," ELH 3
(1936): 190-217. On georgic overtones in The Shepheardes Calender, see Patrick
Cullen's Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1970). Three valuable essays in Barbara Lewalski's Renaissance Genres:
Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1986) suggest a new interest in English georgic as a genre which does not entirely
rely on the Virgilian tradition: Alastair Fowler's essay, "Beginnings of English
Georgic," 105-25; Annabel Patterson's "Pastoral vs. Georgic: The Politics of Virgi-
lian Quotation," 241-67; and John King's "Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and
Protestant Pastoral Satire," 369-98. King's essay is especially helpful for its excel-
lent account of a native tradition of "georgic" satire, for which see also his English
Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).
4 Isabel G. MacCaffrey, "Allegory and Pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender,"
ELH 36 (1969): 88-109; Louis Adrian Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds:
The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELH 50 (1983): 415-59. Ten years of
emphasis on cultural poetics and determination not to idealize the artistic product
have played down MacCaffrey's observations; as David Miller's article (note 1) at-
tests, there is a tendency to see Colin from the standpoint of limits, to view him as a
victim of an all-encompassing process that his pathetic art cannot withstand. The
status of Colin's art and the "life" of the calendar have thus been subtly rearranged.
Yet such rearranging overlooks the calendar as a necessarily limited-because
human-artifact; as Pierre Bourdieu has demonstrated, the calendar externalizes
man's labors rather than a universal "nature" (Outline of a Theory of Practice
[Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977], esp. 172-76). While I do not wish to
advocate a full-scale return to MacCaffrey's argument for the "power of imagina-
tion," her emphasis on the limitations of Spenser's calendar should be reexamined.
If the calendar is not exactly transcended by the artist, it is interrupted by the poet
impatient with the process it exemplifies.
Recent attention to the by-now almost canonical Arte of English Poesie by Put-
tenham has led to a rather systematic avoidance of Spenser's vocabulary of labor in
his early poetry, and an insistence instead on his production of and participation in a
courtly norm which, according to Louis Montrose's impressive argument, was cre-
ated by suppressing the "intimate connection" between "herding and farming that
was in fact typical of the Elizabethan countryside" (425). Montrose's other essays on
pastoral tend to focus on its courtly dimension ("Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of
Peele's Arraignement of Paris," ELH 47 [1980]: 433-61, and "Eliza, Queene of
Shepheardes, and the Pastoral of Power," English Literary Renaissance 10 [1980]:
153-82)-a focus that tends to restrict his otherwise scintillating approach to the
genre.
5 In "December" Colin complains: "And thus of all my harvest hope I have I
Nought reaped but a weedye crop of care" (121-22); see also 97-108, 123-30.
6 In Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1966), 59. While the poem is given the title of "The lover lamenteth other to have
Jane Tylus 73
the frutes of his service" by its editor, it is clear, as Stephen Greenblatt has ob-
served, that the realms of love and power here and elsewhere in Wyatt's poetry are
completely interchangeable (Renaissance Self-Fashioning [Chicago: Univ. of Chi-
cago, 1980], 144). It might also be noted that Tottel's Miscellany contains numerous
allusions to the sterility of the Petrarchan lover, bearing out Carol Thomas Neely's
claims in "The Structure of English Sonnet Sequences," ELH 45 (1978): 359-89, for
the essential sterility of the sonnet sequence-a genre that also has its roots in the
fundamentally feudal structure between the knight and his lady.
7 For the inadequacies of the patronage system in dealing with the new condi-
tions of bookmaking in Renaissance society, see E. H. Miller's excellent account in
The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1959), chap. 4. David Miller addresses Spenser's situation in particular in
"Spenser's Vocation, Spenser's Career," ELH 50 (1983): 197-231; for a somewhat
rosy account of Sidney as patron, see Jan Van Dorsten, "Literary Patronage in Eliza-
bethan England," in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Ste-
phen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), 191-206.
8 The Arden edition of Shakespeare's Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen,
1960), 2. E. H. Miller's chapter on patronage in The Professional Writer contains
several examples of dedications that rely on metaphors of husbandry, including
those of Churchyard and Barnaby Barnes.
9 This characterization of georgic as a "potent" genre is that of Kurt Heinzelman,
in The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press,
1980), 145.
10 William Sessions, "Spenser's Georgics," English Literary Renaissance 10
(1980): 202-37; Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1985), chap. 2. Richard Neuse, in "Milton and Spenser: The Virgilian Triad
Revisited," ELH 45 (1978): 606-39, does not argue for the Faerie Queene as georgic,
but sees the Epithalamion as a "georgic" act of self-effacement: the poet steps "into
a larger plane of existence where he is no more than one among many centers of
consciousness" (617). On the general importance of georgic in the period, see M. J.
O'Loughlin, The Garlands of Repose (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1978), and L. P.
Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969),
274-96. James Turner has a valuable discussion of the conflation of a religious po-
etic and a vocabulary of labor in The Politics of Landscape (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1979).
11 The phrase is David Miller's, from "Authorship, Anonymity, and The Shep-
heardes Calender," 219.
12 Juan Luis Vives, "In Georgica Vergilii" (1518), in Obras Completas, tr. Lorenzo
Riber (Madrid: Aguilar, 1948), 1:552. Erasmus also goes to the Georgics for ex-
amples of copious discourse in On Copia of Words and Ideas, tr. Donald King and
H. D. Rix (Milwaukee: Marquette Univ. Press, 1963), particularly 1.2, "By whom
Copia was Developed and by Whom Practiced."
13 Spenser critics have long been concerned with the role of Orpheus in Spenser's
poetry; Thomas Cain's Praise in the Faerie Queene (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska,
1978), Harry Berger, Jr.'s "Spenser's Critique of Pastoral Love and Art," ELH 50
(1985): 27-60, and Jonathan Goldberg's VoicelTerminallEcho (New York: Methuen,
1986), esp. 43-48, represent three recent and widely divergent views. My own view
has been shaped largely by Berger's and Goldberg's, although Berger's claim that
Spenser sees the "Orphic paradigm" as "more admonitory than exemplary" (29)
seems a bit harsh, particularly given Spenser's treatment of the myth in "Virgils
Gnat."
14 Robert Weimann has called attention to the important transition during the Re-
naissance from a social mode characterized by "the reproduction of presupposed
relations" to one in which the "the means, modes, and materials of production were
themselves subjected to appropriation." The poet's growing self-consciousness
about his own labors in an increasingly capitalistic society in turn necessitates a
new vocabulary with which to discuss those labors, which can no longer be con-
ceived as part of an organic process. See his " 'Appropriation' and Modern History
in Renaissance Prose Narrative," New Literary History 14 (1983): 467-68. On
changing definitions of labor in the late medieval period, see Jacques Le Goff's
essays in Time, Work, and Culture, tr. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1980). For the relationship of labor to poetics, see Heinzelman (note 9).
Though I disagree with his essentially conservative reading of Spenser's "eco-
nomics," Heinzelman's inspiring book on the relationship of labor to poetry has
been fundamental for this discussion.
15 See Peter Sacks's moving argument in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre
from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985) that Spenser's
early work is predominantly elegiac: "if Spenser is above [Cohn's] melancholy
withdrawal, it is curious how reticent he is about asserting his superiority. Nowhere
within the poem is there an adequate answer to Colin" (46).
16 Helgerson (note 2) brilliantly discusses Spenser's desires to be the sole "guar-
antor of his works," chap. 2. The dangers of such self-authentication are emphasized
by John Guillory in Poetic Authority (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983): the
triumph of the poetic imagination is for Spenser "a loss of authority," a reduction of
the poem to "a mere heap of words" (42).
17 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1973), 32. For a corrective to Williams's argument for Jonson's blind acceptance of
Jacobean ideology, see William Cain, "The Place of the Poet in Jonson's 'To Pen-
shurst' and 'To my Muse,'" Criticism 21 (1979): 34-48.
18 From "To Penshurst," in Ben Jonson, Poems ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Ox-
ford Univ. Press, 1975), 89.
19 As Marcel Detienne observes in Crise agraire et attitude religieuse chez He-
siode, Collection Latomus, 68 (1963), "Prosperity and the general profits that the
peasant draws from his work are not 'givens' separable from a personal relationship
with the gods and the earth" (49; my translation). Elsewhere Detienne comments
on the "innumerable rules" that the peasant of Hesiod's day was expected to follow.
See also Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (London: Ark, 1984) for an exploration
of the rigorous obedience to taboos in archaic cultures.
20 Virgil's Works, trans. H. R. Fairclough, in the Loeb series (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1974), 1.24-28. See Edward Spofford's The Social Poetry of the
Georgics (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 5-12, on Virgil's deliberate emphasis on
traditional rustic faith.
21 Referring explicitly to Ian Donaldson's edition of Jonson's Poems, Fowler (note
3) calls attention to these georgic references (122n.).
22 Complaining that too many critics have "cast [georgic] under the same head
with pastoral," Addison notes that "though the scene of both these poems lies in the
same place, the speakers in them are of a quite different character, since the pre-
cepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but
with the address of a poet." From "An Essay on Virgil's Georgics" (1697), in Eigh-
teenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1961), 1:1. Subsequent references to Addison's essay are from this edition and are
cited parenthetically in the text.
23 Not long after Addison's rewriting of georgic, David Ricardo would separate
imaginary work completely from labor: its value depends instead on "varying
wealth and inclinations of those desiring to possess it." Cited in Heinzelmann, 154.
On Addison, see John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730-80: An Equal,
Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
24 John Heywood, Of Gentytnes and Nobylyte, ed. K. W Cameron (Raleigh, N.C.:
Thistle Press, 1941), 10.
25 Bourdieu (note 4) discusses the transition from an archaic, artificially main-
Jane Tylus 75
tained economy based on "<good faith" to one that explicitly acknowledges self-in-
terest, 172-73.
26 In this sense, Addison's address to the ideal "spectator" in his Spectator essay
(411) of June 21, 1712, can be seen as an appropriation of the transgressive powers
of the poet: "A man of a polite imagination ... can converse with a picture, and find
an agreeable companion in a statue. He meets with a secret refreshment in a de-
scription, and often feels a, greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and
meadows, than another does in the possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of prop-
erty in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated parts of nature
administer to his pleasure" (The Works ofJoseph Addison, ed. G. W Greene [Phila-
delphia: Lippincott, 1868], 6:325).
27 See Seneca in De Beneficiis 7.4: "The wise man possesses all things"; Moral
Essays, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), 467.
28 Michael Putnam, Virgil's Poem of the Earth (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1979), 149.
29 For a careful reading of the second georgic, see Francis Muecke, "Poetic Self-
Consciousness in Georgics II," in Virgil's Ascraean Song, ed. A. J. Boyle (Victoria:
Aureal Publications, 1979), 86-102.
30 Putnam (note 28) discusses Virgil's relationship to Lucretius, 146-48.
31 "The Ciconian dames ... tore the youth limb from limb and strewed h
broadcast over the field" (4.520-22). In Latin, the final phrase is sparsere per agros:
this ghastly phrase is the last reference in the Georgics to the fields of which it has
been Virgil's principle concern to sing.
32 When Aristaeus first calls upon his mother, Cyrene, he defines himself as the
"complete" husbandman: "lay the hostile flame to my stalls, destroy my crops, burn
my seedling, and swing the stout axe against my vines, if such loathing for my honor
hath seized thee" (4.330-32). In three brief lines, he mentions three of the four
"arts" Virgil summarized at the beginning of the first georgic: farming, oenology,
and breeding; that Aristaeus is also a beekeeper-the subject of the fourth georgic
-is of course already known.
33 Sacks (note 15) discusses the elegiac creation of "a fiction whereby nature and
its changes, the occasions of [man's] grief, are made to depend on [man]" (20).
Elegy thus becomes the vehicle with which man attempts to master nature. See also
the observation by T. Jacobsen, cited by David Halperin in Before Pastoral: Theo-
critus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1983), that "in the [archaic] lament the vividness of recall and longing was an actual
magic reconstitution, an attempt to draw back the lost god or temple by recreating in
the mind the lost happy presence" (112).
34 Putnam (note 28), 313.
35 The xv Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur
Golding (London, 1575), 140 (11.61-66).
36 David Miller, "Spenser's Vocation, Spenser's Career," 210. Helgerson (note 2)
calls attention to Spenser's "lack of financial support" during the period (75).
37 Goldberg (note 13) refers to Colin as an "orphic and ovidian poet" (57)-the
suggestive implications of which are developed in the remainder of this essay.
38 Two sensitive recent readings of Spenser's debt to Mantuan are those of Nancy
Jo Hoffman, Spenser's Pastorals (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), and
David Shore, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral: A Study of the World of Colin
Clout (Montreal: McGill-Queens, 1985).
39 Mantuan, Eclogues, 1.1-2. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted;
the Latin edition used is Wilfred P. Mustard's Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1911).
40 Richard Mallette comments that in Virgil "The locus amoenus is unchallenge-
ably the locus poeticus" (Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Pastoral [Lewisburg:
Bucknell Univ. Press, 1983], 25). The first chapter of Mallette's book is an excellent
introduction to the complexities of the pastoral genre.
41 Note the rhetoric with which Silvanus greets the exhausted, silent shepherd:
"Candidus, with us you once used to feed the flocks and beneath cool shade blow
your pipes of reed" (1.4-5).
42 The line is from George Turberville's translation (1567), The Eclogues of Man-
tuan, ed. Douglas Bush (New York: Scholars Fascimiles, 1937), G.iiv.
4 5.188-90. In Turberville's translation: "Farewell then churlish Chuffe, / Pray
God thou never hast ynouffe. / Would all thou handiest mought / (as Mydas did of
yore) / Be Golde, for canse thou setst of golde / more than of vertue store" (H.iiiv)
44See Terence Cave's remarks, apropos of Ronsard, on poetic fureur as an at-
tempt-but a "circular, self-endorsing" attempt-to authenticate poetic discourse
in the Renaissance (The Cornucopian Text [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979], 241).
45 Fasti, tr. James Frazer (Cambridge: Loeb, 1976), 319 (6.5-19).
46 The line immediately following "agitante calescimus illo" is "impetus hic sa-
crae semina mentis habet" (6.5-6).
47 Goldberg (note 13) notes that in "Aprill," "praise is founded on elegiac strains"
(53). John King has also alerted me to the connection between funereal and corona-
tion imagery in the London pageants for Margaret of Anjou in 1445, recently pub-
lished by Gordon Kipling in Medieval Theatre 4 (1982): 5-27.
48 Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1981), 173.
49 E. H. Miller (note 7), particularly chaps. 3 and 4; Helgerson, chap. 1.
Jane Tylus 77

Spenser Virgil Poetic

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Spenser, Virgil, and the Politics of Poetic Labor

Author(s): Jane Tylus

Colin Clout's elegiac plaints in The Shepheardes Calender have

54 The Politics of Poetic Labor

56 The Politics of Poetic Labor

And if there be so much art in the choice of fit precepts, there is

Addison silences not only the voice of the laboring husbandman,

58 The Politics of Poetic Labor

Yet in a move that will be repeated by Cuddie in "October," this

As Michael Putnam has observed in his stunning commentary on

60 The Politics of Poetic Labor

62 The Politics of Poetic Labor

This tension between Virgil's conservative narrator and the

Already was the Ghost of Orphye gone

Soone as thou gynst to sette thy notes in frame,

64 The Politics of Poetic Labor

Anxious to domesticate Orpheus's powers to the pastoral bower,

66 The Politics of Poetic Labor

0 if my temples were distaind with wine,

The moment is of course imaginary, for it is only within the protec-

68 The Politics of Poetic Labor

But ah my corage cooles ere it be warme,

Yet the retraction is not Virgilian, for whereas Virgil's narrator

70 The Politics of Poetic Labor

University of Wisconsin, Madison

1 David Miller, "Authorship, Anonymity, and The Shepheardes Calender,"

72 The Politics of Poetic Labor

74 The Politics of Poetic Labor

76 The Politics of Poetic Labor

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