The Shepheardes Calender by Edmund Spenser

First published: 1579

Type of work: Poetry

Type of plot: Pastoral

Time of plot: Sixteenth century

Locale: England

Principal characters

• Colin Clout, the greatest of the shepherd poets
• Hobbinol, his friend
• Thenot, a wise old shepherd
• Cuddie, a young shepherd, an aspiring poet

The Poem:

January. Colin, forlorn and rejected by his beloved Rosalind, compares his mood with the wintry landscape:

Thou barrein ground, whome winters wrath  hath wasted,Art made a mirror to behold my plight:Whilome thy fresh spring flowrd, and  after hastedThy summer proud with daffadillies dight,And now is come thy winters stormy state,Thy mantle marred wherein thou maskedst late.

At the end of this poem, Colin breaks his shepherd’s pipes and resolves to write no more poetry.

February. An impudent young shepherd, Cuddie, complains of the wintry blasts to the elderly Thenot, and he scorns the old man’s philosophical view that one must learn to endure the long succession of misfortunes that this world brings and be concerned only with the safety of the flock. Tired of Cuddie’s rudeness, Thenot tells the fable of an old oak and a proud briar bush. The briar persuades a farmer to cut down the tree to show off its own beauty. All is well until winter comes; the briar then dies without the protection of the oak against wind and frost. Cuddie is unmoved by this parable of youth and age and breaks it off abruptly.

March. Two young shepherds welcome spring as a time for love. They describe Thomalin’s encounter with Cupid. Thomalin tells a friend how, while he was hunting on one shepherds’ holiday, he heard a rustling in the bushes:

With that sprung forth a naked swainWith spotted wings like peacock’s train,And laughing lope to a tree,His gylden quiver at his back,And silver bow, which was but slack,Which lightly he bent at me.

April. Thenot finds Hobbinol grieving over the sorrows of his friend Colin Clout and mourning that Colin’s unrequited love deprived all the shepherds of his poems. Thenot asks Hobbinol to recite one of Colin’s verses to while away the hours as their flocks graze, and he complies with an ode on “Fair Elisa, queen of shepherds all.” Colin calls upon the muses, the graces, the sun, and the moon as he begins his praise of the daughter of Pan, the shepherds’ god, and Syrinx. Then Colin describes Elisa’s beauty:

See, where she sits upon the grassie green, (O seemly sight!)Yclad in scarlet, like a maiden queen And ermines white.Upon her head a cremosin coronet,With damask leaves and daffadillies set: Bayleaves between, And primroses green,Embellish the sweet violet.

Thenot, convinced of Colin’s gifts by this recitation, comments on the folly of giving in to love.

May. Piers and Palinode discuss the corruption of shepherds who neglect their sheep to seek their own profit (indirectly condemning the priests of the time). Palinode, who is discouraged because he cannot participate in the spring revels of other shepherds, asks why the good shepherd, the clergyman, should not have a right to the pleasures others enjoy. Piers, more serious than his companion, speaks at length about the responsibility of those who care for the flocks. They must, he argues, forsake worldly concerns and trust in God for their living if they are to set a good example for their sheep. He disagrees with Palinode’s contention that there is no reason for shepherds to live less pleasantly than anyone else, and, to illustrate the dangers of association with the wicked, he tells the familiar fable of the innocent young kid who is duped and carried off by a smooth-talking fox.

June. Colin returns to admire the peaceful life his friend Hobbinol makes for himself in the fields. Hobbinol praises Colin’s poetry, but the latter disavows the possession of any great talents: “But piping low in shade of lowly grove/ I play to please my self, all be it ill.”

Colin is content to serve Pan, the god of shepherds; he makes no claims to be worthy of the patronage of the Muses. Because his poetic pleas are not powerful enough to pierce the heart of Rosalind, he is forever doomed. He entreats the “gentle shepherds”: “Tell the lass, whose flower is woxe a weed,/ And faultless faith is turned to faithless fear,/ That she the truest shepherds heart made bleed/ That lives on earth, and loved her most dear.”

July. Thomalin contrasts the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the life of the first shepherd, Christ, and “the brethren twelve that kept yfere the flocks of mighty Pan” with the lavish living of the purple-clad priests of his day. He was recently shocked to hear of their way of life:

For Palinode (if thou him ken)Rode late on pilgrimageTo Rome, (if such be Rome) and thenHe saw thilke misusage.For shepherds, said he, there doen lead,As lords done other where;Their sheep han crusts, and they the bread;The chips, and they the cheer.

August. Willy and Perigot contribute alternate lines to a rollicking love lyric, designed to cure Perigot of his melancholy mood, occasioned by an unhappy love affair. When they finish, Cuddie, their judge, recites for them one of Colin’s doleful laments to his Rosalind.

September. Diggon Davie returns to the country with news of the miseries he experienced on his travels in the cities, where he found everything filled with greed and corruption. His language is harsh, and his mood is deeply pessimistic. When the shepherds sell their souls to the devil, he argues, their sheep inevitably suffer.

October. Cuddie questions the value of writing. Even when his work is good, it seems to bring him little reward. Piers, his older, wiser friend, answers, “The praise is better than the price.” He has faith in the didactic effects of poetry: “O what an honor is it, to restrain/ The lust of lawless youth with good advice,/ Or prick them forth with pleasance of thy vein,/ Whereto thou list their trained wills entice!”

He counsels Cuddie to turn to epic, to sing of wars and of princes. This kind of poetry, the young man replies, might have been possible in Augustan Rome, where Vergil found willing patrons; in their age, however, there is no climate for poetry. Colin alone might soar toward the heavens in his verse, but he is the prisoner of love. Piers, a good Platonist, maintains that love, in fact, freed the poet, giving him wings to lift him up out of the “loathsome mire.”

November. Colin presents a lament for Dido, a beautiful lady who died young. He speaks first out of deep distress, calling on the muses and all nature to mourn with him. Then the mood changes, and he rejoices to know that the lady “is installed now in heaven’s height,” where “lives she with the blessed gods in bliss.”

December. Colin reminisces about the carefree days of his youth, the spring of his life, when he climbed trees in search of ravens’ eggs and shook nuts from walnut trees and learned the art of song from the good, old shepherd Wrenock. His summer years brought the painful heat of love, which withered his promising poetic talents: “So now my year draws to his latter term,/ My spring is spent, my summer burnt up quite,/ My harvest hastes to stir up Winter stern,/ And bids him claim with rigorous rage his right.” Colin finds himself old and ready to leave the world, and he concludes with a farewell to his art, his flocks, and his friends.

Bibliography

Bouchard, Gary M. Colin’s Campus: Cambridge Life and the English Eclogue. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. Assesses the influence of Spenser’s experiences at Cambridge University upon his pastoral poetry, including The Shepheardes Calendar.

Hadfield, Andrew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Spenser. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Collection of essays providing an overview of Spenser’s life and work. Some of the essays discuss the relevance of Spenser, his life and career, the historical contexts of his work, his use of language, and his literary influence. “Spenser’s Pastorals: The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clout Come Home Again” by Patrick Cheney examines these works.

Lethbridge, J. B., ed. Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Reprints a collection of papers originally delivered at a conference about Spenser. Includes discussions of the Spenserian stanza, Spenser’s relationship to Ireland, and the trend toward a new historical criticism of his work. “Pastoral Motivation in The Shepheardes Calender” by John Moore analyzes this poem.

McCabe, Richard A. Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Analyzes how Spenser’s experiences of living and writing in Ireland challenged his ideas about English nationhood. Assesses the influence of colonialism on the themes, imagery, language, and structure of his poetry.

Miller, David L. “Authorship, Anonymity, and The Shepheardes Calender.” Modern Language Quarterly 40, no. 3 (September, 1979): 219-236. An early poststructuralist analysis of the poem and its ambitions. Argues that Spenser deliberately created a poem that would stake his claim as a major poet.

Nelson, William. The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. A concise, insightful introduction to the poem and its place in Spenser’s career and in English literary history.

Phillippy, Patricia Berrahou. Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Examines works by Spenser and other poets to analyze their use of the palinode, or an ode in which the poet retracts the opinion of an earlier poem. Discusses The Shepheardes Calendar and Spenser’s other “palinodic pastorals.”

Sacks, Peter J. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Excellent analysis of Spenser’s use of the elegy form in the context of the elegiac tradition in English poetry. Discusses the genre as a literary expression of the psychology of grief and consolation.