REVIEW: ANALYZING SPENSER'S SONNETS
Read these two sonnets, then study the brief essays below which apply several critical lenses to the poems.
The two sonnets are presented here with their original spelling, then with contemporary spelling.
SONNET 74
Most happy letters fram'd by skilfull trade,
with which that happy name was first desynd:
the which three times thrise
happy hath me made
with guifts of body, fortune and of mind.
the first my being to me gave by kind,
from mothers womb deriv'd by dew descent,
the second is my sovereigne Queene
most kind,
that honour and large richesse
to me lent.
the third my love, my lives last ornament,
by whom my spirit out of dust was raysed:
to speake her prayse and
glory excellent,
of all alive most worthy to be praysed.
Ye three Elizabeths for ever live,
that three such graces did unto me give.
SONNET 74 (Contemporary Spelling)
Most happy letters fram'd by skillfull trade,
with which that happy name was first designed:
the which three times thrice happy hath me made
with gifts of body, fortune and of mind.
The first my being to me gave by kind,
from mother's womb deriv'd by dew (due?) descent,
the second is my sovereign Queen most kind,
that hon our and large riches to me lent.
The third my love, my life's last ornament,
by whom my spirit out of dust was raised:
to speak her praise and glory excellent,
of all alive most worthy to be praised
Ye three Elizabeths forever live,
that three such graces did unto me give.
SONNET 37
What guyle is this, that those
her golden tresses
She doth attyre under a net of gold:
and with sly skill so cunningly them dresses
that which is gold or heare may scarse
be told?
Is it that mens frayle
eyes, which gaze too bold,
she may entangle in that golden snare:
and being caught may craftily enfold
theyr weaker harts, which are not wel aware?
Take heed therefore, myne eyes, how ye doe stare
henceforth too rashly on that guilefull net,
in which if ever ye entrapped are,
out of her bands ye by no meanes shall get.
Fondness it were for any being free,
to covet fetters, though they golden bee.
SONNET 37 (Contemporary Spelling)
What girl is this, that those her golden tresses
she doth attire under a net of gold:
and with sly skill so cunningly them dresses
that which is gold or here may scarce be told?
Is it that men's frail eyes, which gaze too bold,
she may entangle in that golden snare:
and being caught may craftily enfold
their weaker hearts, which are not well aware?
Take heed therefore, mine eyes, how ye do stare
henceforth too rashly on that guilefull net,
in which if ever ye entrapped are,
out of her bands ye by no meanes shall get.
Fondness it were for any being free,
to covet fetters, though they golden be.
Applying Critical Lenses to the Sonnets
New Historicist Lens
An interesting fact to note about the Renaissance is that children were
considered peripheral or subordinate to the adult world, often described as
inhuman (like pets, at times affectionately coddled and at others strictly
trained) or as servants (they were, for example, often expected to serve
daily meals to adults as they stood silent at the edges of the dinner table).
The extremely high death rate of children also made them seem rather
expendable. They were, however, important insofar as they were often exchanged
(given up for fostering) to other nobles or to Queen Elizabeth herself at
court. (Note also that wives died at childbirth much more frequently at that
time.) In exchange for this "gift," these foster-parents,
especially Queen Elizabeth, were expected to civilize the gift-child (the
ornament) and to generously return to the giver all kinds of material gain,
be it wealth, favor, political power, etc. To quote
Patricia Fumerton, a New Historicist at the University
of California, Santa
Barbara, "Passing children (like other precious
artifacts) from family to family was one of the means by which primitiveness
in Elizabethan adults--their aggression and instinct for war--was
suppressed." It was also one of the ways in which power was consolidated
by the hegemonic group.
In "Sonnet 74", the gift exchange of the three Elizabeths, further emphasized
by the trope of the three graces (often portrayed as a dancing ring), grows
out of this gift culture, which undergirds power
and an Elizabethan sense of civility with the circulation of bodies. The
"guift" of life, given by the mother
("The first my being to me gave by kind"), is thus translated into
a circulation of wealth, with the queen now as surrogate mother ("That honour and large richesse to me
lent"), and then into a circulation of women, here understood as
ornament or wealth ("my lives last ornament"). The sense of
equitable gift exchange between the poet and his lover thus serves to counter
the destabilizing greed and cunning of the woman portrayed in "Sonnet
37". By suggesting that he "owes" these three women, the
speaker also expects in return, through the more civil logic of gift
exchange, "honour and large richesse." The threatening gold-woman of the earlier
sonnet is corrected (controlled) by the courteous
civility of the "ornament" women in the later sonnet, now given
freely in a hegemonic circulation of wealth.
Marxist Lens
These two sonnets betray an underlying anxiety on the part of this
colonial landlord (Spenser owned the lands and castle
of Kilcolman)
about market capitalism (not to mention the bourgeoisie) and its influence on
both the public and the private levels. Not surprisingly, the commodified woman in "Sonnet 37"
is associated, on a metaphorical level, with what the author perceives as the
"guyle" and "sly skill" of
bourgeois traders. The constant repetition of gold (lines 1, 2, 4, 6, 14)
mimics both the proliferation of capitalist production and the reduction of
all values into monetary value, so much so that "That which is gold or heare, may scarse be
told." In "Sonnet 74" some of the terms ("skillfully trade" and, in line 8, the lending of
"large richesse") suggest middle-class,
capitalist circulation; however, the author tries very hard to legitimize his
own "trade" by invoking, through his mother, a sense of
aristocratic "dew descent" and then impressing upon his once again commodified lover ("my lives last ornament")
the stamp of sovereign legitimacy. Might the final sentence in "Sonnet
37" also be a warning directed at other aristocrats not to allow
the "golden snare" of capitalist ideology to enter either their
public or private lives: "Fondnesse it were
for any being free,/ To covet fetters, though they golden bee"?
Psychoanalytic Lens
A strong psychic dynamism is at work in Sonnet 37 caused primarily by a
deep-seated split in the narrator's consciousness between his Ego Ideal
, which wishes to be independent of his sexual desires, and
his Id, which
insists on the fulfillment of the body's desires. In lines 9-12, the superego,
which continues to make its demands for perfection on the narrator's psyche,
becomes introjected to the point that the poet in fact
warns himself to keep his distance from the object of his
libidinal desires: "Take heed therefore, myne eyes, how ye doe stare." His own unacceptable
desires are at the same time projected onto the love object, who is then seen as the true cause of the poet's troubled
state. His subsequent contempt for the woman-whore serves to further fuel his
own narcissistic
sense of superiority or grandiosity. In fact, however, the speaker is so anxious
about the woman's material, fluid, natural self that to be once again
comfortable he has to translate her, alchemically, into a solid object which
he can represent, control, dominate, and make safe. Unfortunately, once she
has become so "armored" she is no longer available to him as a
means of satisfying his sexual desires, so these get piped off into the
sexism/ sadism of the poem. In the last two lines, the speaker also turns his
previous, passive situation as the rejected lover into an active situation by
passing on the psychic wound (the superego's own injunctions against sexual
desire) through his warning to other men.
Gender Lens (Feminist)
The commodification of the woman as
"golden" in "Sonnet 37" serves to reduce
the lover into an object that, one then infers, can be possessed and
controlled as one might an "ornament" ("Sonnet 74").
The difference between the two sonnets is that in the former the woman is
presented as yet illegitimate or counterfeit and therefore dangerous ("guyle," "sly skill,"
"cunningly," "craftily," "guilefull
net") whereas in the latter sonnet she has received the stamp of "sovereigne" legitimacy. The sovereign, in this case
Queen Elizabeth, may well be a woman rather than a man, but this situation is
controlled by both commodifying the queen (placing
her into a circulation of "richesse" at
line 8) and by equating her with the gender roles that are reserved for women
by the contemporary patriarchy: wife in the last half of the poem and mother
in the first half. Indeed, in "Sonnet 37" we see that
if either of these roles are not assumed by a given women, if she for example
rejects the courtly lover-poet, she is very quickly labeled
as whore. In this phallogocentric discourse, woman
can either be a producer of men (mother) or a mirror for men (a wife).
Indeed, by speaking "her prayse and glory
excellent" in "Sonnet 74", the poet is in effect
praising himself for having acquired such an "ornament." Note also
that it is the poet's "skillfully trade"
which, one assumes, is best able to frame the letters of "Elizabeth"
(lines 1-2). Once again, woman becomes merely the negative object or "Other"
to man's defining and dominating subjectivity.
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