Edmund Spenser\'s Epithalamion and the Sacraments of Nature

Spenser's Epithalamion

How does Edmund Spenser reconcile holiness with passionate love in his "Epithalamion"? For a start, we must acknowledge precisely what "holiness" means to Spenser. Spenser is the pre-eminent English Protestant poet, and supported the religious reforms of the Church of England against the Catholic church. This is precisely relevant to Spenser's imagining of marital love in the "Epithalamion" for one salient reason -- the Catholic church holds marriage to be a sacrament, whereas the English church (to which Spenser adhered) does not. This should be fairly obvious, because the English church was founded so that the King could have a divorce, but it was fairly recent at the time Spenser was writing: the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were issued in 1563, and Spenser writes the "Epithalamion" a little more than thirty years afterward in the mid-1590s. A sacrament is an official religious sanctification: it imparts holiness to something like marriage. In writing the "Epithalamion," therefore, Spenser finds himself having to use poetry to generate a sense of holiness for his own Anglican marriage that Catholic poets would consider to be inherent in the sacramental act of marriage itself. Spenser's "Epithalamion" is the poet's attempt to generate, rhetorically, the sense of holiness which is appropriate to a Christian sense of marriage, with an awareness that the act is not inherently made holy by the poet's version of Christianity.

As a result, Spenser's sense of holiness in the "Epithalamion" is somewhat bizarre: there are more allusions to pagan religious belief from ancient Greece and Rome than there are allusions to actual Christianity. But what is perhaps more strange is the way that the allusions to both are mingled: we can see this in the transitions between the thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas of the poem. The thirteenth stanza is filled with conventional Christian religious trappings:

Behold, whiles she before the Altar stands,

Hearing the holy Priest that to her speaks,

And blesses her with his two happy Hands,

How the red Roses flush up in her Cheeks,

Although the language turns obviously metaphorical when it wishes to praise the bride's modesty or chastity by likening her blush to flowers, the set-dressing here is quite recognizably that of a Christian church: the stanza as a whole gives us not just the "Altar" and the "holy Priest," but also "Angels" who sing "Alleluya." But the following stanza pronounces "all is done" (i.e., the marriage is performed) and then suddenly gives us an influx of pagan deities, "ye God Bacchus" and "Hymen" and "the Graces":

Crown ye God Bacchus with a Coronal,

And Hymen also crown with Wreaths of Vine;

And let the Graces daunce unto the rest,

For they an do it best:

This would not seem particularly bizarre if Spenser made it clear that the religious trappings of the thirteenth stanza represented sincere belief and those of the fourteenth are mere poetic devices, but the poet does not present it that way: instead we seem to be in a world full of supernatural beings, some Christian and some pagan, who are all presented as being real and alive in the world of the poem. The description makes us feel that Edmund Spenser walks out of a church where Angels have been flying around and peeking in his wife's face, and marches straight to a Bacchic orgy where he joins the pagan rites. What is the reason for this compositional choice?

I would suggest that the reason is evident in the overall structural principle of the poem, which is organized around the recurring refrain: "The Woods shall to me answer, and my Eccho ring." This could be read as religious, in the way that it resembles an antiphonal call and response. However the poet is relating directly to nature here. Thus the more overtly religious language in the poem should be understood within the context of the overwhelming preponderance of natural imagery throughout: not only the conventional flower imagery ("lilies and roses" in Stanza 3) but the veritable menagerie of creatures which appear in the text ("trouts and pikes" in Stanza 4, the catalogue of "chearful birds" in Stanza 5, or the various less pleasant beasties, the "scriech-owl" and "frogs" and "vultures," that are dealt with apotropaically in Stanza 19), all the way up to the invocations of heavenly bodies and zodiacal signs. If Spenser's Protestant marriage to Elizabeth is not sacramental, instead the entire natural world will be invested with numinous significance through the power of the poet's imagery. In some sense, we should understand the invocations to pagan gods like Juno in Stanza 22 to be like the summons for singing birds -- this is the common mythical inheritance of poets, rather than a belief system, and this is what must be used to construct the meaning. This is, of course, precisely the way in which the poem's refrain works: obviously a voice that echoes in a forest is a natural phenomenon, but it is only through poetic logic that the resounding noise becomes an "answer." And indeed the fact that the last word of the refrain is "ring" makes it sound like everything in the poem is conspiring to make the poet's marriage something sanctified by nature itself.