Antiquities of Britain: Spenser's Ruines of Time

Abstract

Antiquities of Britain:Spenser's Ruines of Time Hassan Melehy In The Ruines of Time, the poem that opens his Complaints (1591), Spenser offers reflections on the evanescent nature of all worldly things, death, and the creation of new life that may be found in poetry. Indeed, The Ruines of Time presents a poetics that Spenser develops and follows throughout the Complaints, and no less than a manifesto for a renewed English poetry, founded on the ruins of the past, a new life springing forth on the funeral monuments of the dead. In this respect, Spenser engages in a productive imitation of one of his major French predecessors, Joachim du Bellay, whose sonnet sequences the Antiquitez de Rome and Songe (published together in 1558) he presents as translations toward the end of the Complaints under the respective titles Ruines of Rome: by Bellay and Visions of Bellay. As I will show here, The Ruines of Time is marked by frequent allusion to and reworking of these sequences. And in a broader perspective, Spenser borrows notions of imitation from Du Bellay's Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse (1549), a text with which he was likely familiar from as early as adolescence through the agency of his teacher, Richard Mulcaster. As I have presented it elsewhere, for Du Bellay imitation involves borrowing pieces of text from models from the past, reordering them, transforming them, and writing a text that addresses and contributes to the present context.1 That is, past models are drawn on in such a way that [End Page 159] they might ultimately be surpassed. Although Du Bellay distinguishes imitation from translation,2 his imitation depends in part on translation, as segments of another text in a different (often ancient) language become part of the new, imitative text. And just as Du Bellay continues his theorization of imitation in the Antiquitez and Songe, Spenser offers a poetics that imitates, in order to leave it in the past, Du Bellay's Deffence, in part as a continuation of the latter's English counterpart, Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy. In the course of this paper, I will present The Ruines of Time as the overture to a "Defense and Illustration" of English verse, which the Complaints volume taken as a whole constitutes. The Time of Ruins It is quite fitting that The Ruines of Time, as the opening of the Complaints, takes time and its ruinous effects as its subject. The poem involves a temporal progression that, in the Complaints, starts with the translations that appear at the end of the book. At the very end is Visions of Petrarch, which Spenser translated from Petrarch's Canzone 323 (and from Clément Marot's French version of it, "Des Visions de Petrarque"); preceding this series is Visions of Bellay. And before this sequence is Spenser's own variation on the theme and structure of the translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay, Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. Acknowledging his predecessors at the end of his book, Spenser moves toward a future of English poetry that will be free of the tutelage of these same predecessors and that is built on the funeral monuments of certain English knights-in particular the poet-knight Sidney. Although this temporal progression may or may not coincide with the order in which Spenser composed these poems (their dates of composition and revision have never been firmly established),3 The Ruines of Time describes the temporality of the emergence of English poetry from its antecedents: the poetics of The Ruines of Time demands a regard to the past, and by way of the past a regard to the future. In recognizing and crediting his predecessors at the end of the Complaints, Spenser is announcing that their poetry is effectively in ruins, ruins from which he will build his own poetry and open the way to the poetry of the future. The temporal reversal that Spenser builds into the order of presentation of his book is at the same time a movement forward, for it demonstrates that the [End Page 160] destruction of the old poetry is by its very nature also a creation of the...