Chapter Three: A ‘goodlie bridge’ between the Old and the New: the Transformation of Complaint in The Ruines of Time

Summary

To move from Complaints' translations to its original poems is to become more conscious of the differences between Spenser and his contemporaries. Though ostensibly an elegy for Leicester and Sidney, The Ruines of Time in fact uses their deaths much as Milton was to use the death of Edward King in Lycidas – as an opportunity to discuss poetry and the rôle of the poet. Though Spenser uses complaint to bewail the death of Sidney, his poem is not a conventional lament for great men, despite his claims in the Dedication to the Countess of Pembroke that it was ‘speciallie intended to the renowming’ of the Dudley family, ‘and to the eternizing of some of the chiefe of them late deceased’. The differences between Spenser's treatment of Sidney's death and that of his contemporaries can be illustrated by ‘The Funeral Songs of that honourable gentleman, Sir Philip Sidney, Knight’ set by Byrd and published in his Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety (1588). Though this poem's quantitative metre is unusual, its lament is stylized and relatively predictable. It aims to amplify our sense of the loss of Sidney by the staccato iteration of its lament: ‘SIDNEY is dead!’; ‘SIDNEY, the sprite heroic!’; ‘Come to me grief, for ever!’ The poet's grief leads directly to the plaintive text whose goal is to move its listener to acknowledge the justice of its ‘plaint’.

By contrast, The Ruines of Time uses the complaint mode in a much more complex way.