The Space of Spenser's Poetry: What Does it Mean to 'prick' a 'plaine'?

Notes on Scenes

Hello there, fellow reader, and welcome to this: my actual first Substack after months of lurking, reading, envying, being too busy to actually get on with writing myself. I present to you this first from a ghost reader.

Fear not, I am not dead myself, but I read a lot of books by people who are, about people who are, and I want to share my thoughts on them with you. More importantly, I want this Substack to offer you the chance to read vicariously. Reading-proper is hard and long and it makes your eyes tired, and who really wants to dedicate upwards of 13 hours reading the laboured prose and poetry of writers who really wanted to make it as complicated as possible? I happen to love laboured prose, perhaps because witnessing overt peacocking keeps my own ego in check - they make me laugh, I find them funny. But I also think it’s entirely fair that many people simply can’t be arsed. I personally don’t enjoy reading for reading’s sake. I enjoy stories. And I’ve happened across some good ones while chuckling away at these Great Classics which I think should still be told and felt, just without all the nonsense. What I’m trying to say is that this Substack is a place for my little musings on the books I read. You can read it and steal all my ideas for your own, joining the honoured ranks of those people pretending to read things they’ve never actually opened. Maybe you’ll encounter a story you never thought to read but which really grips you, and be encouraged to investigate further (I faithfully promise to mark all spoilers in case you want to read them yourself). Or maybe you’ve read these books before, but struggle to find anyone to talk to about them. Use my posts as you will, my humble aim is to create a universe of ghost readers, all ghost reading in their own way.

This first is a note on the opening scene of one of the greatest works of literature in the English language, which is a catch-all term for a book which is far too long, too dense - too impressed with itself; The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. The chances of anyone sitting down to read this book outside of a university library are statistically zero. It’s insanely long and probably unfinished so you don’t even get the satisfaction of it ending. Its social/political/religious relevance died out with Queen Elizabeth I (upon whom the eponymous Faerie Queene is based, and upon whom much praise is zealously heaped as though the author’s head depended upon it (it probably did)). It’s entirely written in poetic verse, to such quality that the famous stanzaic structure was subsequently named the ‘Spenserian Stanza’, but which hasn’t really been used to great effect since its publication. It has never seen any cinematic adaptions that haven’t been heavily tampered with, probably because the plot is so convoluted and downright outrageous that pulling any consistent 90 minute narrative from its pages results in.. well, not The Faerie Queene. (Allegedly Star Wars was ‘loosely’ based on it, but like… where?) Romeo and Juliet it ain’t, but it is breathtaking, and remains one of my favourite works of Early Modern literature no matter how much Donn, Marlow and Shakespeare I read. Spenser’s poetry is so intricate, it unfolds like the layers of the most complex piece of origami - ever uncovering new meaning and new form. It is one of the only texts I’ve ever read where, upon putting any section to a room of literature students, each will come back with entirely new and different interpretations, so rich is Spenser’s poetic meaning. (I encourage you, once you have read the opening stanzas included below to pause and consider what you think it means before you read my interpretation. It’s more fun that way).

This mini essay explores just one moment from this saga - one line, really, and I could write even more on it than I already have. This is the first in a series I will be publishing here I’m lamely going to call ‘Notes on Scenes’ where I basically just write my thoughts on small snapshots of the books I read. I’ve been working on one for a Dickens, but I thought this was the perfect text to start with because of its complexities - it’s really only possible to read The Faerie Queene as tiny, fleeting chunks all combined in a glorious, endless chaos. If you’ve never read it, I hope it gives you some small sense of Spenser’s mastery, and maybe even encourages you to read at least a canto or two, if only so you can say you have.

A ghost reader 👻

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A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,

         Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,

         Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,

         The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde;

         Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:

         His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,

         As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:

         Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,

As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,

    The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,

    For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,

    And dead as liuing euer him ador'd:

    Vpon his shield the like was also scor'd,

    For soueraine hope, which in his helpe he had:

    Right faithfull true he was in deede and word,

    But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;

Yet nothing did he dread, but euer was ydrad.

The Faerie Queen, I.1-18

‘A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shield’ is arguably one of the most powerful moments of visual and spatial imagery in English literature. Without ceremony or orientation we are dropped into Spenser’s Faerie Lond and confronted with this dynamic vision of a knight, galloping across some barren wilderness, so fast as to puncture (or rather ‘prick’) the very earth on which he rides; the sun beating down and reflecting off of his armour in a dazzling spectacle of assumed heroic purpose. ‘This’, we think, ‘is rather exciting’. We recognise that Spenser’s genius is his ability to form such a full image within only the first two lines of iambic pentameter. The hooves of our heroes steed deafen us, the sun glinting off his armour is blinding.

The plosive alliteration in this first line (‘pricking on the plaine’) implies an insistence on this as a space. The aggressive repetition of sound, we think, is being used to situate us - thrusting us into the action in a way we are powerless to prevent. We are initially inclined to think of this as a solid structure. The heroic imagery of the knight on noble steed is so archetypal we are lulled into the trap of thinking that this is the point - that this is merely another description of an image with which we are already so familiar that there is no need to interrogate the boundaries between knight on horse set against a backdrop designed only to enhance the aesthetic presentation of his heroism. We almost do not question it. But the phrase stands out in its sharp audibility and rhythm in contrast to the description of the knight on either side. ‘Is this an onomatopoeic mirror to create the sound of the horse’s hooves?’, we wonder. Perhaps, but still it stands out in the stanza. This ‘plaine’ which we first assumed to be a backdrop is pushed to the fore as it sits in our mouths. It is more important than mere artistic flourish, Spenser is telling us that this space is, in some way, significant. 

A deep-dive into the OED and we are left, disappointingly without a concrete alternative definition offering a new understanding with which to conceptualise this space. In ‘plaine’ we find descriptions ranging from ‘A broad tract of land which is comparatively flat; an expanse of level ground’, ‘Something plain; the straightforward facts; a simple or unadorned thing’, to ‘Of a surface of any kind (frequently of a part of the body): not curved, angled, etc.; flat, flattened’. Such descriptions only serve to confuse Spenser’s intentions in our mind as we fail to find a connecting thread which might offer an affirmative understanding of this space. It is only when we go back and consider the verb ‘pricking’ that such a thread begins to materialise. In order to understand this space, we must reorient our analysis towards thinking about this phrase, less in terms of foregrounding the noun ‘plaine’, and more in terms of thinking of the ‘pricking’ which takes place upon it, in which we expose another image as we conceptualise the act of marking some blank surface as the act of writing upon the page. 

Spenser’s presence in the text has long been noted in various different characters within the poem (Colin Clout, the poet-musician, Genius, the Janus-like figure who guards the gates between Faerie Lond and the space beyond, even Redcross on his quest to defend Gloriana’s kingdom from the malign influences of an allegorised Catholicism), but to open the poem with an acknowledgement of Spenser the author, as one who is actively in the process of creation even as this tale unfolds is significant beyond its implications for our experience of the space of Faerie Lond. We are made to recognise that the ‘plaine’ into which we are introduced is a space which is actively being constructed. 

This is only to the extent, however, that it even is the space, upon which we should be focusing our attentions. Returning again to the importance of the verb, we must acknowledge that Spenser, in this moment of poetic spatial creation, is trying to direct our attention away from our physical surroundings towards the direct focus of this stanza: the suit of armour. These ‘mightie armes and siluer shielde’ constitute the space in which we are actually being oriented. Thinking of this opening moment in terms of the visual ideals we discussed earlier, it becomes evident that the space of the suit of armour is perhaps best defined by the shell in Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space (1994). Bachelard discusses the shell in terms of ‘the beauty and solidity of its geometrical form’ (p. 106) - something we have already considered in discussing both the awe with which we are introduced to this as an aesthetic object, and the archetypal ideal of its rendering - but also in terms of the abject fear with which we confront the potential of what is inside (pp.110). The Redcross Knight (whom, it should be noted, is exclusively identified by the visual aspects of his armour until as late as canto ten), is cuts a striking figure: his weapons are ’mightie’, his shield is gleaming silver, he is emblazoned all over with the ‘bloudie Crosse’ in honour of both ‘his dying Lord’ and ‘soueraine hope’. It is, without doubt, a captivating image, and one which comes to inform our reading of the text, despite the fact that it is fundamentally deceptive. 

The dents and scratches found upon the plated metal are experienced as ‘wounds’, as though it were functioning as a human body, which might suggest that we should see this suit of armour as a representation of the living man inside. However, this is preceded with the description of ‘old dints’ - ‘dints’ being another word which describes impressions or marks, again reminding us of Spenser’s active role in the creation of this metal body and the heroic myth it represents. Plated armour itself becomes a ‘plaine’ which has been ‘pricked’ upon, drawing our attention back to this act of construction, now an act of deconstruction for the armoured body. In this way, we might think of the suit of armour in terms of the post-human context of the automaton, or even cyborg - as a figure which is designed to replicate life but which is designed to endure what a human body could not. The armour-as-shell functions as a space of protection for the body of the wearer, as well as space in which that body and our concept of his identity is obscured. In this way it contitutes a barrier between the self and the external world. This is affirmed in the following lines as we are told that these are the scars won on ‘many a bloudy fielde’, but that the man inside the armour was not the one to have won them since he has never seen battle (‘Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield’ - the line is nestled comfortably in the middle of the stanza, bracketed on either side by heroic external imagery, giving us the truest sense of the wearer on the inside). This gives the armour a sense of agency as a space not beholden to the wearer, and which allows the wearer a certain agency over his own identity as it presents aesthetically. The shell, which is fundamentally an external casing, does not hold transformative powers over the internal space it walls off. Inside the armour he looks like the Redcross Knight, the distinction here being that he himself remains untransformed - he does not become the Redcross Knight simply because he wears the armour. This is the space of creation all of its own and functions as an allegorical metaphor for Spenser’s writing. Bachelard’s shell perfectly raifies this concept when he states that, in contrast to the natural shell which is created by the creature from the inside out, ‘a shell by a man would be obtained from the outside, through a series of enumerable acts that would bare the mark of touched-up beauty’ (The Poetics of Space, p. 106). Here we see a shell which, as a physical object, bears the implication of being man-made, and which forces the imposition of chivalric ideals by all who view it onto the undeserving wearer.  

Despite Spenser’s deliberate separation between armour and wearer, he continuously associates them as one, only ever referring to a single ‘he’. Lines such as ‘But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore’ seem to suggest that the breastplate and the man’s chest are one in the same’ This should not be taken to imply that, despite his inexperience, that we should think of the wearer as being worthy of the same heroic aesthetic as the armour he is wearing. Rather it serves to perpetuate the concept of this aesthetic depiction as deception - that man and armour and the same singular thing to which we might give the name ‘knight’ (the suit of armour is, afterall, humanoid). Even as we are reminded that they are separate, they are shoved back together in their visual conception. This is the problem which arguably defines this text: how do we begin to pull apart aesthetic styling from any kind of concrete understanding upon which we might be able to define Faerie Lond as a space. Spenser is explicit in the attempts of this aesthetic construction to deceive us, even as he acknowledges his involvement in the constructing it, leaving us unable to trust his intentions in offering us any kind of anchor within the space of the poem, and forcing us to cast doubt on every aspect of his creation.