Time to get those rivers married! Finishing up the Hesiodic catalogue, Spenser/the narrator told us that all the rivers ‘that day in order seemly good / Did on the Thamis attend, and waited well / To doe their dueful service, as to them befell’ (44). We discussed whether this catalogue is in fact orderly, the result of editorial decisions on Spenser’s part (after all, why these rivers and not all the others?), or whether its river-like onrushing shows him, once again, at the mercy of the poem. One moment that does suggest an orderly, curated catalogue comes when the narrator brackets off Scotland with the ‘Twede, the limit betwixt Logris land [England/Wales] / And Albany [Scotland]’ (36). This stanza began with the Tyne, another river in the north of England (think: Newcastle-upon-Tyne), and ends with the blood ‘Of Scots and English both, that tyned on his [the Tweed’s] strand’, ‘tyne’ meaning perish in Scots/northern English dialect. There is a chiasmus in ‘Logris / Albany / Scots / English’, bracketing the Scots within the English (think: Scotland as internal colony [John Kerrigan]). Scotland is one place colonist Edmund Spenser is not willing to go, though he does give us a preponderance of Irish rivers, including the Mulla, which flowed by his estate during his ten-year stay in Eire: ‘And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep’ (41).
We wondered: is this a nature poem? Diana pointed out the geological specificity of the descriptions; yet, at points, culture overtakes nature as the narrator reflects on conventions of naming rivers, such as ‘the stony shallow Lone, / That to old Loncaster his name doth lend’ (39) or the multilingual ‘Awniduff, which of the English man / Is cal’de Blacke-water’ (41). We considered the ‘dewy’ nature of nature in The Faerie Queene: fresh, new, morning-lit. In the description of Medway, her silvery dress looks as if made of stars, yet is also clearly made of silver: the dress’ sprezzatura, like the poem’s, looks effortless but also ‘bewrays’ its own effort, ‘to let men plainely wot / It was no mortall worke’ (45). Here, Idil noted that the onrushing movement of rivers pauses to allow for some tautological moments: ‘Then came the Bride, the lovely Medua came’ and ‘her feet appeared plaine, / Her silver feet’ (47). Progress pauses for beauty; we were moved. Finally, the narrator lists all fifty of Medway’s nereid bridesmaids in a joyous (and at times surprisingly trochaic) display of metrical virtuosity, tiring out his Muse (53) but perhaps not his readers—at least, not these readers. It may be that the pleasure of the Marriage of the Rivers is best understood by reading aloud, among friends.
[EKL]