Spenser's Trace

Raising his voice against the din, the postman says the weather is to worsen, that the winds will mount into a category that we in Ireland call "storm force." Streams flow down the graveled driveway; spied even from the distance of the windows, the road is awash with small rivers floated with the detritus that is autumn, flukes and brown-orange leaves, yew needles blackened by rain. When, for a moment, the wind breathes in, I glimpse smoke against the gorsed and heathered hill that says our neighbors, here in the Wicklow mountains, are in and at the fire. And then the wind resumes. I almost wait for the power to cut out, lines clipped by branches broken or snagged: I have filled kettle, water jug, a pot, knowing that if it cuts out our pump will cut out too, and the well, not dry, will seem so. And so these slight preparations.

I am thinking about how wild wind and rain might sound in a building composed of meter-thick, handcut granite and clay and none of the modern insulations, how they might have sounded to the four-centuries-dead writer Edmund Spenser when he lived in County Cork: more distant, perhaps, more persistent, a dull ache that ran through Kilcolman Castle like a murmur of language not understood—rivulets slipping down the tower's face, over slow, relentless time tracing their channels into speckled gray stone made black with wet. I imagine that in most of the castle, the rain would have been something one merely sensed—a disturbance of air. Surely the granite would have muted the sound unless one was standing in a top room of the tower, where the lash of water could be heard against beams and turf and straw packed dense against slabs of slate. Rain and wind would have been available as sound only in rooms directly beneath a roof, or discerned through small, heavy glass windows that would have distorted the view of any storm like a fun-house mirror, perhaps exaggerating the bend of trees or the size of the raindrops until the outside world was threatening, deformed—perhaps making the world of weather seem far, far away, like a view through a telescope.

I close my eyes to contain the sound of this current rain and try to imagine Spenser hearing rain four centuries ago on the other side of Ireland, his eyes fallen closed in a rare moment of indulgent daydream—Spenser sheltering amid those gray stone walls, Spenser beyond a name and reputation: Spenser alive, existing, listening to an Irish rain something like this one.

* * *

Many who know of Edmund Spenser will know the name only and very little of his work. Even for those who study or have studied English literature, Spenser is rarely required reading in the way that Shakespeare is. One can move through a four-year undergraduate degree in English literature, as I did in the United States, without reading his poetry. Spenser, once known as "the poet's poet," a writer once linked in a trinity with Shakespeare and Milton as the greatest of English authors, has lost a good deal of his former status.Many know Spenser's name only as that of the author of The Faerie Queene, but will not have read the epic allegory itself, and likely know very little about Spenser in a more general sense; he appears to have developed a reputation as difficult, inaccessible, and dated. It would appear that little has changed since David Hume, in his 1759 History of England, wrote that "Spencer [sic] maintains his place in the shelves among our English classics: But he is seldom seen on the table." Despite this, Spenser has persistently attracted a certain attention and readership, and much of this attention has, in recent years, come from Ireland or from a perspective that considers Spenser's time in Ireland. Spenser left a trace in Irish cultural memory, albeit one that remains largely concealed.

From approximately 1580 onward, when he traveled to Dublin in the service of Lord Grey de Wilton, Spenser spent most of his time in Ireland...