A. Kent Hieatt. Short Time's Endless Monument. The symbolism of the numbers in Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion. New York: Columbia University Press, I960.
It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the intricate argument of this book. Spenser's Epithalamion contains 365 long lines and 68 short ones distributed among 24 stanzas and is the only one of his poems in which stanzas vary in length and in which one of the characters is attended by the Hours. Professor Hieatt explains these peculiarities by discovering beneath the literal surface a numerical symbolism referring to diurnal and annual 'movements' of the sun, to the cyclic return of the seasons and the succession of generations which make life possible and compensate for individual mortality. The Hours attend the Bride in order to indicate their connection with the stanzas; the stanzas vary in length in order to include 365 long lines signifying the days of the year. The Hour-stanzas signify diural hours, and night falls at the seventeenth stanza because in Southern Ireland there are about sixteen daylight hours at the summer solstice. Spenser indicates that the Hours are also sidereal by a use of imagery which pairs stanzas in such a way that the series I to 12 correspond to the series 13 to 24. The Hour-symbolism as a whole indicates 'the position of the heavens in relation to the sun at the four seasons of the year, and the lengths of day and night at the four climactic points of the sun's annual progress'. The sun moves more slowly than the fixed stars and the Envoy symbolizes that... 'it is upon this daily hanging back that the year, and the whole rhythm of organic life, depends'.
Professor Hieatt's interpretation of the diurnal Hour-stanzas is illuminating and accords with the poem's literal meaning. His treatment of the sidereal Hours is less convincing, for the correspondences of the 'matching stanzas' are not sufficiently striking to remain in the reader's memory and equally plausible pairings can be arranged. (For instance I9 pairs as well with 5 as with 7, and 13 as well with 20 as with 1.)
The coincidence of his wedding and the summer solstice led Spenser to connect diurnal and annual solar movements in stanza 15, and his 365 long lines may be meant to suggest the same connection; but he gives no sign that the whole poem contains an intricate astronomical symbolism or that, when he offers his Song as a recompense to his bride, he is referring, not to a hitch in the wedding preparations, but to the unpunctuality of the sun.
Can one grasp complicated numerical symbolism while reading a poem? Surely not. The different levels of The Faerie Queene present no parallel. Elizabethans didn't have to do sums in order to equate Belphoebe, Elizabeth, and Chastity. Moreover, Spenser provides plenty of obvious emblems and straightforward explanations of his meaning.
Epithalamion might conceivably be both a poem and a cryptogram, but Professor Hieatt claims that the numerical symbolism should change and enrich our understanding of the poetry. We thought Spenser was hymning his marriage, but really he was brooding on mutability and comforting himself with the thought that children confer immortality on their parents. But the bridegroom says nothing of this: he hopes that his posterity will enjoy earthly happiness and heavenly immortality. Professor Hieatt has produced a learned, fascinating, and thoughtprovoking thesis, but, to my mind, not a convincing one.
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This slim volume constitutes an event of importance in Spenser scholarship. Not only does it offer an entirely fresh interpretation of Epithalamion, but also (though the author himself does not claim this) the possibility of a new approach to Spenser's poetry as a whole. Until recently the criticism of Spenser mostly concerned itself with fairly large literary units. The tacit assumption was that, however accurate his allegory, however condensed and allusive his mythology, nevertheless, in terms of the phrase, even of the stanza, Spenser's construction was loose and uneconomical. He might (though this was doubtful) have written the best cantos in the best order; but not the best words in the best order. Mr. Hieatt's very original book is one of a number of contemporary studies that are completely altering this older conception. For he is able to show-in my opinion quite conclusively-that the minutiae of the poem are consummately ordered in an intricate system of numerological symbolism. This is the main structural principle; and no one ignorant of it is in a position to make pronouncements about Epithalamion's formal qualities.
A number of other Elizabethan poets used numerological arrangements (I have collected many examples in Peele, Drayton, and Jonson in particular); yet no other seems to have hit upon Spenser's brilliant device, of using the numbers of astronomy. This device makes possible a mimetic dramatization of astronomical and temporal patterns at the formal level. It is as a total entity that Epithalamion celebrates the cosmic renewal of life to which marriage makes its human contribution. For, of the larger, cosmic movement, the poem's exterior structure presents an arithmological model-a microcosm with its own system of numerical laws.
Mr. Hieatt begins by noticing what it is almost incredible that no one has noticed before: namely that the 24 stanzas and 365 long lines of Epithalamion represent numerically the measure of the day in hours and of the year in days. The bearing of this pattern upon the problem of the poem's apparently irregular metrical scheme is not lost upon Mr. Hieatt. Previous attempts to explain this unique metrical form by referring it to Italian canzone structure have never entirely succeeded. Now we see that the variations in stanzaic length, and in the proportions of long and short lines, must follow from the numerological scheme as a matter of arithmetical necessity. It is impossible to divide 365 equally into 24 parts.
Given these initial observations, the discovery of subtlety after subtlety of arrangement follows naturally, until with mounting excitement the reader forms the impression that he is for the first time experiencing the poem substantially as Spenser intended it. We see, for instance, the structural division of the 24 stanza-hours into hours of day and hours of night, signalized by a change in the refrain from positive to negative forms at stanza I7: the stanza at which, in the 'narrative', night comes upon the day of Spenser's marriage. More exactly, the transit from light to darkness is at 1. 300, 'Now night is come.. .', the last of the group of long lines at the beginning of stanza 17. This line occurs exactly16 stanzas after the commencement of the poem. Now, as Mr. Hieatt is able to show, at the latitude of southern Ireland, the place of Spenser's marriage, on 'the longest day in all the yeare', the hours of daylight were also 16. The short lines appear to symbolize divisions of time, marking the graduation of the stanzas into four quarter-hour groups of long lines; a precision of measurement characteristic of the remarkable numerology of Epithalamion.
Many further subtleties are revealed, particularly in the Envoy, where individual words are re-enlivened by Mr. Hieatt's ministrations, and come to exhibit a weight and accuracy unsuspected before. Yet one hardly ever feels that the symbolic arrangements are being invented. This is partly because at every turn results are independently confirmed by the actual wording, or by some feature of the imagery. Thus the hours do not merely appear as stanzas, but are also prominent among the bride's attendants: 'fayre houres'
Which doe the seasons of the yeare allot,
And al that euer in this world is fayre
Doe make and still repayre. (11. 100-2)Objectivity is also assured by Mr. Hieatt's method, which inspires confidence by its lucidity and rigour. As is proper in an essay breaking new ground in such a field, maximum allowance is made for the possibility that patterns may be the result of mere coincidence. And at every stage Mr. Hieatt makes it quite clear which patterns are being established as certain, and which only tentatively suggested.
The only phase of the argument which is imperfectly worked out is that describing the system of paired images in the two halves of the poem. (Mr. Hieatt's concluding section is an edition of the text, designed to display these correspondences.) Some stanzas are matched convincingly (such as 9 and 21, with their moon-goddess images); but with others the comparison seems far-fetched. Nevertheless, the pattern is established: a critical overhaul of this section would add more instances of pairing than it subtracted. For instance, the parallel between stanzas 2 and 14, which seems to Mr. Hieatt his weakest, seems stronger if we recall that the Bacchus of the later stanza is an avatar of the earlier stanza's sun-god.
Another instance where Mr. Hieatt's argument might be buttressed comes in his demonstration that a prominent mention of the marriage-day occurs around the 103rd long line. No accident, surely, that this day, St. Barnabas's Day, was the 103rd of the year, if 1 March is reckoned to begin the year. But Mr. Hieatt needlessly undermines this construction by a qualification: 'March 1 is not, of course, conventionally speaking, the first day of the year, which for Elizabethans was Lady Day, March 25.' In fact, when Spenser was writing, before the Gregorian calendar reform was accepted in England, the beginning of the astronomical year (the vernal equinox) was 10/11 March, not 25 March. But a separate tradition, of crucial importance for Mr. Hieatt's thesis, began the astronomical year on 1 March; a practice which had the convenience of making the intercalary day, 29 February, conclude the calendar.' At a number of other places where Renaissance astronomy enters the argument it would have been instructive, in view of modern ignorance of the subject, if Mr. Hieatt had gone into a little more detail.
These flaws do not in my view seriously detract from what represents a permanent contribution to Spenserian scholarship. Short Time's Endless Monument should be read, not only by specialists, but by all those interested in extreme poetic achievements. For this brilliant essay in literary investigation, itself a critical tour de force, reveals Epithalamion to be an apex of Renaissance art, a miracle of artistic unity, with a hidden complexity almost unknown in continental poetry of the period. Its numerology is never merely ingenious or cryptic, but the result of 'a pursuit of an integral meaning, integrally expressed, below the surface of discourse'.