Spenser's Muiopotmos as an Allegory

Extract

Most readers of Spenser's Muiopotmos will recall Professor Palgrave's comments upon the poem in his essays on The Minor Poem of Spenser. He said in part: “The lyric regarded from this point of view, is as light and fanciful, as winged and ethereal, as Clarion himself: the sunshine of the Summer's day which it describes glitters through it: the musical ripple of rhyme and metre is unbroken.” Then, finding but a fantastically slight connection between the episodes of the tapestries and the story of Clarion, Mr. Palgrave further summed up his comment upon the poem: “The tale hence seems even more inconsecutive than Mother Hubbard's; it neither is a whole as a story, an allegory, nor a moralization; and one asks in what humour a poet so sage and serious as Spenser, an artist so finished, can have painted this picture?—a question for sufficient answer to which he might have pointed triumphantly to the exquisiteness with which the fairy web is wrought and embroidered; to the poet's right, now and then, to be fancy free.”