Las inferencias superestructurales

Parallels for the themes and arguments of Alcyon’s hysterical lament can be found in contemporary drama.^"^ What is particularly unusual in Daphna'ida is their appearance in Alcyon’s lament in the context of a pastoral elegy. Generically, Daphna'ida is a pastoral elegy disrupted by excessive grief.^^ The components of Alcyon’s complaint—nature, animals, shepherds—belong naturally in a controlled elegy such as Colin’s elegy for Dido in ‘November’ from The Shepheardes Calender. The unusual focus on imperfectly resolved grief in Daphna'ida derives from the poem’s major literary influence, Chaucer’s Book o f the Duchess?^ Spenser disruptively plots the subjectivism o f this poem onto a pastoral framework. Alcyon is a shepherd who elects to grieve completely outside the pastoral community. Spenser highlights Alcyon/Gorges’s self-imposed exile from society and his lack of interest in other people’s opinion of him. This strategy simultaneously stresses the depth and genuineness of Alcyon/Gorges’ link to Daphne/Douglas and puts pressure on Alcyon’s pastoral community—the English court—to do its best to mend his grief.

Throckmorton is intended to signify his greater devotion to the Queen just as Alcyon’s failure to take cognizance o f Ambrosia stresses his devotion to Daphne. However, whilst Ralegh’s silence marginalises the significance o f his wife to him, Alcyon’s has, because o f its juxtaposition with Daphne’s injunction to him to look after Ambrosia, paradoxically the opposite effect o f stressing the centrality o f his daughter. Another difference is that Alcyon’s frenzied fidelity to his absent patron can have no conceivable utility, much as he tries to convince him self that if he is good Daphne will arrange for him to die (lines 379-92).

Clemen’s description o f the genre o f the dramatic lament (1961, 211-52) includes many elements— the apostrophe to Fortune; the invocation to the gods; the inexpressibility topos\ rhetorical questioning; the idea that the speaker’s grief is unique; the appeal to others for sympathy— found in Daphnaïda. Oram briefly compares Alcyon to the ‘overreachers o f Elizabethan drama’, mentioning, too, affinities with pastoral love complaint (1981, 144-5; 1989,487).

Cf. Bernard 1989, 123-6. Oram (1989, 487) calls Daphna'ida ‘a pastoral elegy manqué’; Harris and Steffen argue that it is ‘an antipastoral— a formal, highly structured song o f grief which everywhere denies the efficacy o f either song or form’ (1978, 27). D eN eef (1982, 182, n . l l ) interprets Daphne as an ideal ‘reader’ o f pastoral elegy whose job is to guide the reader towards a coherent interpretation o f the poem.

Pastoral elegy, o f which Spenser’s ‘November’ (Spenser 1912, 460-3) is a paradigmatic instance, sometimes uses a vision of the beloved to help the mourner to realise that the loved one is in heaven and need not be mourned. Colin’s elegy for Dido in ‘November’ ends with his confident vision of Dido in the Elysian fields (lines 175-202). In Daphnaïda, Alcyon projects onto this pastoral convention two very different visions of lost beloveds from The Book o f the Duchess (Alcyone’s vision of Ceyx and the man in black’s vision o f White^^), producing a distorted version of the climax of ‘November’.

The core of Alcyon’s complaint, his memory of Daphne on her deathbed (lines 253- 94) and the following eight stanzas (lines 295-357), is made up of bits and pieces taken from ‘November’ and The Book o f the Duchess. Like the man in black, unlike the ‘professional’ Colin (Kay 1990, 31), Alcyon is a mourning widower, who enters into dialogue with the poem’s narrator. His vision of his beloved, is, like the man in black’s, based on the memory of her when alive. Its focus on the moment of the beloved’s death, however, has more in common with Colin’s elegy and Alcyone’s vision of Ceyx than with the man in black’s potent recreation of the living White. The name ‘Alcyon’ is an

^ Chaucer 198^ 329-46. Daphnaïda's use o f The Book o f the Duchess was first pointed out by Nadal (1908). Most critics who have compared the two poems (e.g. Berlin 1966; Harris and Steffen 1978; Oram 1983) argue that Chaucer’s poem is consolatory while Spenser’s is not.

Like Daphnaïda, The Book o f the Duchess has a narrator who encounters a grieving husband— Chaucer’s in a dream, Spenser’s in a Winter landscape. In Chaucer’s poem, though, that encounter is preceded by the image o f another mourner whose story Chaucer’s narrator reads before going to sleep, Alcyone, widow o f the drowned King Ceyx. The Book o f the Duchess engineers a parallel between its two mourners’ coming to awareness o f the reality o f their loved one’s death. Alcyone, uncertain o f Ceyx’s fate, is confronted with her dead husband’s animated body telling her not to mourn (lines 195-211). The mourner inside the dream, the man in black, comes gradually, by means o f an elaborate dialogue with Chaucer’s narrator, to an awareness o f the reality o f his beloved’s death. The blazon through which the man in black reconstructs the memory o f his dead love White (lines 848-1041) parallels Alcyon’s vision o f Ceyx: memory o f the beloved in both cases eases the pain o f loss. Neither Alcyone nor the man in black transcends their grief by means o f the vision o f the lost beloved. Alcyone’s Ovidian speech and metamorphosis are, significantly, omitted by Chaucer, whilst there is no time at the end o f the poem, as the narrator’s dream ends, for the man in black to think about his response to his memorial reconstruction o f White. In each case, something positive seems to

obvious link to Chaucer’s Alcyone. Both Alcyon and Alcyone complain bitterly after the vision of the dead lover. Alcyone’s complaint, present in Chaucer’s Ovidian source, is omitted in The Book o f the Duchess—Alcyon’s complaint in Daphnaïda makes good the omission. In general, Alcyon’s encounter with Daphne is, like its analogues in The Book o f the Duchess, charged with personal emotion and a vivid sense of physical presence. Like all three o f its analogues it is positioned in close proximity to a complaint. However, whilst the complaints of the man in black and Colin precede the moment in which the death of the beloved is fully faced, and Alcyone’s complaint is entirely absent from the text, Alcyon’s complaint surrounds and is nurtured by the vision of Daphne. There is no hint of the consolation that, implicit in the elaborately-terraced strategies of The Book o f the Duchess, is such a key feature of ‘November’.^*

The centre o f Alcyon’s complaint is a tragic reshaping o f the elegiac structure of the last part of ‘November’. Both poems cover roughly the same ground, though in a different order and with different emphases. The basic pattern is straightforward:

‘November’ Daphnaïda

Tree image Tree image

(lines 83-92) (lines 239-45)

Memory o f Dido alive Memory o f Daphne’s deathbed; failed consolation

(lines 93-112) (lines 251-92)

Mourning; pathetic fallacy Memory o f Daphne alive

(lines 113-52) (295-315)

Memory o f dead Dido; successful consolation Mourning; pathetic fallacy

(lines 153-201) (lines 316-54)

have been achieved through the reappearance o f the beloved, though exactly what its significance is remains mysterious. For the debate among Chaucer critics see Chaucer 1987, 966-76.

^ The effect is heightened by the pastoral context o f Alcyon’s lament, which builds in the generic expectation o f consolation. The primary function o f Ceyx’s appearance to Alcyone is to inform her o f his death. In Daphnaïda, though, the entire point o f Daphne’s speech is to tell Alcyon not to be sorry for her death and to devote his life to the care o f Ambrosia.

Colin’s first memory o f Dido as a living woman entertaining the shepherds ‘With cakes and cracknells and such country chere’ (line 96) leads into an account of how all the shepherds and all nature mourn her (lines 113-52). His song is rooted in an awareness of the pastoral community as a whole, whose sorrow at Dido’s death he tries to banish by means of his vision of her in the Elysian fields (lines 153-201). Alcyon’s first memory of Daphne is of a dying woman offering him consolation for her death (lines 251-92). Failing to be consoled, he only then remembers her in her prime, among the other shepherds and shepherdesses (295-315). Aggressively commanding nature and the shepherds to mourn Daphne (lines 316-54), he proceeds in the rest of his complaint to a denunciation of everything in the universe, alienating himself in extremis from the pastoral community.

The means by which Alcyon suddenly remembers Daphne’s activity in the pastoral community are crucial. Remembering her on her deathbed he contrasts first her words (lines 295-301), then her face (lines 302-308), with her words and demeanour at the time of their courtship (‘How happie was I then, and wretched now?’ (line 308)). It is at this point that he suddenly remembers Daphne dancing and singing in public:

How happie was I, when I saw her leade The Shepheards daughters dauncing in a rownd? How trimly would she trace and softly tread The tender grasse with rosie garland crownd? And when she list aduance her heauenly voyce, Both Nimphs and Muses nigh she made astownd,

And flocks and shepheards caused to reioyce. (lines 309-15)

This is an important moment in the poem, for it is Alcyon’s bitter reaction to Daphne’s absence from the pastoral community (‘But now ye Shepheard lasses, who shall lead/Your wandering troupes, or sing your virelayes?’(lines 316-7)) that prompts in him the rage against the universe that engulfs the rest of his complaint and confirms him in his

self-imposed alienation from society/^ There is a significant gap in the text here. Whilst Alcyon openly considers the state of Daphne’s words and face during her final illness, the description of Daphne dancing stands alone; it is not contrasted by Alcyon with the stillness of her dying body or the weakness o f her limbs. Behind Alcyon’s extreme grief at this point is, I think, brute historical fact. Douglas Howard, it seems, had been paralysed for some years before her death, a circumstance Thomas Howard tried to exploit in his lawsuit by arguing that Douglas had been physically incapable of bearing a child. In 1591 Douglas’s mother gave evidence about the condition of her daughter’s limbs:

Lac/x fronces howard reported that her daughter Dowglas went nere two yeres wth a tympanye & often during that tyme was trobled wth a most grievous ache, w/7/ch withered all her lower partes fi'ow the

girdle downe that she could not move her self but where her legges were laid they continued till they were removed by others: & so borne to & ft"o her bedd: And her sinewes so shroonk, that her heeles were shroonke neere vp to her buttocks, wA/ch could not be drawne out untill she dyed. (DRO D10/L8).

It is from this horrifying sight, I think—this suppressed vision o f Daphne at the heart of the poem’s clientage strategies—that Alcyon recoils between lines 308 and 309 of Daphnaïda?^