Pathetic Fallacy in Spenser\'s Poetry

Talk about Spenser's use of the "pathetic fallacy" and the ways in which nature contributes to or mocks the poet's lament. Sack tells us, for instance, that "December" resolutely traps Colin in an exclusively natural world, dragging him and even his former poems into a physical degeneration such as that of rotting nature (48). In what sense is the natural world a trap for Colin?

You naked trees, whose shady leaues are lost,
Wherein the byrds were wont to build their bowre:
And now are clothd with mosse and hoary frost,
Instede of bloosmes, wherwith your buds did flowre:
I see your teares, that from your boughes doe raine,
Whose drops in drery ysicles remaine.

This passage in Edmund Spenser's "January" demonstrates Colin's amorous plaint regarding Rosalinde's rejection of him. Following the bucolic tradition, Spenser invokes the natural world as a means of illustrating human emotion, and, in "January," where nature itself is withering, the natural world becomes a form of melancholic entrapment for Colin, and a metaphor for the sorrowful state he cannot progress from. By comparing Colin's melancholia with the dreary winter season, Spenser utilizes pathetic fallacy as an outward manifestation of Colin's internal grief, and the dead of winter shows no sign of alleviating Colin's blunted hope in attaining Rosalinde's affection.

The most vivid image in this passage, the "ysicles" (l. 36) on the tree, personified as "teares" (l. 35) becomes a psychological mirroring of Colin's own melancholy. The finality of the last line, made heavy with its concluding stress, "remaine," (l. 36) marks an inability to propel forward, suggesting a sense of permanence in mourning. Spenser amplifies this eternal state of grief by positioning his poem in the bleakest month of the calendric scheme. January signals a resignation of life, and, figuratively, the loss of vitality, as we see in Colin's mental degeneration throughout the rest of the poem. In the plaintive mode, Colin's direct vocative address to "[y]ou naked trees" (l. 31) echoes his melancholic propensity and displaces his own feelings of desolation onto the outside world, which its current state of decay only serves to augment.

The "naked trees," and the bitter pastoral setting, then, are not only literal, but serve as extended metaphors for Colin's bare emotive state as the lovesick and dejected shepherd, in line with the pastoral convention. The "shady leaues […] lost" (l. 31) therefore symbolize Colin's own loss of vivacity; the shedding of former greenery becomes suggestive of a funereal loss of youth, and the omnipresence of physical degeneration signals Colin's metaphoric death as a result of his being jilted. Indeed, the imagery in this passage indicates the departure of life in accordance to the calendric cycle; the "byrds" who "were wont to build their bowre" (l. 32) have migrated to warmer climates, and "hoary frost," emblematic of aging, now shrouds the abandoned nests (l. 33).

The bucolic setting thus echoes Colin's state of supreme pessimism. In contrast to the "bloosmes, wherwith your buds did flower," (l. 34) spring has been robbed, much like Colin's happiness, and replaced with "teares, that from your boughes doe raine" (l. 35). Spenser's oscillation between the past tense of the blossoms which "did" flower and the tears that "doe" rain suggests an irreversibility, at least in Colin's eyes, to the "drery" season of winter (l. 36). Whilst the cosmic seasons run in cycle, Spenser hyperbolizes the elimination of universal symbols of life. The remaining tears, now frozen as icicles on the tree, projects Colin's misery as a wide scale and perpetual loss. This metaphor dramatically shows Colin's own tainting of misery onto the outside world through his elegiac perception of it, thus trapping him in a state of heightened mourning from which he can no longer recover.












Edmund Spenser, "January" in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by S. K. Heninger, Jr (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970), ll. 31-6.
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