“The planet-like music of poetry”: The Music of the Spheres and the Poetics of Mimesis in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss and Milton’s Nativity Ode

Abstract

This essay explores two variations of the commonplace allegorical identification between poetry and the music of the spheres in the English Renaissance. In Edmund Spenser’s Bower of Bliss episode from The Faerie Queene, Book II (pub. 1590), and John Milton’s “Nativity Ode” (pub. 1645), it highlights the inversion of the trope, by which poetry is contrasted, rather than identified, with the music of the spheres. That practice is traced back to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “poetics of noise”, and it is further argued that Spenser and Milton invert the trope in an effort to Christianize it. Their variations are discussed in terms of the formal relationship between cosmic harmony (suggesting a homogeneous whole comprising the heavens and earth) and the inaudibility of the music of the spheres in this fallen world (suggesting a qualitative difference between the two realms and thus, a binary hierarchy). In Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, the knight of Temperance encounters an alluring semblance of heavenly music, which he must recognize as deceitful and overcome in order to achieve his end. Spenser here self-consciously presents poetic mimesis and the transgression of ontological boundaries as dangerous; Christian poetry must in good faith warn readers of its own “flawed” mimetic nature. Milton, on the other hand, offers an epiphanic vision of cosmic harmony in an ambitious attempt to inspire his readers to strive for moral perfection. He hedges his mimetic practice in the conditional to signal that he accepts, but also moves beyond, the mimetic principle suggested by Spenser.

Keywords

• music of the spheres
• English Renaissance poetry
• cosmopoetics
• Neoplatonism
• mimesis
• Spenser (Edmund)