The spousalls betwixt the Medway and the Thames

William Blake, Edmund Spenser, c. 1800

Source: Wiimedia Commons

In Book IV, Canto XI of The Faerie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser describes the marriage of Thames and Medway.  I won't attempt to describe here how this fits into the plot, but it takes place in Proteus's house and the guests include many gods of seas and rivers.  Among these are Nile, Rhine, Ganges, Amazon and 'rich Oranochy, though but knowen late' (Spenser's friend Raleigh had explored the Orinoco a year earlier, hoping to find El Dorado).  English rivers are of course invited, but so too are the rivers of Ireland, where Spenser was living at the time.  Incidentally, there are occasional brief references to the Irish landscape in other parts of The Faerie Queene, e.g. the River Shannon (Shenan) whose battle with the ocean tide is a simile for the struggle between two knights (and perhaps the unequal struggle between Ireland and England too).  I have written here before about Spenser and Ireland and it is not really surprising that this wedding encompasses the Irish rivers, for 'why should they not likewise in loue agree'.

Thames, the bridegroom, arrives with his elderly parents Thame and Isis to the accompaniment of a harp played by Arion.  His bride arrives later with handmaids and sea nymphs.  I will quote here just one stanza, which comes as Thames processes in, dressed in a light blue robe and wearing a coronet in the shape of London.  Various tributaries to the Thames are mentioned, including the one nearest to where I live, the Lee.

And round about him many a pretty Page
Attended duly, ready to obey;
All little Rivers, which owe Vassalage
To him, as to their Lord, and Tribute pay;
The chaulky Kenet, and the Thetis grey,
The morish Cole, and the soft-sliding Brean,
The wanton Lee, that oft doth lose his way,
And the still Darent, in whose Waters clean
Ten thousand Fishes play, and deck his pleasant Stream.

I love that description of the Lee.  It would make a good quiz to match the epithet to the river in this Canto - stately Severn, storming Humber, speedy Tamar - or guess it from a brief description 'decked all with Woods / Like a Wood-God, and flowing fast to Rhy' (the River Rother).  In real life the Thames and Medway meet and merge at Rochester, where Spenser had worked as secretary to the Bishop in 1589.  A year later he mentioned in a letter a poem he was working on, now lost, called Epithalamion Thamesis, which prefigured this section of The Faerie Queene.  There was also a model for this Canto in another river-wedding poem, De Connubio Tamae et Isis, fragments of which appear in William Camden's great topographical work Britannia (1586).  In Camden, Isis is the male god, who comes from a cave in the Cotswolds to meet his bride, Tame, at Dorchester in Oxfordshire, where they retire to the nuptial chamber.  After the celebration they rise as one, Thamisis, and make their way downriver, past Windsor, Runnymede, Hampton Court and Richmond, towards the sea.   

Are there earlier examples of river-marriage poems?  In a an article on the subject ('Spenser, Camden, and the Poetic Marriages of Rivers', Studies in Philology, 1967), Jack B. Oruch notes that the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano wrote a 'topographical pageant' into his poem Lepidina (1496), in which Sebeto, a river god, marries the patron divinity of Naples.  As for later writers, there is Michael Drayton, whose Poly-Olbion I have mentioned here before - his Fifteenth Song (1612) takes up again the theme of the marriage of Thame and Isis.  The rivers Walla and Tavy are wed in Britannia's Pastorals (1616) by a friend of Drayton's, William Browne of Tavistock.  Browne may also be the author of an anonymous poem in which the Torridge marries the Ock.  And there is a 1613 masque by Francis Beaumont in which the Thames marries the Rhine, part of the celebrations for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth (later called The Winter Queen) and Frederick V.

J. M. W. Turner, Union of the Thames and Isis ('Dorchester Mead, Oxfordshire), 1808

Source: Wiimedia Commons 

The poetic tradition seems to have faded out in the early seventeenth century.  In 1808 Turner exhibited a painting entitled the Union of the Thames and Isis, but this is not one of his mythological paintings.  Instead of Camden's magnificent bridal chamber, prepared for Tame by Grace, Concord, Hymen and the Naiads, we have a view of cows standing in brown water.  The Tate's curators describe this quiet landscape: 'The Thame, hardly more than a stream, is in the foreground while the Thames [Isis] is glimpsed beyond the wooden bridge on the right. Modest and direct, the picture also evokes the seventeenth-century painter Aelbert Cuyp in its lighting and pastoral imagery.'  Two more centuries on, it is hard to imagine a return to the extravagant topological wedding feasts of Spenser's time, though it would be fun to write one in which the river gods make small talk over glasses of fizz, watch the bride and groom trying not to giggle, sit through an inappropriate best man's speech and end up the dancing drunkenly to Abba on a slippery dance floor.

A Book of Migrations

Rebecca Solnit's A Book of Migrations (1997) was reissued this year and classified as history/memoir rather than travel, though it is ostensibly about a month spent in Ireland.  The book circles round the themes of landscape and memory, place and identity, journey and exile, as Solnit ranges across the history and culture of Ireland from the flight of the cursed King Sweeney to the bitter experiences of Travellers in contemporary Ireland. The ways in which Ireland has been viewed through the prism of English cultural attitudes are illuminated by the frequent reminders of her own radically different experiences growing up in California, with its arid landscapes and long, straight roads, short historical memory and assumptions about the possibility of an unpeopled wilderness. At the Cliffs of Moher she looks out at the sea, 'a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink.  I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean.'
    

Cover photo by Dave Walsh who reviews the book on his website.

I'll try to convey here just one of the many interesting points she makes on landscape and culture, although I should stress that the elegance of her argument is difficult to convey out of context.  In describing the sixteenth century suppression of Ireland by English colonists and its deforestation for shipbuilding and metal smelting, she also talks about the concurrent campaign to suppress the Gaelic poets, whose rhymes in praise of military successes were seen as a kind of propaganda. But 'what is most peculiar about the war against the poets and trees in Tudor era Ireland is the close involvement of the two greatest English poets of the age, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.' Furthermore, these were the two writers who practically created the English tradition of pastoral poetry. You might think, she wryly observes, that 'a country of wandering poets and pastoralists should have enchanted the English rather than appalled them.'

Sir Philip Sidney's father was Lord Deputy of Ireland and urged the English to 'spoil' and take the goods of any 'rhymers' they caught.  Sidney himself would later go on diplomatic missions to Ireland for Queen Elizabeth. Spenser went over in 1580 as secretary to Sir Henry Sidney's successor Lord Grey and wrote a lengthy report A View on the Present State of Ireland, which recommends subduing the Irish by starving them.  He took over an estate in County Cork, formerly the seat of the Desmond family, and 'immediately became unpopular with the neighbours'. It was targeted by rebels in 1598 - Spenser was lucky to escape to England, where he died later that year.  Back in 1589, when Sir Walter Raleigh visited him, Spenser's home 'was surrounded with woods of "matchless height"; a few years later only bare fields surrounded the castle.'

The remains of Spenser's Kicolman Castle, County Cork

Photo: Early Modern Whale

For Solnit the shadows of Spenser and Sidney's political lives in Ireland lie across their artistic merit.  'The exquisite poetry of Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie Queene is inextricably linked to his brutal prose A View on the Present State of Ireland ... Should the magical trees he celebrated in the poem be weighed against the trees he uprooted in County Cork?  Can one have the latter without the former, since Ireland's lack of a landscape tradition is rooted in its scarred landscape?  Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature?  Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter?  Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike?  Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?'