Spenser and the Choir of Frogs

Spenser and the Choir of Frogs

Ne let th’ unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking
Make us to wish theyr choking. (Spenser, Epithalamion)^[1]

First, a disclosure: I hate epithalamia. I find them gross and patriarchal, like a verbal airing of bloodied laundry. They make a public celebration out of what in many cases must have been a traumatic episode in a young woman’s life and ushered her into a lifetime of hurt, from the dangers of childbearing to the thousand natural cruelties from which even the best marriages are not immune. Sappho knew this. A bridegroom may be “equal to Ares” and “honored … exceedingly” by Aphrodite, yet the bride may still lament the loss of her virginity.^[2] Lady Mary Wroth knew this. Urania notably contains no joyful marriage songs: love and marriage are chronically misaligned, women constantly suffer men’s inconstancy, and nothing short of a spiritual recommitment or a timely toss off a cliff can relieve their pain.^[3] Louise Glück knew this. Her “Epithalamium” invokes the promise that the hand, given and taken at the wedding, “will not harm you”—a promise, she implies, that in the “terrible charity of marriage” goes unfulfilled.^[4] Carol Ann Duffy knows this too. Her “Betrothal” throbs with danger at every cadence: wedding is an act of force (“Make me…”), and every repeated promise of assent is followed by an allusion to Ophelia’s muddy death.^[5]

Even the earliest male writers of epithalamia must have recognized to some extent this awful truth. In Theocritus’ Idyll 18, which celebrates Helen of Sparta, her girl companions will miss her after she is married “as suckling lambs miss the udder of the ewe that bore them.”^[6] The editor deems this simile “inappropriate, since the girls are the same age.”^[7] What he misses is that the simile is forward-looking: the girls express an entirely rational apprehension that becoming a lamb-bearing ewe could absent Helen not only from the “running course” and “flower meadows,” but from life itself. In Catullus’s Carmen 62, the maidens’ chorus laments how the young bride clings to her mother’s embrace and is cruelly torn away (complexu matris retinentem avellere natam).^[8] In Carmen 61, the bride is urged not to refuse her husband his marital right, “lest he go elsewhere to find it,” and the groom must reluctantly “give up [his] old pleasures” (male te a tuis…glabris…abstinere) while his former male lover (concubinus) becomes a mocked, put-upon waiter distributing nuts to boys. Even in his poem celebrating the divinely sanctioned wedding of Thetis to Peleus (Carmen 64), the ornate marriage bedspread depicts a tale of betrayal and abandonment, of Ariadne by Theseus.

And yet, Catullus blithely keeps going: patriarchy must be upheld; paternity must be ensured (61.204-18). To the protesting maidens’ chorus, a competing chorus of young men replies that a girl, like a vine, must not go untended, untilled (inculta), and must bear fruit so as to be dear to her husband and not hateful to her father (62.49-58). A bride should not fight against her parents’ arrangements: after all, her virginity is only 1/3 hers; the other 2/3 her parents have transferred to her spouse (62.59-65). It is not for nothing that Hymen, the god invoked in marriage hymns, has come to be associated with anatomical virginity itself—a perennial source of puerile mirth for squirming, snickering adolescents.

Things got only worse when epithalamic conventions were theorized and codified, by Julius Caesar Scaliger in Latin (Poetices libri septem, 1561) and by George Puttenham in English (The Arte of English Poesy, 1589).^[9] The ambivalence that classical poets had at least acknowledged became crudely, explicitly prescriptive. Scaliger suggests that the bride could be “tease[d]…about certain matters in a style not altogether modest,” such as her “fear of the coming combat” (praelii futuri metum).^[10] This so-called combat, he later notes, required guards to be posted outside the door to keep away young women (muliercularum), lest they be “disturbed” (commoveretur) by the “cries of the maiden enduring violence within” (virginis clamore, quum intus vim pateretur).^[11] Scaliger downplays the theory that making noise outside the marriage chamber—shouting, singing, throwing nuts—was meant to drown out her groans (gemitus). Puttenham, however, goes all in: “the tunes of the songs were very loud and shrill, to the intent there might no noise be heard out of the bedchamber by the screaking and outcry of the young damsel feeling the first forces of her stiff and rigorous young man.”^[12] Charming.

In light of the models and theories that precede it, Spenser’s Epithalamion is truly an astonishing achievement. It is rightly considered the most successful translation of the classical genre into a new, Christian context, and with the happy twist that the poet celebrates his own wedding.^[13] Spenser largely follows the traditional formula: the waking and dressing of the bride, the summoning of attendants, the procession, the formal ceremony, the celebration, the bedding of the bride, the warding off of evil, and prayers for the blessings of “fruitfull progeny” and “large posterity” (403, 417). Most effective, however, is his geographical translation of the epithalamion to the Irish countryside. All the mythological attendants are still present—muses (“learned sisters”), graces, hours, and nymphs “both of rivers and the forrests greene: / And of the sea” (1, 37-9, 98, 103)—but what lends the poem its colour is local specificity. The “Nymphes of Mulla” tend to “silver scaly trouts” and “greedy pikes,” which, Spenser boasts, “all others doo excel.” Others “keepe the rushy lake” near Kilcolman castle, “Where none doo fishes take” (56-61). Woodland nymphs “keep the dere” and chase away “wylde wolves” (67-70). The town Spenser describes feels lived in, the townsfolk familiar. The “Minstrels gin to shrill aloud” with pipe and tabor and stringed instruments, while the damsels “tymbrels smyte” (129-36). The boys that shout “Hymen io Hymen” do so while running “up and downe the street”; the “people standing all about” applaud and join in the singing (137-47). The church with its “roring Organs” and joyous choristers, the “holy priest” blessing the bride at the altar, the excitable angels that “about her fly, / Ofte peeping in her face,” the bells that ring through the town (218-41, 261-2)—everything vibrates with harmonies both natural and divine. It is an undeniably gorgeous poem, cosmically resonant, with a haunting refrain of answering woods and ringing echoes. There is genuine care and tenderness in it, and the highest compliments to Spenser’s bride. Spenser set the gold standard for English epithalamia, from which all later attempts are considered a falling off.^[14]

Yet even for Spenser’s Epithalamion I reserve a grudging sort of admiration. Spenser wisely omits the traditional Fescennine jests, but his poem is often unwittingly funny and vaguely embarrassing to the modern ear.^[15] Herein lies the problem of Spenser writing his own wedding hymn: naturally, he cannot allow any sort of ambivalence, but the more assiduously he glosses it over, the more ghoulish the implications appear.^[16] How did Elizabeth Boyle feel about her bridegroom telling the attendants and later readers to gaze at “Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, / Her paps lyke lyllies budded” (175-6)?^[17] And not all the mythological comparisons, to Maia and to Alcmena, can obscure the fact that the poet chooses to “display” his love on her bed as he is about to “take” her and beget some new “Tirynthian groome” (300-10, 328-9). Never mind that Maia is “Twixt sleepe and wake” when “Jove her tooke.” Never mind that Alcmena’s night with Jove results in one of the most harrowing births in all of Greek mythology (which is saying something). Ironically, and almost despite himself, Spenser must eventually acknowledge that the consequences of his own wedding night will require Juno’s “comfort” for a woman “in [her] smart” (390-5).^[18] Of course, all this would be read differently in Spenser’s world, where marriage is a “symbol of harmony both in religious, social, and sexual terms,”^[19] but my distaste is only partly presentist, especially considering the classical examples. Spenser’s contemporaries clearly did not mind. And this is where I really begrudge his monumental triumph: it spawned a host of lesser, patronage-seeking epithalamia, a toadying choir of frogs that make me wish their choking.^[20]

That is not to say that some results are not interesting. Donne, for instance, picks up both the accidental humour and the thinly veiled sexual violence in Spenser’s poem, and, as is his wont, amplifies everything.^[21] His Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inn—written almost immediately after the publication of Spenser’s (1595)—is a nasty parody, but tinged, also, with grudging admiration. Spenserian echoes abound. Donne’s very first line, “The sunbeams in the East are spread,” recalls Spenser’s “Early before the worlds light giving lampe / His golden beame upon the hils doth spred” (19-20)—although Donne’s rhyme of “spread” with “bed” (cf. Spenser’s “lusty hed”) immediately signals a change of direction.^[22] Spenser’s “wished day” (31) becomes Donne’s “wished bed” (63); instead of the bride’s “tender foot” (49), Donne strays upward to her “warm, balm-breathing thigh” (7). The “merchants daughters” in Spenser (167) become “Daughters of London” in Donne, where they serve not only as the bride’s attendants, but also as objects of materialistic desire for the male guests. They are “Our golden mines and furnished treasury”; they are “angels” themselves, but more importantly, they “bring …/ Thousands of angels on [their] marriage-days” (13-16).^[23] These creatures are a far cry from Spenser’s angelic-looking bride (153) and the real angels that sing “Alleluya” at the altar (240). Even the innocent “temple gates” (204) become oddly warped in Donne’s rendition. They become suggestively “two-leaved,” leading first to the temple’s “sacred bosom” and then to its “lean and hunger-starvèd womb,” which is also a “tomb” that can hardly wait to “fatten” itself with the bodies of the newlyweds’ parents and later the newlyweds themselves (37-42).^[24]

Above all, Donne’s twelve-line stanza—rhyming aabccbdeedff, with interspersed shorter lines and a terminal hexameter—is clearly derived from the more varied and capacious stanzas of Spenser’s poem.^[25] The convention of a refrain probably originated in classical epithalamia, but the iambic hexameter is a Spenserian feature. In his hexameter refrain, however, Donne makes no bones about what is really being celebrated: the bride “Tonight puts on perfection, and a woman’s name” (72). She is a “pleasing sacrifice” (75), lying “Like an appointed lamb, when tenderly / The priest comes on his knees t’ embowel her” (89-90). Gross; intentionally so.

Donne does eventually fall in line when he is impelled to compose epithalamia for a royal wedding—of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine—and a royal favourite’s wedding, of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, to Frances Howard, Lady Essex (both 1613, the former on Saint Valentine’s Day, the latter the day after Christmas). Both times, Donne takes cues from Spenser, to summon cosmic harmonies for the former and to gloss over the scandalous origins of the latter. And both times, he turns to an unlikely source: Chaucer. References to Chaucer are routine in Spenser, but rare in Donne. These double-layered allusions create a secure framework that links the literary, political, spiritual, and natural worlds, while deflecting attention from the patronage bid and the unease of the main event.

The date of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding is fortuitous. It gives Donne an easy entry into numerology (with a 14-line stanza), a neutral refrain rhyming on “Valentine,” and an occasion to celebrate love that does not always center the royal coupling. The day is also associated with the annual mating congress of birds:^[26]

Hail Bishop Valentine, whose day it is!
……..All the air is thy diocese
……..And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
……..Thou marriest every year
The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher;
……..Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon,
As doth the goldfinch or the halcyon;
The husband cock looks out, and straight is sped,
And meets his wife, which brings her feather-bed.
This day more cheerfully than ever shine!
This day which might inflame thyself, Old Valentine. (1-14)^[27]

In an inspired turn, Donne extends the list by presenting the royal wedding as a mystical marriage of “two phoenixes” (18).^[28] Donne may have borrowed parts of his avian catalogue from Spenser (Epith., 78-84), who also includes the lark, the blackbird (“ouzell”),^[29] and robin redbreast (“ruddock”). But the tradition of birds marrying on Valentine’s Day comes from Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls: “For this was on Seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make” (309-10).^[30] The reference would have been somewhat fresh in Donne’s mind, as Spenser cites Chaucer in the Mutability Cantos (1609)—and through Chaucer, Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae—to invoke the goddess Nature who presides over the proceedings (FQ VII.vi.9).^[31] Donne’s Palatine epithalamion recaptures the light humor of Chaucer’s poem and seems to imply that Nature, along with Valentine, blesses the royal union. Indeed, through this union “Nature again restorèd is”: two phoenixes become one, and all is right with the world (99-102).

The same cannot be said of Donne’s cautious, ironic Eclogue 1613, which frames the Somerset epithalamion.^[32] The epithalamic formula helps him produce a reluctant wedding song, and once again Chaucer by way of Spenser comes to his aid. The very fact that Donne, a city wit, composes an eclogue is a Spenserian move. But the opening lines sound like a negative revision of the Canterbury Tales. Idios (“private man,” Donne’s stand-in) is away from court, and Allophanes (“other-seeming,” his friend Sir Robert Ker^[33]) finds him in a wintry landscape:

Unseasonable man, statue of ice,
What could to country’s solitude entice
Thee in this year’s cold and decrepit time?
Nature’s instinct draws to the warmer clime
Even small birds, who by that courage dare
In numerous fleets sail through their sea the air.
What delicacy can in fields appear
Whilst Flora herself doth a frieze jerkin wear,
Whilst winds do all the trees and hedges strip
Of leaves, to furnish rods enough to whip
Thy madness from thee, and all springs by frost
Have taken cold, and their sweet murmur lost? (1-12)

The two lines starting with “Whilst” echo Chaucer’s repetition of “Whan.” But instead of Zephyr’s “sweete breeth” inspiring in “every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes,” we have harsh winds that strip “trees and hedges” of leaves. (Donne cannot quite resist extending the conceit as leafless branches become whipping rods for his own “mad” avatar.) Instead of April’s “shoures soote” piercing the “droghte of March,” sweet-murmuring springs are frozen into silence. In Chaucer, the “flour” (flower) is newly “engendred”; in Donne, “Flora” herself shivers in a coarse “frieze jerkin.” Nature’s effect on small birds, “smale foweles,” is another reversal: their “courage” (an echo of “corages”) consists in flying to warmer climes.^[34] The wintry eclogue sets the tone for the epithalamion that follows: the Somerset wedding generates heat but leaves the poet and the reader cold.

The main tension of Eclogue and Epithalamion 1613 lies in the contrast between the warm celebrations at court—all “inflaming eyes” and fiery “loving hearts” (225)—and the icy wilderness in the country. The natural order is disturbed, and Donne is playing with fire. The Earl of Somerset’s passion burns so hot that it could melt the North Pole and open the elusive Northwest Passage (105-15). Lady Essex’s hair—which she wore loose, like a virgin^[35]—is so “radiant” that she could scorch the earth like Phaeton (142-5). The newlyweds’ love risks turning “all to fire” (220). And Idios, having composed his unwilling song, tries to reduce it to “ashes” before his friend stops him (226-35).

What allows Donne to salvage a problematic genre, and what I actually appreciate about epithalamia, is the emphasis on the natural world. This is the element that modern writers of epithalamia lean on, if they want their poems to do any celebratory work at all. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s fragmentary “Epithalamion” for his brother Everard seems distracted from the main event by the sight of boys gamboling in a “a candycoloured … gluegold-brown / Marbled river, boisterously beautiful” and sun-dappled through a “Fairyland” of trees and “flake-leaves light.”^[36] E. E. Cummings begins his “Epithalamion” in an eroticized Chaucerian vein, with the “aged unreluctant earth who dost / with quivering continual thighs invite / the thrilling rain the slender paramour / to toy with thy extraordinary lust.”^[37] April engenders flowers—“the red / leaps into the maple’s cheek” and the “golden crocus” rises from the dead (59-64)—and gives way to “miraculous May,” a “shining girl / of time untarnished” (105-6)—an allusion, perhaps, to Maia. This is not a positive epithalamion: it bristles with negative prefixes of excess and of lack, and its classical gods are silent, distant, enshrined in ivory and gold. It is nature that gives the poem its erotic charge and exuberant charm, with catalogues of flowers—“the lilac’s smoke the poppy’s pompous fire / the pansy’s purple patience and the grave / frailty of daisies”—and of birds, from the Old World’s “unimaginable upward lark” to the New World’s laughing “flicker” (73-80). Even the inveterate urbanite Frank O’Hara, in his cautious marriage poem for his friends, marks the turn from “dreary February” to spring, even if its only signs are “Maria Tallchief’s rhinestones and a perky little dog barking in a bar,” and the eyes of the soon-to-be-married couple that “light up with blue, like a ripple subsiding under a lily pad, or with brown, like a freshly plowed field.”^[38] More recently, Linda Gregerson’s “Epithalamion” evokes another body of water for its faintly echoing Spenserian refrain—“Sweet lake, abide our lingering here”—and marks the coming of spring by the return of a slightly “deranged” robin attacking the window, “relentless as /    the warming earth.”^[39] No matter that all human attempts to stop her fail; no matter that some animal, “year after year,” leaves a “wreckage / of yolk-smeared shell” beneath her nest. Like her, we are “stubborn in matters of joy,” all the more so in the face of “grief.”

Nature has her own mysterious ways, her own epithalamic traditions, from birdsong (which is really a chorus of mating calls) to the “unpleasant Quyre of Frogs” that Spenser is so eager to shoo away. Whether he knows it or not, the frogs too are performing a wedding ritual. The culprit here is Rana temporaria, Ireland’s only native species of frog.^[40]

Spenser did not much like frogs. In the very first episode of The Faerie Queene, we find them in the vomit of Errour. These “loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,” are in turn linked to the “monstrous” creatures spontaneously generated in the slimy floodplains of the Nile (FQ I.i.21-22). The “December” eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender mentions a “loathed Paddocks lordling” sitting on a “grieslie Todestoole” (69-70), and E.K. notes that both “Paddocks and Frogges” sit in this lordly manner. Poisonous toads and frogs comprise the diet of Malbecco as he transforms into the monster Jealousy (FQ III.x.59-60). Frogs, in short, are objects of loathing and disgust.

Spenser had his reasons. Frogs were among the ten plagues of Egypt (Exodus 8:1-14), and at the Apocalypse froglike creatures emerge from the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet (Revelation 16:13). Their classical representations—at least ones that Spenser would have known—are hardly more favourable. It is unlikely that Spenser read Aristophanes, whose croaking chorus of frogs taunts and irritates Dionysus and serves as a form of social critique, or the mock-epic Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice). Ovid’s Metamorphoses, however, provides a damning account of the origin of frogs in the rude, railing, uncharitable Lycian peasants (VI.317-81).^[41] The goddess Latona arrives in Lycia exhausted from childbirth—an ordeal worse than Alcmena’s—and from her subsequent wanderings, all thanks to angry Juno. Parched in the relentless sun and dehydrated from breastfeeding her newborn twins (VI.341-2), she tries to take a drink of water from a lake—a “common” (communis) or “public right” (publica munera). Yet the local peasants prevent her, scorn her, and threaten her despite her desperate pleas. Worse still, in their spite, they “soiled the pool itself with their feet and hands, and stirred up the soft mud from the bottom, leaping about” (VI.363-5). For this cruelty and insolence, they are turned into frogs, condemned forever to leap and wallow in the muddy pool. Even underwater they “exercise their foul tongues in quarrels” and “try to utter maledictions” (VI.374-6). Their voices are “hoarse, their inflated throats swell up, and their constant quarreling distends their wide jaws” (VI.377-8). An unpleasant choir indeed.

But not all frogs croak. Some, especially in North America, are downright musical, although that does not necessarily endear them to listeners. George Sandys, who composed his translation of Ovid during his sojourn in Virginia, was so impressed with the local frogs that he included them in his extensive commentary. Frogs, he explains, are “the Hieroglyphick of impudence and clamor” and are at best a nuisance, at worst a plague:

These were sent as a plague to the Aegyptians: these drave the Abderites out of their country, whom Cassander planted in Macedon: these depopulated a Citty in France, and now not a little infest Virginia in Summer: called Pohatans hounds by the English, of their continuall yelping. And as they croake & ride one upon another in shallow plashes: so Pesants baule and gamball at their meetings; soused in liquor, as froggs in the water.^[42]

Given the frogs’ biblical and classical baggage, Sandys was unlikely to appreciate even the best amphibian choristers, and his account suggests these were not the frogs he encountered. Based on their summertime activity and a call similar to the yelping of hounds, Sandys probably meant a species of tree frogs, either green or barking (Dryophytes cinereus or gratiosus).

There is, however, another American frog species that is entirely suited for a joyful epithalamic choir: spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer), the early-emerging chorus frogs that sing from late afternoon well into the night.^[43] Spring peepers’ genus name comes from Greek pseudes (false) + akris (locust), for the similarity of their calls to the chirping of insects. The species name, Latin for “cross-bearing,” refers to the dark X-shaped marking on their dorsal side. They are tiny, but extremely loud. Up close, their clear, high-pitched peeps reach between 92 and 98 decibels—comparable to a lawnmower—and the chorus only amplifies the effect.^[44] The males sing communally to attract females, who choose their mates based on the strength, frequency, and timing of their calls. This lek system, which centres male display and female choice, distinguishes spring peepers from many other frog species and makes for a perfect antidote to the more troubling aspects of the genre tradition. And so, to exorcise my epithalamic antipathies, I have written a new epithalamion, with a further geographical translation to my neck of the woods in Ontario: a “choir of frogs” from across the Pond. I should mention that I am an avid backcountry canoe-tripper and an amateur naturalist. The idea came to me in the middle of a springtime portage in Algonquin Provincial Park, beginning with the catalogue of flowers. The peepers were out in force that evening. I have never seen one, but their sound is one that I look forward to every year as winter turns to spring. Aside from the obvious poetic license, descriptions of the behaviours of frogs and birds are scientifically accurate. The catalogues of birds and flowers include only species that I have observed or that have been confirmed in this location at this time.^[45]

Epithalamion Made at Algonquin Park

1.

……When April rains have swelled the ice too full
…………And winds have split the frozen sheet to floes;
……When the young Sun has tamed the starry bull
…………And rides him over the receding snows;
……When budding maples smile in peachy haze,
……And birches sway in a transparent blaze
……Shaking their darling catkins golden-green,
………………As longing to be seen;
……When Opeongo breaks her icy bonds;^[46]
……When moose wade into newly open ponds,
……And beavers leave their lodges in the reeds,
……And otters slide amid the muddy weeds,
……And trout bestir themselves in lake and brook,
……From every vernal pool and marshy nook
……We sing, in merry mating chorus peeping:
………………This is no time for sleeping!
……Awake, awake, and seize the brief springtide!
……Each hoping to embrace a peeper bride,
……Nightly we shall our tuneful vigil keep
From evening until dawn, while all the world doth sleep.

2.

……We rise when the sun quickens his decline
…………And breezes soften their diurnal breath,
……And shadows stretch from every stately pine
…………Amid the gilded needles strewn beneath.
……And though the heron lurks with steely beak,
…………With sudden strike he seldom us aggrieves:
…………Clad in the hue of winter-sodden leaves,
……We play our ancient game of hide-and seek—
……And each of us no bigger than an inch!
…………We even change our tints to dark or pale,
………………And if that trick should fail,
……We leap into the pond without a flinch.
……We do not fear the nipping nightly chill,
………………Nor freezing waters still.
……Our best and bravest sing the earliest notes
……Filling with air their little clarion throats:
……“Come hop into the pool wherein we steep
And make a little stay while all the world doth sleep!”

3.

……Who ever guessed that these our bodies small
…………Could be the vessels of so great a voice!
……Ten thousand strong is our connubial call
…………Making the melting wetlands to rejoice;
………………Nor do we ever need
…………A clanging bell or feeble oaten reed;
……Nor ask we aid of any sylvan muse.
…………Nor does our wedding song a blessing lack:
…………Each bears a tiny cross upon his back—
……How could a peeper such a swain refuse?
……Yet many of our calls are met with scorn,
………………And many stay forlorn.
……We do not grudge our brothers their success,
……But louder sing their union to bless,
………………And to entice more brides
……To come unto the water’s teeming sides;
……For our aquatic marriage rites are brief:
……Once pearly clusters cling to rush and leaf,
……The bride at once out of the pond shall leap
Away into the night, where all the world doth sleep.

4.

……Ye flowers that carpet the old woodland trails,
…………Attend the pleasure of our nuptial song!
……Come, pure white bloodroot, whom no hand assails,
…………And bring the purple liverleaf along;
……Come violets, blue and downy, white and sweet,
………………And your spurred brethren greet.
……And you, spring-beauties tender-streaked with pink,
…………Be not so loath to see the Dutchman’s breech
…………Hung out all fresh, but rather higher reach
……To meet their seemly gaze without a wink;
……And you trout lilies, leave your downcast looks
………………And launch your golden hooks!
……Ye trilliums, fly your colours red and white,
…………And bring your painted sister wondrous-rare;
……Furl not your banners yet for fading light,
…………And leave not yet the dappled hillsides bare,
……But stay awhile over their mossy sweep
To cheer the northern night, while all the world doth sleep.

5.

……You clumsy bipeds tramping in your boots
…………And wearing on your heads long hollow shells,
……Slipping in mud and tripping over roots,
…………What noise you make cursing both heavens and hells!
………………Ev’n turtles are more limber,
……Sunning themselves on half-submergèd timber!
……You may be warm-bloods, yet you fear the cold:
…………You inch into the water, full of doubt,
……Then take one dip, still thinking you are bold,
…………And in a flash run shrieking, splashing out
……And scurry back to warm you by the fire.
…………But while you shiver in your fancy rags
………………And huddle in your bags,
……Welcome, poor wedding crashers, to our choir!
……Now hush and listen to our piping sweet
………………And merry measures meet;
……No music concert ever came so cheap:
We thrill the evening air—and challenge you to sleep!

6.

……Now dusk has fallen, night shall come ere long,
…………And every other voice shall grow subdued:
……The winter wren shall cease his trilling song
…………And hide amid the brushy underwood;
……The black-capped chickadee no more shall chide,
……Nor whistle Phoebe to appease his bride;
……The myrtle warbler shall no more be tweeting
………………In calling for his sweeting;
……The white-throat sparrow shall no more so late
……Sing Oh sweet Canada to draw his mate;
……Even the barrèd owl, his love to woo,
……No more shall grumble of who cooks for you.
……Only the loons, decked out in black and white,
……Shall raise their wailful cry into the night
……Across the starlit mirror of the lake
…………To shores of rugged gneiss and granite tall;
………………So shall their trem’lous call
……Wild harmony to our sweet piping make
……And echo through the forest dark and deep
And share with us the night, while all the world doth sleep.

7.

……But when the night is spent, and the still morn
…………Sighs mistily over the waters’ hush,
……And waking dawn the heavens to adorn
…………Lets steal into her face a rosy flush,
……We shall grow still and silent one by one,
………………Our vigil being done,
……And hide in weeds and reeds and leafy litter—
……A perfect bed for an amphibious critter:
……For in the day our dreadful foes abound.
…………And so, before we rest our weary throats,
…………We sing a prayer with our waning notes:
……To keep our precious tadpoles safe and sound
……From spotted salamanders’ greedy maws,
……From naiad dragonflies’ insidious jaws,
……And from the garter snake’s quick-flicking tongue;
………………Nor let our pools dry out
…………Ere froglets find their legs to hop about.
……And when the final liquid note is sung,
……We bide our time till evening bids us peep;
Now welcome in the day, for we have gone to sleep.

…………Envoy.
……Whoever reads this lyric in the deep
……Of winter nights that many make to weep,
……Think that in springtime we once more shall peep,
And spare a kindly thought for peepers while we sleep.

Photographs by the author, taken from all over Ontario

Works Cited

1. Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, ed. William Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). All citations of Spenser’s Epithalamion and other shorter poems are from this edition. ↑
2. Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 226-33 [Fragments 111, 112, 114]. ↑
3. Lady Mary Wroth, Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, select. and introd. Josephine A. Roberts, 1^st ed., Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Printed writings, 1500-1640, Part 1 vol. 10, gen. ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 192-3; page references are to the 1621 text as reproduced. Instructed by an oracle, Amphilanthus cures his sister Urania of heartbreak by throwing her off a cliff into the sea at St. Maura—a fall that leaves her unharmed. St. Maura is the island of Leukas or Leucadia, where Sappho reportedly leapt—to her death—trying to cure her unrequited love for Phaon (Ovid, Heroides XV.163-180). Ovid, Heroides; Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, rev. ed. by G.P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 192-3. Amphilanthus never does become faithful to Pamphilia, who in her last sonnet redirects her constancy from Amphilanthus to “truth, which shall eternall goodnes proove” (Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, sonnet 9 [103 in modern editions], 47-8). ↑
4. Louise Glück, Descending Figure (New York: The Ecco Press, 1980), 17. ↑
5. Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture (London: Picador, 2006), 21. ↑
6. Theocritus, Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, ed. and trans. Neil Hopkinson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 264-5. Other classical authors of epithalamia include Anacreon, Pindar, Statius, Ausonius, and Claudian. ↑
7. Theocritus, 264n. ↑
8. Catullus, Catullus, Tibullus, and Pervigilium Veneris, trans. Francis Warre Cornish, J.P. Postgate, and J.W. MacKail, respectively; 2nd rev. ed. by G.P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; 2005). All citations of Catullus are from this edition. ↑
9. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem: Faksimile-Neudruck der Ausgabe Leipzig von Lyon, 1561 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987), 150-5 [Book III Chapter 101]; for English translation by Jackson Bryce, see Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 271-96. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 138-41 [Book I Chapter 26]. ↑
10. Scaliger, 150; Dubrow, 274. I depart from Bryce’s rendering of praelii as “wrestling-match.” ↑
11. Scaliger, 153; translation and paraphrase mine. ↑
12. Puttenham, 139. ↑
13. Thomas M. Greene, “Spenser and the Epithalamic Convention,” Comparative Literature 9.3 (1957): 215–28. On medieval, continental, and earlier English Renaissance epithalamia, see Dubrow, 30-5. ↑
14. Paul W. Miller, “The Decline of the English Epithalamion,” Texas Studies in Literature &Language 12.3 (1970), 405-16. ↑
15. Alexander Dunlop, “Amoretti and Epithalamion,” in Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, 594: the lover in the Amoretti is “inescapably ironic” and a “comic figure because in his lack of self-knowledge he is made to seem temporarily inferior to the reader” but this “comic characterization is undermined by the quasi-heroic role he assumes in Epithalamion.” ↑
16. For other troubled readings of Spenser’s Epithalamion, see Dubrow, 36-9; Joseph Loewenstein, “Echo’s Ring: Orpheus and Spenser’s Career,” English Literary Renaissance 16.2 (1986): 287-302; Douglas Anderson, “‘Vnto My Selfe Alone’: Spenser’s Plenary Epithalamion,” Spenser Studies 5 (1984): 149-166. ↑
17. Dunlop (590-1) notes that Epithalamion is more a “demonstration of mastery” than a celebration of “mutual good will,” and that the bride’s presence and voice are barely present. “Some may see this as a ritual of subordination, not of mutual bonding. The integration of the ideal of mutuality into Spenser’s assumptions about social and political institutions and his fundamentally hierarchical pattern of thought remains partial and problematical.” ↑
18. Juno is the same goddess who jealously withheld her aid from Alcmena, prolonging her agony for seven days (Ovid, Metamorphoses IX.285-315). As Alcmena tells it, “cold horror holds my limbs and my pains return even as I think of it…I fiercely strove and, mad with pain, I shrieked out vain revilings against ungrateful Jove. I longed to die, and my words would have moved the unfeeling rocks.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. ed. G. P. Goold, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2:22-5. Juno did the same to the goddess Leto, or Latona, tormenting her for nine days—two more than Alcmena’s seven—before allowing the twins Apollo and Diana to be born (Homeric Hymn 3, To Apollo, 89-119): “Leto for nine days and nine nights was pierced by unutterable birth pangs.” Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer, ed. and trans. Martin West, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 78-81, accessed 20 May 2026, https://doi.org/10.4159/DLCL.homeric_hymns_3_apollo.2003. For more on Latona, see below. ↑
19. Einar Bjorvand, “Prothalamion,” in Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems, 756. ↑
20. This choir included Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, Henry Peacham, and Thomas Campion. ↑
21. Ramie Targoff, “Marriage and Sacrifice: the poetics of the Epithalamia,” in Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets, ed. Yulia Ryzhik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 171-82. ↑
22. John Donne, The Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols., Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow, England: Longman, 2008), 2:183. All subsequent citations of Donne are from this edition. ↑
23. The pun on “angels,” or gold coins, is common in Donne. See, for instance, his Elegy: The Bracelet. ↑
24. The suggestiveness of double doors is classical. See Ovid, Amores I.9: “the former [soldier] breaks down city-gates, the latter [lover] – double-doors” (hic portas frangit, at ille fores). Ovid, Heroides; Amores, 356; translation mine. ↑
25. This reworking of Spenser’s form shows Donne’s preference for couplets and embraced rhymes (rather than interwoven ones) and presages the more radical, satirical alterations he would make to generate the stanza of Metempsychosis. ↑
26. The Poems of John Donne, ed. H.J.C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 2:92. ↑
27. Robbins has “quiristers” rather than “choristers”; I have emended for clarity. ↑
28. The epithet “Phoenix-bride” links Princess Elizabeth to Queen Elizabeth I in English Renaissance iconography. See Dubrow, 166-7; Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153-87; Kevin Curran, Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Farnham, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 89-100; Georgianna Ziegler, “A Second Phoenix: The Rebirth of Elizabeth I in Elizabeth Stuart,” in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Elizabeth H. Hageman and Katherine Conway (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 111-31. ↑
29. Technically, a species of true thrush of the genus Turdus, the same as the American robin but not the same as the European robin redbreast. ↑
30. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3^rd ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). All citations of Chaucer are from this book. ↑
31. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, text edited by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki, 2^nd ed (Harlow: Longman, 2001). All citations of The Faerie Queene are from this edition. ↑
32. Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 272-3. ↑
33. Alternatively spelled “Carr”; not to be confused with the namesake groom Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, Sir Robert Carr’s cousin and patron. ↑
34. Another possible source is Spenser’s “January” eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender (25-36), which also mentions “naked trees,” absent birds, and the shepherd’s “life bloud friesing with unkindly cold,” perhaps echoed in Donne’s “frieze jerkin.” ↑
35. David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, 1993), 123, 132-4; Curtis Perry, Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 103. ↑
36. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; 2019), accessed 20 April 2026, https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198118831.book.1/actrade-9780198118831-work-173 . ↑
37. “Epithalamion” is the first poem of Cummings’s first book of poetry, Tulips & Chimneys (1923). E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ed. George J. Firmage, rev., corr., expanded ed., Centennial ed. (New York: Liveright, 1994). ↑
38. “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen, introd. John Ashbery, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The poem celebrates the marriage of Jane Freilicher to Joe Hazan. John Lowney, “The ‘Post-Anti-Esthetic’ Poetics of Frank O’Hara,” Contemporary Literature 32. 2 (1991): 244-64. ↑
39. Linda Gregerson, Canopy (New York: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2022), first published in The Poetry Review (Spring 2020). The refrain is surely an allusion to that of Spenser’s Prothalamion: “Sweete Themmes, runne softly, till I end my Song.” ↑
40. “Frogs,” Irish Peatland Conservation Council (Bog of Allen Nature Centre, Lullymore, Rathangan, Co. Kildare, Ireland), accessed 22 January 2026, https://www.ipcc.ie/a-to-z-peatlands/peatland-species/frogs/ ↑
41. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1:310-15. ↑
42. George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, ed. Karl K. Hurley and Stanley T. Vandersall, fwd. Douglas Bush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 294-5. I am grateful to Gordon Braden for this reference. ↑
43. Illinois Natural History Survey, “Spring Peeper (Pseudacris crucifer),” INHS Herpetology Collection, accessed 24 January 2026, https://herpetology.inhs.illinois.edu/resources/species-lists/ilspecies/spring-peeper/; Ontario Nature, “Spring Peeper,” Ontario Nature: Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, accessed 24 January 2026, https://ontarionature.org/programs/community-science/reptile-amphibian-atlas/spring-peeper/; Andy Stefan, “Spring Peeper,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, last modified August 1, 2023, accessed 24 January 2026, https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/spring-peeper ↑
44. H. Carl Gerhardt, B. Diekamp, and M. Ptacek, “Inter-male Spacing in Choruses of the Spring Peeper, Pseudacris (Hyla) crucifer,” Animal Behaviour 38.6 (1989): 1012-1024, accessed 21 May 2026, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-3472(89)80140-X ↑
45. C. Sean Blaney et al., Checklist of Vascular Plants of Algonquin Provincial Park, 5^th ed. (The Friends of Algonquin Park: Whitney, Ontario, 2020), accessed 22 January 2026, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344907315_Checklist_of_Vascular_Plants_of_Algonquin_Provincial_Park_5th_Edition . ↑
46. Ice-out in Algonquin Provincial Park is declared when its largest lake, Opeongo, is free of ice and allows for free passage of boats through its four basins. “Algonquin Park Ice Conditions,” The Friends of Algonquin Park, Algonquin Provincial Park, accessed 24 January 2026, https://www.algonquinpark.on.ca/news/ice-out.php. The name “Opeongo” is said to be derived from Algonquian “Ope au wingauk” or “sandy at the narrows.” Jessica Consiglio, Tristan Knight, and April McCrum, Recovery Strategy for the Lake Whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) – Opeongo Lake large- and small-bodied populations in Ontario, Ontario Recovery Strategy Series, prepared for the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, Peterborough, ON (King’s Printer for Ontario, 2024), accessed 22 January 2026, https://www.ontario.ca/page/lake-whitefish-opeongo-lake-large-and-small-bodied-populations-recovery-strategy; N.V. Martin and F. E. J. Fry, “Lake Opeongo: The Ecology of the Fish Community and of Man’s Effects on It,” Technical Report No. 24 (Ann Arbor, MI: Great Lakes Fishery Commission, 1973); S. Bernard Shaw, Lake Opeongo: Untold Stories of Algonquin Park’s Largest Lake (Burnstown, ON: General Store Publishing House, 1998). ↑