prothalamion

a prothalamion. Courtship turns to matrimony for Clarence

Like Eliot, Hemingway contrasts harsh realities by evoking the ideal celebrated in Edmund Spenser's Thames setting for his Prothalamion. Hemingway looks back at Cuba "before Columbus sighted it" and affirms that the stream will flow onward "after the Indians, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone" (149).

ruleth prudently." (11) Spenser's "Prothalamion" (1596) is especially powerful in this regard, chosen here not for its eroticism or for its "spousal" celebration of the double-marriage of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester, but for its pastoral vision of London as the seat of love, peace, and gender-harmony.

One wants to hear that skill or music you create in poems like "Morning Swim" or "Sisyphus" or "Halfway." Or your sonnets "Purgatory" and "Prothalamion." You talk so subtly to yourself in form and rhyme--in an incantatory way, as you do in "Morning Swim" and "Sisyphus." I love the penultimate couplet in that poem.

When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser's "Prothalamion" with the line "Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song," what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser's most popular, is unfamiliar?

Other than the nine lines, however, it is clear that this stanza has little in common with the stanza of The Faerie Queene: the seventh and ninth lines are composed of a rhyming refrain in dimeters, "O heavie herse," "O carefull verse," which changes at the poem's climax to "O happy herse," "O joyfull verse." The stanza has more in common with the yet more articulated stanzas of the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion, for the motion within each stanza has constraints of repetition that are absent in the epic.

One is entitled Prothalamion and the other Epithalamion, the Greek for ``before the wedding chamber'' and ``at the wedding chamber''.

(There are a number of variants of the word--"epithalamium" and "epithalamia" are the Latin terms, with English versions such as "epithalamion" and "epithalamies," and, for a betrothal poem, "prothalamion.") During the renaissance revival of the genre, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Dryden all composed epithalamia inspired by the wedding poetry of Sappho, Aristophanes, Euripides, Theocritus, Catullus, Statius, and Claudian.

(10) Paul Alpers finds that Spenser himself, having reached an apogee of the heroic form in The Faerie Queene, withdrew from the pastoral tradition 'between the publication of Books I-III, in 1590, and Books IV-VI, in 1596', to write 'Amoretti, Fowre Hymnes, Epithalamion, and Prothalamion [...] in genres in which he had not written before' representing 'an alternative body of major poetry' for his poetic expression, one that afforded him the opportunity also to deal with 'mythological representations' and 'the experience of love and its relation to love as a cosmic force'.