“How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness": Spenser’s Ruines of Time

Abstract

The main speaker of The Ruines of Time, the genius of Verlame, is not a mouthpiece for Spenser but a character in her own right. The enemy of such historic English worthies as Pendragon and Boadicea, Verlame has affinities with the Roman Whore of Babylon and certain Old Testament ruin-haunting creatures. Moreover, she is possessed by the despair attendant upon sin, and her monologue is less an elegy than a complaint. Given that her theme is the grief arising from worldly loss, her plaint is indeed a perverse consolatio in that it casts the narrator into despair rather than consoling him. Because of her perversity, many of Verlame’s ideas, including her famous defense of poetry as a medium for making its subjects eternal, are implicity cast into question. Indeed, the structure of the poem itself reminds us that poetry should not eternize its subjects but work in time to heal, civilize, and elevate the reader. At the same time, Verlame, precisely because of her sinful nature, is a suitable vehicle for expressing grief, which from the Augustinian perspective of Protestantism is a weakness due to sin. Hence Verlame’s lament for Leicester, Sidney, and others generates an aesthetic tension between the disorder of human grief (as expressed by Verlame) and the religious expectation of faith and hope. Only in the concluding two sets of visions does the poem become a true consolatio. The first set of visions, six scenes of worldly ruin, affirm the providential power of God at work amid the transcience of things. The second set of visions, six symbolic renderings of he apotheosis of Sir Philip Sidney, reminds us of St. Paul on resurrection and sets forth Sidney as an example of the risen elect. In this manner do the final visions answer and assuage the despair engendered in the narrator by Verlame.

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