 Mae'n fath i'w weithio. Yw ystod, mae mae'n gøi'n sefyllfa gwybod a'i ddod i chi'n gwybod, mae'n mynd ddod i mi'n edrych yn fawr pwy o ddechrau o'r poeitri. Mae'n gwybod i'r seducsion. Mae'n gwybod. Iawn, mae'n gwybod i'w meddwl iawn i'r gofnidol. Mae'n meddwl i'r gofnidol i'w meddwl i'r gofnidol. Felly, oedden nhw'n ddweud ychydig i'w ddweud y ffordd, yn ddweud y ffordd, ac yn ymdillio'r ffordd, felly rydyn ni'n ffordd. Felly, ymddangos i'r ddweud y ddweud y ddweud o'r ddysgrifetibol o John Elizabethan, neu Sir John Davies. Mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r Cwrt i'r Llywodraeth, roedd'n ddweud o'r Elirdyn ni'n ddechrau, Roedd Davies yn unrhyw Fenyddol a mhppersau yn yr ystodol sydd yn ei wneud. Yr Elirdyn ni ddechrau, rydy gallai ar�draeth ac yn ddweud o'r hynny'n elw. Roedd Davies yn ymddangos i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ffordd. Wrth gwrs o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r llun, wedi gynhyrch o'r hebahau cyfrindig yng nghyrch, ond ddweud ymbrosell. Roedd rydyn ni'n gyntaf eu corw'u credu. Mae fydd yn ddigonol yn ddigonol iawn, neu ddigonol'r cynhyrchu'r ddigonol, ac roeddwn i'r ddau fydd ddau i'r ddau o'r ddau. Dwi wedi'n gyrraedd yma ym Lincol. Mae yna'n ddau i'n rhaid i'r ddau. Roedd Paul Pennefeather yn y Ddau Cymru yn ymddiolol i yma. Dwi wedi'n gyrraedd o'r ddau o'r awdurdod yn yr ysgolol. y ffigur yn y Llyfrgellau Ymddiadau Ilywyr, yw'r ddynnu yn ymddiad James y Prifysgol Llyfrgellol. Yn ymddiadau, byddwch, yma hefyd. Rwy'n gweithio'r parlymenau, Ffrakha, a rwy'n ei gweithio'r edrych ar ymddiadau. James yw ymddiadau yma, ymddiadau yma ymddiadau ymddiadau ymddiadau ymddiadau ymddiadau ym 1613. Felly, mae'r cymddiadau cymddiadau ymddiadau. When the Irish Catholics insisted on placing their own man in the speaker's chair, the corpulent Davis was simply picked up by his supporters and placed atop him. How things have changed. Davis's, shall we say, stately appearance is also shown by some 1590s gossip. John Davis goes waddling with his arse out behind as though he were about to make everyone he meets a wall to piss against. Unfortunately, though you may say fortunately, there are no surviving images of Davis, so what I've given you is two contrasting images. The first one over here is William Herbert, First Lord of Powys, from about 1595. I was thinking flash young man about town. Of course he's far, far, far too posh for Davis, who is much more middle class. The second one though is Sir John Croake, Speaker of the House of Commons in about 1616. He's a crusty old placeman, if you like. But all of this notwithstanding and epigrams about farting, what I'm interested in is Davis's philosophical poem, Nosgey Typsum, which is the Greek for know thyself. I should say throughout the lecture I'm going to be using images from the early books where possible and this is a moment to thank the OU library which enables us to through subscriptions to things like early English books online to have these fantastic resources both for our materials and for students. It's so exciting to be able to see the real thing. So here we go. This is the first stanza of Nosgey Typsum. Why did my parents send me to the schools that I would knowledge might enrich my mind since the desire to know first made men fools and did corrupt the root of all mankind? Why did they indeed? If only I had known Davis's poem when I was 13 and thinking of my my parents, one thing I another hat tip I wanted to do is to my parents Jean and Jonathan who did hope to be here but sadly can't be today because it would have been nice to have two professors Brown from the same family here but I hope you're watching online mum and dad and I hope I don't disgrace the family name too much. Anyway the point important thing about this is it's not totally surprising to have an Elizabethan poet questioning human knowledge. Davis repeats the traditional Christian argument that the desire to know led Adam and Eve to the original sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. In this light sending your son to school is theologically dangerous. The whole of the educational enterprise participates in what Davis goes on to call the spirit of lies or the devil's suggestions. Still this kind of skepticism is provocative because it opens the question of the value of education and the purpose of literature. Davis is of course playing with ideas rather than seriously overturning the schools. Like the current prime minister, Elizabethans were big fans of grammar schools. Most early modern writers take the view that education is an intrinsic good which leads to socially productive men who can run the country and Elizabethan education was incredibly sexist with very few exceptions. It was a privilege reserved for boys. It was also socially restricted, limited to what was called the better sort that is those with the financial means to pay for education not open to anything really at that time. Literature too was to be productive and socially useful. It should inculcate moral and theological truths memorably in order to make its readers better people. One of the most influential formulations of this idea comes from Edmund Spence's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh. I feel I should apologize here to Dr Gibson for my mispronunciation of Raleigh but like John Lennon who will crop up later I can't say Raleigh. I know it's how they did. Anyway this is from the letter that was appended to the first edition of The Fairy Queen and it's this sentence here. The general end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline. Spence's formulation has been endlessly debated but the core idea is pretty straightforward. He wrote the poem to educate with the residual sense of manipulate or mould a gentleman or noble person. Spence's editor AC Hamilton makes the point that the phrase may include women. Maybe so but you still have to be quite a posh person, a noble person. And what comes from this is that the poem itself is a source of education, a kind of a school. So what were Elizabethan schools like? To quote Iggy Pop, no fun. The school Spence went to, merchant tailors in London, had statutes which outline the school day. Here I go. The children shall come to the school in the morning at seven o'clock both winter and summer and tarry till eleven and return at one o'clock and depart at five and for ice in the day kneeling on their knees they shall say the prayers appointed. Early modern images of schools depict rigidly stratified classrooms in which basically boys are beaten into obedience. I should say here a thank you to the visual resources unit in FAS which got several of these images and again has been instrumental in getting us such great images over many years into our modules. So students on A334 will, English literature from Shakespeare to Austen, will be familiar with this woodcut which I used to illustrate the schooling Orlando laments missing out on at the start of Shakespeare's Ask You Like It. Look at the master beating the poor unfortunate boy here and the ferocious tours or whip which is also being wielded by the other master on the right. Of course Orlando laments missing out on the knowledge rather than the beatings but there is a sense in which the one was a concomitant of the other in the 16th century. Roger Ascom, who was Elizabeth the first tutor, puts a modern sounding complaint into the mouth of William Cecil Lord Burley, Elizabeth's first minister. Here we go. Diverse scholars of Eaton be run away from the school for fear of beating whereupon Mr Secretary took occasion to wish that some more discretion were in many school masters in using correction than commonly there is. Though it's rather nice to imagine 16th century foreigners of David Cameron and George Osborne running away from Eaton, note that this is a plea for more discretion in the use of correction rather than a rejection of corporal punishment outright. In schools and in courts Elizabethans believed in the salutary effects of violent punishment and this was through empire and the growing cultural authority of English a legacy bequeaved to generations of educators and legislators. What sort of curriculum did boys follow? In OU terms it was pretty much all arts and social sciences with a slight tinge of language studies. I'm afraid that STEM and FBL didn't get much of a look in. Teaching was primarily in Latin moving on to Greek and even Hebrew later on. Even at university, which added some maths, the main focus was on rhetoric and philosophy. This was if you like a curriculum warped towards the language arts with an almost obsessive focus on the works of a few cultural heroes. Chief among these was the Roman lawyer and orator Cicero who was for 16th century intellectuals an omnitalented epitome of everything to be desired stylistically. To switch codes he was a sort of Johann Cruyff or Lionel Messi of Latin syntax, a god to be adulated and imitated. The curriculum also included Roman poets like Virgil, Ovid and Horace alongside large doses of the Bible and religious texts like the Book of Common Prayer which enunciated the religious ideology of the Church of England and the Elizabethan state. Still the musical score on the back of the wall here does indicate that there was some variety in how Elizabethans thought of culture. Spencer's teacher Richard Mulcaster summarised Plato in recommending for children gymnastic for the body and music for the mind though he goes on to interpret the latter much more broadly than we would connecting it with speech and harmony. In effect music was another language art. Robert Miola notes that students acquired extraordinary sensitivity to language especially to its sound a sensitivity which in many ways we've lost. Elizabethans heard the differences between say verse and prose and between different verse forms. Their inner ears this is a phrase of Miola's were finely attuned to stylistic nuance. The main emphasis in the curriculum was translation. You read texts in their original languages, translated them into English and then translated them back into Latin striving all the time for elegance and likeness to your original. You're expected to memorise hundreds of lines of Latin poetry. No fun perhaps but such a curriculum did create a generation of writers with an almost morbid consciousness of how language shapes meaning and the different ways in which style represents meaning according to context. In Sonnet 76 Shakespeare writes this is here all my best is in dressing old words new, spending again what is already spent. He's talking of course about his love. I keep writing you the same poem because you're so fab but he's also reflecting an education which was relentlessly focused on dressing old words new. No moving forwards here. Shakespeare moves me to my main concern, the relationship between education and devices like comparison. One of the things you first notice when you read Elizabethan poetry is its wordiness and its rhetoric. So here's John Davis again in his charming poem about dancing orchestra which sketches the relationship between poetry and rhetoric. For rhetoric clothing speech in rich array in looser numbers teach of her to range with 20 tropes and turnings every way and various figures and licentious change but poetry with rule and order strange so curiously doth move each single pace and as all is marred if she won foot misplace. Davis exemplifies the thing he's describing. He uses formal devices what he calls tropes to turn or vary what he's saying. Rhetoric is concerned with the elaborate clothing of speech it's licentious or unrestrained it veers from trope to trope in the looser numbers of prose. Poetry on the other hand is more mysterious with rule and order strange because of its dependence on the single pace of rhythm. All is marred if she won foot misplace where foot has the sense of a metrical unit as well as punning on dancing. Elizabethans loved puns they're much more I'm sorry I haven't a clue than Gavin and Stacey and you see this all the time in the literature. Davis is saying that poetry is dependent on rhetoric though more curious because of its because of its formal structuring. Finally poetry and rhetoric are arts of seduction this is shown by the larger narrative of orchestra which Davis presents as an episode which Homer missed out of the Odyssey. Here's a picture of Odysseus coming home to Penelope. What happens is that while Penelope is away all these Randy suitors congregate in Ithaca trying to get her to marry her marry them but of course Odysseus comes back and kills them all at the end. This is a tapestry from Hardwick Hall of course so what happens in orchestra is that one of the suitors Antionist tries to persuade Penelope to dance. Davis poem preserves Antionist's gentle art and cunning courtesy which Homer forgot because as he says he was old and blind and saw it not. This stanza which we've just read is part of Antionist's seductive strategy. I have to say it's a long way from do you want to dance and hold my hand but that in the poem is what he's trying to do. These aren't 20th century models of poetry. In his grumpy commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets the modern poet Don Patterson maintains poetry is largely the art of saying things once and only once which is why he loses patience with so many of the sonnets. Shakespeare didn't write to this recipe and is quite content to include reduplicative passages which to Patterson often sound tedious to vary the art form. Modern songs also don't require elaborate imagery. The Beatles sergeant Pepper which is like me 50 this year largely issues a strange imagery even as its writers attempted to cope with the effects of LSD. As Rob Chapman puts it what all the best psychedelic Beatles songs share is a penchant for images and ideas that are rooted in the quotidian and conveyed in familiar language. There's an absence of similion analogy, no torturous metaphor, nothing designed to alienate. He's thinking of things like quietly turning the backdoor key, stepping outside she is free, a song which also notes fun is the one thing that money can't buy or I read the news today oh boy, 4000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire. There's an exception which I'll come to at the end. Elizabethan poetry is wordier, much more full of tropes and licentious change, more prone to repetition and less rooted in the everyday. I turn now to Sonate 18 because it's such a celebrated example of the Elizabethan poetic and I stole it for the title of this lecture and also because I was anticipating a beautiful sunny day but look what it's like outside. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate, rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines and often is his gold complexion dimmed and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade nor lose possession of that fair thou oest, nor shall death brag thou wondrust in his shade when in eternal lines to time thou grossed. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee. Paterson's commentary is in this case very helpful. Shakespeare doesn't just show how the summer's day is a poor comparison. In enumerating all the ways it's poor, he provides a negative litany of his love's real qualities. Paterson also draws attention to the poem's sheer brass neck with its claim that the young man the poem addresses will live forever. I should say here the first 126 sonates are all addressed to a young man. The conjuring trick Shakespeare performs is firstly to tell us that the young man is more lovely than any conceivable summer's day and secondly that through the magic of poetic immortality he'll live on perpetually in the eyes of later readers. Comparisons don't work for you but the assertion of what you are in lines of verse will guarantee your survival. Shakespeare's trick of course depends on rhetoric. The couplet, oh sorry, the couplet is framed with repeated so longs here and here. This is an example of the device called a naffora, the repetition of the same word or phrase in successive clauses. In the art of English poetry of 1589 George Putnam calls this the figure of report and notes that it enables the poet to lead the dance to many verses in suit by which he means in the same clothing like servants in livery sorry a note again an analogy between poetry and dancing. Why bother with a naffora? Well Shakespeare's couplet I think shows us the so long clause is bind the enormous bragging of the clothes into a persuasive and memorable shape. It sounds inevitable as though Shakespeare were reporting a truth rather than just asserting how great he is. Note too the repetition of this in the final line. So long lives this and this gives life to the one and aphora begets another and this is crucial because in the pronoun Shakespeare underlines the poem he's actually writing, the poem we're reading as the magic means of cheating death. This is time travel, Shakespeare's textual tARDIS. So to an extent all comparisons are dodgy. Shakespeare is sceptical in his attitude to the paraphernalia of previous poetry and we see this in sonnet 130 this time to a woman about a woman my mysticise and nothing like the sun. Again comparisons don't work, corals redder than an ellipse, music's more pleasing than a voice and in an outrageous challenge to tradition she isn't like a goddess. I grant I never saw a goddess go my mistress when she walks treads on the ground which is probably my single favourite line of poetry ever. I don't know why but maybe someone will ask me. This is a poem about what the couplet calls here false compare. The reality is rarer than the literary cliche and the whole business of comparison is dangerous, tenuous. One of the interesting things about sonnet sequences is that they don't try much to be moral or educational. Part of their popularity was that they enabled young writers to explore socially forbidden passions in racy literary forms without seeming to care too much about tomorrow. This is the thesis made famous by the late Richard Helgerson. Elizabethan writers followed the trajectory of the parable of the prodigal son. They wasted their time on the word, I'm afraid it's irresistible, the trumperies of poetry. As one such money young wastrel Sir John Harrington put it poetry is no substantial study. As we've seen Spencer thought differently. The next slide is in lieu of a portrait of Spencer but it is a version of him as a poetic wastrel. As Andrew Hadfield's biography demonstrates, the two portraits which are most associated with Spencer almost certainly not of him. The dating's all wrong or fatally the subject is wearing the wrong kind of rough. This woodcut though is definitely the real thing. It's from Spencer's first major publication The Shepherd's Calendar of 1579 and depicts the lovelorn ambitious shepherd Colin Clout who's Spencer's persona. As a portrait, of course it's not much to go on though. There might be the suggestions of a wispy beard here which is an interesting style decision but it is an icon of Spencer in the role of the poet. Notice at the bottom of the picture the broken bagpipe. Colin breaks this in a fit of peak at the end of January because of his failure to seduce the enigmatic Rosalind. For thou pleasest not where most I would he perpetrates what I want to call bagpipe side. It's a significant image because right at the start of Spencer's career it shows his ambivalence about poetry. On the one hand it's his means of accessing the city over here and the real Spencer did use his literary and rhetorical skills in precisely this way. On the other it just doesn't work with the girl as Colin puts it, shepherd's device she hateth as the snake and laughs the songs that Colin Clout doth make. His sense of the ambiguity of poetry is also at the heart of the fairy queen. As A334 students know the fairy queen is a massive unfinished epic. Spencer published six books in his lifetime with the promise of six more to come. He may even have envisaged a 24 book structure. To give you a sense of its scale it's about 34,000 lines where Homer's Iliad is over 15,000 lines. It's an epic committed to what one critic calls gigantism and it shows the same tendencies to stylistic access to giving more which I noted in Shakespeare's Sonnots. This is emphatically not a poetry of saying things once, but I'm going to talk about a minute part of the poem only. At one point Spencer refers to two stanzas as being a minimum, a half note and that's as far as we'll go to get today. This is some minimum though. It comes at the end of book three as the night of Chastity, Grytemart as in a much Elizabethan literature. This is a girl dressed as a boy rescues another girl Amorette from the clutches of the nasty enchanted Bwyserane. The next picture is Walter Crane's rather voluptuous 1890s illustration of Amorette. Walter Crane's an interesting guy because he was as well as a pre-Raphaelite artist and an illustrator of Spencer, another anarchist but I'm not going to say much more about him than that. Bwyserane's a sinister enchanter who performs vivisection on Amorette's heart to try to persuade her to love him rather than her chosen partner the loyal yet it has to be said slightly whiny Scudamore. In the 1590 edition the poem the book climaxes with the ecstatic union of Amorette with Scudamore. But in the 1596 edition Spencer rewrites the closing stanzas to omit the reunion. What we're reading are cancel stanzas which were never reintegrated into the fabric of the poem. The quotations on two slides because the first stanzas spliced across two pages but it's a nice break as well. Likely he clipped her twitched his arm his twain and straightly did embrace her body bright her body late the prison of sad pain now the sweet lodge of love and dear delight. But she fair lady overcommon quite of huge affection did in pleasure melt and in sweet ravishment poured out her sprite no word they spake nor earthly thing they felt but like two senseless stocks in long embracement dwell Had ye them seen you would have surely thought that they had been that fair hermaphrodite with that which that rich roman of white marble wrought and in his costly bath caused to be sight so seemed those two as groaned together quite that Britomart half envying their bless was much impassioned in a gentle sprite and to herself oft wished like happiness in vain she wished that fate nold letter yet possess. There's an enormous amount that might be said about these stanzas so I'm combining my observations to two areas first how Spencer adapts his narrative source and second what the hermaphrodite image reveals about his comparisons. The source is Ovid's story of hermaphrodites and salmaecus from the fourth book of the metamorphoses because this is such a visual episode I'm going to tell you the story through a painting by Jan Gossard an artist from the french speaking low countries. One of the rhetorical tropes Spencer uses in the setting stanza is ecfrasis or the literary description of imagined artwork so it's not unreasonable to use this kind of visual aid. Gossard's painting shows in the foreground the water nymph salmaecus wrestling with the desperate-looking hermaphroditus who is the son of Hermes and Aphrodite and his modesty is saved by a rather nice looking twig of ivy which is borrowed from Ovid. It is it has to be said a typical Ovidian story of forced sex between gods and mortals as well as a great cautionary tale against the perils of skinny dipping. Salmaecus grabs hermaphroditus while he's innocently bathing and doesn't let go until the gods grant her plea to fuse them together permanently. Delightfully well it delights me anyway Gossard isn't quite on top of the latin the puzzled new creature which wanders around in the background and here's a close-up of it has two heads. In the latin Ovid says that the hermaphrodite has one face faccheisque una or in Arthur Golding's Elizabethan translation to both them did remain one countenance. Spencer is quite close to Ovid but like two senseless stocks in long embracement dwelt reworks of its image of the change being like two twigs both growing into one. The latin Siquis Conducat Cotice Ramos has the sense of as when someone grafts a twig onto a tree. It's a neutral almost scientific observation of the creepy creeping process whereby two bodies emerged into one. Ovid I think is trying to amaze us with the transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Golding again captures this rather well you could not say it was a perfect boy nor perfect wench it seemed both and none of both to be in contrast Spencer focuses on the emotional reality oh sorry getting ahead of myself focuses on the emotional reality which subsists between his characters. His senseless stocks image freezes the reader's attention on something which seems dead a pair of tree stumps but isn't. Spencer rewires Ovid's images of forced transformation into one of unlikely mutuality a story about sexual compulsion becomes an image of equipoise between two lovers melting in sweet ravishment into one another and yet the hermaphrodite stands that complicates the image hugely. In the words of my colleague David Lee Miller the hermaphrodite is a distraction of the kind to which the lovers are momentarily immune and the fact that no one knows what rich roman Spencer is talking about only heightens the distraction. Writing towards the end of his life CS Lewis warned that readers might find the image somewhat repellent for Lewis the hermaphrodite is an orthodox realization of the words of Genesis that man and wife shall be one flesh. This slide from a German emblem book gives a related image of Amor Conygallus or marital love yet what the stanza actually does is to describe the embrace of Amoret and Scudamore whose marital status at this point in the poem is uncertain in terms of two overlapping acts of wireism. First we're told that had we seen them we would have thought they were like the roman's bathroom statue. Second Spencer focuses on Britomart much impassioned in a gentle sprite by the sight of Amoret and Scudamore. We get a better purchase on this stanza through looking at its rhetoric. I've already mentioned Dekfrasis but the major trope here is apostrophe which is an address to the reader. Had ye them seen you would have surely thought. It's as though Spencer is stepping outside of the poem and nudging us into attention. I've always really liked that surely which has the sound of a teacher who's really keen that you notice what he or she has. The Elizabethan retoretician Henry Peachham defined apostrophe as the turning our speech from the first person to the second. Turning encapsulates the words Greek meaning to turn away and reflects its origins in classical oratory when a speaker would abruptly move from the normal audience to a different or imagined one. For Peachham and most Renaissance authorities apostrophe is an emotive device which as he says is very apt to vehement objections and grievous complaints. So when Shakespeare's Mark Antony addresses Julius Caesar's corpse oh pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth that I am meek and gentle with these butchers what we hear is a move from Antony's acid politeness with the conspirators to a supercharged revelation of what he really thinks. Modern criticism though stresses a different aspect of apostrophe. In the words of the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics apostrophe is a metapoetic device by means of which a speaker addresses his own utterance. This works well in context. Spencer as I've said seems to butt in with a reminder that we aren't seeing actually the lovers but and with a bewildering illusion to an unknowable art object as Donald Chaney observes the poet's direct appeal to the reader as an active interpreter of the poem's incidents stresses an ironic warning of the ambiguity of appearances. It's more than this though had ye them seen introduces the comparison between the lovers and the statue so that apostrophe replaces conventional cues of simile he's not saying they were like a statue in order to involve the reader in a troubling and layered image. Spencer's concern I think is perceptual he's using apostrophe to complicate our perspective because we've got no convincing sources for the image we must make sense of it in its own terms as poetic imagery. Elizabethan theorist unsurprisingly tended to view imagery in moral terms for putnam by your similitude you will seem to teach any morality or good lesson by speeches mystical and dark. What sort of good lesson can Spencer be teaching here? There are answers in terms of the broader allegory of book three as the legend of chastity. I've given you a snippet of this approach in Lewis's emphasis on married love. Britomart's envy goes back to the fact that she hasn't yet met her husband, Artigal, with whom of course she will found a dynasty which leads to the Tudors. This is one of the tricks of Renaissance epic that you get used to. In vain she wish that fate nold letter yet possessed which I think is on that slide is in this sense a moral cliff hanger which prepares us for twists of the narrative which come in books four and five and yet I'm not really satisfied with such readings. Spencer's apostrophe serves to implicate the reader in acts of overlooking the Roman in his bath, Britomart watching those two as grown together quite and then ourselves as readers animating both. This leads me back of course to the purpose of literature. Before that though I want to go back briefly to Sergeant Pepper. The one exception to the rule that the album issues imagery is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, described by Chapman as the most pastiche to psychedelic lyric of all time and this is a real tongue twister, whose florid imagery launched an entire tradition of marshmallow munchkins and lemonade lollipop wow. Despite this dubious legacy, Lucy is a rhetorical lyric which uses apostrophe throughout. Picture yourself in a boat on a river. Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain. Picture yourself in a train on a station. John Annan clearly liked the device that to me unbearable imagine, though much beloved of Jeremy Corbyn we hear, is little more than a litany of imperatives. Imagine this, not that. Think this, don't think that. But in Lucy the ideologue side of Lenin is subordinated to the childlike fantasies who wants to estrange the ordinary, to put the listener in a space where anything seems possible, where the boat, the bridge and the station are portals away from the everyday. Climb in the back with your head in the clouds and you're gone. Spencer had no thought of turning his readers on in the counter cultural way envisaged by Lenin. Nevertheless, his code-shifting invitation tries to seduce through the tricks of classroom rhetoric to innovate our responses to seeing something intimate, half a skew from the norm. Consider the rhyme on bless here. This is the kind of thing which has irritated generations of readers, including some of Spencer's contemporaries. Isn't it cheating to walk the formation of the word bliss just to get the rhyme? Elizabethan English was more fluid than in later centuries and elsewhere Spencer does things like changing hand to hond to get a rhyme with fond. The bless rhyme is both a convenience and a pun. Britomark wants the sexual bliss she sees in front of her and desperately wants to configure this as a kind of blessing. This is underlined, I think, by half envying, like the reader perhaps she knows she shouldn't want the things she does. In contrast, the Roman in his bath is blissfully, sinfully at one with his fantasy and Spencer, it has to be said, doesn't seem much bothered about that. This leads back to the problem of why he dropped these stanzas. Lewis thought he may have intended to reinsert them at a later stage, possibly at the end of Scudamore's account of how he won Amoret in book four. Another alternative is harsher. Spencer deleted the stanzas because he realised they don't altogether perform the instructional work the fairy queen was intended to. This would mesh with the downbeat character of the end of book three in the 1596 fairy queen. The last slide shows the revised ending. What happens in narrative terms is that Scudamore waits for Britomark's return in vain so that he and Britomark's page depart for further age, but it's the poetic shift which is the starkest change of gear. Imagery is absent, replaced by the blunt assertion of fact, his expectation to despair did turn. Where the 1590 version concludes with a stanza in which Spencer develops a traditional pastoral image of his poem as a plowing team knackered by their labors, and after all those lines you might think that's reasonable, now cease your work and at your pleasure play. In 1596, all we get is this really weary half hemi stick at the end whilst here I do aspire. Spencer it seems has grown concise and that concision may be his considered response to the elaborations of the earlier ending and in particular the weird voluptuousness of the hermaphrodite. So does reading poetry make you a better person? 20 years ago I would have said no. Elizabethans laid claim to a moral defence of poetry because they couldn't admit that their work was immoral, satiric, sexy, disrespectful. These days I'm not quite so sure. Despite many years of reading The Fairy Queen, I don't think I show many traces of virtuous and gentle discipline. However the filter of complexity which Spencer throws across most human transactions probably affects the way I behave personally and professionally and not invariably for the good. I'm going to close with the last sentence of Graham Swift's recent novella Mothering Sunday in which a novelist reflects in detail on a single day from her youth and the complicated ways in which this day informed her career as a writer interested in truth telling. And it was about being true to the fact the one thing only followed from the other that many things in life oh so many more than we think can never be explained at all. Reading Britomart, Watch Scoodamore and Amorette while thinking of the statue is it seems to me one of those many inexplicable things. Thank you very much.