From ‘Prothalamion’
There in a meadow by the river’s side
A flock of nymphs I chancéd to espy,
All lovely daughters of the flood thereby,
With goodly greenish locks all loose untied
As each had been a bride;
And each one had a little wicker basket
Made of fine twigs, entrailéd curiously.
In which they gather’d flowers to fill their flasket,
And with fine fingers cropt full feateously
The tender stalks on high.
Of every sort which in that meadow grew
They gather’d some; the violet, pallid blue,
The little daisy that at evening closes,
The virgin lily and the primrose true,
With store of vermeil roses,
To deck their bridegrooms’ posies
Against the bridal day, which was not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
A prothalamion is a poem celebrating a forthcoming wedding. Spenser seems to have invented the word when he wrote this poem in 1596. It marks the engagement of the earl of Worcester’s two daughters, Lady Elizabeth and Lady Katherine Somerset.
The poem’s speaker begins by telling us how he’d gone for a walk by the Thames to get escape the frustrations of a stalled political career. It was there (around Blackwall) that he found these nymphs gathering flowers.
Even in the late 16th century the Thames was a busy working river. Ships carrying furs and timber from the Baltic, spices from the Indies, and coal from Tyneside made their way up the river to
unload on the wharfs below London Bridge. Watermen operated small rowing boats as taxis, ferrying passengers up and down and across the river. Blackwall itself was home to a shipyard.
Not that you’d know that from Spenser’s poem. There, the Thames ‘runs softly’ through meadows full of violets, daisies, lilies, and nymphs. Later, two ‘purely
white’ swans (representing Lady Elizabeth and Lady Katherine) swim on the River Lea. Perhaps Spenser is providing his aristocratic patrons with a landscape built for their pleasure where they
don’t have to worry about things like working people. Or perhaps he is providing two young women about to be married with an example of how even the everyday world can be enchanted, for poets
and for people in love.
But this is a very public poem. It wasn’t sent privately to the sisters, but was quickly printed and for sale in London. To these readers who saw the river every day, nymphs by the Thames were clearly a flight of fancy. But they, like us, would assume that they had a point. The poem asks its readers to make sense of its fictions. A natural way to do this is to find the ‘deeper truths’ they represent.
When we look for this ‘deeper truth’, the poem becomes a comment on the sort of landscape that is appropriate for young brides. It is right, the poem suggests, that its lilies are ‘virgin’ and its primroses ‘true’ because those should also be the qualities of the young women it is addressed to. It is right that it should be full of nymphs who while away the day in flowery meadows because a bride should look forward to her marriage as an earthly paradise. It is even right that the poem should rhyme, because a husband and wife should be in natural harmony with each other. This is the way the world should be in a poem about marriage.
We might think that these are not, in fact, such natural truths. But Spenser’s sweet song hints at the power poets have to write their own opinions across the face of the world.
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