Chapter 12 - Spenser’s Cruel Cupid
Blindfold he was, and in his cruell fist
A mortall bow and arrowes keene did hold,
With which he shot at randon, when him list,
Some headed with sad lead, some with pure gold;
(Ah man beware, how thou those darts behold)
A wounded Dragon under him did ly,
Whose hideous tayle his left foot did enfold,
And with a shaft was shot through either eye,
That no man forth might draw, ne no man remedye.
(F. Q. III, xi, 48)
This stanza provides examples of nearly everything in Spenser which tends to disappoint a modern reader. The movement of the verse is extremely regular: only in the fourth line (‘Some headed with sad lead, some with pure gold’) is the iambic flow disturbed. The image presented appears banal. We have heard a thousand times before that Cupid is blindfold and that he bears arrows. Even the distinction between two kinds of arrows is not new. We have met it in the Roman de la Rose (908 seq.) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 462 seq.). There are no tensions or ambiguities in the language; nothing but literal, sequacious description. The only novelty is the dragon under Cupid’s foot. The only puzzle is the shaft that has put out its eyes, and the curious emphasis (in the last line) on the hopeless character of the injury. It sounds almost as if Spenser were pitying the dragon. One does not expect a writer of chivalrous romance to pity dragons.
Such a passage neither demands nor admits the minute verbal explication in which the most vigorous modern criticism excels. There is, however, room for explication of a different sort.
Cupid’s arrows, generally banal, are not banal in Spenser.
In the very frontispiece of his poem he has introduced (I, Proem 3) the loves of Mars and Venus. In the Odyssey those loves were little more than a merry tale; by Spenser’s time they had come to symbolize the victory of beauty over strength and peace over war; concord resolving discord. This is what the story meant to Lucretius and Plutarch; and to Botticelli, in whose picture the profound sleep of Mars and the waking tranquillity of Venus powerfully present ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’—not their desire only but that of all creation. The disarmament of Mars is emphasized by the fact that his arms have become toys for infant fawns to play with. But Spenser adds another detail. He disarms Cupid as well as Mars. It is a Cupid without his ‘deadly Heben bowe’ who inspires the concubitus whereby the goddess Harmony was engendered.
This is not the only place where Cupid is deprived of his weapons.
The Angel in II, viii, 6 is compared not simply to Cupid but to Cupid sporting with the Graces and ‘having laid his cruell bow away’. Cupid is admitted to the House of Alma (II, ix, 34) ‘having from him layd His cruell bow’. Again in the garden of Adonis he takes his pleasure ‘laying his sad darts Aside’ (III, vi, 49).
There are, admittedly, places where his arrows are mentioned in merely rhetorical fashion; as in I, Proem 3 itself or III, ii, 26, or ii, 35, or vi, 23. They colour the language but barely reach the visual imagination. When the arrows are included in, or expressly excluded from, a fully realized image, they are usually significant.
Their mention in the stanza we are considering stamps this Cupid as a particular kind of Cupid.
The bandage on this Cupid’s eyes would be banal if we stopped reading when we had finished the stanza. But it is presently going to leap into meaning. We shall then see the living Cupid—hitherto we have been looking at his statue—equally blindfold at first and then unbinding the bandage to enjoy the sight of Amoret’s torture. At which ‘he much rejoiced in his cruell mind’ and clapped his wings (III, xii, 22). He is blind except to the pleasures of cruelty; to them, gladly attentive.
And what of the dragon? Dragons (or serpents) have various significances. For modern depth-psychology they mean the libido or even the phallus. In some contexts they have meant wisdom. Sometimes, if they have their tails in their mouths, they are the symbol of eternity. But the key to this particular use lies elsewhere. In Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531) we find the virgin goddess Minerva (or Pallas) pictured with a dragon as her attendant. The verses which follow explain why:
Vera haec effigies innuptae est Palladis: Ejus
Hic draco, qui dominae constitit ante pedes.
Cur divae comes hoc animal? Custodia rerum
Huic data: sic lucos sacraque templa colit.
Innuptas opus est cura asservare puellas
Pervigili; laqueos undique tendit amor.
A long tradition of dragons as guardians lies behind this. The Golden Fleece was guarded by a dragon, and the dragon which guards buried treasure (say, in Beowulf and the Volsung story) is as old as Phaedrus (IV, xx). More relevant than either is the dragon of the Hesperides. The Hesperides themselves associate it with virginity, and so, more potently and on a deeper level, do the golden apples. For apples often symbolize the female breasts; perhaps, especially, girlish and undeveloped breasts—the pome acerbe, the ‘unripe’ apples, of Ariosto’s Alcina in the Furioso (VII, 14) or those of Philoclea in the Arcadia (1590, I, xiii, 6).
Alciati’s book was so well known that we may be sure that it is, directly or indirectly, the source of Spenser’s blinded dragon. This is the guardian of chastity mutilated in the very organs which qualified it for guardianship. The same function is allotted to the dragon, with the same emphasis on its eyes, by two other English poets. Thus in Jonson,
What earthly spirit but will attempt
To taste the fruite of beauties golden tree,
When leaden sleepe seales up the dragon’s eyes?
(Every Man in his Humor, 1601, III, i, 19)
And in Milton,
But beauty, like the fair Hesperian tree
Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard
Of dragon-watch with unenchanted eye. . . .
(Comus, 393–5)
Without going beyond the single stanza, then, we discover that this Cupid is more particularized than he seemed at the first glance. But let us now go beyond it.
He is made of ‘massy gold’ (stanza 47). Gold of itself could never, I believe, be a symbol of evil to any human poet. But in this particular context Spenser has already contrived to make gold sinister. This statue stands in a room whose walls are covered with tapestries in which
the rich metall lurked privily,
As faining to be hid from envious eye;
Yet here, and there, and every where unawares
It shewd it selfe, and shone unwillingly;
Like a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht backe declares.
(28)
Again, if we go forward from the stanza we started with, we discover that this statue is not merely decorative. It is, in the full theological sense, an idol. And its effect on Britomart, through whose eyes we are seeing the whole adventure, is very remarkable. It ‘amazed’ her; she couldn’t stop looking at it; she was ‘dazd’, dazzled and confused, by its extreme brightness.
Britomart, we know, is the Knight of Chastity. But Chastity, as embodied in her, means for Spenser True Love; that is, constant, fertile, monogamic, felicific love. Though she is, during the action of the poem, a virgin, she is much more like a mother-goddess than a virgin goddess. We are never for long allowed to forget that she is to be the ancestress of kings and heroes—
For from thy wombe a famous Progenie
Shall spring, out of the auncient Trojan blood.
(III, iii, 22–3)
It is love, so conceived, that comes to defeat the cruel Cupid, but is momentarily dazzled by his idol.
The conception of such an enmity between Cupid—one kind of Cupid—and True Love is also found in a passage from Sidney where Cupid is banished from (of all places) the marriage bed. In the Epithalamium sung by Dycus we read
But thou foule Cupid syre to lawlesse lust,
Be thou farre hence with thy empoyson’d darte,
Which though of glittring golde, shall heere take rust
Where simple love, which chastnesse doth imparte,
Avoydes thy hurtfull arte.
(The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler, Jr.
[Oxford, 1962], p. 92)
The ‘arrows’ of Cupid in the ancient tradition meant, I believe, no more than the sweet-sharp stings of bodily desire. It is clear that they cannot mean this when Spenser or Sidney banishes the arrows from scenes of what they regard as True Love. If they meant that, the absence of the arrows could only mean impotence and frigidity. But in both poets, lawful and unlawful love alike usually seek fruition; are not, in the cant sense, ‘Platonic’.