note

they came creepinge forth upon theire handes
for theire legges could not beare them…
and if they found a plott [of water-cresses or shamrocks],
theyr they flocked as to a feast for the first time
open the temple gates unto my love
they spake like ghostes, crying out of theire graves
they did eate of the carrions, happye wheare they could find them
out of everye corner of the woode and glenns

soe that the speach be[ing Irish],
eeny weeny meany greeny queeny
airy lairy hairy scary fairy
the hart must needes be [Irishe];
for out of the aboundance of the hart,
the tonge speaketh

texts adapted from Spenser (A View of the Present State of Irelande, and Epithalamion)

Written for Anna Dennis, Liam Byrne, and Jonas Nordberg, Spenser is a ‘portrait’ of the 16th-century Elizabethan court poet Edmund Spenser (1553-99), which continues my ongoing interest in the concept of musical portraiture. The writer and art critic John Berger posits the idea that portraiture betrays as much, if not more, about the artist themself – the way they see the world; their physical, aesthetic, social, and political perspective – as it does about the subject of the portrait. In this sense, it can be a method to shape an understanding of oneself through the exploration of someone else.

Widely considered perhaps the greatest poet of the English Renaissance, Spenser is known for his technical achievements (the ‘Spenserian stanza’) across an array of sonnets, odes, and allegorical works, including, most famously, The Fairie Queene. He was also an English state servant and went to Ireland in 1580, where he acquired land in the Munster plantation and served under Lord Grey and Walter Raleigh in the Second Desmond Rebellion. His opinions on Ireland and the Irish found expression in his prose pamphlet A View of the Present State of Irelande: written as a dialogue between two Englishmen, it calls for the pacification of the Irish through scorched earth policies (the effectiveness of which he’d witnessed during the Desmond Rebellion) as well as the erasure of the Irish language.

As a portrait, Spenser is concerned with the complexities of the man and his image: simultaneously the great Elizabethan poet and militant reformer – someone who can articulate, with succinct beauty, that language gives expression to the very being of a people, while simultaneously advocating for the destruction of it. Alongside a short rhyme of my own composition, it makes use of extracts from the poet’s writings (including A View, as well as the marriage ode Epithalamion) as the basis for a collage of texts, all set within a fractured structure of sharply juxtaposed moods and tempi.

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