The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29

Abstract

The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by his guardian angel, finds himself surrounded by larks whose cruciform shapes in flying match their singing of the name “Jhesu.” Having fallen for the second time when fighting the dragon, Spenser’s Red Cross Knight rises on the third morning to find himself victorious. In his rising he is compared with the lark at dawn. The Edenic setting (which underlines the theme of the redemption of “fallen” man by the risen Christ) is also illuminated by Deguileville’s Ame; Spenser’s two trees are reminiscent of the “green and the dry” in the French allegory, according to which Christ appears as the apple pinned to the dry tree in reparation for the apple stolen by Adam. When one examines Shakespeare’s reference to the lark in Sonnet 29 in the light of the tradition represented by Deguileville (whose work not only Spenser but also Shakespeare might have read in English translation) the question arises as to whether the beloved addressed in line 10 (“thee”) could be Christ, and the speaker a Christian worshipper moving from self reproach to Christian gratitude. Such an interpretation is challenged by the standard assumption that the sonnets reflect a narrative produced by a love triangle. But from Petrarch’s Canzoniere on, sequences of love sonnets had contained poems of religious adoration.