ABSTRACT
To demonstrate the continuity of the image of the fertile imperial queen throughout the epic, as well as the poem’s increasingly blatant interest in local topography and the Munster plantation, we begin here with the end of the poem, or the “Mutability Cantos” from the unfinished Book VII (pub. 1609). As we have seen, in its opening lines (the Proem to Book I), in a passage reminiscent of the opening invocation to Augustus in Virgil’s Georgics, Spenser’s epic celebrates the sun-like power of the Queen to illuminate his dark corner of the empire and raise his poetic style, and the poem itself, in toilsome tribute: the same idea controls Canto vii of the “Mutabilitie Cantos,” thus providing consistent ideological book-ends for his great unfinished work.
