Tho couth I sing of love, and tune my pype
    Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made: 
    Tho would I seeke for Queene-apples unrype,
    To give my Rosalind; and in Sommer shade
    Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade,
    To crowne her golden locks:  but yeeres more rype,
    And losse of her, whose love as lyfe I wayd,
    Those weary wanton toyes away dyd wype.

In the same eclogue we may trace a deliberate contrast between various descriptive passages.  Thus Hobbinol feels the magie of the summer woods—­

    Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes,
    Which thou were wont on wastfull hylls to singe,
    I more delight then larke in Sommer dayes: 
    Whose Echo made the neyghbour groves to ring,
    And taught the byrds, which in the lower spring
    Did shroude in shady leaves from sonny rayes,
    Frame to thy songe their chereful cheriping,
    Or hold theyr peace, for shame of thy swete layes.

Closely following upon this stanza we have Colin’s lament, ’The God of shepheards, Tityrus, is dead,’ containing the lines: 

    But, if on me some little drops would flowe
    Of that the spring was in his learned hedde,
    I soone would learne these woods to wayle my woe,
    And teache the trees their trickling teares to shedde.

We have here a specifie inversion of the ‘pathetic fallacy.’  The moods of nature are no longer represented as varying in sympathy with the passions of man, but are deliberately used to heighten an effect by contrast.  Even this inverted correspondence, however, is for the most part lacking in the subsequent eclogues, and it must be admitted that in so far as Spenser depended on a cyclic correlation for the unifying of his design, he achieved at best but partial effect.  Another means by which he sought, consciously or unconsciously, to produce unity of impression was by consistently pitching his song in the minor key.  This accounts for the inverted correspondence just noted, and for the fact that even the polemics have an undercurrent of regret in them.  In this case the poet has undoubtedly succeeded in carrying out the prevailing mood of the central motive—­the Rosalind drama—­in the subsidiary scenes.  Or should we not rather say that he has extracted the general mood of the whole composition, and infused it, in a kind of typical form, into the three connected poems placed at critical points of the complex structure?  The unity, however, thus aimed at, and achieved, is very different from the cyclic or architectonic unity described above, and of a much less definite character.

It remains to say a few words concerning the language of the Calender and the rough accentual metre in which parts of it are composed, since both have a particular bearing upon Spenser’s attitude towards pastoral in general.