When it comes to reading modern poetry, counting the number of lines usually isn’t a great strategy for interpretation. But early modern poetry is a different story. During the English Renaissance, people got very into “numerology,” or the idea that certain numbers have particular significance. For example, as we mention in the “Summary and Analysis” section of this guide, some architects used significant numbers when designing a house—one of Sidney’s peers built his house with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, and 7 courts, based on the days in the year, weeks in the year, and days in a week.
The same careful use of numbers often applies to poetry written in this period. One of the most famous examples of careful numerological organization is the poetry of Edmund Spenser. For example, his poem Epithalamion, which celebrates marriage as a cosmic renewal of life, is exactly 24 stanzas and 365 lines long—according to the number of hours in the day, and the number of days in the year.
The content of each stanza is also determined by its hour; night falls a quarter of the way through the sixteenth stanza, and we can calculate that, during the time of year and in the place where Spenser was married, the day was in fact exactly 16 and one-quarter hours long. The perfect alignments between the content of the poem, Spenser’s own circumstances, and the numerical qualities of the lines make it pretty much undebatable that the alignments were intentional for the author.
Spenser was not the only early modern poet to use countable characteristics to reinforce the meaning of his poetry. So did Drayton, Peele, and Jonson—including in “To Penshurst.” The patterns are hard to catch on your own, but once you see it, it’s hard to argue with. The poem is composed of 51 couplets, a popular number in the Renaissance because it was used to structure the Psalms. It’s also what you get when you multiply 3 and 17—and Jonson lists exactly 17 species that provision Penshurst. And the poem’s 51 couplets are in fact divided into 3 groups of 17—something the poet gestures to when he writes,
pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,
As loth, the second draught, or cast to stay,
Officiously, at first, themselves betray
The line, “as loth, the second draught” in fact begins the second third of the poem. The weary pikes have arrived a line too soon, which speaks to their eagerness to be devoured by the lord of the house.
Ultimately, detecting these numerological patterns is fun, but unnecessary for making sense of the poem. Usually, the patterns reinforce themes you can also detect in other ways. However, they do prove that Renaissance poets structured their poems extremely carefully and deliberately. Most poets in this period worked hard to make their writing sound improvisational, as though they had just dashed something off. But that’s an effect that conceals extreme care—care that invites us, as readers, to pay attention to every detail of the poem.
