Look, I like poetry. I love poetry, actually - even did my PhD on it. And I've come to think that, more than prose, poetry dates. This doesn't have to be a bad thing - the Pearl, for instance, is utterly fantastic and its language is older by far than what's in here. And what's in here isn't all bad - occasionally Spenser comes across a turn of phrase or a sense of narrative that caught my attention, and Walter Crane's illustrations are amazing. I also enjoyed the set-up of it, the matching poem to month and mood. But for the most part, this just feels dated to me, and not in a good way. I was going to call it twee but it isn't really; that's an unfair assessment. But take January's poem: a shepherd boy falls in love with a girl called Rosalind, who doesn't appear to love him back, so he throws himself on the ground and breaks his pipe in pieces so he can't play it anymore, in a sort of emotional tantrum which may well explain why Rosalind is steering clear in the first place. That sort of thing - hysterical melodrama that verges on (what to the modern eye can appear as) the very purplest of purple prose. Very different from today's poetry, which is admittedly far more to my taste.

I dunno. I'm hoping to wade my way through Spenser's Faerie Queene later this year. Here's hoping it's an improvement.