Colin Clouts Come Home Againe

Clout's Come Home Again by the English poet Edmund Spenser and published in 1595 has been the focus of little critical attention compared to the poet's other works such as the The Faerie Queene, yet it has been called the "greatest pastoral eclogue" in the English language. In a tradition going back to Petrach, the pastoral eclogue contained a dialogue between shepherds with a narrative or song as an inset, but which could conceal allegories of a political or ecclesiastical nature.

The poem is an allegorical pastoral on the subject of Spenser's visit to London in 1591 and written after his return home to Ireland in that year. He dedicated it to Sir Walter Ralegh in partial payment for the "infinite debt" Spencer felt he owed him. (Sir Walter Ralegh had visited him prior to his London trip.) In Colin Clouts description of his visit to London, this poem is Spenser's most autobiographical. He identifies a number of anonymous poets the real life identities of whom have been speculated on over time.

Although Clout's Come Home Again is a pure pastoral poem, the poet through the use of "inset within inset narrations, is able to mock the limitations of the pastoral mode by mocking the use of ordinary terms. While he intersperses "grim realities" into the text, he does so in georgic rather than pastoral mode and rises to "an exalted vision of cosmic love" in a way that gives the poem a refined complexity that was unique to English literature at that time and which became a model for many later poets.