This essay discusses the shorter poems that Spenser published in the 1590s with the exceptions of 'Mother Hubberds Tale' and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. Do they have anything in common aside from authorship and relative brevity? Perhaps so. All concern love or sorrow, and some explore the often tense relation of those two energies that Spenser variously locates in the psyche, the state and the cosmos. True, much human life can be read as a dialectic of desire and melancholy (in Elizabethan terms, 'forward' and 'froward' passions), but Spenser's focus on the dialectic is particularly sharp. These poems are by definition non-epic ventures. Yet awareness of The Faerie Queene is never far away, sometimes detectable in verse on the collapse of greatness, sometimes, more obliquely, in echoes of Virgil or Ovidian subversions of the Aeneid, and sometimes audible as references to the national epic on which Spenser the lover knows, or says he knows, he should be working.

Complaints (1591) was published by William Ponsonby, publisher of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Much remains mysterious about this venture. Did Spenser oversee its printing? In a preface Ponsonby reports that he has collected the contents, extracting poems from those owning copies, retrieving others 'purloined' from Spenser, and failing to obtain some others. Spenser had been in England, so it is possible that he oversaw the printing or at least authorised the volume's arrangement.