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The Faerie Queene (1590) was one of the most influential poems in the English language. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united Arthurian romance and Italian renaissance epic to celebrate the glory of the Virgin Queen. Each book of the poem recounts the quest of a knight to achieve a virtue: the Red Crosse Knight of Holiness, who must slay a dragon and free himself from the witch Duessa; Sir Guyon, Knight of Temperance, who escapes the Cave of Mammon and destroys Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss; and the lady-knight Britomart’s search for her Sir Artegall, revealed to her in an enchanted mirror. Although composed as a moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene’s magical atmosphere captivated the imaginations of later poets from Milton to the Victorians.

References to The Faerie Queene abide throughout Melville's works (for instance, in the "Extracts" of Moby-Dick and the epigraphs of "The Encantadas"). In addition, Carole Moses notes a number of structural similarities between it and Melville's Mardi: "the climactic meeting between Taji and Hautia echoes" the Bower of Bliss; Yillah "relies heavily on Spenser's Garden of Adonis and Temple of Love" with "details...from Scudamour"; "Spenserian allusion" links Yillah with Una; Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi are delineated ala "Spenser's House of Temperance"; and "Alma seems based on the Spenserian character of the same name."

Book II is centered on the virtue of Temperance as embodied in Sir Guyon. On his quest, he fights several evil, rash, or tricked knights and meets Arthur. They come to Acrasia's Island and the Bower of Bliss, where Guyon resists temptations to violence, idleness, and lust, destroying he Bower and rescuing those imprisoned there.

Faerie Queene (Book 2): ~127pp

Faerie Queen (modernized, annotated, and abridged):

Supplemental:

Extracts:

  • "Fairy bower in the fair lagoon, scene of sylvan ease and heart’s repose,—Oh, Yillah, Yillah! All the woods repeat the sound, the wild, wild woods of my wild soul. Yillah! Yillah! cry the small strange voices in me, and evermore, and far and deep, they echo on." (Mardi, 1.64)
  • "Busy at scuttle-hole in floor / Of rock, like smith who may repair / A bolt of Mammon’s vault." (Clarel, 3.24)
  • "Mammon, never meek as Moses, / Gouty, mattressed on moss-roses, / A crumpled rose-leaf makes him furious." ("The Rose Farmer")
  • "Not in vain had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father’s fastidiously picked and decorous library; where the Spenserian nymphs had early led him into many a maze of all-bewildering beauty. Thus, with a graceful glow on his limbs, and soft, imaginative flames in his heart, did this Pierre glide toward maturity..." (Pierre, 1.2)
  • "Archimago’s cave / Was here? or that more sorcerous scene / The Persian Sibyl kept within / For turbaned musings?" (Clarel, 4.13)
  • "plunging in among a parcel of these river-nymphs.... [they] swarmed about me like a shoal of dolphins, and seizing hold of my devoted limbs, tumbled me about and ducked me under the surface, until from the strange noises which rang in my ears, and the supernatural visions dancing before my eyes, I thought I was in the land of the spirits." (Typee, 18)

This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.

Related topics

Literature
Medieval History
Theology
Mythology
Poetry

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