Week 10 - April 16
Fairies
are made and not born --we begin with Error and Duessa
To read The
Faerie Queen one must relax -A Bartlett Giamatti(former baseball
commissioner)
One must learn as a reader to discriminate, to be flexible and
tolerant. This is what the poem, to which nothing is alien, in
which the unity is finally imaginative, is telling us. Be alive
and open, for the poet is fashioning you as he fashions the poem
(67)
Matthew Woodcock:
Fairy in the Faerie Queen
-- Fairies
are made not born
-- There is obviously a clear line drawn between active belief
(and perpetuation of belief) in fairies
and elves, and the tacit recognition of the practical and aesthetic
expedience of constructing a fiction concerning fairies. (28)
-- How fairy mythology is employed as a means of elevating,
celebrating, and distinguishing
an individual. (35)
-- The narrator's engagement with his materials is sustained
throughout
The Faerie Queen-stress of the narrator's own role as the lens
through which we view the fairy realm. ((61)
Elizabeth Heale: The Faerie Queen: A Reader's Guide
--Each book
follows its knight on what is both a chivalric quest through
a perilous landscape and
a moral journey in pursuit of a complete understanding of that
book's virtue in all its facets. (13)
--…complexity
and mystery are deliberately sought effects…There is…a
paradox at the heart of
Spenser's project. In competition with his desire to educate
the virtuous person through the poem is
his deeply Protestant pessimism about the ultimate fallenness
of the human condition and the
inevitable failure of human virtue. (15)
-- Each
book in a different enacts a similar pattern of resolution almost
but not finally achieved.(16)
-- This
seemingly honest, compassionate, and dutiful voice open to all
the discouragements and
emotions of the moral condition (17)
-- Perception
of the fallen world of experience as a complex, uncertain and
deeply ambiguous place through which we, like the knights, must
go forward, learning to act like them in full knowledge that
interpretation is always provisional. (19)
-- The 'yets'
and 'buts' point top the contradictions (33)
Full jolly knight he seemed and faire did it
As one for knightly giusts amd fierce encounters fit/..
But on
his brest a bloodie Crosse he bore… (Book1 canto 1)
A Bartlett
Giamatti: Play of Double Senses
-- So the
twin impulses of epic: to show man imposing order, while conveying
the futility of trying to control chaos…(26)
-- The double impulse within epic, of creation and decay (43)
-- The impulse to go from the wild edges to what one hopes is
the ordered clearing at the center (49)
-- We must learn as spectators, as readers, to read back from
what is available to what is hidden (83)
-- With Arthur, we as readers must learn when to begin to "doubt
our dazeled sight (II,xi,4)) for as the poet constantly tells
us and show us, "forged things do fairest shew" (IV,
v, 15)
-- Readers must strive to become relevant to great poems (89)
-- Language always bears within it the seeds of monstrosity
as well as beauty. (91)
--To the extent to which The Faerie Queen is an account of the
way our lives are compounded of impulses to self-deception on
the one hand and drives to revelation on the other, the poem
is an account of the struggle within each of us,. between Archimago
and Merlin, between perspective distorted and vision undeflected.
But least we posit too simple a dualism, we must remember that
voyeur and voyant, black and white magician, are finally at
one within us all, and that at bottom Spenser is exploring the
most deeply rooted impulse of all, man's capacity to create
with the mind. (120)
Book 1 - We
begin with deceit - not just Una but Duesssa/Fidessa
not just with the Redcrosse Knight but with Archimago
…but a poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most
concerneth him, and there recoursing to things forepaste and divining
of things to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.
Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Ralegh
A Brief
Reading from Book I, Cantos I and II "wherein of old
dints of deepe wounds did remain"
&
Canto XII "behold I see the haven nigh at hand"
A look at
metaphor
pages 42, 43,44,53,59
Group tasks
1. The Bower of Bliss (Book II, Canto XII,40 ff) pages 46-52)
create your own bower, seductive yet dangerous
describe it so we can see the allure and the peril of it
2. in your
own poem what seductive power is in danger of luring your poem
of its true quest -what temptations imperil your poem(poetry)?
3. The assault
of the senses (Book II, Canto XI, 8-15)
pick a sense of storm it - in a poem of 8-10 lines overwhelm it/overkill
with a particular
odor or sound or sight or taste or touch
Assignment:
explore a time when you were led astray/deceived
Skim Faerie Queen: Books 3 & 6
as a poet
what/who is your Duessa, what/who is your Una
"where is (YOUR) … happy land of faerie"
