The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser(1590)
Extract
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life does greatly please.
Knights ride through forests where every tree conceals an allegory and every maiden is also a virtue or a nation, and the landscape they traverse is England, dreamed into Arthurian romance. Edmund Spenser published the first books in 1590 and three more in 1596, though the poem was never completed, and what survives is the most ambitious poem of the English Renaissance. Each book follows a knight embodying a virtue: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy. The stanza Spenser invented, nine lines of interlocking rhyme, moves with a music that shifts from battle to pastoral to vision without breaking stride. It is a poem that asks to be wandered through, a cathedral of verse where every chapel opens onto another.
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Milton inherits Spenser's ambition and his stanzas, but trades allegory for theology and fairyland for the cosmos.
Dante sends another knight through enchanted landscapes toward grace, and the allegory is just as thick but the path is straighter.
Cervantes takes the same chivalric romance Spenser celebrates and lovingly demolishes it.