A thought:
Why not try to look at it as an "inversion" of all order - both grammatical
and content-wise.
Let's say that Spenser tried to stress the idea of destruction/subversion of
order on all fronts:
He would subvert the order of nature - dead and living adore him;
Subvert the order of the scriptures where for life we have death;
Subvert the grammatical order [unless he was thinking in German at the time]
and put the verb at the end - as does Hymen in Shakespeare's "As You Like
It" - "Then is there mirth in heauen, When earthly things made eauen attone
together." - subversion of order on a purely structural level to stress the
content of the matter.
Oded
________________________________
Oded Ilan
Content & Support Supervisor
www.whquestion.com
Tel: +972 (3) 639-4304 Ext. #115
Fax: +972 (3) 639-7943
Mobile: +972 (54) 890-167
mailto: [log in to unmask]
________________________________
-----Original Message-----
From: caddison [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 11:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Query
At the risk of being banal, I suggest that this is a prosodic
choice on the part of Spenser. "And dead as living ever him adored"
is a typical Spenserian line, with a syntactic inversion that
shoves the verb to the end of the line and the iambic rhythm
quite regular. "Living as dead" is definitely not Spenser. The
phrase from Revelation would itself do as an iambic pentameter
line,but it does not have quite the regularity that Spenser usually
enforces: "I am he that liveth, and was dead." (Does Spenser use
headless lines?)
Catherine Addison
"Peter C. Herman" wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> In I.i. of the FQ, the narrator describes Red Crosse's relationship with
> Christ thus: "And dead as living ever him adored," and Anne Prescott &
Hugh
> McLean in their edition (and Anne Prescott in personal correspondence)
> point out that the line inverts Revelations I.18: I am he that liveth, and
> was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore" (KJV); "And [I] am alive,
> but I was dead: and behold, I am alive for evermore" (Geneva). My question
> is, how common was the locution "dead as living"? I am asking because I
> have found another text that uses this locution, and am wondering if the
> author is alluding to the FQ.
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Peter C. Herman
>
> Peter C. Herman
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|