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
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