Harry Berger quoting Anne Prescott:
> "Whether a poem written to one (or no) lady and then recycled for another
>in a sense becomes a new text and now hers is an interesting question about
>language, intention, voice, and time."
>
and Katherine Eggert:
>"You'll notice, of course, that I'm waffling on the question
>of intentionality by making FQ rather than Spenser the agent here -- but
>why not argue that Spenser himself is a constructed and ventriloquized
>discourse?"
asks:
>How would these two comments, taken together, affect the issue under
>discussion?
OK. I'll play. The situation would be rather like that obtaining with
that other Elizabeth (the Glorious One), wouldn't it? Does the myth
call forth the woman, or vice versa -- or do both "dilate" one
another? Or, to put it another way:
For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.
Yet not too like, yet not so like to be
Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs
The difference that heavenly pity brings.
For this, musician, in your girdle fixed
Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:
The imagination that we spurned and crave.
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