>> Redcrosse knows what his dream means he must do;
>
> Andrew, is this the same thing as saying "Redcrosse knows what his
> dream tells him to do"?

Hello Harry,

All in amaze he suddenly vp start
  With sword in hand, and with the old man went;
  Who soone him brought into a secret part,
  Where that false couple were full closely ment
  In wanton lust and leud embracement:
  Which when he saw, he burnt with gealous fire,
  The eie of reason was with rage yblent,
  And would haue slaine them in his furious ire,
But hardly was restreined of that aged sire.

Retourning to his bed in torment great,
  And bitter anguish of his guilty sight,
  He could not rest, but did his stout heart eat,
  And wast his inward gall with deepe despight,
  Yrkesome of life, and too long lingring night.
  At last faire Hesperus in highest skie
  Had spent his lampe, and brought forth dawning light,
  Then vp he rose, and clad him hastily;
The dwarfe him brought his steed: so both away do flie.

There are multiple preparations (primings) for Redcrosse's error here: not
only Errour, but the dream to which he remained unpersuaded (Milton of
course picks up on this kind of necessary priming in Eve's dream before
the temptation). Spenser repeats 'suddenly' twice (stanzas 4 and 5) to
emphasize the interruption of Redcrosse's 'sound repast', whereupon he
jolts up so quickly that Spenser doesn't even have time to get a preterite
ending on the back of 'start' (not to mention the delayed 'ment', of line
4 of stanza 5, which should have been tacked on to 'amaze' in line 1: the
jumbling up of syllables and lopping off of verb tenses plays out the
confusion of Redcrosse's disorientation pretty neatly).

'Ment' is curious in line 5 beyond the way it answers 'amaze', though.
Who ever heard of couples being 'ment'? ('Who is bold enough to admit that
he or she has never had such an experience?') I think I would stick to the
'meaning' of this image to him of what he must do, and the eliding of a
'telling' and a 'choosing'; because in the following lines we go straight
from the palpably-meant 'wanton lust and leud embracement' (where, again,
the metre requires us to give four syllables to 'embracement' and make it
a pair of iambic feet, giving us 2-for-1 in the ment department: what is
meant? wanton lust and leud embrace is meant.) to the remarkable
effacement (oops, sorry) of the subject in lines 7-8:

  The eie of reason was with rage yblent,
  And would haue slaine them in his furious ire...

The blinded eye (I) of reason would have slain them? Or Redcrosse?
Obviously we are 'ment' to recall the 'he' of line 6, but the asyndeton in
the interposition of line 6, coming as it does on the back of a lot of
verbal confusion earlier in the stanza, throws the whole question of
agency into a passionate entangle-ment. The experience of this stanza is
the closest thing I have ever seen in English poetry to the way I feel
when my daughters wake me up at 3 in the morning; and I don't see a
process here of ceding authority, then choosing to actualize a
possibility--I just see confusion, and 'amaze' giving way to 'ment',
thence to 'embracement', thence to 'yblent'. The rest of the passage--the
gall-eating frenesis of the 'too long lingring night'--is not marked by
choice and election, but impatience to make good his departure. Usually in
Spenser the dawning light brings 'rose' (the rosy-fingered Eos of Homer:
see stanza 7 for its appearance, for Una, a couple of lines later); here
Redcrosse is in such a rush he translates the color to movement, and it is
his, preventing, movement: 'then vp he rose...hastily'.

andrew