I'm a sucker for the most obvious harmonies.  My favorite line (doesn't everybody have at least one?) has always been "The Eugh obedient to the bender's will," because I really do sense the combination of resistance and obedience in the play between the dipthong, emphasized by orthography, of "eugh" as it modulates into the long "o" of "obedient," and the remarkable series of vowells and consonants that follows.  I feel both the bender's will and the eugh's resistant bending together in that line.

David Lee Miller

Department of English              543 Boonesboro Avenue
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Germaine Warkentin
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 1:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Noises in Spenser

Now here's an idea for a new thread.  I've been reading Northrop Frye's Diaries 1942-1955 as a prelude to writing the headnotes and introduction to a volume of his collected works (the "Early Critical Writings, 1933-63"), and on Monday, March 20, 1950, he writes as follows:

"The graduate group went very smoothly, with a lot of absentees, but for once I got somewhere near Spenser. It was just the straight stuff about the rhetorical allegory, or decorum, being largely a matter of imitative harmony, the sound being an echo of the sense.  Also all of the funny noises in Spenser."

Have we ever given any thought to funny noises in Spenser?  If not, we clearly have some catching up to do. Germaine.

--
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Germaine Warkentin // English (Emeritus)
VC 205, Victoria College (University of Toronto),
73 Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, CANADA
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