Perhaps Spenser's verse might be so hard to remember because the
relationship between its sound and the mental images or concepts it
invokes is not at all an essential relationship, and so the sound and the
ideas need to be memorized separately, as it were. (This is not a comment
on the relationship between name and thing, or not only that, but more
specifically a comment about the way that Spenser creates ambiguity
and doubling.) So, for example, in the famous stanza in which Amoret is
led out into Busirane's masque by despite and cruelty ("After all these
there marcht a most faire dame / led of two grysie villains, the one
Despight, / the other clept Cruelty by name: / she doleful lady like a
dreary spright / cald by strong charmes out of eternal night/ had death's
own image figured in her face" -- and that was *not* from memory) -- the
ambiguity of reference in the pronoun "she" means that you don't really
know from "she doleful lady" to "had death's own image" who or what you
are looking at, as everyone has long since pointed out. And if memory of
text involves not only the ability to see the visual images invoked by
the text but also to keep words the words of the text firmly pinned to
those images, Spenser's verse, which creates ambiguities and doubles that
obscure a clear sense of which pictures and concepts are pinned to what
words, should thus be notoriously impossible to keep in one's head. So,
it's not so much, perhaps, that Spenser's language is a transparent
container, or a husk, for an intellective process that discards words once
it gets going (although, of course, the concepts conveyed by Spenser's
allegory may be contemplated without taking into account the texture of
the verse). It's more that the verse resists giving the reader the
materials of memory, as if what Spenser wanted us to remember were
paradoxically that the Faeire Queene were eternally elusive.
Genevieve Guenther
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