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> risk that allusion).  This doesn't mean, of course, that he doesn't also
> work with effects that the voice can't reproduce in one reading--such as
> the two possible pronunciations of "Busyrane"--but this is to say that he
> counts on our wanting to reproduce the poem in our ears and upon our
> sometimes being frustrated of doing so in any simple way.  He works in a
> multilayered-counterpoint aurally, as he does allegorically.

Yes, this is exactly what I was after--sorry, a bit too tired to express
myself clearly. I have been interested lately in poems that explicitly
force you to make decisions about word order and pronunciation (as they
often do about syntax, and always do about pace, register, etc.); I do
sometimes think that Spenser is deliberately provoking uncertainty about
pronunciation in order to create an experience of reading that is *like*,
say, the application of a law, or the interpretation of a text, or the
judgment in a moral problem. Every reading of the poem thus becomes,
explicitly, already an interpretation, already an application, and
limiting, of the 'faerie' poem to the phenomenal world.

az