1–2 through . . . through passing (by . . . passing through 1596): 1590 is infelicitous but not incoherent; the compositor may have misread copy already marked for the revision effected in 1596. An ethical question in play throughout the canto is whether the ‘Palmers governaunce’ leads Guyon to pass through perils on his journey or demands that he pass by them (cf. Milton on the importance of confronting vice, vii.19.1-2n).
4 Acrasy: See i.51.2-4n on the etymology of the name, which associates Acrasia with Impotence as lack of self-control (see xi.23.8n) and opposes her to ‘Palmers governaunce’.
1.1 St. 1 The unmistakably erotic connotations of the language in this stanza are difficult to reconcile with an allegorical program in which Arthur’s victory over fleshly lust in the person of Maleger provides a ‘foundation’ for Guyon’s capture of Acrasia.
1.1 frame: Cf. Daniel (1930): ‘All verse is but a Frame of Words’ (Defense of Rhyme 88-89). The ‘frame of Temperaunce’ is Alma’s castle, hence the human body, ‘rising’ in triumphant contrast to the ups and downs of Maleger in the preceding canto (see the pun on ‘in descent’ at ix.1.5); it is also the allegorical architecture for the Legend of Temperance, which attains full articulation as the narrative approaches its conclusion.
1.3 highest: May be a transferred epithet, although it works as a modifier for both ‘pricke’ and ‘prayse’.
1.4 Formerly grounded: Arthur’s defeat of Maleger in the previous canto ‘grounds’ the House of Alma by overcoming the death inherent in its ‘goodly workemanship’, which ‘must turne to earth’ (ix.21.8-9). The pun in ‘grounded’ suggests that Maleger’s Antaeus-like resurrection is opposite-yet-identical to the House’s demise.
1.5 bountyhed: L bonitatem.
1.7–1.8 Now comes . . . sensuall delights: Point and pricke can be synonyms; the alliterative language here suggests a bodily allegory in which the highest praise is pinpointed within the greatest peril at the sensitive tip (glans) of the penis. This passage may be recollected in section 28 of Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’, on the sense of touch (‘the treacherous tip of me’, line 3).
2.1

St. 2-41

The chief literary model for Guyon’s voyage is found in Homer, Od 12. Spenser cites Ulysses in FQ Letter as Homer’s exemplary ‘vertuous man’, a conventional assessment that accords with Natale Conti’s interpretation of Ulysses in Mythologiae 9 as the rational soul embattled on the one hand by emotions like fear, anger, or grief, and on the other by sensual pleasures (814-15). Harvey offers a similar assessment when he mentions his plan to read Leicester ‘suche a Lecture in Homers Odysses, and Virgil’s Æneads’ before his Lordship’s travel abroad that he will need no further instruction (Letters 5.162-70). Other antecedents for Guyon’s voyage include Virgil, Aen 2-3, and medieval accounts of the voyage of St Brendan (e.g. in Legenda Aurea; see Var. 2.448-49). The most immediate antecedents are Tasso, GL 15 and Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades, one of the earliest and most widely circulated accounts of new world exploration.

Read (2000) notes that ‘there are times when perils of the kind described in the Decades offer more immediate and vivid models than could be found in Spenser’s traditional sources’ (96), but the modeling at work in Spenser’s use of exploration narratives is far more indirect than in Tasso. In GL Carlo and Ubaldo travel through clearly identified Mediterranean and Atlantic topographies, and their voyage includes an explicit prophecy of the Christianization of the heathen New World, complete with an apostrophe to Christopher Columbus. Guyon and the Palmer, by contrast, encounter literary rather than geospatial landmarks, in keeping with the redefinition of ‘place’ introduced in the proem to Book II, where voyages of exploration are introduced as a trope for reading. Guyon’s voyage with the Palmer develops the trope in some detail.

2.4 the third Morrow: The scriptural resonance of this phrase (Matt 12:40, ‘For as Jonas was thre days, and thre nights in the whales bellie: so shal the Sonne of man be thre dayes and thre nights in the heart of the earth’) amplifies the connotations of the canto’s opening declaration (‘Fayrely to rise’) and reinforces the link between Arthur’s victory over the son of the earth and Guyon’s pending encounter with the temptations of the flesh.
2.5 2.5 Spenser’s image recalls two moments in the Aeneid. In the first, Aeneas, having just buried his nurse Caieta, sails past Circe’s island as splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus (‘the sea glitters beneath [the moon’s] dancing beams’; 7.9). In the second, Aeneas as he contemplates the approach of war in Latium magno curarum fluctuat aestu (‘tosses on a mighty sea of troubles’; 8.19), turning his thoughts sicut aquae termulum labris ubi lumen aënis / sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae / omnia pervolitat loca (‘as when in brazen bowls a flickering light from water, flung back by the sun or the moon’s glittering form, flits far and wide’; 8.22-24). Ariosto picks up this image to describe Orlando’s distracted mood just before he abandons the siege at Paris to go in search of Angelica: qual d'acqua chiara il tremolante lume, / dal sol percossa o da’ notturni rai, / per gli ampli tetti va con lungo salto / a destra et a sinistra (‘[his thoughts] were like the tremulous gleam which a limpid pool gives off under the rays of the sun or moon--high and low, to right and left it fans out’; OF 8.71, trans. Waldman). Spenser at first appears to be moving the image back toward its more serene initial context, but the intervening traces of mental disquiet reappear in the immediately following lines.
3.3 acquight: Includes the sense of deliverance by paying or cancelling a debt.
3.4 Gulfe of Greedinesse: Based on Homer’s Charybdis by way of Virgil and Conti (Od 12.101-110, 234-59; Aen 3.420-32, 555-67; Myth 748-51).
4.1–4.2 4.1-2 Spenser replaces Homer’s Scylla and her monstrous anatomy with a magnet (L magnes), masculine in gender and only residually shaped like a body. See ‘the rock of the Adamant’ in Huon of Bordeux (ch. 109).
4.5 rift: The use of ‘rift’ to signify a projecting edge rather than a fissure is unusual, but characteristic of Spenser. Compare the rhyme-word clift, which is Spenser’s preferred form of ‘cliff’ even though it is also a variant form of ‘cleft’. For the pairing of these terms, see e.g. Eden, ‘The ryftes and clyftes’ (1555: 134), or Holinshed (1965:1:217), in a passage Spenser remembers at III.iii.8-9, describing a ‘rift or clift’ near the shore of ‘a little rockie Ile in Aber Barrie’. Compare also the ‘ragged breaches’ hanging down at II.vii.28.3.
4.9 wawes: Cf. Coverdale (1535: Jas 1.6), ‘For he that douteth is lyke the wawes of the see’.
5.7–5.8 5.7-8 See Prov 1.12, ‘We wil swallowe them up alive like a grave even whole, as those that go downe into the pit’.
6.4 Tartare: Tartarus, the region of the classical underworld Hades specifically reserved to the damned.
7.2 ruinate: From L ruo to hurl down. With ‘broke’, suggesting financial ruin.
7.5 exanimate: From L ex out + anima breath, with a possible play on animus soul.
7.6–7.9 7.6-9 Echoing 1 Tim 6:9, ‘For they that wil be riche, fall into temptation and snares, and into many foolish and noysome lustes, which drowne men in perdition and destruction’. See also 1 Tim 1:19, ‘Having faith and a good conscience, which some have put away, and as concerning faith, have made shipwracke.’
8.4 Seagulles: Proverbially greedy; see Nashe 1599 (Lenten Stuffe 60), ‘That greedy seagull ignorance is apt to devoure any thing’.
8.5 Cormoyraunts: A large, voracious seabird, proverbially a figure for gluttony, greed, or the rapacity of userers. See Chaucer, ‘The hote cormeraunt of glotonye’ (PF 362).
8.9 drift: ‘Floating matter driven by currents of water’ (OED); see Hakluyt 1907 ‘Foure leagues from the lande, you finde . . . many drifts of rootes, leaves of trees, [etc.]’ (Voyages 3.249). Here the context suggests an accumulation of such flotsam, or the place where it accumulates.
9.8 counselled: With a pun, counsel- led.
10.1 Ferryman: See Conti (Myth 170): ‘God’s goodness is the source of our hope and of the joy that is the vehicle which ferries us across those troubled waters—that is, Charon’. The Ferryman enables Guyon’s boat to ‘apply’ (steer) a ‘course’ as opposed to being ‘driven’ to a ‘drift’ (8.9).
11.7 wandring Islands: Mentioned earlier at i.51 and vi.11.3-4; cf. Homer’s πετραι επηρεφεες petrai epmrephees overhanging rocks (Od 12.59). On floating islands see Herodotus (Histories 2.156), Pliny the elder (Natural History 1.17) and Pliny the younger (Letters 8.20).
13.1 St. 13 For the story of Latona giving birth to Apollo and Diana on the isle of Delos, see Ovid (Met 6.186-91) and Virgil (Aen 3.73-77); also Conti (Myth 838, 840).
13.9 temple: ‘honor’ 1596
14.2 14.2 The purposive forward progress of the voyagers combines two motifs that recur throughout the episode. One is a contrast between linear progress and ‘wandering’ in illusion; the other links temperance to timing, as the voyagers resist delay but pause to deliberate.
14.6 touchen: For a ship, to call in passing; for a man, to have sexual contact.
15.3 cause: Plays etymologically and homophonically with case, cosa, and chose, echoing the Wife of Bath’s ‘bele chose’ (CT Wife of Bath D 510) and sustaining the double-entendre of ‘to touchen there’.
16.2 bord: See Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1.3.56-7): ‘“Accost” is front her, board her, woo her, assail her’.
17.1 St. 17-20 The mermaids, the ‘quickesand of Unthriftyhead’, and the ‘Whirlepoole of decay’ form a series analogous to Phædria, the Gulfe of Greedinesse, and the Rocke of Reproch. There are distinctions to be made (e.g., greediness is a moral condition that incurs shame, whereas unthriftyhead is a behavior that leads to decay), but as the monsters and water-hazards proliferate there is also a sense of redundancy, reminding us that all the moral threats in this canto are forms of excess. At times the allegory itself seems in this way to be infiltrated by the forces it seeks to demonize. On a formal level, this tension plays out the ethical distinction between ‘passing through’ and ‘passing by’ perils (see arg.1-2n).
17.2 17.2 The awkward caesura after ‘him’ recapitulates within the line Guyon’s experience of his ferry ride, interrupted by an unscheduled stop and an unwanted invitation to dally, even as Phædria renews her effort to delay ‘their gate’ (see 14.2n).
17.6 auyse: Contrast this well-advised pause with Phædria’s attempt to delay the voyage.
17.9 17.9 See Circe’s description of the Sirens in Homer (Od 12.37-54).
18.4 the narrow way: Matt 7:14, ‘the gate is streicte, and the way narowe that leadeth unto life’.
18.8 discoloured: With a pun on ‘discolour-red’.
18.9 Vnthriftyhed: Cf. 8.8, ‘lost credit and consumed thrift’.
19.4 mesprize: From Fr méprise, from prendre ‘take’.
19.5 hazardize: A nonce-word for which OED records no other instance.
21.1 earnest: ‘heedful’ 1596
21.3 21.3 They reach (‘fetch’) the far end of the ‘narrow way’ (18.4) that separates the whirlpool from the quicksand.
21.7–21.9 21.7-9 The land- and seascape of Guyon’s voyage is frequently imbued with affective states proper to the moral hazards signified. Conti cites classical interpreters who rationalize Scylla as a promontory shaped like a woman, with caves whose roaring sound resembles howling dogs (Myth 748-49); Spenser, who follows a similar impulse at 4.1-2 (see note), nevertheless sustains a residual or figurative animation of the seascape.
22.2 Outragiously . . . enraged: See OED s.v. ‘outrage’: ‘In English often reanalysed as out prefix + rage n., a notion which affected the sense development’.
22.7 horrour: (L horrere to bristle, shudder) can describe both the action of the waves and the voyagers’ response; likewise ‘reare’ can describe the upsurging of the water or the upsurge of emotion of those who witness it.
22.9 liuing sence: Cf. pr.2.1 (‘with better sence advize’) and pr.4.4 (‘his sence . . . too blunt and bace’), linked to the figure of reading as a voyage of discovery; and 26.1, where ‘living sence’ is corrected by ‘the Palmer well aviz’d’.
23.1 St. 23-24 Spenser’s principal sources for these stanzas are Pliny Naturalis Historiae, Gesner, Historiae animalium. vol. 4, and Olaus Magnus Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. For detailed discussion see Var 2.359-64; SpE reproduces a sampling of Gesner’s woodcuts (‘natural history’ figs. 1-3).
23.2–23.5 23.2-5 Dame Nature as artist with ‘cunning hand’ mirrors the poet: his ‘pourtraicts of deformitee’ are her deformed portraits (‘fowle defects’).
23.6 Spring-headed Hydres: The Hydra was a serpent whose heads when cut off would sprout again; see Theatre 12.13 on the Hydra’s ‘seven springing heads’. In the second of his twelve labors, Hercules slew the monster by cauterizing its neck-stubs before new heads could grow (Virgil, Aen 6.576-77; Ovid, Met 9.68-74). The notion of the Hydra as a sea-beast may derive from Boccaccio, Genealogia 13.1 (Gesner 4.457-60).
23.6 sea-shouldring Whales: A phrase famous for the response it elicited from John Keats, who when he read it as a schoolboy was said to have sprung up from his seat to imitate the Whales’ action (Clark 126, qtd Var 2.360).
23.8 Scolopendraes: Sea-serpent reputed to cast up its entrails to eject the hook after swallowing bait (Gesner 4.839). P. A. Robin traces confusions regarding this creature in natural histories from Aristotle to Rondelet (Animal Lore in English Literature 120-22, excerpted in Var 2.360-61).
23.9 Monoceros: The narwhal, a tusked Arctic whale (Gesner 4.547).
24.1–24.2 24.1-2 The walrus, a.k.a. ‘morse’ or mors marine (L mors death).
24.3 Wasserman: Ger ‘water-man’ (not previously recorded in English).
24.5 Sea-satyre: If there are mermaids and mermen, then it stands to reason that there must also be mer-satyrs; Gesner reproduces a drawing of one (7.4.999), and mentions reports from fishermen who have heard human cries before a storm at sea (Lemmi in Var 2.363).
24.7 Huge Ziffius: From Gk ξιφιας xiphias, swordfish (Gesner 4.1049).
24.9 Rosmarines: either the walrus (mors marine) or the sea-horse, said to climb out of the water to graze on promontories.
25.4 enrold: Cf. IV.iii.41.5, Gnat 257.
25.8 bugs: From Welsh bwg ghost, hobgoblin.
26.1 St. 26 The Palmer’s reassuring demystification of sea-monsters enacts the skeptical and rationalizing impulse implicit in many interpretations of Homer’s monsters and marvels. In the present episode this impulse plays against the recurrent tendency of Spenser’s imagery to animate the seascape (see 21.7-9n).
26.6–26.7 26.6-7 See Exod 14:16, where Moses divides the Red Sea with his rod; Matt 8:26, where Christ calms the sea; 2 Kings 2:14, where Elisha crosses Jordan with Elijah’s mantle; Virgil, Aen 1.142-3, where Neptune calms the sea; and Tasso, GL 14.73, where Ubaldo wields a similar magic wand.
27.1 St. 27-29 Recalling Duessa’s cameo in the role of distressed maiden in the first episode of Book II. The play on ‘seemely’ (comely) and ‘seemed’ (27.6, 8) points to the mingling of erotic and chivalrous motives that imperils the knight’s judgment in both episodes, as the Palmer explains at 28.9.
28.1 streight: See 29.5-6, where the line-break unfolds the pun.
28.7–28.8 28.7-8 See st. 26n. The compressed syntax, asserting that the maid is not a real woman but ‘onely womanish fine forgery’, echoes the Palmer’s dismissal of the sea-monsters at 26.2, and implicates the process of personification in a kind of reverse derivation: if English obtains the adjective womanish from the noun woman, allegory here converts the adjective back into a noun and then embodies the noun in a fictional referent.
29.1 courage: From L cor heart.
29.3 embosome: The maid's ‘bayt’ implies a hook—taken not into the mouth, but into the heart and mind, as the phrase ‘embosome . . . in your mind’ indicates.
30.1 St. 30-32 Spenser’s Mermayds (30.2) derive from the Sirens in Homer (Od 12.39-54, 165-200), but many details in his account come from later sources, including Virgil, Ovid, Pausanius, Boccaccio, and Conti. Homer does not specify the bodily form of the Sirens. Genealogia 7.20, Myth 645, and T. Cooper refer to them as mermaids; Pausanius and Conti also represent them as winged and birdlike.
30.2 30.2 Hamilton 2001 notes the emphasis placed on still by the enjambment here, together with its repetition as a rhyme-word at mid-stanza. Stillness is both the temptation the Sirens offer and the fate they threaten: sailors wooed to sleep by their song never awaken (see Conti Myth 642: ‘they would lull them [sailors] into a very deep sleep. And once these sailors were asleep, they would toss them into the sea and kill them’). Cf. the pun on bayt in st. 29.
30.2–30.6 30.2-6 Echoing Virgil’s description of the bay (‘a haunt of Nymphs’) where Aeneas and his men take shelter after the opening storm in the Aeneid, the prelude to his encounter with Dido (1.157-73).
30.7–30.9 30.7-9 Implying that the theater ‘trades’ in illusion and is therefore ‘deceiptfull’, analogous to ‘womanish fine forgery’ (28.8).
30.8 fiue: In classical accounts, two or three, expanded to five presumably to correspond to the senses, to which they appeal (cf. ‘a straunge kinde of harmony; / Which Guyons senses softly tickeled’, 33.6-7, and the repeated emphasis on the senses in the proem).
31.1–31.2 31.1-2 Pausanius relates that the Sirens ‘were persuaded by Hera to compete with the Muses by singing’ (Desc 9.34.3), though his Sirens are avian rather than piscine in form. (His version may reflect the influence of Ovid, Met 5, in which it is the Paeonian sisters rather than the Sirens who compete with the Muses in song; they are transformed into Magpies.)
32.2 applyde: Also ‘adapted’, because the Sirens were said to ‘pick out the precise melody that each man would enjoy hearing’ (Conti Myth 644). Thus in the following lines, the Sirens sing directly to Guyon: ‘O thou fayre sonne of gentle Faery, / That art in mightie armes most magnifyde / Above all knights’.
32.7–32.9 32.7-9 The temptation offered by the Sirens is variously glossed as wisdom, voluptuous pleasure, sloth, or flattery. Spenser’s Sirens, like Despair (I.ix) and Phædria when she sings Cymochles to sleep in canto vi (15-17), offer rest to the weary (see 30.2n).
33.1 St. 33 The sea, surf, and west wind accompany the song of the Mermaids to make up a four-part harmony comprised of alto (mermaids), treble (Zephyrus), tenor (surf), and bass (sea).
33.3 33.3 The trochaic substitution in the fourth foot of this line, combined with the length of the preceding syllable ‘waves’, creates a striking metrical imitation of ‘waves breaking’.
33.5 Zephyrus: Zephyrus also wafts through the Bower of Bliss, where he appeals to the senses of sight and smell (v.29.8-9).
34.1–34.4 34.1-4 Ulysses had to be bound—twice over—to the mast of his ship; the contrast is heightened when Guyon and his Palmer pass the Mermaids’ bay at mid-line with barely a caesura, and are already ‘descrying’ something else by the end of line three—their forward momentum further emphasized by the enjambment of ‘gan descry / The land’.
34.5 a grosse fog: One of the details Spenser’s episode has in common with the Celtic Legend of St. Brandan (see st. 2-41n).
34.5–34.9 34.5-9 The final lines suggest a return to primal chaos; Hamilton 2001 notes the etymological pun in Universe, from L unus one and vertere to turn. Lines 5-7 amplify the disorienting effects of the fog with contortions of the syntax. The sense is, ‘With his dull vapour, a grosse fog has over spred that desert and enveloped heavens chearefull face’.
34.7 heauens chearefull face enueloped: Cf. the Wandring Wood, ‘Whose loftie trees yclad with sommers pride, / Did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide’ (I.i.7.4-5).
36.1 St. 36 Cf. the ‘Owles and Night-ravens’ haunting the entryway to Mammon’s cave (vii.23 and notes), accompanied by ‘sad Celeno’ (the leader of the Harpies, according to Virgil). For details in this stanza, T. P. Harrison (1956: 64-65) suggests both Gesner (3.524-26) and Magnus (692) as likely sources (see st. 23-24n).
36.1–36.2 36.1-2 Cf. Rev 18:2 on the fallen Babylon as ‘a cage of everie uncleane and hateful byrde’.
36.4 ill-faste: Maleger’s ‘first troupe’, sent into battle against the bulwark of sight, includes ‘some . . . Headed like Owles’ (xi.8.1-3).
36.7 Strich: Hamilton 2001 notes that it is also called the ‘lich-owl’ (‘lich’ = corpse) ‘because its cry was supposed to portend death in the house’ (OED).
36.8 whistler: This is the first use recorded in OED. On ‘the Seven Whistlers’ as birds of ill-omen in English folklore, see The English Dialect Dictionary, 19-20.338, s.v. ‘Seven’.
36.9 hellish: Virgil’s Aeneas encounters the Harpies among many other monstrous apparitions at the mouth of hell (Aen 6.289). They are ‘prophets of sad destiny’ because they foretell hardship to Aeneas and his men (3.245-58).
37.1–37.3 37.1-3 The deflating effect of the adversatives (‘Yet’, ‘but’) in line 3, like the mention of rowing in line 4, suggests that fear, for all the verve of the phrase ‘fild their sayles with fear’, actually has little propulsive force of its own.
37.7–37.9 37.7-9 The Palmer’s exhortation to Guyon echoes Una’s words to Redcrosse as they approach her parents’ usurped kingdom (I.xi.2.1-2).
37.8 sacred: A Latinism illustrated by Virgil’s auri sacra fames (‘accursed hunger for gold’; Aen 3.57) and mentioned in A Vewe when Irenius reports the ancient name of Ireland to have been ‘Sacra Insula, taking /sacra for accursed’ (3725-26). Also found in Livy and Horace. See Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus 2.1.120-1, ‘our empress, with her sacred wit / To villainy and vengeance consecrate’.
39.1–39.2 39.1-2 As Aeneas and his men sail past Circe’s island, they hear gemitus iraeque leonum / vincla recusantum et sera sub nocte rudentum, saetigerique sues atque in praesepibus ursi / saevire, ac formae magnorum ululare luporum (‘the angry growls of lions chafing at their bonds and roaring in midnight hours, the raging of bristly boars and encaged bears, and howls from shapes of monstrous wolves’; Aen 7.15-18).
39.4 surquedry: See 31.5; here context suggests not presumption but surfeit, especially of sexual pleasure.
39.4–39.9 39.4-9 Homer’s Odysseus reports that the beasts on Circe’s island ουδ᾽ οἵ γ᾽ ωρμηθησαν επ᾽ ανδρασιν, αλλ᾽ αρα τοι γε / ουρησιν μακρησι περισσαινοντες ανεσταν (oud’ oï g’ ōrmēthēsan ep’ andrasin, all’ ara toi ge / ourēsin makrēsi perissainontes anestan; ‘did not rush upon my men, but pranced about them fawningly’; Od 10.214-15). According to Ovid’s Macareus, the animals did ‘rush on us, filling us with terror’ initially; he continues, ‘But there was no need to fear them . . . Why, they even wagged their tails . . . and fawned upon us’ (Met 14.254-58).
39.8 vpstaring: Cf. the ‘heares / Upstaring stiffe’ of Trevisan, I.ix.22.2-3.
40.1–40.6 40.1-6 For literary precedents to the Palmer’s staff, see 26.6-7n. The staff protects Guyon as the magical herb moly protected Odysseus and his men from Circe’s powers (Od 10.287-94). In Tasso, Ubaldo subdues Armida’s threatening beasts with a verga aurea immortale (‘everlasting staff of gold’; GL 15.49.5).
40.6 them selues: An intensifier, but may also suggest that the beasts fear themselves, like Archimago at I.ii.10.7-8.
41.3–41.8 41.3-8 In Homer it is Mercury who gives Odysseus the herb moly as an antidote to Circe’s charms (Od 10.276-309; see 40.1-6n); later, Homer describes the god using Caduceus to lead dead souls into the underworld (24.1-5). Virgil ascribes to Mercury’s staff power over the living and the dead (Aen 4.242-4). Mercury is the messenger god, said by Conti to represent divine reason and wisdom (Myth 369-70). None of these sources mention what kind of wood the Caduceus was made of.
41.4 Stygian: from Styx, one of the rivers that bound the underworld.
41.9 vertue: Cf. 26.6.
42.2 Bowre of Blisse: See the description at v.27-35 and notes. Spenser’s Bower condenses two Homeric sites, the island of Circe (Od 10) and the garden of Alcinous (7.112-32), combining these with the history of the corresponding topoi, the enchanted isle and the locus amoenus. Cf. the islands of Ariosto’s Alcina (OF 6.19-25) and Tasso’s Armida (GL 15.53-66, 16.1-26), and the garden of Trissino’s Acratia (ILG Books 4 and 5; see Kostic 1969: 297-301 and Var 2.443-44). These literary places are at once similar and opposed to the biblical garden celebrated in the Song of Solomon: ‘My sister my spouse is as a garden inclosed, as a spring shut up, and a fountain sealed up’ (4.12). Spenser plays on this topos with a light touch in Am, apostrophizing his beloved’s bosom as ‘the bowre of blisse, the paradice of pleasure’ into which his thoughts have, like Guyon in st. 63-69, been ‘too rashly led astray’ (76.3, 6).
42.3–42.4 42.3-4 These lines define the Bower as a ‘choyce’ locus of art, and hence a ‘place’ in the textual and rhetorical as well as the spatial sense (see ix.1.9n). As a topos, it has been singled out by the most skillful mimetic artists living. Cf. the description of Phædria’s island in canto vi as ‘a chosen plott . . . As if it had by Natures cunning hand, / Bene choycely picked out from all the rest’ (12.1-4). The recollection of this motif now, with the destruction of the Bower impending, evokes Gen 13:11, ‘Then Lot chose unto him all the plaine of Jorden’, especially in conjunction with the preceding verse: ‘So when Lot lifted up his eyes, he saw that all the plaine of Jorden was watered every where: (for before the Lorde destroyed Sodom and Gomorah, it was as the garden of the Lorde . . . )’.
42.5–42.7 42.5-7 The place where all sweet things come together, with its mingled appeal to ‘sense’ or ‘fantasy’, is the locus amoenus, a topos traced by Curtius (1953: 195-200). See 42.2n.
42.8 42.8 This line covertly identifies Spenser himself as the artist of the Bower by inflecting the familiar pun on his ancestral name (De Spencier) as a nominalized verb of sexual release: What Shakespeare in sonnet 129 would call ‘th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ is here the dispense of pleasure in an erotic fantasy. (For other instances of this play on the poet’s name see Cummings 1971: 95 and CV H.B. 5.3, along with FQ II.i.36.1-3, II.ix.29.1, V.i.7.5, and notes.) The emphasis on copiousness alludes in part to the fact that, at 87 stanzas, this is by far the longest canto in the poem.
43.1 enclosed: Cf. Song Sol 4:12 and 42.2n.
43.4 43.4, 8-9 The weakness of the fence and insubstantiality of the gate suggest that they may be intended less to prevent trespass than to provoke it. The Bower is a hortus as much inconclusus as conclusus.
43.5 Nought feard theyr force: ‘The force of the beasts was not at all feared’.
43.5 fortilage: An ironic term for the invitingly ill-defended Bower.
43.7 efforced: The language throughout this stanza flirts with the distinction between ‘pleasure’ and ‘battery’.
44.1 St. 44-45 The ‘famous history’ of Jason and Medea is told at length in Ovid, Met 7 and Appolonius Rhodius, Arg 3. Medea is Circe’s neice.
44.1 yuory: This detail may come from Trissino, ILG 5.165, although the common source for both writers is likely to be the gate of false dreams in Virgil (Aen 6.693-96).
44.4 ywritt: Cf. viii.43.3, where the portrait of Gloriana is ‘writt’ on Guyon’s shield.
44.5–44.6 44.5-6 Medea’s ‘mighty charmes’ are potions made up from magic herbs; ‘her furious loving fitt’ is the overwhelming passion for Jason that compelled her to betray her father, King Aeëtes, by helping to ensure Jason’s ‘conquest of the golden fleece’ in return for his promise of marriage. According to Conti, ‘The ancients made up . . . the things that they said about Medea to encourage us to keep our feelings in check, and to try to live a decent life. Other writers thought that Medea was a criminal and an indecently passionate woman. For in fact she betrayed her parents, her kingdom, and her native land because she lusted after Jason and had an insane longing for him’ (Myth 489).
44.7 44.7 Jason later set Medea aside to take a new bride, Creüsa. Conti, in the passage quoted above, continues: ‘And she sought after this stranger, this treacherous impostor, this man who had a habit of forgetting what people had done for him’ (Myth 489). The phrase ‘falsed fayth’ may recall Chaucer’s accusation against Jason in LGW: ‘Ther other falsen one, thou falseste two’ (1377).
44.8–44.9 44.8-9 These lines jump back to the beginning of the story: Jason gathered the finest young warriors in Greece to sail in quest of the golden fleece. Aboard the ‘venturous’ ship Argo, they sailed across the Black Sea to the kingdom of Colchos, ruled by Aeëtes.
45.1 Ye might haue seene: This is the first in a series of ekphrastic passages that will carry through Book III, all marked by references to trompe l'oeil verisimilitude. Spenser is consistently skeptical about the mimesis of appearances: the value of sensuous appeal in art is questioned in the proem to Book II and in the exchange between Guyon and Arthur over the image of Gloriana ‘so goodly scord’ on Guyon’s shield (ix.2-3), and the same appeal to (and power to deceive) the senses is the stock in trade of the 1590 poem’s major villains, Archimago, Duessa, Acrasia, and Busirane. Interestingly, Conti remarks that to some writers, ‘Medea represented Art, the sister of Circe or Nature; for Art tries its best to imitate Nature, and the closer it gets, the better art it's supposed to be’ (Myth 489). For Spenser’s introduction of this motif as a keynote of Book II, see the notes to the proem, st. 4 and 5.
45.3–45.4 45.3-4 Here the force of mimetic illusion is seen as blurring the distinction between represented content (nature) and the medium of representation (art), a metamorphosis in which the medium and the thing represented seem to turn into each other. See Introduction, 00.
45.6 45.6 In the course of her ‘furious loving fitt’ Medea dismembered her brother Apsyrtus, casting pieces of his body into the sea to slow the king’s pursuit when she fled with Jason.
45.9 45.9 Still experiencing love as a ‘furious . . . fitt’ when Jason abandoned her, Medea sent his new bride Creüsa a poisoned robe that burned her to death.
46.2 red: As writing, carving, and painting are all comprehended in the verb ywritt (44.4n), so reading, seeing, and interpreting are all compounded in the verb read (cf. the puns in the rhyming pair ‘discovered’ and ‘measured’, pr.2.4, 7).
46.2–46.3 46.2-3 Cf. the weakness of the fence enclosing the garden (st. 43).
46.9 46.9 Cf. Idleness, who ‘greatly shunned manly exercise’ (I.iv.20.2).
47.1 St. 47-48 Both the name Agdistes and most of the detail in these stanzas derive from Conti (Myth 243-245), but the ‘celestiall powre’ contrasted with the Genius of the Bower also has much in common with Conti’s Mercury (361-71), who in turn is associated with the Palmer (see 41.3-8n). According to Conti, Mercury was in charge of re-embodying ‘souls who had completed their stay in the Elysian fields’ (368), and was identified with ‘God's will . . . insofar as it brings things to life or sends them off to burial or the underworld’, and ‘with that divine power implanted by the gods in men’s minds, the power that wonderfully puts all our human activities in perspective and keeps them from falling apart. And since the ancients thought that this power is the source of our dreams, they said that Mercury was in charge of dreams’ (371). Elsewhere Conti does use the phrase ‘celestial power’ to describe Genius (901). He derives the name ‘Genius’ from L gignendo, ‘bringing forth’ (244). (For a more extensive canvassing of sources for Genius in both his guises, see Var 2.375-76.)
47.8–47.9 47.8-9 Spenser is one of the earliest writers in English to use the word self as a substantive rather than a pronoun or adjective (see Am 45.3, ‘in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane’). The description in these stanzas suggests links to L ingenium (lit. ‘genius within’) and English inwit, but these (though often personified by medieval writers) are faculties rather than entities. Spenser follows Conti in treating the self as a spirit distinct from the person it supervises, and consequently stresses the paradoxical way in which the Genius-self is non-identical with the ‘we’ whose self it is, who can ‘perceive’ its indwelling presence but cannot ‘see’ it directly. Spenser differs from Conti in treating this spirit as a generic or collective presence, ‘our Selfe’, inhabiting the individual (‘him selfe’).
48.8 porter: See Chaucer, CT Second Nun G 2-3, ‘Ydelnesse..porter [v.r. poter] of the gate is of delices’. Porter comes from the n. port ‘gateway’, but insofar as this Genius leads, or misleads, his title may also owe something to the verb meaning ‘convey’.
48.8 deuizd: Cf. i.31.8: ‘That deare Crosse uppon your shield devizd’.
49.3 Mazer: Cf. SC Aug 26, ‘A mazer ywrought of the Maple warre’; also the goblets of Duessa (I.viii.14.1-5) and Acrasia (II.i.55). Circe enchanted her victims by offering them ‘a potion in a golden cup’ (Od 10.316). In a Christian context such cups of enchantment parody the Holy Grail and the wine of the Eucharist (a reference anchored here by ‘sacrifide’). Given Spenser’s fondness for the pun in ‘amaze’, the sense of maze as ‘bewilder’ is probably also present.
49.9 And broke his staffe: Already showing Guyon’s responses verging on the excessive; see 57.3-6n. The Porter’s staff with its powers of illusion is opposed to the Palmer’s 'mighty staffe, that could all charmes defeat’ (40.3).
49.9 charmed semblants sly: Cf. 48.6, ‘guilefull semblants, which he makes us see’. ‘Sly’ (cunning) may describe either the semblants or the act of conjuring them—or both. The Bower’s Genius personifies an aesthetic technique that uses suggestion to elicit erotic fantasies—a technique that is on offer in the present canto as early as its first stanza and recurs frequently in the descriptions of the Bower. See 45.3-4n on the temptation presented by the ornamentation on the ivory gate.
50.1 St. 50 The syntax implies a deferred main clause that never in fact arrives: the travelers behold a plain whose ground, mantled and beautified . . . . The suspension of sense amid sprawling ornamentation anticipates the fate of Verdant with his ‘ydle instruments’ (80.1).
50.6 her mother Art: By introducing Art as the mother of Flora, Spenser inverts the aesthetic theory Polixenes will later espouse in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.88-97): in the Bower of Bliss, Nature is created by Art. (The flowers may be artificially created by the kind of cross-breeding Polixenes defends; they may also be flowers of rhetoric.) Nature is also denigrated by Art, the comically officious mother of the bride who insists on ‘too lavishly’ adorning her not-pretty-enough daughter. For Nature as artist-manque, see 23.2-5.
50.8–50.9 50.8-9 The concluding shift from past tense (‘Did decke her’) to present (‘forth . . . she comes’) reinforces the loss of orientation in the face of spectacle that is implicit in the failure of syntactic closure. The travelers are rendered passive (‘they behold’) by a display of excess that takes over both energy and initiative as it comes forward to greet them.
51.1 Iouiall: ‘Under the influence of, or having the qualities imparted by, the planet Jupiter, which as a natal planet was regarded as the source of joy and happiness’ (OED). Ironic in the present context insofar as Jove’s usurpation ended the golden age of Saturn’s reign and thereby initiated seasonal change (Ovid, Met 1.113-18).
51.5–51.9 51.5-9 See Chaucer, PF 204-6: ‘Th’air of that place so attempre was / That nevere was ther grevaunce of hot ne cold; / There wex ek every holsom spice and gras’ (also Tasso, GL 15.53-54, and Homer, Od 4.567-69, 6.43-45). The language of these lines (‘intemperate . . . moderate . . . attempred’) suggests that the Bower presents Guyon with a simulacrum of the virtue he espouses.
51.8–51.9 51.8-9 Given the tendency of the diction throughout the stanza to half-animate and half-personify the locus amoenus, the secondary senses of ‘disposd’ as ‘put into a favorable mood’ and ‘spirit’ as ‘disposition, or temper existing in, pervading, or animating, a person or set of persons’ (OED) are also in play.
51.8 disposd: Cf. ‘Words well dispost’ (viii.26.7).
52.1 St. 52 The set of competing loci amoeni listed in this stanza are all (except Parnassus) contaminated by associations of lust and violence. The allusions to these places are likewise shot through with misdirection, as if imitating the Bower’s technique of seduction-by-distraction.
52.1–52.3 52.1-3 Rhodope, ‘the pleasaunt hill’ where Orpheus sang (Met 10.86-105), is also the place where he was later dismembered (11.39-43); Ovid twice calls Orpheus Rhodopeius (‘Rhodopean’, 10.11-12, 50). Spenser’s version of the background story about the nymph may derive from the treatise Libellus de Fluviis, once attributed to Plutarch, which reports that she bore a ‘gyaunt babe’ fathered by Neptune and then arrogated to herself the name ‘Juno’, commanding the gods to worship her. She was punished by being turned into the mountain.
52.4 Thessalian: Tempe is the valley where Apollo pursued Daphne, whose transformation into the laurel is the prototypical metamorphosis in Ovid (Met 1.452-567). Spenser compresses the narrative, in which it was technically Cupid who gored Apollo’s heart with love: he shot Apollo with a golden-tipped dart to kindle love, Daphne with a lead-tipped dart to inspire flight.
52.6 Mount Ida, near Troy—where Venus and Anchises conceived Aeneas—was also the setting for the infamous judgment of Paris, which gave rise to the Trojan War (see vii.55 and notes).
52.8 Mount Parnassus is the haunt of the Muses and a frequent reference for Spenser: cf. SC Apr 41, June 28, 70, and Julye 47; Gnat 21-22; Teares 58; DS Ormond and Ossory; FQ I.x.54 and VI.pr.2.
52.9 Eden selfe: See Gen 2:8, ‘And the Lord God planted a garden Eastwarde in Eden’, and the Geneva gloss: ‘a place . . . moste pleasant and abundant in all things’.
53.4 53.4 See Prov 4:25, ‘Let thine eyes beholde the right, and let thine eyeliddes direct thy way before thee’.
53.6–53.9 53.6-9 The vegetation growing up around this ‘gate, / No gate’ seems to have its arms at once wide open (‘did broad dilate’) and closing in all around (‘clasping’). Cf. the ambiguities in Spenser’s description of the first gate (st. 43). The alliteration in the final line very nearly turns the branches’ ‘wanton wreathings’ into wanton writhings (an example of the aesthetic technique mentioned in 49.9n).
54.1 St. 54 See 51.8-9n on the tendency to half-personify the landscape, which at times intensifies to more than half. At such moments the resulting vegetable fantasia starts to resemble an anamorphic orgy. Cain (1978: 92-93) notes echoes in this and the following stanza of New World reports describing the mines of Peru and the gardens of the Incas. The same lines also contain echoes of the Garden of Proserpina in canto vii.
54.7 Hyacine: Hyacine in 1590 gets corrected to Hyacint, perhaps not by the author. The hyacinth is ‘deepe empurpled’ because it springs from the blood of Apollo’s beloved companion, whose name it bears. See Ovid: ecce cruor, qui fusus homo signaverat herbas, / desinit esse cruor, Tyrioque nitentior ostro / flos oritur formamque capit, quam lilia, si non / purpureus color his, argenteus esset in illis (‘behold, the blood, which had poured out on the ground and stained the grass, ceased to be blood, and in its place there sprang a flower brighter than Tyrian dye. It took the form of the lily, save that the one was of purple hue, while the other was silvery white’; Met 10.210-13).
54.7–54.9 54.7-9 The progression from purple through red to green shows the fruit un-ripening as if in coy retreat from the solicitation described at mid-stanza.
55.1 55.1 Cf. the apples of the Hesperides in Proserpine’s Garden (vii.54-55).
55.3–55.4 55.3-4 As the fruit goes from being metaphorically to literally artificial, the figurative suggestion of a coy retreat from the hands and eyes of ‘covetous guest’ also becomes explicit. The subtextual allusion would seem to be to Midas and Tantalus (see vii.58-60 and 59.5-9n, and the provocations implied in the description of the Bower’s outer gate, st. 43 and notes).
55.5 rich load: Grapes made of gold would indeed be much heavier than edible grapes.
55.9 Cf. the ‘looser garment’ of Genius (46.7-9).
56.1 Cup of gold: Cf. the ‘mighty Mazer bowle of wine’ set beside Genius (49.3).
56.3–56.6 56.3-6 The delicacy with which this ‘comely dame’ bursts the grapes in her ‘fine fingers’ creates a remarkably juicy image—one that will be remembered by Milton when Eve crushes fruit to prepare refreshments for the angel Raphael in Eden (PL 5.344-47), and by Keats in ‘Ode on Melancholy’: ‘him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine’ (27-28). The line-break, ‘with fulnesse sweld, / Into her cup’, admits of a momentary impression (or ‘guilefull semblant’, 49.9n) that the juice swells into the cup without assistance.
56.4 breach: Perhaps also the delicate parting of the fingers, which prevents any ‘fowle empeach’ (hindrance) of the ‘sappy liquor’ on its way into her cup. The slight hindrance offered by the enjambment of lines 4-5 (itself a ‘daintie breach’) is sufficient to evoke another false semblant or two (49.9n) from the associations clustering around the phrase ‘daintie breach’; cf. ‘Their dainty partes’, 63.9).
56.5 empeach: There is also a pun on ‘peach’. Gerard (1597) describes the red peach as ‘very like to wine in taste, and therefore marvellous pleasant’ (1448). His description of the white peach is suggestive enough to gloss the florid polymorphous sexuality of the fruit in Spenser’s Bower: ‘The fruit or Peaches be round, and have as it were a chinke or cleft on the one side; they are covered with a soft and thin downe or hairie cotton, being white without, and of a pleasant taste; in the middle whereof is a rough or rugged stone, wherein is contained a kernell like unto the Almond; the meate about the stone is of a white colour’.
56.9 guise: Cf. 21.8, 66.2.
57.3–57.6 57.3-6 Cf. 49.7-9; this time, Guyon doesn’t just overturn the cup ‘disdainfully’, he shatters it ‘violently’. The joke in ‘Excesse exceedingly was wroth’ may implicate the knight insofar as his response to Excesse is excessive. Cf. Milton, Comus 651-52 and the interlinear scene direction following 813, where the brothers cast down the sorcerer’s cup and shatter it.
57.6 Excesse: Her name and office as sommelier recall Eph 5:18: ‘be not drunke with wine, wherein is excesse’. At Matt 23:25, Jesus denounces the scribes and pharisees as hypocrites, ‘for ye make cleane the utter side of the cup, and of the platter: but within thei are ful of briberie and excesse’. The Geneva glosses ‘excesse’ (which translates the Gk ακρασια akrasia) as ‘intemperancie’.
57.8–57.9 57.8-9 Since the porch of Excess is not really a gate but only like one (53.6-7), it remains unclear whether she suffers Guyon and the Palmer to ‘passe’ by or through (see arg.1-2n).
58.1 daintie: Cf. 56.4.
58.2 58.2 The characteristic action of the Bower.
58.2–58.4 58.2-4 We are told at 53.2-3 that Guyon ‘suffred no delight / To sincke into his sence’, but here again the syntax fosters a ‘guilefull semblant’ (49.9n) in which all pleasures seem to abound plenteously in the knight’s sober eye, where they enjoy a happiness unmarred by jealousy or rivalry. The awkward implication would be that Guyon, in reasserting the sobriety of his eye and repudiating the pleasures that have abounded there, is enacting envy of ‘others happinesse’.
58.5 painted: In literary usage, commonly used to mean ‘brightly coloured or variegated, as if painted’ (OED), but the artificiality of the Bower leaves open the possibility that they are literally colored with paint. See also 50.6n for the possibility that the flowers, like the ‘streak’d gillyvors’ disdained by Perdita (‘no more than were I painted’) in The Winters Tale (4.4.82, 101), are artificial in that they are hybrids.
58.7–58.9 58.7-9 Translating Tasso, GL 16.9.7-8: e quel che ’l bello e ’l caro accresce a l’opre, / l’arte, che tutto fa, nulla si scopre. Ironically, the art that ‘appeared in no place’ concludes a list of all the features that the ‘Paradise . . . doth offer to his sober eye’. The motif of offering modulates into that of display alternating with concealment: see st. 54-55, 63-66 and notes.
59.1 St. 59 Cf. Ovid, simulaverat artem ingenio natura suo (‘Nature by her own cunning had imitated art’; Met 3.158-9). Spenser’s stanza is based on Tasso, GL 16.10. Spenser’s stanza dilates the first half of Tasso’s, amplifying both the resentment of the competitors and the paradox whereby their conflict inadvertently yields harmony—a parody of the classical commonplace of concordia discors, or harmony in discord. On the paragone of Art and Nature, see Hagstrum (1958: 81-88), SpE s.v. ‘nature and art’, and 50.6n, above. Fairfax, translating Tasso in 1600, shows the influence of Spenser’s stanza.
60.1 St. 60-68 Based on Tasso, GL 15.58-66. The substitution of a fountain for the pool in which Tasso’s damsels bathe may reflect Acrasia’s ‘fountain of concupiscence’ in Trissino, (ILG 5.520-00; see Var 2.444). Tasso’s maidens swim and display themselves but do not ‘wrestle wantonly’ (63.8)—an elaboration so tempting that it resurfaces in Fairfax’s translation of the passage from Tasso. On the verbal differences between Spenser and Tasso, see Pollock (1980).
60.1 fountaine: Recalling the fountain at I.vii.2.8-7, also associated with lust. Contrast the antithetical well at II.ii.3-10, so ‘chaste and pure’ that it won't wash the blood off Ruddymane’s hands, and the sister-bride in the Song of Solomon, described as ‘a spring shut up, and a fountaine sealed up’ (4: 12).
60.6 ouerwrought: Not recorded in OED. Presumably, as Hamilton suggests, ‘wrought all over’, with the added suggestion that the ornamentation is overdone. There is also the suggestion that the implicitly phallic fountain mirrors the language of the passage, so insistently ‘overwrought’ with the ‘curious ymageree’ of those guilefull semblants the Bower’s Genius makes us see (49.9n). Insofar as these semblants are latent and fleeting fantasies thrown off by the diction, imagery, syntax, sounds, and rhythms of the verse, they also remain only half-seen. (See 58.7-9n on the motif of display yielding to concealment.)
60.9 60.9 The phrase ‘liquid joyes’ melts the pleasures depicted on the fountain into the waters coursing through its channels. In simultaneously desubstantializing the water (‘liquid’ becomes an adjective) and half-substantializing the joys, the phrasing here may offer a gloss on the ‘sappy liquor’ of 56.3 (cf. I.vii.7.2, II.v.28.5). The liquidity of these joys is further insinuated by the rare substitution of a comma for the expected full stop at the end of the stanza.
61.1 St. 61 Cf. st. 59, v.29, and notes. With its trompe l’oeil imitation of nature, metallic ivy with anthropomorphically lascivious arms, and faux crystal teardrops, this tableau brings together several of the principal motifs in the canto, including the half-animation of the landscape, the paragone of art and nature, and the evocation of sexual fantasies.
61.6 Low: Implies a homophonic deictic ‘Lo’.
61.8 fearefully: Becomes ‘tenderly’ in 1596 and 1609.
61.9 for wantones: A recurrent term in the description of the Bower, its senses fluctuate among lasciviousness, naughtiness, affectation, luxury, insolence, extravagance, recklessness, and caprice, none of which seems an obvious motive for tears—but see Acrasia’s faux pity and moist eyes at 73.9 and 78.3-9. The water droplets on the ivy at once simulate post-coital triste and insinuate the motives of a predatory mock pietá.
62.6 three cubits: Three of these make neither a great ‘depth’ nor a great ‘hight’.
62.6–62.9 62.6-9 Parodic echoes of Rev 4: 6 (the ‘sea of glasse like unto cristal’ with God’s throne in the midst) and 21:11 (the New Jerusalem ‘shining…like unto…a Jasper stone cleare as cristal’).
62.9 sayle: In architecture, ‘to project from a surface’ (OED). The upright fountain with its ‘Infinit streames’ and ‘ample laver’ combines a number of opposites: the motions of welling and falling, depth and height, motion and stasis—this last an ironic anticipation of the moment when the voyager Guyon will ‘slacke his pace’ in response to the temptations in the fountain (68.4; see 14.2, 17.2, where the motif of slowing forward progress with delay prepares for Guyon’s slacking of his pace).
63.2 Laurell trees: See 52.4-5n. Daphne, fleeing Apollo, was transformed into the laurel, ‘meed of mightie Conquerours / and Poets sage’ (I.i.9.1-2). These laurels seem to remember their origin in Ovid, insofar as they continue to ‘defend / The sunny beames’, but their ‘shady’ defense has been co-opted by the Bower’s strategic deployment of reluctance as provocation (see st. 43 and notes).
63.6–63.9 63.6-9 The spectacle in which the maidens ‘seemed to contend’ simulates in a playful vein the paragone of Art and Nature, ‘striving each th’other to undermine’ (see st. 59 and notes). C. S. Lewis notoriously (and dismissively) referred to the damsels as ‘Cissie and Flossie’ (1936: 331), but as aquatic wrestlers they might answer to ‘Guyon’, from the Edenic river Gihon (Hebrew Giħôn, interpreted as ‘Bursting Forth, Gushing’), and gyon, glossed as ‘wrestler’ in The Golden Legend (see SpE s.v. ‘Guyon’, Fowler 1960, and Snyder 1961). Their spectacle thus combines exhibitionism and homoeroticism with narcissism (Guyon is beholding a displaced image of his own desire), and in this respect it resembles the song of the Sirens, who according to Conti adapt their song to reflect the desires of the listener (see 32.2n). Cf. the hermit’s description in Tasso of Armida bending over Rinaldo sì che par Narciso al fonte (‘so that she resembles Narcissus at the spring’; GL 14.66.8). Much as the Bower itself parodies temperance (51.5-9n), the wrestling damsels parody Guyon’s binding of Furor (iv.6-15), Arthur’s defeat of Maleger (xi.41-46), and with these, the theological topoi on which they are based: that of wrestling against ‘spiritual wickednesses’ (Eph 6:12) and of Christ as ‘an holy wrasteler’ (Caxton’s phrase, fol.clviv).
63.8 ne car’d to hyde: On the motif of alternating concealment and display in this and the following stanzas, see 58.7-9n.
63.9 Their dainty partes: See 14.8, 15.3n and 56.4n. These maidens exposing their dainties are contrasted specifically to the pair Arthur and Guyon court in the parlor of Alma’s castle (their antithesis is Shamefastnesse, representing Guyon’s desire for modesty), and more generally to the allegory of the temperate body, which modestly ‘avoids’ the genitals in favor of the parlor-heart (see ix.32-44 and notes).
64.3 as ouer maystered by might: Cf. Guyon ‘maystering his might’ (53.5), and the interplay of provocation with defense at the Bower’s outer gate, st. 43 and notes.
64.9 amarous: The spelling might also suggest L amarus bitter (cf. Virgil, amores . . . amaros, ‘the bitters of love’; Ecl 3.109-110).
65.2 His: On ‘his’ as neuter pronoun, see ix.1.8n.
65.3 the Cyprian goddesse: Conti relates, ‘Right after she was born, they say that Venus emerged from the sea and used both her hands to wring the sea water from her hair and face’ (Myth 315). He goes on to quote Antipater of Sidonia on the beauty of Apelles’s portrait of Venus ‘rising from the sea’.
65.4 Oceans . . . froth: The froth is ‘fruitfull’ because it derives from ‘the genitals of Heaven, which Saturn cut off and threw into the sea. [Venus] . . . was conceived from the foam that crests the water, a foam that was created when Saturn hurled the genitals into the sea’ (Conti, Myth 314).
65.7 Whom such when Guyon saw: I.e., the simile comparing these damsels to the birth of Venus expresses Guyon’s perception: the birth is occurring in the beholder’s eye.
65.9 65.9 Cf. ‘her guilefull bayt / She will embosome deeper in your mind’, 29.2-3 and 29.3 note; also 58.2-4 and note.
66.2 guise: Given their own nudity, OED sense 4, ‘condition with regard to dress’, has some relevance.
66.3–66.9 66.3-67.9 On the motif of alternating concealment with display see 58.7-9, 60.6, 63.8, and notes.
67.1 St. 67 Translating Tasso, GL 15.61.
67.8 lockes: With the addition of ‘lookers theft’ (not present in Tasso’s Italian) punning on locks that take keys.
68.1–68.3 68.1-3 See ix.41-44 on the blushing of Shamefastness. The interplay here of blushing and laughing (associated with Phædria at vi.3.3-9, 6.7, 7.6-7, and xii.15.4) parallels the alternation of concealing with displaying. Both in turn align with the forward/froward pair introduced in the first episode of Book II (see i.34.7-9, i.37.1, and notes). Tasso’s damsel likewise exhibits both pleasure and shame: a lor si volse lieta e vergognosa (‘from them she turns away pleased and ashamed’; GL 15.61.9), but does not laugh.
68.9 corage cold could reare: Guyon’s ‘pace’ may slacken, but his libido is as taut as a piano-wire.
69.3–69.4 69.3-4 Undistracted forward progress has been a keynote of Guyon’s journey in canto xii, but travel in the landscape of Faeryland is rarely linear: having entered the Bower of Bliss twice already (st. 50 and 57-58), the knight and his Palmer only now ‘come nigh’. The repetition of ‘Now’ emphasizes that they are verging upon ‘point of that same perilous sted, / Where Pleasure dwelles in sensuall delights’ (1.7-8).
69.8 Acrasia: For the derivation of the name, see II.i.51.2-4, xii.57.6, and notes.
70.9

70.9 The Bower’s all-inclusive harmony combines vocal and instrumental music with sounds of apparently natural origin; see st. 59n on the paragone of Art and Nature, here seemingly reconciled. Appearances may be deceptive, however: in the episode from Tasso that Spenser is tracking closely in these stanzas, we are told that L’auro, no ch’altro, è de la maga efetto (‘the breeze itself, not to speak of the rest, is made by the sorceress’; GL 16.10.5); see below, 72.1-2: 'There, whence that Musick seemed heard to bee, / Was the faire Witch herselfe’. The stanza in Tasso that stands behind Spenser’s 70.8-71 is 16.12, but in Tasso there are no voices and instruments.

Spenser seems to combine Tasso’s stanza with two later descriptions of the enchanted forest that do mix human and natural music (18.18, 24). Those illusions are explicitly demonic, however, whereas the wind’s harmonizing in this stanza is ambiguous (caso od arte, ‘chance or art’). Tasso’s a prova (‘in contest’) does imply competition, but his birds are competing with each other, not with Art. Contrast vi.24-25, where Phædria joins in the song of the birds, but ‘would oftentimes . . . strive to passe . . . Their native musicke by her skillful art’ (25.2-4). The presence of art in the harmonics described by Tasso at 16.12 is not explicit, but is implied in the formal patterning of the interchange of birds and breezes.

71.1 St. 71 The elaborate patterning of this stanza, inspired by the interchange of birds and wind in Tasso, is clearly meant to imitate the music it describes, as Hughes (1750) observes: ‘an Imitation of Tasso, but with finer Turns of the Verse: which are so artificial, that he seems to make the Musick he describes’ (Var 2.385-6). John Hollander, in SpE s.v. ‘music’, observes that ‘Stanza 71 represents this blended music with remarkable skill, punning on base and meet, troping the interlocking of rhyme and the intertwining of syntax as the relations of vocal and instrumental polyphony in the Elizabethan “broken” (mixed) consort’ (483).
71.1 shrouded: The additional sense of putting a winding-sheet on a corpse for burial does add an ominous note; cf. I.i.8.2-3.
71.2 attempred: Cf. ‘disposd’ (51.8 and note).
71.3–71.4 Angelicall . . . diuine: See the ‘heavenly noise / Heard sownd through all the Pallace’ when Una and Redcrosse celebrate their betrothal (I.xii.39.1-2).
72.3 a new Louer: glancing implicitly at his predecessor, Mortdant (i.51-55).
73.1 St. 73 The description in this stanza derives from Lucretius by way of Tasso. Its Lucretian origins connect the stanza with the love of Mars and Venus invoked repeatedly in Spenser (see I.pr.3.7-9 and note). Lucretius begins De Rerum with an invocation to Venus that includes a prayer for peace, which she can grant because Mars succumbs to her charms (1.33-40). Tasso echoes the Lucretian invocation in his description of Rinaldo alseep in Armida’s lap (GL 16.18.7-19). In translating Tasso with the phrase ‘her soft breast’, Fairfax will chasten the Latin gremium and Italian gremio, which can mean either lap or breast, whereas Spenser (at 76.9) will prefer the more sexually suggestive ‘lap’.
73.3–73.4 73.3-4 In Lucretius, Mars feeds his eyes on Venus. Tasso gives the metaphor a paradoxical turn as Rinaldo consumes himself while feeding his gaze on Armida. Fairfax slightly softens this paradox. Spenser by contrast sharpens the paradox while shifting it from Verdant to Acrasia ‘seeking medicine, whence she was stong’. At the same time, Spenser detaches the paradox from the trope of feeding, which he also shifts to Acrasia, giving it a decidedly predatory rather than self-destructive turn: Latin pascit and Italian pascendo give way to the animalistic and more violent depasturing, which means not just feeding on but utterly consuming. At this point the reversal (and transvaluation) of Lucretius is complete, having proceeded by way of an intertextual troping that enacts the figure of hypallage or exchange, nicknamed by Puttenham ‘the Changeling’ (see 45.3-4 and note).
73.6–73.7 73.6-7 Upton proposed that the ‘lips’ and ‘eyes’ in these lines were transposed in printing, and that the correct reading would have Acrasia sucking the knight’s soul out through his parted lips (Var 2. 387-88). Alternatively, the transposition of lips and eyes may simply extend the work of hypallage described in the preceding note. Lucretius describes Mars’s breath hanging upon Venus’s lips, an image that almost suspends the act of respiration in the luxuriance of the kiss. Tasso imagines Rinaldo sighing, with the transfer of his soul into Armida represented as a simile or impression. Spenser literalizes the transmigration of the warrior’s soul while transferring the action to Acrasia: not his sighing but her sucking carries his soul into her.
73.9 73.9 This line completes the stanza’s remarkable fantasy of erotic hypallage: Rinaldo’s sigh now reappears as Acrasia’s, and the as if of similitude travels with it, reappearing not as the impression that the knight’s soul leaves him, but as the mocking suggestion that Acrasia pities him: poor baby! This sexualized mock pietá, like other details in the passage, parodies Venus’s relation to Adonis in Malecasta’s tapestry (III.i.36-38) and to ‘her deare brood, her deare delight’ (III.vi.40.4) in the Garden of Adonis episode.
74.1 St. 74-75 This carpe diem lay, a counterpart to Phaedria’s siren song at vi.15-17, is based on Tasso, GL 16.14-15. Tasso’s singer is a male parrot. Fairfax changes the bird’s sex; he also chastens the flower’s nudo . . . sen (‘naked breast’) to the less vivid ‘beauties’. Spenser leaves the singer unspecified, but captures the sense of sen with ‘bared bosome’. His translation is so close, and so inspired, that it must have set a daunting precedent for Fairfax (see the exchange on this subject between Hazlitt and Lamb, Var 2.289). Spenser’s striking innovation is the closing phrase ‘equall crime’, which makes the pleasure more salacious than in Tasso, since the consciousness of sinning seems to constitute a distinct pleasure in its own right (cf. ‘pleasant sin’, 77.2.)
74.1 74.1 Cf. vi.14.9, ‘The whils with a love lay she thus him sweetly charmd’.
74.4–74.8 74.4-8 On the motif of alternating concealment with display see 58.7-9n. In mingling the motives of bashfulness and exhibitionism, the rose behaves like the damsels bathing in the fountain at st. 66.
75.5 75.5 Three successive y-a combinations in this line mark syllabic elisions (man-ya Lad-yand man-ya). In this way the line gathers extra syllables ‘whilest yet is time’ even as it also inserts a comma to preserve the impossible caesura following Lady’. The caesura tries to hold the Ladies and their Paramours apart as the elision runs them promiscuously together.
75.7 deflowre: Another distinctive touch, not found in Tasso. The implication is that since time will eventually pluck the virginity of ‘mortall life’, we might as well get there first.
76.7 76.7 As the forward march of knight and palmer turns stealthy, the syntax of the line calls awkward attention to the ‘covert’-ness of their approach by foisting onto them the agency of the verb ‘display’, which properly belongs to Acrasia. Unlike the maidens in the fountain (66.1), she does not see Guyon seeing her, but the description in the following stanza makes it clear that she actively solicits the viewing eye.
76.9 76.9 Cf. st. 73n. Tasso writes nel grembo molle / le posa il capo (‘in her soft lap / he rests his head’); Spenser transfers the softness (across the line-break, as it were) from the lap to the action of arranging the head.
77.1 St. 77 The ‘vele of silke and silver thin’ worn by Spenser’s Acrasia comes not from Tasso but from the description of Venus in Chaucer, PF 265-73. Spenser’s description of the Bower more than once echoes Chaucer’s description of the garden outside the Temple of Venus (see 51.5-9 and note). Chaucer’s lines on Venus derive in turn from Boccaccio, Tes 7.65. On Spenser’s use of both passages, see Anderson (2008: 137-39), who notes the resurfacing of Boccaccio’s sottil in Spenser’s subtle web. See Ariosto’s description of the gown in which Alcina greets Ruggiero, also described as suttile (OF 7.28.4-8).
77.2 As faint through: Hints at the posed quality of the tableau.
77.2 pleasant sin: Cf. ‘equall crime’ (75.9).
77.7 77.7 Arachne was also present in Mammon’s cave (vii.28.7-9). The spider was associated with the sense of touch (cf. Harvey, Speculum Tuscanismi, in Familiar Letters, and xi.13.3), but Acrasia’s veil seems woven to entangle the gaze.
77.8–77.9 77.8-9 Gossamer, woven by the balloon-spider, though Spenser seems to think it is made of sun-dried dew.
78.1 bare to ready spoyle: See st. 43 and notes. The Bower’s structures and its anamorphic vegetation (insofar as these may be distinguished) consistently mimic the motives and postures of Acrasia.
78.3 languour: Spenser’s syntax associates the drops of perspiration rather with the lassitude that accompanies them than with the ‘sweet toyle’ which produces both.
78.4 Few drops: ‘distild’ and compared to ‘Nectar’, Acrasia’s drops of perspiration recall the ‘sappy liquor’ that Excesse ‘scruzd’ into her golden cup at 56.1-6.
78.6–78.9 78.6-9 Although Acrasia’s eyes moisten ‘their fierie beames’, they do not quench the flames those beams kindle when they pierce the hearts of observers; rather they seem to intensify the brightness of those beames. This description catches up and summarizes a motif introduced in Guyon’s opening encounter with Duessa, formulated again in the brothers Pyrochles and Cymochles, and repeated with variations throughout Book 2: fire and water seem to be opposites, but the irascible and concupiscent passions associated with them are mutually reinforcing (see i.34.7-9n).
79.4 deface: The emphasis in the following lines on the knight’s ‘sweet regard’ and ‘well-proportiond face’ as a visual map of the good qualities and budding prospects going to ruin in Acrasia’s embrace suggests a pun on de-face: the knight’s identity is being obliterated.
80.2 hong vpon a tree: Like trophies taken in battle. Cf. I.v.5.7-9, V.v.21.7. In SC Dec 141, Colin Clout hangs up his shepherd’s pipe on a tree because he has failed in love.
80.3 moniments: L monumentum (from monere, to remind) refers not only to statues and tombs, but also to written records and works of literature; their erasure here contrasts with Arthur’s discovery of Briton moniments in the chamber of Eumnestes (ix.59.5-6).
80.4 ra’st: Echoing deface: the coat of arms has been eradicated from knight’s escutcheon as his face and his memory of himself fade away.
80.8 spend: For the punning reference to orgasm, see 42.8 and note.
80.9 blend: Cf. iv.7.7, iv.26.3, vii.1.4, and notes.
81.4 A subtile net: The counterpart to Acrasia’s veil (see st. 77 and notes), the Palmer’s net derives from the snare ‘fine as spider’s webs’ (ηυτ᾽ αραχνια λεπτα, ēut’ arachnia lepta) that Hephaestus uses to catch Aphrodite and Ares in the act of adultery (Homer, Od 8.280; cf. Ovid, Met 4.171-89). It thus catches up both the reference to Arachne (77.7) and that to Venus disarming Mars (st. 73). The adjective suggests both the thinness of the material and the skill with which it is woven.
81.7 fowler shame: Punning on the meaning of fowler as a hunter who uses nets to catch wild birds.
82.8 Verdant: See 73.4 and 79.8-9 for implication that Verdant is Acrasia’s pasturage. His name contrasts him to Mortdant (i.49.9), whom he has just avoided becoming.
83.1 St. 83 Guyon’s destruction of the Bower echoes Josiah’s destruction of the images, places, and implements of idolatrous worship (along with the ‘houses of the sodomites’) surrounding Jerusalem, described at 2 Kings 23:4-16. See also Isa 13.9: ‘Beholde, the day of the Lord cometh, cruell, with wrath and fierce angre to lay the land waste: and he shal destroy the sinners out of it’. Spenser here departs significantly from Tasso, where Armida herself summons infernal powers to destroy her garden and palace (GL 16.68-69).
83.4 the tempest of his wrathfulnesse: The echo of tempest in temperance may suggest the irony of Guyon’s intemperate wrath.
83.6–83.8 deface . . . race: This rhyming pair connects Guyon’s destruction of the Bower to the erasure of Verdant’s knightly demeanor and coat of arms at 79.4 and 80.4. If, as Aquinas argues, ‘all irascible passions arise out of concupiscible passions’ (Summa I, qu. 81, art. 2, ad. 1; cf. i.34.7-9n), then Guyon’s rampage may be an alternative response to the sexual arousal brought about by the scenes he has witnessed—a means of refusing to ‘spend’ in the way Verdant has done (80.8). This would properly oppose his counter-orgasmic destruction of the Bower to its creation, encoded in the phrase ‘poured forth with plentifull dispence’ at 42.8 and would complete the physical allegory of male arousal begun in st. 1 (see st.1n and 1.7-8n). It would also link his destruction of the Bower to his aborted attack on the Redcrosse knight in canto i.
83.8 race: As Verdant’s shield was ‘fowly ra’st’ at 80.4.
84.2 sorrowfull and sad: As there is no mention of shame, it remains unclear whether Verdant or Acrasia regret Guyon’s behavior or their own. This ambiguity will surface at 86.4-5, when some of the men restored to human form exhibit ‘inward shame’ while others exhibit ‘wrath, to see their captive Dame’.
84.4–84.5 84.4-5 Described in st. 39-40.
84.9 84.9 Not the only time a character in the poem requests a gloss: see I.iii.32.8, where Archimago inquires of Una (no doubt with some nervousness) ‘what the Lyon ment’.
85.1 St. 85-87 Acrasia’s prototype in turning men to beasts is Homer’s Circe (Od 10), but as Hamilton 2001 notes, it is Conti and not Homer who suggests that the men’s animal shapes reflect the passions that dominate their minds (Myth 476). In Homer, Circe’s victims retain human intelligence, transformed in body only. Whitney (1586), following Conti, reports that Circe’s menagerie prefer to retain their animal forms: ‘when they might have had their former shape againe, / They did refuse, and rather wish’d, still brutishe to remaine’ (82). In Spenser, the ‘sad end . . . of life intemperate’ (85.6) is evidently reversible, but both this end and its reversal seem provisional; Spenser neither follows Homer nor hews to the Conti-Whitney revision, but splits the difference between them.
85.3 85.3 Continuing the implication that Acrasia devours the humanity of her lovers (see 82.8n).
86.7 Grylle: From Gk γρυλλος gryllos hog. Derived from Plutarch’s satiric dialogue ‘Beasts Are Rational’ (MoraliaI 986B), in which one of Ulysses’ companions named Gryllus declines to reclaim his human form, arguing that beasts are in fact more temperate than men. For the subsequent history of Plutarch’s Gryllus in texts by Gelli, Machiavelli, and Petrus Costalius, see SpE s.v. ‘Grill’; on the pertinence for Book II of the tradition of philosophical skepticism embodied in Gryll, see Loewenstein (2007).
86.8 87.8 Echoing Rev 22:11, ‘he which is filthie, let him be filthie stil’, and 2 Pet 2:22, ‘the sowe that was washed, [is returned] to the wallowing in the myer’.
86.9 87.9 Cf. 83.4, the tempest of his wrathfulnesse: Temperance includes good timing, grasping the moment as opposed to seizing the day. The Palmer’s emphasis on timing thus implicitly contrasts Acrasia’s carpe diem topos (st. 74-75) with that of binding Occasion: as Kiefer observes, Occasion in Renaissance portrayals acquires maritime imagery previously associated with Fortuna because ‘seizing the tide was regarded as parallel to the idea of seizing the forelock’ (1979: 21). Cf. iv.4.5-8.