Spenser's Faerie Queene struggles against reduction; there is no one-to-one correspondence between thing and meaning. Spenser reformulates figures and images throughout the poem, allowing meanings to be altered and complicated as the reading progresses. Language and form work to divide these moments of action and implication; space within or between stanzas (or songs or books) allows for changes in narrative tone and complications of meaning. As Spenser revises the act of wandering in Book I, Canto I, giving it a moral significance alongside its spatial significance, he takes an epic simile and, using a sequence of similes, forces it to undergo changes in meaning and intention. In Canto I, this technique is visible in stanzas 20 to 23, in Spenser's epic similes of the Nile and the shepherd. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Sections 20-22 support a single image, with variations. It is the image of an uncontrolled and overflowing glut. Stanza 20 describes Error's vomit, "a stream of horrible, black pyson", containing bits of flesh, books and papers, and eyeless frogs and toads, which "sought their way in the bad herbs”? (20.2-8). Spenser takes care to introduce a certain idea of ​​life alongside the dead and material fragments of vomit; the frogs and toads, freed from Error's mouth, crawl through the grass in a surprising and unexpected image. This allows Spenser to move forward with his epic simile in stanza 21, in which the meaning of life is perverted in the course of the simile. The simile, drawn from the natural world, begins by referring to fertility, healthy abundance, and the cycle of seasons bringing rain and flood: As when old father Nilus begins to swell With timely pride above the valley Egyptian Its great waves bring forth fertile mud And overflow from every plain and humble valley. (21.1-4)But in the second quatrain of the stanza, the idea of ​​regeneration is complicated. Like the creatures that emerge and move away from the vomit of Error, the swelling of the Nile leaves "huge piles of mud... where breed / Ten thousand species of creatures, partly male / And partly female of his fruitful seed” (21.6 -8). This second quatrain continues with the ideas of the first; the “fertile ooze,” as it should be, produces a “fruitful seed.” But this seed is perverted. The seed's sexual paternity and maternity are obscured, incestuous, or otherwise depraved, and engender "ten thousand kinds of creatures" of mixed male and female orientation. Spenser writes: "Such monstrous forms elsewhere cannot be found by any man", recalling the image of the half-serpent and half-woman Error, "the most loathsome, the most filthy, the most foul and full of vile disdain” (21.9, 14.6-9). . The natural and abundant order of the world, like the natural and rich human acts of wandering and procreation, are so quickly tainted. Spenser implies that error constantly multiplies, sleeping in the fertile mud, so that romantic wandering "a non-linear spatial game in a romantic landscape" too easily becomes epic wandering, which is not innocent but morally suggestive. The epic simile in stanza 21 continues through stanza 22, so that it is unclear whether the simile should be read as an exposition of stanza 20 (the vomit of error) or as an exposition of stanza 21 (the children of the vomit of error). In any case, it probably did notof importance. Spenser connects the two excretions to the perverse spread of the river in stanza 21, so that the three stanzas are linked visually and allegorically. Error, like the seed of the river, is “fruitful”. Spenser writes: "She poured out from her hellish gulf, / Her offspring fecund and cursed with little serpents, / Deformed monsters, birds and black as ink" (22.5-7). The offspring of Error and the River are both "deformed" and unnatural offspring. While these monsters are characterized by their filth, almost surpassing the knight with their keen stench, the narrator notes that they are harmless, "swarming all around his legs, he cried out, / And he burdened him with pains, but could do no harm at all” (22.8-9). The final couplet of stanza 22 is the narrator's interjection, an effect of distance which allows the reader a small release from the epic and narrative tension sustained and built through the three stanzas. We are told that the Knight cannot be harmed and so we can appreciate the quality of the poetic image, especially as it takes a comic turn in stanza 23. Here Spenser uses another epic simile to combat that presented in the previous stanza. stanzas. The offspring of Error are transformed from the thick and humble (creeping and swarming) to the light and airy. He writes, like sweet Shepheard in sweete euen-tide, when Ruddy Phoebus gins at Welke in the west. . .A cloud of cumbersome gnats molests him, all striving to fix their weak stings. (23.1-5) It is still a crowd scene, but gentle, more of a disturbance than a danger: “From their nuisance he can nowhere rest, / But with his clownish hands their tender wings / He sweeps them away , and this often spoils their murmurings” (23.7-9) The description of Error's offspring is enclosed between two epic similes, both drawn from the natural world, but with different degrees of threat and therefore different degrees of narrative distance by them. relation to the Knight. Spenser uses a series of similes that introduce different modes of vision throughout the song, thus allowing multiple perspectives. Thus, when Una approaches the Knight in verse 27 to greet his victory by saying ". Well, be worthy of this Armory", while in stanza 26 we have just been told that "His enemies have killed themselves", we understand that the two statements are not incompatible (27.5, 26.9) . From the Knight's point of view, or perhaps from Una's, he is worthy, having faced "certain peril" (24.2). He did not see himself as the shepherd chasing the flies from his flesh, as we did. Spenser reduces the knight's adversary in the space of a stanza and suggests that greater and more dangerous battles are yet to come. The strength of the poetic image and its malleability in Spenser's conception is seen in the way it returns later in Canto I. In stanzas 36 to 38 he revisits the comparison of the shepherd and the flies. After Error's defeat, the Knight and Una rest at Archimago's inn. While the two sleep, "[Archimago] goes to his office, and there lies / His books of magic and his arts of various kinds, / He searches for powerful charms to trouble the sleeping spirits" (36.7-9). This is reminiscent of Error's vomit in stanza 20, which is filled with what magic is made of: "huge lumps of flesh and raw goblets...books and papers...loathsome frogs and toads , who lacked eyes” (20.3-7). This symmetry of the basic materials casts Archimago on the side of evil in the song, aligning him with error. From these books, Archimago chooses a few verses, and he calls legions from the deep obscurities.