Trash Canto - The Faerie Queene Book 1 Canto 10

This Canto is so dull, so long, so joyless, tiresome, overwritten, undramatic and turgidly allegorical that I cannot recommend you listen to it.

Briefly; Redcrosse goes the the magic house of Coelia (Heaven) and meet her three magic daughters, Fidelia, Speranza and Charissa, who introduce him, in turn, to an endless, ENDLESS (ITS 68 VERSES, a third as long again as most other Cantos) list of Spenserian mono-quality allegorical figures who often have their own lists of peoples and qualities to introduce him to.

Sometimes its like reading an excel sheet as a fucking poem.

Anyway, Redcrosse goes through whats essentially a very long Rocky Montage for the soul so he can be good after being a tool for the last 9 Cantos.

This is a lot less interesting than it sounds, its essentially a rather tiresome protestant sermon (more than the rest of the poem).

A few elements worth mentioning;

Fidelia is surprisingly goth for s Spenserian heroine, or at least, an interesting mix of standard brightness-metaphors and weird shit;

"...
Of which the eldest, that Fidelia hight;
Like sunny beames threw from her Christall face,
That could have dazed the rash beholders sight,
And round about her head did shine like heavens light.

She was arayyed all in lilly white,
And in her right hand bore a cup of gold,
With wine and water filled up to the hight,
In which a Serpent did himself enfold,
That horror made to all, that did behold;
But she no whit did change her constant mood:
And in her other hand she fast did hold
A book, that was both signed and sealed with blood,
Wherein darke things were writ, hard to be understood.

........

And when she list pour out her larger spright,
She would command the hasty sun to stay,
Or backward turn his course from heavans hight;
Sometimes great hosts of men she could dismay,
And eke huge mountains from thier native seat
She would command, themselves to bear away,
And throw in raging sea with roaring threat.
Almighty God her gave such power, and pussiance great."

Why is Charissa (Charity) not in this image?
Because according to the poem she goes around with her boobs out.
(To suckle her endless young.)

The second interesting thing is that to purge his guilt (he probably boned Duessa between lines in a previous Canto) Redcrosse has to submit to essentially being tortured in a mirror of all the stuff he has gone through in previous Cantos with the imprisonment and encounter with Despair, but now presumably its ok because its for a holy purpose.

Anyway, at the end a magic man takes him up a mountain, shows him the kingdom of heaven and tells him he was born and Englishman and is going to be Saint George, now go and fight that Dragon.

Dragon Fight next Canto I promise.

Book One Canto Ten

The Faerie Drive

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