Thursday 2 November 2017

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.



I'm not doing the podcast thing any more because I'm almost completely certain it isn't working. 
But if it is working for someone and you want me to keep doing let me know in the comments, 
which I have turned back on.

10 comments:

  1. I don't have a podcast app, but I added the one you'd set up to my RSS reader and it's coming through there, so, something's probably working.

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  2. I was unfortunately unable to get the podcastery to work (Pocketcasts found your feed, but none of the audio files ever had any data), but I've had no problems downloading episodes the normal way.

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    1. Same thing happened to me, have no idea why.

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  3. Also, thanks for reopening your blog comment section. I've been compiling a response each day to post as a singular article once you were done, but this will actually be easier better for context.

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  4. Worked for me Patrick. Keep the line of semi-scouse bards going. You're in good company.

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  5. I haven't been listening to the podcasts but I have been reading these articles! Which I've quite enjoyed, and I do mean to listen to the recordings at a later date. Keep up the good work!

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  6. It is really cool you are doing this. Could this canto the sort of monster manual for semi-divine nymph things or at least populate a random table with their features?

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    1. I probably won't do a full table as its taking an hour and a half each day as it is, but I will try to break down useful elements into a list at the end of each post and then maybe someone else can put them in a generator.

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  7. I have been enjoying this series a lot, I hear the audio files while I draw. Thank you for sharing them!

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