The Faerie Queene, Canto 4

Well I have to say I much prefer Everyman to the Faerie Queene. If I wanted to frustrate myself by trying to deciphering something I'd just pick up the paper and attempt the cryptoquote. I mean my goodness Edmund Spenser, just say what you want to say and be done with it. Everything has to be interpreted and worked through on all different levels of meaning just to figure out what the heck hes really trying to say. Now I know how helpless men feel when attempting to figure out women.

So about the text. I found the stanzas about the seven deadly sins intriguing. I think its interesting that pride is the leader and seemingly utmost of the sins. The fotenote states that this procession where Pride is queen was typical of medieval art but I wonder why exactly that was. Perhaps its because a prideful person is one who is very self assured and dominant and therefore desires leadership roles or perhaps its something biblical that I'm unaware of. I'm sure there is some deeper meaning that he is intending here, but like I said earlier, thats has not been my forte with this story. As for that and the rest of the sins, I really liked how he characterized them giving each of them a very human form. It wasn't just the sin but a human embodiment of it and that made it more real and it reminded me a lot of the victims in the movie Seven. He described the sins in such detail that you saw not only the sin but the very danger in possessing it at an extreme level. He also assosciates a lot of the sins with others. For example, he has Idlenesse riding on a slouthfull asse, and Wrath upon a Lion, presumably implying that many of these sins are often in combination. Spenser uses a lot of the alliterative technique here, especially in stanza 26 in which he uses an abundance of "L"s to create such a strong image of Lechery. Although I wasn't a fan of trying to read into all of the deeper meanings that he creates and recreates, I was very entertained by this procession of the sins and his eloquent manner of depicting them.