The Poetical Works of - OUDL Home

THE FAERIE QUEENE • CHARACTERIZATION IIx
He is deeply sensitive to the beauty of light upon the water. The
armour of Pyrochles glitters
as the Sunny beames do glaunce and glide
Vpon the trembling waue (II v 2)
The moistened eyes of Acrasia are like the starry light
Which sparckhng on the silent waues, does seeme more bright (II xii 78 )
The beauty of women again and again suggests to him imaginative effects
of light and shade The ' angel face' of Una ' makes a sunshine in the
shady place', the damsells who dance before Colin have faces * glancing
like evening lights ', Bntomart, as her hair falls to her feet, is creasted all
with lines of fiene light,' like the sky upon a summer evening
The conventions of the life of chivalry which have dictated the outward
actions of his dramatis personae should not blind our eyes to the truthful
simplicity of their emotions The heroic career of the warrior maid
Britoimart," may have little in common with ordinary life, But the manner
in which her inner life is revealed, in all its subtle changes of mood,
might well excite the envy of a realistic novelist Spenser's knowledge of
a woman's heart and a woman's ways finds constant and subtle expression
With a touch of vivid detail he can invest with lirving interest a-wholly
subordinate character Clarinda, asked for news of her prisoner for whom
she has a secret love, is taken off her guard and thrown into confusion, but,
so soone
As she her face had wypt, to fresh her blood, (v v 45 )
she recovers herself, and is able to invent a plausible tale The anxious
care of the aged nurse Glauce over her sick mistress is depicted m many
delicate strokes of humour and pathos, and the stanza that closes the
midnight scene between them would be hard to surpass in its homeliness,
its dramatic truth of detail, and its climax of tenderness
Her chearefull words much cheard the feeble spnght
Of the sicke virgin, that her downe she layd
In her warme bed to sleepe, if that she might,
And the old-woman carefully displayd
The clothes about her round with busie ayd,
So that at last a little creeping sleepe
Surpnsd her sense She therewith well apayd,
The drunken lampe downe in the oyle did steepe,
And set her by to watch, and set her by to weepe (in ll.47)
Spenser's love of children is quickened by a rare sympathy with the experience
of woman He realizes by an intuition, in which he comes 4 near
to Wordsworth, her passionate tenderness for the child unborn, for, the
child that is her living care, for the child that is not hers. When Britomart