Abstract
The many wings of The Faerie Queene belong to real and imaginary creatures in the fictional world, and also arise in similes and metaphors. They can embody and represent swiftness, height, and lightness, but they can also be surprisingly heavy and awkward. The interpretive framework offered by Guillemette Bolens’ The Style of Gestures, which discusses the role of ‘sensorimotor resonance’ (mental simulation of movements and their meanings), offers a way of appreciating readers’ mental gliding, soaring, flapping, stalling, and falling. Spenser draws attention to moments where wings are hard, and/or metallic, where the expectation of airiness in flight is confounded, and where flying things come crashing to the ground. These moments resonate with the theology and poetics of The Faerie Queene. The encounter with unexpected weight can act as a reminder of the power of sin, and the struggle to live a moral life. Spenserian wings have literal hard edges to complement the figurative hard edges to his images of Christian experience. Such moments shadow one way in which the poem’s allegories function: it is important to Spenser’s method that they cannot maintain their distance from worldly burdens.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See also Webb (2013).
- 3.
All quotations from The Faerie Queene are from Spenser (2007), with u / v and i / j modernised.
- 4.
OED, ‘Flaggy, adj.2’.
- 5.
The question of Spenserian humour is on the periphery of this essay’s concerns. The surprise fall has an element of bathos which brings it close, at times, to comedy. On this aspect of the dragon in Book I, see Moshenska (2018, 28): ‘Although it arrives in the poem crammed with symbolic malevolence, a terrifying panoply of fangs, ire, and flaggy wings, once reread through the lens of its eventual transformation into a child’s plaything the dragon’s behaviour on its first appearance seems hardly in keeping with its demonic status’. See also Coldham-Fussell (2020, 80–111) on Book I, arguing for the importance of comedy more generally in the book, as a means of overcoming Redcrosse’s problematic self-reliance.
- 6.
OED ‘Flag’, n.3, ‘The quill-feathers of a bird’s wing’. Also OED ‘Sail’, n.1b, ‘Applied to the wing of a bird. poetic. Also technical in Falconry, the wing of a hawk’.
- 7.
On Muiopotmos and hospitality see also Chris Barrett’s chapter in this volume.
- 8.
OED ‘Shear’, n.1, 3c.
- 9.
- 10.
Scholarly accounts of the Spenserian stanza form are drawn to its ways of configuring time and exposition. See Dolven, who notes the place for a ‘second thought in the middest’ (2004, 17); Gross, on its ‘power of continuity and transformation’ (2004, 17); MacDonald 2015, on its ways of slowing things down; and Carlson 2019, on its interactions with excess.
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Lyne, R. (2024). Spenser’s Wings. In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_12
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