OLD LOVES AND WARS
Fierce warres and faithfull loves/ Shall moralize my song.—Edmund Spenser
In spare moments I am reading the Faerie Queen for the first time. At the slow but steady rate of one canto per month, I find myself apparently occupied for the next six years, and happily so. Faerie Land is growing on me—or I am growing into it. More and more frequently my mind is wrestled into the dim loveliness of Spenser’s world. I feel my thoughts tuned to its archaic cadence, its ordered beauty, its ‘actual avenging virtue.’ This is not a passive or a tranquil world. But it is beautiful.
So much have I enjoyed reading, taking notes, and looking at illustrations, that I have started collecting and archiving my efforts on another blog: Old Loves and Wars. May it be a help to you on your way to Goodness, Beauty and Truth.
One of the resources you will find there is Spenser’s prefatory letter, addressed to Elizabethan courtier and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. {Why didn’t I hear of it before canto five?} In this letter, Spenser presents the Faerie Queen as an education for the moral imagination: ‘The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline... [M]uch more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.’
• St. George by Donatello •
May 16, 2014