Spenser's Faerie Queene struggles against reduction; there is no one-to-one correspondence between thing and meaning. Spenser reframes figures and images throughout the poem, allowing meanings to shift and complicate as you read. Language and form work to divide these moments of action and implication; the space within or between stanzas (or songs or books) allows for changes in narrative tone and complications of meaning. Just as Spenser revises the act of wandering in Book I, Canto I, attributing to it a moral meaning alongside the spatial one, so he takes an epic simile and, using a sequence of comparisons, forces it to undergo changes in meaning and intent. In Canto I, this technique is seen in stanzas 20 to 23, in Spenser's epic similes of the River Nile and the Shepherd. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Stanzas 20 to 22 support a single image, with variations. It is the image of excess not contained and spilling out. Stanza 20 describes the Error's vomit, "a deluge of horrible, black pison," containing lumps of flesh, books and papers, and eyeless frogs and toads, which "sought their way in the turf"? (20,2-8). Spenser is careful to introduce some idea of ​​life along with the dead and material fragments of the vomit; the frogs and toads, released from the mouth of Error, crawl away into the grass in a startling and unexpected image. This allows Spenser to enter his epic simile in stanza 21, where the meaning of life is perverted throughout the simile. The simile, drawn from the natural world, begins by referring to fertility, healthy abundance, and the cycle of seasons that bring rain and floods: As when old father Nilus begins to swell With timely pride upon the Egyptian valley, His fat waves make the flow the fertile slime And every plain and humble valley overflows. (21.1-4)But in the second quatrain of the verse, the idea of ​​regeneration is complicated. Like the creatures that crawl out and away from the vomit of Error, the swelling of the Nile River leaves “Huge mounds of mud… where breed / Ten thousand species of creatures, part male / And part female of its fruitful seed " (21,6) -8). This second quatrain continues with the ideas of the first; the “fertile slime,” as it should, produces “fruitful seed.” But this seed is perverted. The sexual paternity and maternity of the seed are obscured, incestuous, or otherwise depraved, and generate "ten thousand kinds of creatures" of mixed male and female orientation. Spenser writes, “Such monstrous forms elsewhere cannot be seen by any man,” recalling the image of Error as half-serpent, half-woman, “Very lothsom, filthy, foul, and full of vile contempt” (21.9, 14.6-9 ). . The natural and abundant order of the world, like the natural and rich human acts of wandering and procreation, is thus rapidly contaminated. Spenser implies that error constantly reproduces itself, lying dormant in fertile mud, so that romantic wandering "nonlinear spatial play within a romantic landscape" too easily becomes epic wandering, which is not innocent but morally suggestive. The epic simile in stanza 21 continues to stanza 22, so it is unclear whether the simile should be read as an exposition of stanza 20 (Vomit of error) or as an exposition of stanza 21 (The children of the vomit of mistake). In any case, it probably doesn't matter. Spenser links both excretions to the perverse propagation of the river in stanza 21, so that all three stanzas are visually and allegorically linked. Error, like the seed of the river,it is “fruitful”. Spenser writes, “She poured out of her hellish pit, / Her fruitful progeny cursed with little serpents, / Monsters misshapen, birds, and black as ink” (22.5-7). Both Error's and River's offspring are "deformed" and unnatural offspring. Although these monsters are characterized by their filthiness, almost overwhelming the Horseman with their vivid stench, the narrator notes that they are harmless, "swarming around his legs he huddled, / And he was sore, but could not hurt at all" (22.8 -9). The final couplet of stanza 22 is the narrator's interjection, a distancing effect that allows the reader a small release from the epic and narrative tension sustained and built across the three stanzas. We are told that the Knight cannot be harmed, and so we can enjoy the quality of the poetic image, especially as it takes a comic turn in stanza 23. Here, Spenser uses another epic simile for the fight he laid out in the previous stanza . The children of error transform from thick and humble (crawling and teeming) to light and airy. He writes, like gentle Shepheard in sweet euen-tide, when the ruddy Phoebus gins to welke in the west . . .A cloud of cumbersome midges harass him, all trying to stick their feeble stings. (23.1-5) It's still a crowd scene, but a gentle one, more a nuisance than a danger: "From their annoyance he can rest no where, / But with his clownish hands the tender wings / He sweeps away, and often spoil their murmurings" (23.7-9). The description of Error's offspring is sandwiched between two epic similes, both drawn from the natural world, but with different degrees of threat and therefore different degrees of narrative distance from the Knight. Spenser uses a series of comparisons that introduce different modes of vision throughout the canto, allowing for multiple perspectives. Thus, when Una approaches the Knight in stanza 27 to greet his victory, telling him "Well worthy are you of that Armory," when in stanza 26 we have just been told that "His enemies killed themselves," we understand that the two statements are not incompatible (27.5, 26.9). perhaps from that of Una, he is worthy, having found himself in "certain danger" (24.2) He did not see himself as the shepherd who drives away flies from his flesh, like us. Spenser reduces the Knight's adversary to the space of one stanza and suggests that bigger and more dangerous battles are yet to come. The strength of the poetic image and its malleability in Spenser's design are seen in the way it returns later in Canto I. In stanzas 36 to 38 he revisits the simile of the shepherd and the flies. After Error's defeat, the Knight and Una rest in Archimago's inn. While the two sleep, "[Archimagus] goes to his study, and there frequents / his books of magic and arts of various kinds, / seeks powerful spells, to trouble sleepy minds" (36.7-9). This is reminiscent of Error's vomit in verse 20, which is full of the stuff that magic is made of: "great lumps of flesh and raw pieces... books and papers... loathsome frogs and toads, which lacked eyes" (20.3-7). This symmetri never damned hed,A-wait where their service applies. (38.1-4) The shepherd in stanza 23, Redcrosse, has become Archimago in stanza 38, the flies have become goblins, and the epic simile has been freed from the merely metaphorical world to become a real and corporeal part of the story, anticipating the granting of physical form to the allegorical characters as Book I continues. Accompanying this shift from the figurative to the literal is an intensification of degree. Harmless flies, fluttering around a completely different and less moral shepherd, suddenly become dangerous. Archimago chooses "i"..