Image II (12.21.21)

Think of the image in the opening lines of The Fairie Queene of the Red Cross knight riding across a plain.  He is riding fast, "pricking" or spurring his horse onward.  Can you see it? -- a silver shield glinting in the sun, a red sash billowing behind.  Can you hear? -- the thunder of pounding hooves, the snorting of the horse in full gallop, the clash of shield on armor.  Can you feel, can you smell? -- the earth shaking, the sweating horse flesh, the divots of turf. 

Spenser elaborates so much with just a couple of lines of the image:

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plain,

All clad in mighty arms and silver shield,

Wherein old dents of deep wounds did remain,

The cruel marks of many a bloody field . . . 

and of his horse:

His angry steed did chide his foaming bit,

As much dismaying to the curb to yield:

Full jolly knight he seemed, and fair did sit,

As one for knightly jousts and fierce encounters fit.

I can't count the number of times this remarkable image has surfaced into my mind's eye since the first time I read it (which would have been in a course in Renaissance English literature).  

Narrative imagery like Spenser's has always moved me.  And for me, nobody does it better in poetry than the Elizabethans.  Except maybe Homer.  Or Virgil.  Or Dante.  Well, too much to go into on that score.  But I'm thinking of this particular image and its power to excite for a particular reason: placement.  It is Spenser's opening gambit.  

There's a clue, in the fifth line of the opening, that this narrative image is false: "Yet arms till that time did he never wield."  I remember reading the line the first time through, pausing, then rereading a couple of times, because it didn't make sense.  What's all the dented armor about then, if not "many a bloody field"?  And why would the poet undercut such a spectacular opening image with this idea?

It turns out that that's what The Fairie Queene is about, being tested and coming up short, until you've been tested and survived enough to earn those dents.  It's about being worthy of what you seem.

Now that's a message, an intellection, borne of an image!  One that I've carried with me through the many years since I first encountered those opening lines.  I want to say this image and how it plays out in The Fairie Queene have formed me in some fundamental ways, intellectually, emotionally.  Maybe that's going a little far.  But my point, I think, is this: images can be powerful things, emotionally and intellectually.  They'll stick you, and then they'll stick with you.