The diction and imagery in relation to the allegory of the Faerie Queene

Abstract

This study concerns itself with the verbal surface of The Faerie Queene, exploring the ways in which its diction and imagery create an allusive and self-defining poetic medium through which are projected the 'historical fiction' and qualifying perspectives upon it. Special consideration is given to the rhetoric of the poem's voice and its establishment of a complex narrator's persona. Imagery is approached first through an examination of the formal and material contributions to the narration made by simile. A characteristic circular exchange is observed in the relationship of patterns of motif in simile to the larger images of the allegorical narrative, paralleled in a similar interaction between personification at the narrative level and metaphor on the verbal surface. The 'visual' quality of the language of description and its modifications are discussed both as technical and thematic principles. Finally, the ways in which linguistic surface in vocabulary, syntax and imagery reflects and reinforces thematic ambiguities are explored, and it is suggested that ambiguity, rather than being a disease of the allegory, is a condition of its poetic breadth and didactic force. In a long allegorical poem language is likely to get short critical shrift, to be treated apart from the allegory or dipped into now and again to support allegorical explication; this study attempts to show how in The Faerie Queene, functioning as both object and sign, diction and imagery form the warp and woof of allegory.