Spenser’s Wings

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.