When one book helps you understand another

This morning we were reading Canto 3 of The Faerie Queene Book I, in which the sorcerer Archimago disguises himself as the Redcross Knight after having caused Redcross to mistrust Una and leave her behind.

Una (whom Spenser also calls Truth) has gone to find her knight, and when the disguised Archimago catches up with her, she really believes him to be Redcross. Every time I've read this I've wondered why the character who is identified as the Truth was deceived by this evil man, but today something caught my attention. A little earlier in the canto, Una is compared to the sun . . .

     . . . Her angels face
     As the great eye of heaven shyned bright,
     And made a sunshine in the shadie place;
Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace.

. . . and that reminded me of something.

At the beginning of the school year, I read Paradise Lost with Angelina Stanford's Early Modern Literature class. In this story, when Satan escapes from Hell, the first thing he does is to ask Uriel, the angel whose sphere is the sun, for directions to Earth, so that he can see "this new happy race of men," and give praise to God.

   So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through Heav'n and earth:
And oft though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity
Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems.

(Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 681-689)

The more Great Books you read, the more it improves your ability to understand what you're reading -- they're all talking to one another.

Poetry for Coronatide

“O sweeter than the marriage-feast,

’Tis sweeter far to me,

To walk together to the kirk

With a goodly company!”

The two youngest and I have been reading Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” aloud together since last week, one section per day. We read the final section this morning, where the passage quoted occurs. How appropriate, and how fitting, even though I had only vague memories of the poem when we decided to read it after finishing Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.

When I asked my kids what they wanted to read next, my 17-year-old said, with a knowing smile, “The Wasteland.” Her older brother was looking through his poetry book to see if it was in there so he could go ahead an mark the place for tomorrow.

“What’s the first line of that?” he said.

“‘April is the cruelest month,’” she said, and we all laughed.