Spenser and Pullman, cont.

Notes on some more water poetry in Faerie Queene book I, with some reference to Pullman's essays.

The author's letter from Spenser suggests a reading in the light of the Odyssey, whose hero in the medieval framework apparently stood for the virtuous private individual, as Agamemnon in the Iliad stood for the virtuous ruler. Which is a fascinating cherry-picking summary of the Homeric epics.

And Pullman is always attentive to the role of the writer in speaking about how to read their work. He famously says his daemon is a crow or magpie, stealing shiny bits of story, but less well known is the "dusty, broken-down, out-of-date old owl who used to be a teacher" counterpart (faerie-like, does he have more than one daemon? Daemon Voices 142).

In Book 1
i.21 Nilus
ii.10 Proteus
iii.21 Odysseus
iii.31 Much like as when the beaten mariner...
xi.10, 18 dragon like a ship
xi.29 Well of Life, for the healing of the Nations
xii.1, 42 poem like a ship

Book 2 opens with reference to the discovery of the new world, and to "other worlds":

What if within the moon's fair shining sphere--
What if in every other star unseen
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more; yet such to some appear.

Which surely Pullman could not have missed, if he read that far. But he reads like a butterfly, writes like a bee... Of course Professor Olsen's caveats about making too much of source material are very much in order here. All the so-called source tells us by itself is that ideas have been had before, and even before getting there they likely appeared somewhere else before that. Where do ideas come from? is a favorite question to return to, but the beautiful things is that they do come.

In his Daemon Voices, Pullman invokes Spenser's Faerie Queene as one of those books one admires without being particularly energized about reading, as contrasted with Blake's works (341). Still, the direct quote and attribution at the end of La Belle Sauvage suggests he did read it at least enough to draw that passage from it to leave the reader pondering.

But there are many non-Spenserian references to water and watercraft which are surely at least as apposite as well. Chiefly in Milton (ie. PL II 636, cited in DV 54). But also the likening of the flight of Dust from every world to a flood (435), and the particle of story which guides the whole essay Poco a Poco, the image of pouring water (205), rooted in an old iconography of Grammar, that stories for children are as water for plants...