Like as the Waves Make Towards the Pebbled Shore

By Allan Metcalf. Whoa, that’s Shakespeare. (Sonnet 60.) But it’s the best description I know of the verse form invented by his contemporary Edmund Spenser for The Fairy Queen, a marathon of a poem set in an allegorical Fairyland full of “fierce wars and faithful loves” (in Spenser’s words) and populated by believable characters. If you get the olde fashyonde spelyng out of the way, and concentrate on the story rather than the complicated allegory, as I have argued in two previous posts, you’ll have an amazing journey through its more than 30,000 lines arranged in 3,500 stanzas. More...