FQ 1.6

The Faerie Queene 1.6: Sir Satyrane

This important canto creates a transition from Redcrosse's adventures to Una's plight and demonstrates the workings of “eternall providence” and grace. Though his travels are more exciting, hers are more profound by contrast.  It is the midpoint of the epic as well as the overall narrative, and in the next canto, Spenser delivers the beginning of the story in flashback, which creates the first “rabbit hole” loop, the inception of Redcrosse's quest with Una. Though on one level the author seems to use the canto to criticize fornication and lust, a reader might see this concept usefully complicated. For instance, Redcrosse still falsely believes that Una has been unchaste and thinks of her in the way that the narrator encourages us to consider Duessa. 

Walter Crane illustration for canto 6

Spenser works in his four main medieval genres. He begins the canto with an epic simile and ends it with a romance transition, keeping the allegory in motion by the simple device of Everyman being impervious to the Truth itself, since Redcrosse mistakenly believes Una faithless and ironically regrets abandoning Fidessa-Duessa, Falsehood that he did well to flee.  The lyrical magnificent of the romance stanzas speaks for itself.

Una, the Truth, finds herself captive to Sansloy, Lawlessness. Like a demented Ovidian lover, h“turning wrathfull fyre to lustfull heat,” he tries to woo the unassailable Una by means that might win a Duessa. When Spenser says “Her constant hart did tempt with diverse guile,” it would be best to read “tempt” as “attempt” rather than “fruitfully entice.” Oddly, he uses the "fort" metaphor to describe Una's true chastity just as Duessa used it to mischaracterize her own falsely-labeled honor. 

More unusually, the narrator asks the “heavens,” i.e., the Almighty, “How can ye vengeance just so long withhold?” Could Spenser actually be doubting the concept of Providence that he champions elsewhere as the will of an intermediating God?

A stunning and original line occurs in stanza 6: “The molten starres doe drop like weeping eyes.”  As it happens, the heavens are indeed empathetic, demonstrated by the phenomenon of twinkling stars in the inky sky put to moral use. The sky is crying.

But Una refuses to be passive, or a victim.  the Truth will out. Enter the “Salvage Nation,” not a waste-removal company, but the satyr population in the woods coming to Una’s defense, even including Sylvanus, or Pan.  When Nature, personified by the satyrs, prefers the Truth and defends her, lawlessness fades away in the action of Sansloy fleeing. We will see him again, however

Headliner to canto 6

Though in the clutches of Sansloy, she defends herself by screaming--loudly enough to wake the forest. Clearly

A touch of Spenserian humor: Salvage Nation so loves Una that it wants to “worship her as a Queene with olive girlond cround,” which she will obviously not tolerate. Enter Sir Satyrane, in stanza 20, his name withheld in true epic fashion. Providence delivers him to the aid of Una.  In “Plaine, faithfull, true, and enimy of shame,” he is another doppelganger of RC.

In stanzas 21-26  Spenser constructs an “inlay” to contribute to his modified romance pattern, here providing Satyrane’s history and touching on several themes in FQ 1 as a whole. This knight is “A Satyres sonne, yborne in forrest wyld, / By straunge adventure” indeed. His mother, Thyamis, a beautiful young woman of an amorous disposition, seeks her wayward husband, Therion, in those dangerous woods “to serve her turne” and satisfy her desire for her spouse. Unfortunately for her, a satyr finds her, “And, kindling coles of lust in brutish eye,” takes her captive and “made her person thrall unto his beastly kind.” This compromising and debilitating lustfulness concatenates with virtually all other such activity in Book 1: RC’s guilty stirrings in canto 1, Duessa’s falseness to Sansfoy in canto 2, as well as RC’s own succumbing to lust to come in cantos 7 and 8. However, this sinfulness does not touch Satyrane whatsoever. There is an irony here in that though Satyrane was the product of brutish male lust and undisciplined female wantonness, he is pure and good and sweet, spotless, like his analogue, Sir Galahad. He indicates a mild interest in Una, who with equal mildness lets him know that RC is her man. Satyrane seeks to liberate Una from her kind, well-meaning, but overwhelming forest captors.

Just because one is a product of a lustful encounter between a half-wild creature and an ovulating female does not mean one will turn out to be a bad three-quarters of a person, one quarter goat.   

Chiron and Achilles fresco from Herculaneum

The satyr father teaches his son Satyrane to be a great hunter and knight, analogous to Chiron the centaur who helped rear Achilles. Spenser creates a minature loop back to stanza 21 in delivering Satyrane to Una’s aid.in 29.

Toward the end of the canto, a curious pilgrim crosses paths with Una and Satyrane and informs them that a "Sarazin" has killed Redcrosse.  The three go in pursuit of this criminal, who turns out to be Sansloy. Satyrane does battle with him and Una disappears, believing her champion to be dead. Since the pilgrim turns out to be Archimago, and because we know that Redcrosse is alive, clearly this is a lie told from maliciousness, since he despises Una for no reason besides her goodness: “Her he hated as the hissing snake.”

“The molten stars do drop like weeping eyes” is a difficult line to top for profundity and originality and visceral effect.  However, the sixth stanza from the end shows Spenser at his best, master of sound, onomatopoeia, in describing the fierce combat between Satyrane and Sansloy:

Therewith they gan, both furious and fell,

To thunder blowes, and fiersly to assaile

Each other, bent his enimy to quell,

That with their force they perst both plate and maile,

And made wide furrowes in their fleshes fraile,

That it would pitty any living eie.

Large floods of blood adowne their sides did raile;

But floods of blood could not them satisfie:

Both hongred after death; both chose to win, or die.

Voiced consonants imitate the sounds of battle: “g,” “b,” “f,” “p,” “m” stand for the clash of broadswords and the ringing of steel on armor.  Spenser’s conspicuous use of short rather than long vowels contributes to the idea of the swiftness of the combat. In exaggeration worthy of Le chanson de Roland, “floods of blood,” a repeated phrase, evokes the seriousness and peril of the lists, mortal one-on-one combat. The two lines not devoted to describing the furious action in the stanza play off one another concerning the idea of “pitty.” Though it would be pitiful for any of us to see such a ferocious spectacle featuring double floods of blood, and we might understand that the combatants “hongered after death” with the exhaustion of it all, the final phrase overturns the notion of pity, since the deaths Satyrane and Sansloy hunger after one another’s deaths, not their own.