Foreshadowing In Acrasia's Garden

On a fundamental level, both Acrasia’s and Adonis’ gardens exist in a perpetual battle between Eros and Thanatos. Moreover, in both environments, flesh is the one uncontrollable factor that ultimately leads to death. However, in Acrasia’s garden, her intemperance (excess, covetousness, greed, envy, and narcissism) catalyze the destruction of the flesh. In stanza 52, a foreshadowing occurs when Spenser incorporates a few of Ovid’s Metamorphosis characters such as Rhodope who commits suicide “of Rhodope...herself for grief did kill” and shortly after Daphne Phoebus kills herself out of a love sickness, “fair Daphne Phoebus heart with love did gore.” Later in the story, Guyon reverses Acrasia’s Circean spell that turns Verdant (her boy toy) and all of her other lovers that she turned into beasts back into men, “yet being men they did unmanly look...but one above the rest in special.” The previous line shows men who no longer behaved like men after spending their bodies with Acrasia and hyperbolized in the “one above the rest” called Grille, “that now he chooseth, with vile difference / to be a beast, and lack intelligence” (II.12.86-87). …show more content…

Significantly, Grille’s passage shows a congruity between Spenser and Aristotle’s notion that a soul must actuate knowledge in order to be considered a living soul as opposed to a soul that does not exercise knowledge—who in effect is asleep/dead. Moreover, the characteristics of a negative love’s ability to corrupt the soul and imbalance the humours ultimately lead to