Spenser simply cannot believe that he has left poor Florimell languishing for so long in Proteus’ dungeon! Trapped by both manmade and natural restraints– chained up and imprisoned at the bottom of a large rock– things look grim for her, as the poem seems to have learned from Amoret’s relatively easy escape from Lust. (All she had to do was make a run for it!) Florimell, after all, is known for fleeing, so maybe both Proteus AND Spenser need to tie her down to keep her where they want her… Spenser’s complicity in her imprisonment is an open question, as he does lament how long she’s been there, but then almost immediately interrupts his renewed attention to her with a long resume-boosting catalogue of rivers in the epic tradition. This poem is full of instances of violence against women, but this is an interesting example of the dangers of narrative neglect. (This kind of cruelty via neglect recurs in Book VI when Spenser narrates Serena’s rescue from the cannibals, in which she is so ashamed of her own nudity that she defers her rescue all through the night by hiding herself even from her hero until the daylight fully exposes her, an image which is the last we see of her in the poem…)
But I wonder if there is also a way in which the catalogue of rivers is *also* a kind of narrative neglect? Not as damaging, perhaps, but in listing every single wedding guest– “all those floods” and “all those Nymphes”– there does seem to be a kind of abdication of narratorial responsibility. He’s not making editorial choices about who is important and who is not. No, sir– Edmund Spenser just reports the facts.