Saint George and the Red Crosse Knight

Today is the feast of St George, the patron saint of England. St. George is the Knight of the Red Crosse in the first book of Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Qveene. Armed with Jung and Kinsey, I wrote about Spenser in college. Spenser in the Oxford Standard Authors edition has painfully small type, but I recently bought a Penguin edition of Fairie Qveene more appropriate for my fading eyesight. It’s the first long classic poem I’ve read since Byron’s Don Juan. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead,” says Shakespeare’s Henry V:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot.
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”