This is the first real class of the semester.  We think a little bit about what allegory would mean, for Spenser and for Milton, by starting out with a reading of Milton's Sonnet 23 ("Methought I saw my late espouséd saint") -- the allegorical appearance of love, sweetness, goodness in her person.  In Spenserian and Miltonic allegory, it's not that figures who are present represent abstractions: it's that abstraction becomes present as and in the other person.  Sort of Levinasian, though I don't say so in the Podcast.