The Visions Of Petrarch Comments

Spenser had a serious reason for writing these seven allegorical poems with their symbolic and visionary imagery and their elements of Calvinistic and Protestant theology and morality and their elements of classical mythology. In these poems he picked out some vices that the true believer had to fight off. There was a lot of religious controversies at that time surrounding these vises but he viewed them through the lens of his own Protestant [true] beliefs. The allegorical lessons the reader was intended to learn from reading these poems were supposed to prepare him for death and judgment.