The Faerie Queene is an extraordinarily difficult poem to grasp. By this I do not mean only that it is a difficult book to pick up – though the effort of enclosing the spine of some editions of the poem would stretch the largest of hands. It is a work of which the chief delight is elusiveness. It digresses; it continually changes tone and tack; and it never gets to the point (the vision of Gloriana in all her glory) which it sets as its chief goal. The poem slips through one's fingers as one reads. The smooth flow of the Spenserian stanza creates a beguilingly homogeneous surface, in which an apparently heroic knight could turn out to be a disguised magician, or a lady crying for pity could turn out to be a figure of the Antichrist. Dwarfs, dragons, hermits, witches, women made of snow, forest-dwelling virgins, all drift smoothly by, captured in the flow of Spenser's language, sealed in the music of his unique nine-line stanzas. The ‘Spenserian stanza’, as it came to be known, rhyming ababbcbcc, and ending with a twelvesyllable line, or alexandrine, invites repose: the rhymes interlock and lace back into each other, and the final line draws its slow length along, inviting readerly delay. The form of the poem fights a continual benevolent war with its content. The knights who dominate the action are tasked with pursuing villains, liberating nations, or reuniting lovers. Their efforts to move purposively onwards requires them to struggle against the reflective flow of Spenser's verse, which ebbs backwards endlessly.

The poem, huge, digressive, as big, as incompletable, and as complex as the business of living, was always slightly running away from its author. Appended to its first edition in 1590 (which included the first three books) was a Letter to Ralegh, which states that all the adventures related in the planned twelve books of the poem would ultimately come to rest at the annual feast of Gloriana. The parts of the poem which were printed – six books and two Cantos of Mutabilitie – never fulfil this grand design, and offer no more than a glimpse of Gloriana the Faerie Queene.