Story interest in Spenser's Faerie Queene Book III, canto iv branches off in three directions. The poet's eye follows Britomart until, after wounding Marinell, she rides off along the Rich Strand; then the poet turns to Marinell's mother, the mourning nymph Cymoent; with her ineffectual curse of Britomart, the story line reverses briefly to the heroine and then ricochets off to Prince Arthur who is pursuing Florimell in another part of the greatly complicated forest. It is all somewhat confusing and abrupt, but Spenser in fact has never contracted with his readers for a cantoenclosed unity. In this case, however, the disparate narrative strands, rather like relay racers handing on a torch, do support a structured coherence. One way this coherence is achieved is through pattern; characters have little to do with one another for the most part, but they move in like ways. The primary structural pattern alternates journey with formal complaints. Britomart, seeking her love, rides to the end of the land and speaks her lament on the coast; Cymoent travels over that sea to her supposedly dead son and then utters her complaint on the same shore; Arthur chases through the forest after Florimell and when night blears the track delivers an invective. Journey and lament; and the latter always spoken at some verge, an extremity in place or time. Furthermore, repetitions of images and words link the separate enterprises and expressions of Britomart, Cymoent, and Arthur, sustaining a distinct atmosphere, forming a pattern that survives an apparent inadvertence about plot. The most salient inner relationship, however, is thematic, in the complaints themselves. The complaints are dramatically appropriate locally; but, more, they form a progression, increasing one over the other in length, scope, and animus. It appears that they are arranged so as to compose a cumulative protest against the ineluctable accidents and the dreaded certainties that make human beings finally vulnerable and subject to destiny. If this protest is not sharply urgent, that is because of the manner of Spenser's presentation. For this canto is rich