The Faerie Queene Book 2, Cantos 1-6

I have less to say about Guyon, the knight of Temperance. He travels with a Palmer dressed in black (and who is called, sometimes, the black palmer). The tale seems to make a lot at first of Archimago seeking revenge towards the Redcrosse knight, which gets crossed with pursuing Guyon. However, he only appears occasionally, first to Braggadochio and Trompart (who stole Guyon's horse after Canto 2) where he promises to get them Arthur's sword (when Braggadochio makes excuses for not having a sword of his own), and again at the end of Canto 6, where Archimago comes at the right time to cure Pyrochles, who has been thoroughly burning on the inside after fighting Furor.

The preface has an interesting note, where the author is trying to justify the depiction of the Faerie Land through comparison to such places as Indian Peru and Virginia. As he puts it, the Faerie Land may exist because it hasn't yet been discovered, like these lands. Though, at the same time, that seems a little too much of a tricky point to make, since it is clear in other places that the temporality of the Faerie Land is in both the past and the present. Time and spatial discovery are both troublesome tropes here.

There's really not much to do with Acrasia and the Bower of Bliss yet. As with the dragon in the first book, there are occasional reminders of their existence, but nothing really present. The closest comes when, after Pyrochles fights Furor, Atin gives him up for dead and flees to warn Cymochles. (Pyrochles is the irascible passion, Cymochles the concupiscible passion.) Cymochles is lounging in the Bower of Bliss, alternately getting pleased by all the nymphs and sprites about him and feigning sleep so he can peek at them. Through him, and the example of Phaedra and the Idle Lake, we begin to see the balance of challenges against Temperance. Where in the first book the main opposition to happiness was despair against faith, devaluing the worldly life to turn either to death or a higher life, here the weight falls differently. Phaedra devalues the pursuit of worth in arms and armor in order to promote a life of decadence and pleasure. It's an entirely different way of losing sight of virtue. This time, it is really about maintaining a measure of balance between different extremes that would cloud wisdom and perception. Sometimes the extremes are wrath and idleness. We see this also in the three sisters in Canto 2, Elissa, Medina, and Perissa. They've split a castle in three, each chosen a knight they favor (Medina - Guyon, Elissa - Huddibras, Perissa - Sans loy). Elissa is too sour and ungracious. Perissa is too given to excesses in joys and choler. Medina seems to strike the sweet spot in the middle.

So there's a sweet spot. There's also the strangeness of the child, who at the start of the second Canto cannot wash its wounds of blood. The previous canto has provided an introduction of the themes of extremes through a lady who loved a knight, who was corrupted by Acrasia in the Bower of Bliss. She had his child, tried to win him back, but Acrasia poisons the knight (with yet another cup) and the lady kills herself in despair. The baby has been bathed in their blood and earth, and Guyon with the Palmer has sworn to look after them. Soon, through the second Canto, the blood that cannot be washed away (in a font that is chaste and won't touch the blood) is taken to be a sign and reminder that the Orphan should wreak his revenge. He's called Ruddymane. How this is not a temptation to some later excess, I have yet to see. Perhaps it's like Francis Bacon later explains, that there is a kind of revenge that can be justly sought, when it's in excess of the law but right is on your side. (He doesn't put it exactly that way - he's being typically aphoristic - but the sense is there.)