PREFACE
Dean’s Triptych (Alcina, Armida, Acrasia) unfolds as a hallucinatory journey in which the speaker passes through an enchanted garden and encounters the erotic worlds of the great Renaissance enchantresses
Thus the poem moves progressively from ordinary perception → visionary perception → enchanted garden → classical mythology → Renaissance romance → erotic seduction → explicit sexual embodiment → mystical transformation.
The important thing is that Dean makes the reader experience the same movement. The garden is not simply a symbol explained from outside: the poem itself becomes a sensory labyrinth, continually dissolving distinctions between painting and reality, nature and body, erotic pleasure and mystical revelation. The reader is led through the painted veil rather than merely being told that one exists.
Dean’s Triptych takes the reader on a hallucinatory erotic journey beginning on Laylat al-Qadr. Vision dissolves into golden light, perfumes, flowers, mirrors and Indra’s net, then into a labyrinthine garden populated by gods, satyrs, nymphs and enchantresses. Ruggiero and Rinaldo enter through erotic seduction; fruit, flowers and flesh merge. Music, scent and sexuality overwhelm perception until the woman finally consumes the man’s soul through his eyes