Book IV, Stanzas 5-8 Summary

Stanza 5: The narrator addresses a man whom he accuses of stealing his eyes from a certain blonde woman. He supposes that the man did so because he wanted to appear beautiful even though he was not really. The man, the narrator says, also once imprisoned a man for twenty years. When the man finally escaped, he exacted his revenge by scalping his former captor. Though the narrator insists that the man is more evil than he is, he tries to tell his interlocutor some stories to establish the legitimacy of his own claim to evil. He says, for example, that he once watched a young girl drown in a lake. He even once imprisoned a man for five years and, like his interlocutor, was scalped by him out of revenge.

Stanza 6: The narrator recalls once falling into...