But acting as an avenging Amazon in her nemesis phase, she wishes to bring with her a male victim as a sacrificial victim who will be the thanksgiving offering for this one's harvest year and the propitiation for a successful growing season the following spring. In these actions she is the opposite of Gretchen in Goethe's Faust, where she is the victim of male aggression without benefit of revenge. Thus in stanza VII the lady poisons the unsuspecting knight. He then falls into a dream in which he sees the woman's first victims. And when he wakes up, he finds himself defenseless in what for him is a wasteland but for the narrator is simply the natural scenery of late autumn. For an explanation of the White Goddess myth see Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948. See also