Spenser possibly intended Urania's flight in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 527–32) to foreshadow Polyhymnia's panegyric of Elizabeth (ll. 571–88). As Yates argues, Astraea became a symbol for the Queen, especially in her Virgilian incarnation as the inaugurator of a new golden age. The Elizabethan settlement is imaged in the idea of Astraea's descent back into the world in the person of Elizabeth. So Peele's Descensus Astraeae (1591) presents ‘this gentle nymph Astraea faire’ as a goddess inimical to ‘cruel warres’, but now miraculously ‘Shadowing the person of a peerlesse Queene’. The Elizabeth- Astraea formula became a powerful myth at the service of the Elizabethan state. But it is one which (Yates notwithstanding) Spenser seems reticent of using explicitly. Though Astraea is Artegall's tutor in Justice in The Faerie Queene V.I, in his depiction of Mercilla – the allegorical symbol of Elizabeth as a just monarch – Spenser makes no unequivocal allusion to the Astraea material.

Even though Polyhymnia's praise of Elizabeth gives an opportunity to present her as both the redescended Astraea and true patron of poetry, I believe that Spenser does not take it. If he had incorporated an unequivocal image of Elizabeth as Astraea/Urania in Polyhymnia's complaint, this figure could dispense both ideal justice and artistic patronage befitting ‘this golden age’ she presides over, and eradicate the mortal sin which Urania believes has precipitated the crisis. Polyhymnia's panegyric (ll. 571–82) does at first seem to recall Urania's vocabulary. The phrase ‘Makers majestie’ reduplicates line 512, which is at the heart of Urania's vision; yet in this case it is a simple compliment rather than the visionary goal of human knowledge. Similarly, in calling Elizabeth ‘The true Pandora of all heavenly graces’, Spenser evokes another common epideictic trope. Peele provides an inclusive mythic blazon of the Queen when he calls her ‘Our faire Astraea, our Pandora faire, / Our faire Eliza, or Zabeta faire’. But in the context of The Teares, Pandora is not Astraea. The compliment is a straightforward allusion to the etymology of the name ‘Pandora’ and serves to illustrate Polyhymnia's praise of the Queen as a patron. Elizabeth is the giver of ‘all gifts’ to the ‘divinest wits’ of Polyhymnia's élite group of court poets.