By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-99) is one of the greatest of the Elizabethan poets. When he died in 1599 and was interred in Westminster Abbey, alongside his hero Geoffrey Chaucer, it’s rumoured that Shakespeare may have been among the mourners tossing poems into his grave.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The sovereign beauty which I do admire, / Witness the world how worthy to be praised’: so begins the third sonnet in Edmund Spenser’s 1595 sonnet sequence Amoretti, written to celebrate his own marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. As love poems to one’s newlywed bride go, it must have made the young Elizabeth blush with pride; the sonnet flatters her beauty using the courtly language of the sonnet sequence.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Taken from Edmund Spenser’s 1590s sonnet sequence Amoretti, this poem opens with a paradox: how come the poet’s fiery desire for his ice-cold beloved doesn’t thaw her coldness, but actually makes her even icier and more standoffish? Similarly, how come her coldness doesn’t cool his fire?
My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poem beginning ‘Oft when my spirit doth spread her bolder wings’ is part of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti, which the Elizabethan poet wrote about his courtship of his wife.
Oft, when my spirit doth spread her bolder wings,
In mind to mount up to the purest sky;
It down is weighed with thought of earthly things,
And clogged with burden of mortality;
Where, when that sovereign beauty it doth spy,
Resembling heaven’s glory in her light,
Drawn with sweet pleasure’s bait, it back doth fly,
And unto heaven forgets her former flight.
There my frail fancy, fed with full delight,
Doth bathe in bliss, and mantleth most at ease;
Ne thinks of other heaven, but how it might
Her heart’s desire with most contentment please.
Heart need not wish none other happiness,
But here on earth to have such heaven’s bliss.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti is one of the greatest of the Elizabethan sonnet sequences; after Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (which was the first great sonnet sequence in English), it is perhaps the greatest of all. Sonnet LXXV from Amoretti, beginning ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’, is probably the most famous poem in the cycle, and deserves closer analysis for its innovative use of a popular conceit.