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.
‘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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle 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 […]