Edmund Spenser – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Edmund Spenser’s ‘Easter’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Most glorious Lord of Lyfe that on this day / Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin’: so begins the sonnet ‘Easter’ by Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-99), which is the 68th poem in his sonnet sequence Amoretti. The poem is a joyous celebration of the Easter festival and the meaning behind it.

Most glorious Lord of Lyfe! that, on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin;
And, having harrowd hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin;
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye,
Being with Thy deare blood clene washt from sin,
May live for ever in felicity!

Five Fascinating Facts about Edmund Spenser

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. The word ‘blatant’ was invented in Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene.

Spenser coined the word ‘blatant’ when he came up with the fictional many-tongued creature, the Blatant beast, in his epic poem. The Faerie Queene is a vast allegorical work of fantasy which mythologises England (using native myths, such as St George, alongside a sort of Chaucerian English) as a great Christian nation, ruled over by ‘Gloriana’ (i.e. Queen Elizabeth I).

The Curious Origin of the Word ‘Blatant’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The meaning of the word ‘blatant’ is, one suspects, blatantly obvious. But how it arrived at its modern meaning is not. The word has a curious history within the world of English poetry, and ‘blatant’ took its time to arrive at its modern definition. Its origin is perhaps one of the most curious in all of the English language.