Amoretti

Amoretti is a sonnet-cycle tracing the suitor's long courtship and eventual wooing of his beloved. The work begins with two sonnets in which the speaker addresses his own poetry, attempting to invest his words with the power to achieve his goal (the wooing of Elizabeth Boyle). From the third sonnet through the sixty-second sonnet, the speaker is in an slmost constant state of emotional turmoil and frustrated hopes. His beloved refuses to look favorably upon his suit, so his reaction ranges from despairing self-deprecation to angry tirade against her stubbornness. Most often the speaker dwells upon his beloved's beauty, both inner and outer, and the overpowering effects this beauty has upon him. He uses a variety of motifs to explicate his feelings and thoughts toward the subject of his ardor: predator and prey, wartime victor and captive, fire and ice, and hard substances that eventually soften over long periods of time. Each of these is intended to convey some aspect of his beloved's character or his own fears and apprehensions.

In Sonnet 63, the Amoretti under goes a drastic change in tone. The long-sought beloved has acceded to the speaker's request, making her his fiancée. Several sonnets of rejoicing occur, followed by several expressing the speaker's impatience at the lengthy engagement prior to the wedding day. Here, too, the speaker turns his attention from his earlier aspects of the beloved's physical beauty--her eyes and her hair in particular--and begins to be more familiar with her, to the point of describing in detail the scent of her breasts. From Sonnet 63 through Sonnet 85, the speaker revisits many of his earlier motifs, changing them to suit the new relationship between himself and his beloved. Now he is the hunter and she is the game; he is the victor, and she the vanquished. His earlier criticisms of her pride and stubbornness also change to become admiration for her constancy and strength of mind.

From Sonnet 86 to the end of the sonnet-cycle proper (Sonnet 89), division enters into the relationship. Sonnet 86 marks a moment of wrath on the part of the fiancée, a result of some lie told to her by an individual whom the speaker curses in no uncertain terms. Sonnets 87 through 89 dwell upon the speaker's misery at being separated from his beloved, but there is an implied expectation that they will, eventually, be reunited.

The sonnet-cycle ends with a set of stanzas returning to the poem's title character, Cupid. The first set of stanzas describe how Cupid led the speaker into harm when he was young by drawing his attention to a hive full of honey; when the speaker reached for the honey, he was stung by the resident bees and Cupid flew away. Later, Cupid wounds the speaker with an arrow placed there by Diane, goddess of the hunt. Instead of instilling passionate love into the speaker, it instead causes pain.

The next set of stanzas turn Cupid's attention from the speaker and toward the beloved. They describe an incident in which Cupid comes across the speaker's beloved, but mistakes her for his own mother, Venus, goddess of love and beauty. The speaker tells Cupid that the mistake is understandable, as he has not been the first to confuse the two.

The final set of stanzas focus almost entirely on an incident involving Cupid and Venus. As a child, Cupid is annoyed by a bee buzzing around him as he tries to rest. His mother warns him to leave the bee alone, but Cupid instead impetuously grabs the bee in his hand. He is, of course, stung and releases the bee; his mother attempts to soothe him while teaching him a lesson: he has had no pity on many mortals whom his arrows have "stung," so perhaps he should show the same kindness to them that she is now showing to him. Cupid, however, misses the lesson entirely and goes on arbitrarily firing his arrows at mortals without thought for the consequences of unrequited love. The speaker returns to himself as the target of Cupid's indifferent attentions, resigning himself to languish in unconsummated love until Cupid sees fit to end his suffering.

Themes:

Love as Conflict

In Amoretti love is often depicted as a conflict. In some sonnets it is a battle waged between the beloved and the suitor: "she cruell warriour doth her sefe address,/to battell, and teh weary war renew'th"; in others it is the natural conflict between predator and prey. The speaker never loses his desire for the beloved, but often sees the pain involved as almost too great for the reward he hopes to find at the end.

The Blason Convention

A common convention in Spenser's day was the blason, a poetic form in which a beautiful woman's features are described using metaphors for each specific body part. In some sonnets and in Epithalamion, he makes such a list of his beloved's physical features; in others he inverts the blason by taking one feature of the beloved and comparing it to several different items, as when he compares her beauty to that of a rose, eglantine, and juniper--all flowers whose beauty is protected by sharp thorns or briars.

Pride and Humility

In both the Protestant Christian tradition and the classical Greek tradition, pride is often referred to as the greatest sin a person can commit. Spenser deals with pride in Amoretti, sometimes criticizing his beloved for her proud stance, but more often defending her pride as an outward manifestation of her inner perfection. That she seems proud to lesser men is true only because these men (including the speaker) are truly lesser beings than she. She is not arrogant--she merely is who and what she was created to be.

Her humility, on the other hand, is also asserted. The speaker claims she humbles herself to accept his proposal, and questions why one so celestial in nature would join herself to one so clearly mundane. Others seem incapable of appreciating her humility, however; they see her pride and are moved to either envy or awe at her overpowering self-confidence and the innate virtue of her being.

Dangerous Beauty

More often than not, Spenser describes the beloved in Amoretti as simultaneously beautiful and destructive. She is a "cruell warriour," "a Panther," or the rocks upon which unwitting ships may wreck themselves. She is compared to a rose, her beauty accessible only through thorns. Her glance brings life or death, while her refusal to accede to the suitor's request threatens to kill him.

Even in Epithalamion Spenser cannot resist describing her inner beauty as something so awe-inspiring that those few who ever apprehend it would be struck motionless as one having seen mythical Medusa's face and turned to stone.

The Passage of Time

Spenser often used his poetry to mark time, as if her could prevent its passage by freezing it in verse. Amoretti encompasses tow New Year's Day celebrations, the second of which becomes an occasion for Spenser to reflect on both the past year and his past forty-one years of life. In Epithamalion, Spenser meticulously records the hours of the day from before dawn to late into the wedding night. The ode also encompasses the passage of a year in its 365 long lines, corresponding to the days in a year. The ode's content progresses from the enthusiasm of youth to the concerns of middle age by beginning with high hopes for a joyful day and ending with an eye toward the speaker's legacy to future generations.

Pagan Love

Though firmly entrenched in the Protestant Christian tradition, Spenser followed the artists of his day in admiring the work and beliefs of the ancient Greeks. Nowhere is this more evident than in Amoretti and Epithalamion, where the driving emotion--love--is given free rein to roam the fields of nymphs and drink deeply in the bowers of Bacchus. Spenser uses the most lusty of pagan traditions to emphasize his full-bodied passion for his bride and for life itself. In Spenser's poetic world, there is no division between spirit and flesh; to exalt one is to exalt the other.

Legacy

Spenser's verse is permeated with references to "memorials" meant to outlast the person or even memorialized by eons. His beloved in Amoretti may one day find her beauty fading, but his lines of poetry, in which he has recoreded her beauty and virtue more accurately than any other art can devise, will survive as long as does the written word. A similar dedication to the persistence of poetry occurs in Epithalamion, but here Spenser's concern with his legacy becomes more blatant: the ode ends with several stanzas exhorting the gods to make his wife fertile and grant that they can conceive a child on their wedding night. The second to last stanza describes a multitude of descendants who will inherit "heavenly tabernacles" and rise to the celestial realms, giving Spenser's focus on progeny a cosmic significance.

Characters:

The Suitor

The speaker of Amoretti is consistently the suitor attempting to woo his beloved. This suitor has a strong real-world connection to the poet, Edmund Spenser, since he wrote these poems as part of his suit to Elizabeth Boyle. However, Spenser also intended these poems for publication, so any attempt to identify autiobiographical details within the sonnets should always be tempered by an understanding that Spenser was already a professional poet at the time of the writing, and so a complete identification of the suitor with Edmund Spenser is not always justified.

The Beloved

Throughout Amoretti, the speaker either describes or addresses a beautiful woman whom he seeks to woo. With only rare exception, the "she" in every sonnet is this beloved, who for most of the poetic sequence rebuffs the speaker's attempts to win her hand. Historically, the Beloved may be identified as Elizabeth Boyle, for whom Spenser wrote these sonnets in his suit for her hand in marriage. The reader should be warned, however, that a direct comparison to Elizabeth Boyle should always be made with caution since Spenser, a professional poet, also intended these sonnets for publication. Also of import is the probability that the speaker is an unreliable narrator, caught up in his emotional turmoil, and so his representation of the beloved may be skewed depending on his perception of her attitude toward himself.

The Groom

The suitor of Amoretti has become the groom in Epithamalion. The groom is simultaneously a stand-in for Edmund Spenser and a microcosm of human experience. He proceeds through the day very much as Edmund Spenser may have, but also proceeds through the stages in a man's life in the ode. He begins with the childlike joy of anticipating a new day, progresses to the passionate impatience of a young lover, arrives at the promised moment of conjugal bliss, then turns his eyes toward the future generations he hopes to beget.

The Bride

The beloved of Amoretti is now the bride in Epithamalion. As with the beloved, she can be identified with Elizabeth Boyle, but only cautiously. The bride also represents the ideal woman in her beauty, her inner virtues, and her submission to her husband's will. Although she is the catalyst for the wedding, she is often sidelined in favor of the poets' descriptions of the wedding party, the gods he is invoking, or the children he hopes she will bear for him.