Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire

Sunday, June 3, 2012




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?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal'd with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind. 

A sonnet from Edmund Spenser, rhyming scheme, The lover trying hard to immortalise the relationship. 

The poem is a sonnet grouped into three quatrains and a couplet. The rhyme scheme of the first quatrain is ABAB / fire, great, desire, entreat; the second is BCBC / heat, cold, sweat, manifold; the third rhymes CDCD / told, ice, cold, device; and the couplet rhymes EE / mind, kind. 

The first line is a simile that compares his love/beloved one to ice and the speaker to a fire that for some reason does not thaw his frozen love. The more he pursues her, the faster she flees (the colder she gets!) . There is a 'law of contraries' being created here that defies natural law - those laws like gravity that operate on one and all in normal circumstances. But these are NOT normal times, the speaker alleges. This is a time for miracles in the realm of romance. We are in a foreign place where the usual laws do not apply. The couplet resolves the dilemma by sleight of language - the power of love can overrule natural love and change our very nature. 

2 comments:

Joy Palakkal said...

Nice One!!!
Wishing you a Great Time Ahead..

Viji said...

thanks Joy and that's Spenser for you :)

Post a Comment