Love in Spenser’s Amoretti
•It is sonnet
cycle of love with a detailed description of the lady’s physical beauty and the
lover’s happy
feelings.
•Amoretti is
a story of love between earthlings which is aimed at marriage.
•Meanwhile, Spenser sanctifies
the love by Platonizing and Christianizing the lady.
•Thus it is
clear that the love in the mind of
Spenser is not just an earthly one or a heavenly one separately, but both.
• It is a
combination of both earthly love and sacred love.
Introduction
•Sonnet sequences were a great vogue
during the English Renaissance.
•Amoretti,
a sonnet sequence published in 1595 together with
Epithalamion, “part private and autobiographical, part
mythological”
(Hollander & Kermode, 1973: p. 320)
•It is usually
understood
as a record of the poet’s courtship to his second wife
Elizabethan Boyle whom he married in June 1594, and it
is the first sonnet sequence “to have been written by a poet
to
his bride” (Lerner, 1990: p. 455).
•Spenser names his sonnet sequence
Amoretti, which means “little loves” (Maclean &
Prescott, 1993: p. 587), or “little loves poem”
(Magill, 1992: p. 3158) or “little cupids” (Hollander &
Kermode, 1973: p. 320),
•In detail, “intimate little tokens
of love made out of ancient materials deriving, primarily, from Italy” (Martz,
1991: p. 107).
•No matter what words are used to
interpret the title, one thing seems clear: what Spenser probes into in
Amoretti is love.
•But Spenser’s love is quite
different from his contemporary sonneteers.
•He stands alone as a poet of
marriage.
•Through seeking a real love of the
flesh and the spirit, Spenser interprets the nature of true love.
An Earthly Love
•Amoretti is not about passion but
about love between earthlings.
• To
celebrate his love, Spenser employs the traditional image
of
love, Cupid:
“I
mote
perceiue
how in her glauncing
sight,
legions of loues
with little wings did fly:
darting their deadly arrowes
fyry
bright,
at euery rash
beholder passing by” (XVI, 5-8)
•In this sonnet “legions of loues
with little wings” brings forth an image
of Cupid, the representation of god of love: the lady’s eyebeams
contain
“amoretti”—Cupid, who shoots the deadly arrows at rash
beholders.
•The winged
god of love, Cupid, appears many times in Amoretti:
“him” in Sonnet IV, the “blinded guest” in Sonnet VIII,
“vnrighteous
Lord of love” in Sonnet X, “king” in Sonnet XIX and
“the winged God” and “Cupid” in Sonnet LX.
•The image of Cupid is a symbol of
corporeal love (Hu, 2001: p.
132).
•It is
obvious that the love Spenser pursues is quite different
from
the medieval
one
which is too spiritualized, and also different
from Petrarchan one which “is rather a theatre of the
lover’s
desire alone” (Waller, 1994: p. 76).
•On the
one hand, Spenser’s
love
is an earthly love of real human beings with erotic
desire
waiting to be fulfilled in the way of marriage.
•On the
other hand, it is a mutual love without which no true love
exists
at all.
•Spenser puts the lady on the earth,
the secular and sublunary world.
• One
can see an ordinary woman who wears a net of gold (Sonnet
XXXVII), dresses and makes up before her mirror (Sonnet
XLV) and does “drawen work” (Sonnet LXXI).
•She lives in
her bower, and she has a fear of losing liberty when falling
in
love with a man (Sonnet LXV).
•To praise the earthy lady Spenser
uses more ink on her physical beauty.
•She is
the sovereign beauty (Sonnet III) whom he admires
with “rare perfection of each good part” (Sonnet XXIIII)
• She is a
fair flower in whom fresh youth contains (Sonnet
III);
she has attractive eyes (Sonnet VII) which are hart-thrilling
(Sonnet
XII).
•And the most powerful and
attractive part of her body is her eyes: her
eyes are so charming and powerful that even her glances
will
become arrows or lightning.
•When being
looked at mildly
“with
louely
hew”, the lover’s soul is “with life and loue inspired”
(Sonnet VII).
• So
the speaker tries his best to describe her eyes but
finally he realizes that he can’t find anything on the earth
which
glitters to compare to the brightness of her eyes:
Ref
(IX,
5-12)
•The smile on the lady’s graceful
face is also attractive and sweet.
•“Indeed,
throughout the sequence she is certainly one of the most
smiling and ‘chearefull’
ladies to appear in any English sequences”
(Martz, 1991: p. 106).
•The sweet
smile is “the daughter of
the “Queene
of loue”,
expressing “all thy mothers powrefull
art”
to make the lover’s soul “rauished
in a trance” (Sonnet XXXIX).
• For
this smile with “amiable cheare”, Spenser compares
it to the sunlight in the summer which is pleasant and
lovely (Sonnet XL).
•But for the lover, love is not
always so sweet and so pleasant.
•In opposition to the lover’s
enjoyment of the physical beauty is his suffering
from the lady.
•For Spenser,
love is a war and battle, for which the lover must be
brave, bright and patient to fight again
and again with his “sweet” and “cruell”
warrior (Sonnets
XI, XII, XIIII, and LVII).
•All these sufferings seem to be a
kind of test.
•In Sonnet
LXIII,
after unendurable trial and testing, the lover does see the
happy
shore in front of him.
And
Sonnet
LXIIII celebrates their joyful kiss,
in which he tastes the odour of his lady that smells more
fragrant
than any flower.
And
in
Sonnet LXVII, unlike other sonneteers such as Rime 190 of
Petrarch and “whoso list” of Wyatt,
the lover finally catches his “deer” after a long pursuit
and
attempt:
•The tying of a half-trembling deer
suggests the betrothal to the lady
who is still nervous about her new life (Maclean & Prescott,
1993: p. 614).
•And the
lady’s “paradoxical submission must be
attributed not to the successful suit of the amorous male,
but to her own change of heart and willing participation in
a
delicate act of self-conquest” (King, 1990: p. 168).
•Although sonnet
LXVII seems an announcement of the lover’s fulfilment of
desire, actually the love is a mutual one indeed for both
the
young man and the lady.
•Such is the love story that
Amoretti tells in the secular world.
•In the story Spenser interprets his
idea of love between real human beings.
•It expresses
the un-expectable fate and the long painful process
of the lover’s wooing, and also the pleasant feelings
of
true love between a couple of earthlings who can marry
each
other finally.
A Sacred Love
•Spenser’s love does not only belong
to the secular world between earthlings,
but it identifies itself with sacred nature with characters
of Platonism and Christian ideas as well.
•Spenser’s attitude toward love in
Amoretti agrees with that of Platonism.
•According to
Plato, man in motion drives, desires and struggles
to achieve the culminating objects of his desire, and
man’s
desiring always implies a desire to what is good.
•For this supreme
object of man’s desiring, Plato calls it the good or absolute
beauty.
•All man’s
driving is motivated by a search for beauty and
goodness (Singer, 1984: pp. 53-54).
•Rivers (1979: p. 35) explains that
the central theory of Plato and his
followers is that of the two worlds—the Ideas or Forms theory.
•The first is the world of Ideas or
Forms, which is the world of Being, stable, eternal, immutable and perfect.
•The second world is that of a copy
of the first one, which is the world of Becoming and change.
•The human being belongs to the
second world, and his soul which comes from the first has a longing for a
return or ascent to the first.
•In Symposium, love is a staircase
between the two worlds, and man can get the absolute beauty or
the ideal love in the other world by passing five steps: from
love of physical beauty to love of God (Plato, 1993: pp.
47-48).
•The bearing of Platonism can be
seen easily in Amoretti.
•Sonnet VIII is, first of all, a
praise of “absolute beauty” and virtuous love
in Platonic idea. Spenser says that the lady is more beautiful
than any pretty girl and her “living fire” shines and
burns
up and up to “the maker”—the God, so that the blinded
Cupid
cannot shoot the darts while the “Angels” lead the frail
minds to rest on her “heavenly beauty bound” with chaste
desires.
•Lewis (1998: p. 144) sums up that
the essential attitude of Platonism is
aspiration or longing: the human soul, imprisoned in
the
shadowy, unreal world of Nature, stretches out its hands and
struggles
towards the beauty and reality of that which lies (as
Plato says) “on the other sides of existence”.
•Thus the
lady in
sonnet
VIII, with an image of ascending up to the real world, is
the
avatar of Platonic world of Idea, a world of the original, real
and
clear:Ref.(VIII,
1-2)
•The holy conceptions of Platonic
love is implied rather than stated also in many other sonnets, such as Sonnets
III, VII, IX, XLV, LXI, LXXII, LXXIX and sonnet LXXXVIII.
•In Sonnet III, the lady is “the soverayne
beauty”, with her heavenly fire kindled in the frail spirit of the lover
raising him from baseness to pureness.
•The lover
is at loss for her “celestial hew” and he can only
speak and write the ideal love in his heart that his wit cannot
dictate.
•In Sonnet
XLV, Spenser regards the lady as the image of
“Idea”.
•Because the
world of “forms” is only visible to intellect,
no earthly eyes can enjoy the immortal beauty: Ref.(XLV,
5-8)
•In Sonnet LXI, the lady is a saint
of the first world and “the Idoll” of
the lover’s thought.
•She is divinely worked, born of the
brood of heavenly Angels and is brought up “with the crew of blessed Saynts”.
•Sonnet LXXIX presents the real
nature of the Platonic ideal beauty:
•Spenser also endows the love
between the couple with Christian idea.
•Amoretti compares
the lover’s wooing for love to the worship for
God with the desire for salvation from the fallen world
to
the heavenly.
• A
case in point is Sonnet XXII.
•On the first
day
of the holy Lent, a holiday for fasting and penitence with
devotion,
the lover is willing to do some service for the lady,
his “sweet Saynt”.
•The lover
wants to build a fair temple for the
lady in his mind, in which he puts her bright and noble image.
•He,
like a sacred priest who is devotional and pious enough
for
God, will sit before the godly image, praying, contemplating
and
expecting day and night without any distracting thoughts.
(Ref.
XXII,
9-14)
•It is clear that the lady in this
sonnet is the lover’s goddess, the source
of his bliss.
•Therefore the
lover, being a sinful man originated from
the first Adam, is ready to sacrifice his heart as a
dearest
relic to her on the altar to calm her ire, and at the same time,
the lover himself can get election from the fleshly to the holy
world.
•Such comparison
of the lover’s wooing to the worship for
God’s grace emphasizes Spenser’s praise for spiritualized love
which is saintly because of God’s love of mankind.
A Combined Love
•Spenser is an exceptional genius
with a diversified idea about love.
•But actually
earthly love and sacred love accord with and interact
with
each other.
•Amoretti distinguishes
Spenser from the Renaissance sonneteers of his age
by combining earthly love and sacred love together with
marriage as the holy aim, as Nelson (1965)
puts it:
“Spenser neither declares the earthly
incompatible with the
heavenly, as Sidney does, nor
does he envision an un-broken
ascent which spurs earth in its
aspiration for heaven. He would have both loves, the
one infinitely good, the
other good too because, though
finite, it imitates the infinite”
(p.
114)
•To explore such mixed qualities of
the love in Amoretti, Spenser demonstrates
his artful skill at using the token of carnal love—the
image
of Cupid.
•Traditionally there
are two Cupids in mythological history.
• Hyde
(1990: p. 201) states that the false Cupid
is blindfolded, plays cruel spots with his bow and arrow,
and kindles lustful fires in the hearts of random victims, while
the
true Cupid, who is an unarmed one, benevolent and gentle,
goes in places apart from the world of man.
• It is
not unusual
for
the winged god bearing darts to appear so many a time in
Amoretti.
•What makes
Spenser specific is his use of this old-traditional token
of love: he gets Cupid under the control of reason so
that the blinded god cannot shoot his arrows freely to arouse
lustful
desire to make the random victims die of burning with filthy
“love”.
•In Amoretti, there is a happy king
of lovers with “girland crouned”
(Sonnet XIX), a winged God whom the lover asks to shorten
his
journey so that the lover and the beloved can be conjoined
(Sonnet
LX).
•In contrast,
there is also a cruel and torturing Cupid
darting arrows.
•The unique
art to handle the image of the gods of love, especially the
cruel one, makes the earthy love
and the sacred love united
•Amoretti gives a figurative
description of Cupid darting through the
lady’s eyes which are pretty and powerful enough like the
fatal arrows, and even a glance from these eyes can make
a
frail heart burn flame of desire. Ref (VIII, 5-8)
•Since the inspiring beams of the
beloved derives from the heavenly light,
Spenser does not let Cupid’s darts to harm the base affections
of the lover, but on the contrary, Angels come to guide
the lover to rise up and up until to the chaste desire (not
erotic burning fire) in the saintly world.
•This is a
suitable experiment
of
Spenser trying to combine sublunary love with saintly
love.
•And in Sonnet XVI, Spenser
exemplifies his skilful ability to master Cupid.
•One day
the lover’s heart is in amazement for the “immortal
light” of those lovely eyes, in whose glancing “legions
of
loues”
shoot their “fyry bright” darts at those who is so rash
to
gaze at the beauty. Ref
(XVI,
9-12)
•This time the lover avoids Cupid’s
destructive arrows not by angels’
help but by the twinkle of the lady’s eyes.
•This “twinkle”
of
the
beauty who is “diuine and borne of heauenly
seed” (Sonnet
LXXIX) stops the “misintended
dart” but it does not stop love
•It makes
the earthy love more sweet and holy in a deliberately playful
and smiling way.
•The “twincle”,
therefore, embodies
the
lady’s reason to control fleshly desire, and at the same
time,
it serves the function of directing the earthly love to a
unification
with heavenly love.
•Earthly love and sacred love is
tied to each other inextricably in Amoretti: they are interactional and
interdependent.
•The lady,
who
symbolizes
the divine beauty, “deriu’d from
that fayre
Spirit” and made of “the skye”,
another “Element” besides the four elements
earth, water, fire and air (Sonnet LV), works as the lifting
agent to the lover.
•Because the
lover recognizes that the love is “my soules
long lacked foode, my heauens
blis”
(Sonnet
I), and in return, the lover, a wooer among “men of meane
degree”
(Sonnet LXI), will also help the lady to be more virtuous
and
more holy.
•So when the lady looks at him
mildly with lovely appearance, the lover’s
“soule”
is inspired with life and love (Sonnet VII), and this
love is his “liues last ornament” by whom his “spirit
out
of
dust was raysed”
(Sonnet LXXIIII) “to an higher pitch” when thinking
of “whose heauenly
hew” (Sonnet LXXX).
•It is also true that the lover,
although being lowly, produces a stimulating effect
on his beloved.
•Even the
lady herself takes on contradictory aspects:
she is an absolute beauty of divine virtue with saintly
nature and she is also an earthly woman in the temporal
world
with her feet being on the earth.
•So for the lady there exists a
problem of salvation, for which the lover plays an active role in the matter of
the lady’s leaving earth for heaven. (XIII, 10-12)
•In such a case, the lover’s
courtship becomes essential.
•Therefore the lover asks the lady’s
grace “to vouchsafe to look on me”
because “such lowlinesse
shall make you lofty be” (Sonnet XIII).
•He promises
to praise her “up to a high degree” (Sonnet
LXXXII) “since your light hath once enlumind
me, with
my
reflex yours shall encreased be”
(Sonnet LXVI).
•This interdependent nature of the
union of earthly and sacred love agrees
with Plato’s idea of love.
• Quitslund
(1990: p. 547) points out,
quoted from Phaedrus 255D, that when love is exchanged
mutually
the lover and the beloved are mirrors to each other.
•And Rivers
(1979: p. 38) gives a further explanation that in Ficino’s
system each order in the universal hierarchy—body, soul,
angelic mind and god—aspires to that above, and man always
struggle
to reach god.
•But because
of the intermediate position of
human’s soul, man can both look upwards or downwards which
shows that he has free choice whether to reach the
truth or not.
•Spenser applies
his mirror metaphor in Sonnet XLV.
•In this
sonnet the lover persuades the lady not to look at
herself in the crystal mirror because her goodly image and
beautiful
face appears clearer in his mind than in the mirror:(XLV,
1-4)
•That the saintly image of the lady
is contained in the heart of the lover
clearly illustrates that the saintly nature of the beloved helps
the
lover to be holy and at the same time the lover works as
a
stimulus to make the beloved more lofty.
•Such is the love Spenser strives
for in Amoretti, love both being earthly
and sacred, for the character of which Nelson (1965)
sums up:
“Spenser’s system of love, as even so
cursory a study shows, reaches upward from this world
but keeps foothold within
it… He saw a likeness between the
love that draws the
sexes together, producing noble
deeds and perpetuating the race, and the love that draws
man to God and fills the
world with beauty”(p.
115).
•And therefore the thematic meaning
of Spenser’s Amoretti is justified itself.
•Firstly,
quite different from lust or simple erotic desire which
Spenser calls “base things”, what Spenser needs is
pure and
true love which is full of true emotions with pleasant feelings
between
real human beings on the sublunary world.
•Secondly, Spenser’s love in
Amoretti is a complexity being both earthly
and sacred, aiming at marriage, which possesses a holy
nature
of longing for the soul and virtue to ascend to the heavenly
world
of God.
Works cited
Love
in Spenser’s Amoretti
Jiancheng
Wang1,
Zhengshuan
Li2
Foreign
Language
Department, Baoding University, Baoding, China
School
of
Foreign Languages, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang,
China
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