Friday, January 21, 2022

"My Love Is Like To Ice" by Edmund Spenser

 

My Love Is Like To Ice


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.



Enjoy the poem with beautiful music.


poem video👇

https://youtu.be/2AdQ6VMmi_A





Who wrote the poem "My Love Is Like To Ice" ?


Edmund Spencer (1552 or 1553 – January 13, 1599)

Edmund Spencer was an English poet, often considered as one of the greatest poets in the English language. Little is known about his family and childhood. He attended the Merchant Taylor School and later studied literature and religion at Cambridge University. Along with his poetry, he also had a political career, serving various official posts including a secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland. After his first wife died in 1594, he soon married Elizabeth Boyle, for whom he wrote many love poems.



"My Love Is Like To Ice" explanation


In the poem, the speaker compares his lover to ice and himself to fire. Despite the differences (or perhaps because of them), their love for each other grows greater. The poem is a fourteen-line Spenserian sonnet, pioneered by the poet, consisting of three quatrains with rhetorical questions and an answering couplet. This sonnet is also known as “Amoretti: XXX,” or “Sonnet 30,” which was one of 80 sonnets the poet wrote to celebrate his marriage to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle.


No comments:

Post a Comment