Amoretti XXX: My love is like to ice, and I to fire
Edmund Spenser’s poem “My love is like to ice, and I to fire” is number 30 in a sequence of 89 sonnets titled “Amoretti”. It was first published in 1595 in London, of which only six complete copies remain today. The volume memorializes Spenser’s courtship of Elizabeth Boyle and the couple’s wedding in 1594.
Edmund Spenser was born around the year 1552 in London, England, and he died on 13 January 1599 in London, around the age of 46.
Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse and is often considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.
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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.