Amoretti: Sonnet 64 (“Comming to kisse her
lyps—such grace I found”) EDMUND SPENSER
(1595) In Sonnet 64 of EDMUND SPENSER’s Amoretti,
time and action are suspended. In this ekphrastic
moment (see EKPHRASIS), as the two lovers remain
poised and about to kiss, the speaker gives his reader a
poetic description of his love. Using the conventional
method of the BLAZON, each part of the Lady’s body—
her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, her bosom, her neck, her
breast, and even her nipples—is compared to a fl ower
from a luxurious garden. These comparisons are not
based on sight, however; they are based on smell.
Employing the standard Spenserian rhyme scheme
of abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee, the poem is constructed as two
complete syntactic units. In the fi rst sentence, the
speaker describes the moment of action, which is never
fully achieved: his movement toward his lover’s lips.
The second sentence is composed of a series of similes.
Using fl oral imagery to symbolize femininity is a
conventional literary technique, but Spenser’s blazon
is unusual because it depends solely upon olfactory
imagery. The fl owers the speaker uses to describe this
fragrant woman are signifi cant. Roses, a bed of straw-
berries, lilies (often represents female virginity), “Ies-
semynes” (jasmine), and columbines are all fairly
standard metaphors for love and beauty, but gillyfl ow-
ers, bellamoures, and pincks are a little less obvious. Gil-
lyfl owers, though traditionally thought of as a plant
with fl owers scented like cloves, can have a secondary
meaning as well. The fi rst part of the word, gill, is
defi ned in the OED as “a giddy young woman” (l. 4).
This, combined with the word fl ower, becomes a word
that denotes something like “a giddy young woman’s
fl ower.” The same compound structure is used in the
reference to bellamoures. The word seems to be a com-
posite of two foreign words: the Italian bel (beautiful)
and the French amour (love). Some critics have con-
tended that these are not fl owers at all but loving
glances. They base their reading on the word’s close
relationship to another word derived from Italian, bel-
gards (bel plus guardo, which means “looks”—beautiful
glances). This reading makes sense since bellamoures
are used to describe her eyebrows; thus, the lady’s gaze
is emphasized. Pincks could refer to the general name
of the species Dianthus (pink), which has variegated
sweet-smelling fl owers. The use of this image to
describe the lady’s eyes is appropriate since dianthus
means “double-fl owering.”
In terms of the sequence of the entire Amoretti cycle,
the poem takes place on March 27, the Wednesday
before Easter. Reading the sonnet in regard to its struc-
tural placement, some critics view the kiss upon which
the entire poem is based as a CONCEIT that corresponds
to the biblical topos of Judas’s kiss, by which he
betrayed Jesus (recounted in the gospel proper to the
Wednesday before Easter: Luke 22.1–71). Further evi-
dence of this link between the poem and the passage
from Luke is that the betrayal takes place in the Gar-
den of Gethsemane. If read this way, by delaying the
kiss in the poem, the speaker may be delaying Judas’s
betrayal and, subsequently, Jesus’s suffering.
See also AMORETTI (OVERVIEW).
Melissa FeminoAmoretti: Sonnet 65 (“The doubt which ye mis-
deeme, fayre love, is vaine”) EDMUND SPENSER
(1595) Constructed as an argument, Sonnet 65 of
Amoretti follows the traditional discourse of a Petrarchan
lovers’ debate, with the male speaker as a passive wooer
and his love as the coy woman. The poem’s argument
centers on the speaker’s attempts to alleviate any fears
his love may have about losing her freedom in mar-
riage—an understandable concern for any independent-
minded woman in 16th-century England. Married
women relinquished all fi nancial and personal freedoms
to their husbands. That the speaker needs to address
this issue says much about the woman whom he is
addressing. If she is concerned with her independence,
then she must be fairly independent already. The
speaker, who acknowledges her independence, wants to
capture her nonetheless. Repeated images of bonds,
bounds, bands, and cages demonstrate this. His intent is
to demonstrate that her bondage will not be an unpleas-
ant one if she enters into it willingly and gently: As he
writes, “the gentle birde feeles no captivity / within her
cage, but singes and feeds her fi ll” (ll. 7–8). The ana-
gram implicit in EDMUND SPENSER’s spelling of “birde” as
bride, if scrambled correctly, seems to strengthen the
idea that he is addressing his future wife.AMORETTI: SONNET 65 19