modifi es it. Although the poem begins with an image
of a hunter, the main subject of the fi rst complete sen-
tence of the poem is the “gentle deare,” which does not
appear until line 7. Read this way, the hunter and the
speaker are the syntactic objects of the deer, and the
lines are constructed around one very long simile in
which the deer is compared to the “huntsman.” Thus,
the opening lines may be restated as “the deer, like a
hunter tired from the hunt, returns to a brook to quench
her thirst.” Because the deer is equated with the hunter,
the woman of Spenser’s poem—fi gured as the deer—is
afforded more agency (personal power) than is tradi-
tionally given to hunted women in other poems that
employ this CONCEIT. The deer / dear of Spenser’s poem
is in charge: She wants to be caught. Such a reading
would answer the speaker’s bewilderment in the fi nal
COUPLET: “Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so
wyld, / so goodly wonne with her owne will beguiled”
(ll. 13–14). He is bewildered because he does not know
that it was he who was being hunted all along.
Spenser’s unique use of these motifs is proper to the
poem’s position within the Amoretti cycle. Set on the
evening before Easter, March 30, the poem speaks to
the ancient liturgical tradition associated with that
date: the procession of the catechumens to the front of
the church to be baptized while Psalm 42, a psalm of
spring, was sung. Sonnet 67 echoes this psalm with its
opening construction of “Lyke as” (l. 1) and with its
images of “thirst” and a “brooke” (l. 8). Moreover, the
idea of the willful prey alludes not only to the catechu-
mens’ willing movement to baptism—which is a sym-
bolic death—but also to the willing movement of
Christ to his own slaughter.
See also AMORETTI (OVERVIEW).
Melissa Femino
Amoretti: Sonnet 68 (Easter Sonnet, “Most glo-
rious Lord of lyfe, that on this day”) EDMUND
SPENSER (1595) Sonnet 68 of EDMUND SPENSER’s
Amoretti is also known as the Easter Sonnet. Paired with
Sonnet 22 (said to invoke Ash Wednesday in the Chris-
tian calendar), it is central to autobiographical, numero-
logical, religious, and calendar / real-time interpretations
of the SONNET SEQUENCE. Moreover, the number of SON-
NETs between 22 and 68 equals the number of days
between Ash Wednesday and Easter in 1594, the year of
Spenser’s marriage. Thus, the calendar and autobio-
graphical interpretations are compelling, despite the
contrived nature of such an interpretation.
The religious content of the work is also emergent in
this poem, as Spenser links the progress of his court-
ship with Elizabeth Boyle to the holiness of Christian
(specifi cally Protestant) matrimony. Love within matri-
mony becomes the way men and women can most
closely approach the love of God. For example, Spenser
addresses his remarks to the Lord in the three QUA-
TRAINs, only turning to his lady love in the COUPLET. In
fact, while it is clear that he addresses his Lady at the
end, asking that their love for one another should imi-
tate what the “Lord us taught,” the earthly sentiment
between man and woman can easily be confl ated with
that between humans and heavenly Lord. In this vein,
the tension between mutable human life and love, and
between the eternity of the Lord’s life and love, is dem-
onstrated in each of the fi rst three lines, which refer-
ence resurrection and eternal life alongside the potential
for the lover and his Lady to “entertayne” (l. 12) each
other. This particular sonnet is thus noted for the clar-
ity with which differentiates eternal from human love,
and human capacity from the divine.
The otherworldly aspect of this stanza is offset by its
presence between Sonnet 67, which makes use of
hunting imagery, and Sonnet 69, which invokes war-
riors and conquest. It is as if the author were trying a
range of imagery to defi ne his relationship to the object
of his affection rather than establishing the Lord’s love
as its only “worthy” measure (l. 9). Some critics have
used this STANZA to highlight the tension throughout
the poem between the Neoplatonic philosophy of tran-
scendence (in which human love leads us to divine
love) and acknowledgement of human limitations, for
human life is “lyke” but not equal to the divine.
See also AMORETTI (OVERVIEW).
Janice M. BogstadAmoretti: Sonnet 74 (“Most happy letters
fram’d by skilfull trade”) EDMUND SPENSER
(1595) This poem details the second year of the
courtship between EDMUND SPENSER and Elizabeth
Boyle. It uses the linked QUATRAIN pattern of theAMORETTI: SONNET 74 21