Amoretti III: The Sovereign Beauty

By Edmund Spenser 1552–1599 Edmund Spenser

The sovereign beauty which I do admire,

Witness the world how worthy to be praised:

The light whereof hath kindled heavenly fire

In my frail spirit, by her from baseness raised;

That being now with her huge brightness dazed,

Base thing I can no more endure to view;

But looking still on her, I stand amazed

At wondrous sight of so celestial hue.

So when my tongue would speak her praises due,

It stopped is with thought's astonishment:

And when my pen would write her titles true,

It ravish'd is with fancy's wonderment:

Yet in my heart I then both speak and write

The wonder that my wit cannot endite.

Biography

To understand Edmund Spenser's place in the extraordinary literary renaissance that took place in England during the last two decades of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it is helpful to begin with the remarks of the foremost literary critic of the age, Sir Philip Sidney. In The Defence of Poetry, (1595), written in the early 1580s, Sidney looked back on the history of English literature and sees little to admire. He mentions the . . .

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