Spenser, Edmund. English poet. 1552-1599.

1590 The Faerie Queene (Books I-III)

1595 Amoretti and Epithalamion

1596 The Faerie Queene (Books IV-VI)

Epithalamion. 1595.

Form: 24 complex 18 line stanzas, often linked by concatenation. Most lines are in iambic pentameter, except lines 6 & 11 which are in iambic tetrameter, and the last is always an alexandrine (or iambic hexameter). However, each stanza is different.

Genre: Epithalamion, or a song traditionally sung outside the bedchamber of a recently married couple.

Characters: The poet (maybe Edmund Spenser) and his new wife (maybe Spenser’s wife, Elizabeth Boyle). They were married in 1594.

Summary: The poem chronicles the marriage day of the speaker and his new wife. Each stanza represents a different hour of the day, and the last line in each stanza indicates the distance from the actual ceremony.

Critical Issues:

Concatenation: Rhymes repeated across stanzaic boundaries (such as the repeating of “Eccho ring” at the end of many stanzas). Each of the poem’s 24 stanzas apparently corresponds to an hour of the day on which Spenser and Boyle were married (6.11.1594).

Ruins of Time/Devouring Time motif: A device in which a poet invokes ancient Roman or Grecian architectural monuments in order to illustrate the how the passage of time brings low their mighty achievements. Spenser says, “So let vs rest, sweet loue, in hope of this” (425), comparing his love for his wife to the everlasting nature of “haughty palaces” (420) and “heauenly tabernacles” (422). Is he, like Shakespeare in his sonnets, trying to create an “endlesse monument” (433) that will outlast the temporal nature of the physical world?

Internet Source: http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/amoretti.html