Amoretti: Interpretation Of Eternity Through Love

No one denies the fact that Spenser is among the greatest English poets. However, his Amoretti is not widely recognized as a great sonnet sequence by the whole critical world. This thesis tries to evaluate Amoretti by making a study on the theme of it. With Amoretti being put back into a history of Renaissance ideology, among which Platonism and Christian doctrines affected Spenser greatly, a conclusion is reached that Amoretti is a great work of interpretation of eternity in theme with its best suitable form and structure as a whole. The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter makes an analysis on how Spenser interprets his view of eternity in love. First the sublunary love is analyzed, in which Spenser describes the lady's physical beauties and her virtuous character, utters his sufferings from the lady's seemingly cold attitude and his happy feelings in the process of his courtship. Then the holy nature of Spenser's love is examined: in order to make his love sanctified Spenser both Platonize and Christianize the lady. Thus Spenser's idea of love is clear: the love in the mind of the poet is not just an earthly one or a heavenly one separately, but both, or exactly, a combination of both love. Therefore it is pointed out that Amoretti testifies the theme of eternity itself for Spenser's pursuit of both fleshly and spiritual love which is aimed at marriage: besides the eternal nature of saintly love, the sublunary love also possess a character of eternity: for a married love, the couples who are in love can live in the heart of each other and human beings can reach eternity by procreation. The second chapter analyzes how Spenser explains eternity in time. Two features of time are discussed first: time with a beginning and an end like a line, and time going on and on without a beginning and an end like a cycle. Time as a line means that time ends everything including life of man. This is a fearful aspect of time which man has done his best to deal with. Time as a cycle symbolizes a meaning of eternity which man has being searched for through generations. But Spenser's great concern is how to end time to reach the state of eternity. So next, the ways to defeat time in Amoretti is examined in this part, as is Spenser's ways to turn the "line time"to "cycle time": love and poetry. With marriage as the holy aim, love makes human life continue for ever through children. Poetry can be read for generations thus the person praised by poems and his good fame can be eternalized. In the third chapter, the first to be discussed is the meaning of the Spenserian sonnet rhyme scheme which gives a single sonnet an image of eternity in logic meaning going up and up like a helix until to the final couplet with a special rhyme scheme containing images of cycles. In this rhyme scheme the two internal couplets and the final independent couplet means a lot in explaining the function of the poetic form serving the theme of the poem. Then the arrangement of the 89 individual sonnets is explored in Amoretti as a whole unit of a poem. The arrangement is not random but on purpose, which suggests a roundness image of eternity. And in addition, a numerological method is discussed in this part, in which some certain numbers imply the idea of eternity. And last, an appendix is added to this thesis, which lists the main words related with the meaning of eternity.