The Destination Of Love

Edmund Spenser is one of the great forerunners of the poetic altar of the English Renaissance and is hailed as"the poets'poet". This thesis synchronizes the classical mythology of androgyny with the Christian prototype and the traditional western cosmology to study Spenser's keen and unique rendering of marriage from three levels of humanity, divinity and the harmony of cosmos, highlighting the theme of marriage as the destination of love.The first chapter explores marriage as the access to the perfection of humanity based on the classical mythology of androgyny. Man's thirst for love reflects their quest for beauty physically and virtuously and the desire to find their origin and form the harmonious wholeness of male and female. Marriage links the ideal and the reality, the flesh and spirit. Spenser's humanist concept is clearly displayed by his stress on the perfect humanity created by marriage and his thought to seize time to enjoy life.The second chapter deals with Spenser's view of marriage as the embodiment of the perfect divinity of androgyny with the background of the Christian tradition. On the one hand, earthly beauty is the reflection of heavenly beauty and secular love is the copy of the sacred love. Marriage serves as a golden chain linking them together, achieving the ascent from the worldly to divine, from mutability to eternity and from humanity to divinity. On the other hand, marriage represents the divine providence and receiving God's blessing.The third chapter discusses marriage as an indispensable factor for the concord of the macrocosm as well as the microcosm, which is mainly analyzed from the following aspects: the discordant concord essence of the universe, the harmonious relationship between God and man, the wholeness and hierarchy of the great chain of being of the universe, the continuation and the harmony of the social microcosm.