Uno Amoretto by Spenser

By my count, Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) published 84 sonnets in the collection Amoretti. I'm relying on the Oxford University Press edition of his works, Spenser: Poetical Works, edited by J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. I used to be able to read this edition with ease, but now I find the print to be extremely small, so I have to take uno amoretto at a time and then rest the eyes.

Warning: digression ahead. . . .I had some friends in California who liked to drink (alcohol) much of the evening--beer or wine or mixed drinks--and then top it all off, so to speak, with a wee glass of amaretto, which is an Italian almond liquer, if I have my mixology correct, and not a love poem, although the two are not mutually exclusive, of course. Actually, the liquer is the result of a process whereby herbs and fruits are soaked in oil derived from apricot pits--at least according to the website of Disarrano, makers of amaretto; but the flavor resembles that of almonds. I never got into the habit of topping off the evening with liquer. It sounded like a good idea in theory, but if one were an empiricist or of the theoretical school of Never Mix, Never Worry, or both, it sounded like a terrible idea.

Here is uno amoretto--in fact, it's number one out of the chute--from Spenser. The Amoretti (published first in 1595) are sonnets.

Sonnet I

by Edmund Spenser

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might,
shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
like captives trembling at the victor's sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look
and read the sorrows of my dying spright,
written with tears in heart's close bleeding book.
And happy rhymes bath'd in the sacred brook,
of Helicon whence she derived is,
when ye behold that Angel's blessed look,
my soul's long lacked food, my heaven's bliss.
Leaves, lines, and rhymes, seek her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none.

I have taken broad liberties with the spelling and punctuation here. The Oxford edition from which I took the sonnet preserves the poetry as set in type in 1595. The "v" is printed as "u" in that edition, the possessive apostrophe is not used (it is disappearing--again--from English, even as we speak, by the way), and an "e" is added to such words as tear(e)s and brook(e). Also, hearts (no apostrophe) is spelled harts, but from the context, I gather Spenser was not discussing a male deer, so I went with heart's. I did preserve the absence of capitalization in all but four lines, whereas in Shakespeare's sonnets and most of English formal verse, all words that start lines are capitalized. I've left lilly and spright as they appeared. Rhymes is spelled rymes.

As to the poem itself, it is a kind of meta-sonnet, insofar as it comments upon itself as a published sonnet. The leaves are pages of the book of sonnets, leaves the lilly-handed lover will handle. The poem is almost reckless in its mixing of metaphors (speaking of mixology)--the book as a collection of leaves, the book as bleeding heart, the book as a literal collection of lines and rhymes, the book as being written by tears (not blood), the lover as Angel whose look derives from a mythical river but whose look or approval is also food for the poet's soul. Whew! Blood, tears, water, hearts, leaves, etc.--Spenser has it all going on. There's also a lamp and some captives. I think of a sonnet like this as being almost too rich--like those creamy-centered chocolates in the variety-box. I tend to favor the chocolate-covered walnuts, a simpler candy; and I tend to favor a sonnet that develops along one line and then perhaps takes just one dramatic turn, or makes just one rhetorical shift, or pursues just one additional major metaphorical route. On the other hand, to read a richer variety of sonnet can be a not altogether unpleasant shock. Spenser mixes, but he doesn't worry.

As is almost always the case with a Renaissance sonnet, there is at least one major irony in this one by Spenser. It is, to my mind, the irony that the poet claims to want the sonnet to please only the lover but has gone ahead and published the collection of sonnets for a readership he hopes the sonnets will please.