Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Amoretti and Epithalamion

Sonnet XXX. My love is like to ice, and I to fire

Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)

MY love is like to ice, and I to fire;

How comes it then that this her cold so great

Is not dissolv’d through my so hot desire,

But harder grows the more I her entreat?

Or how comes it that my exceeding heat

Is not delay’d by her heart-frozen cold;

But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,

And feel my flames augmented manifold!

What more miraculous thing may be told,

That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice;

And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,

Should kindle fire by wonderful device!

Such is the power of love in gentle mind,

That it can alter all the course of kind.