17 pages • 34 minutes read
Edmund SpenserAmoretti XXXV: "My hungry eyes, through greedy covetize"
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1595A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Spenser read and translated sonnets in several languages, including French and Italian. Italian poet Francesco Petrarch initially popularized the sonnet form in the 1300s. He wrote over 300 sonnets to Laura who, tragically, did not share his intense feelings of passionate love. Her presence as the distant and unattainable beloved—the cruel Petrarchan mistress—became a literary trope. While Spenser’s sonnets utilize the intense emotional state of being in love Petrarch popularized, Spenser’s beloved does share the speaker’s feelings.
Sonnets became a popular form in English poetry after the publication of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557. The book of poems written by various authors was also titled Songes and Sonettes, and included a number of sonnets in English, including Thomas Wyatt’s popular translations of several sonnets by Petrarch. One English sonneteer (writer of sonnets—and Spenser’s influencer—was Philip Sidney. Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, was published four years before Spenser’s Amoretti by the same publisher, William Ponsonby. Sidney writes about his mad love for a Petrarchan mistress—the wife of another man. Spenser’s sequence, which is somewhat autobiographical, is set apart by the beloved’s opinion of the speaker.
In addition to sonneteers, Spenser was heavily influenced by medieval Arthurian legends, which is more explicitly in his long narrative poem, The Faerie Queene. However, the ideas that came from Marie de Champagne’s court of love in France appear in Spenser’s love sonnets, as well. Many Arthurian legends by Chretien de Troyes and his contemporaries promote a religion of secular love. This religion often includes worshiping a Petrarchan-type beloved. In the case of Lancelot and Gwenevere (and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella), the love is mutual but adulterous. In his sonnets, Spenser includes the intense, overwhelming kind of love seen between knights and noblewomen in Arthurian legends.
Theoretical Context
While Sonnet XXXV predates many critical theories about sight, looking, and the gaze, much of that work—especially the work of John Berger in Ways of Seeing—looks backwards. This means that modern theory is informed by older works about looking, especially looking at women. While the primary concern of Berger’s work is visual art, his text very effectively applies to Sonnet XXXV. First, Berger refutes the classic conception that looking is a passive mode of consumption: “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach - though not necessarily within arm's reach” (Berger, Chapter 1). The split between the speaker and his eyes in Spenser’s poem deliberately works against this theory. The eyes act on their own, but also as a synecdoche, or representation of, the speaker.
Berger goes into depth on the way women—and especially beautiful women—are presented in works contemporary to Spenser. Berger proposes that women must be aware of themselves as observed by men, and that they are given responsibility for the outcome of being seen. This concept is called the Male Gaze, and appears throughout the poem. “[T]he object of their pain” (Line 2) establishes that the beloved is both the object of sight and the thing that induces pain in the eyes, rather than the speaker inducing his own pain by looking.
Mirrors also play into Berger’s thesis. In Medieval and Renaissance depictions of the concept of vanity, naked women are painted holding a mirror, which “make[s] the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight” (Berger, 4). Sonnet XXXV’s structural and metaphorical references to mirrors make the beloved complicit in her beauty, just as Narcissus falls prey to his vanity, despite the lover having no actual action in the poem.
Related Titles
By Edmund Spenser
