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.
Themes
Beauty as Sustenance
Like many Renaissance sonnets, Spenser’s “XXXV” is about love, specifically an obsessive and overwhelming love. The speaker is obsessed with the “fair sight” (Line 10) of his beloved. The poem focuses on looking at her. However, her beauty is only given the description “fair” (Line 10). Instead of listing the beloved’s features or qualities, her physical attributes metaphorically become sustenance. This is an example of the extreme passion characteristic of Petrarchan sonnets. While Spenser’s beloved eventually fulfills his desires and becomes his wife (unlike Petrarch’s beloved, Laura), this sonnet is about the intense longing in the early phase of their courtship.
Beauty as food makes thereby makes it necessary for survival. The speaker argues that his eyes, “lacking [the view of his beloved], they cannot life sustain” (Line 5). Being able to look at the beloved is key to the sonneteer’s very life. This extreme reliance describes a romantic love boarding on religious. The speaker’s communion is metaphoric consumption through the eyes. Rather than consuming the body of Christ, the beloved becomes the holy figure who the speaker eats up with his eyes. He sees the beloved as necessary for sustaining life—both on earth and in the afterlife. The fleeting nature and fragility of life is expressed in terms of romantic obsession.
In addition to the life-ending power that could come from the absence of his beloved, the desire to look can never be sated. The eyes are positively gluttonous. The speaker, at the end of his comparison to Narcissus, says “so plenty makes me poor” (Line 8). In this paradox, even when there is an abundance of opportunity for the eyes to consume the beloved, the speaker still feels impoverished. The diction “plenty” in Line 8 connects to the greed and covetousness in Line 1. The eyes greedily collect visions of the beloved, but this only increases their hunger. Beauty, it turns out, does not sustain as well as food: It simply creates more hunger.
Only Romantic Love is Not Vain
Vanity is a concern that arises in the second quatrain and in the concluding couplet; the speaker concludes that obsessing over the beloved is a way to avoid distinct types of vanity. Early in the poem, vanity refers to excessively loving one's own appearance. The speaker’s eyes are compared to Narcissus’s eyes: “In their amazement like Narcissus vain, / Whose eyes him starv’d” (Lines 7-8). The Greek mythological figure is unable to eat because his eyes could not look from his own reflection. The speaker’s eyes are amazed by the beauty of the beloved, which is not vanity. However, the speaker ends up hungry, like Narcissus, because of his obsession with looking at his beloved. Vanity and romantic love are aligned.
However, in the concluding couplet, the speaker looks at a different kind of vanity: glory. Spenser writes, “All this world’s glory seemeth vain to me, / And all their shows but shadows, saving she” (Lines 13-14). This presents a tension between glory in front of an audience and the more private space of a romance. Glory, in the Arthurian sources that inspired Spenser, is often obtained in the public—and male—space of the battlefield. The overwhelming power of romantic love is considered a distraction from the glory of war. However, some knights in Arthurian legend chose love over fighting. The goal was not glory nor honor—not a reputation in the larger world—but “she” (Line 14). Furthermore, reflecting the speaker’s revulsion for everything but the beloved in the third quatrain, glory is considered repulsive.
In the final line of the poem, the darkness of the “shadows” indicates how glory can be considered part of a black soul, referring to a soul that is damned. Connecting back to the idea of a romantic obsession bordering on the religious, romantic love offers a more moral path than loving oneself, like Narcissus, or seeking glory through personal achievement. The speaker believes that courtship is a better path for the soul than anything else.
Combining Christian and Classical Elements
The argument for the morality of romantic love is a turn from the eyes’ initial sin. In the first line, the eyes’ “greedy covetise” (Line 1) refers to breaking the Christian Bible’s Tenth Commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus, 20:17). This introduces the Bible to the poem, which later becomes highly allusive to classical mythology. “Narcissus” (Line 7) is a figure of Roman mythology, possibly invented by Ovid, who starved to death and became a flower as a result of staring at himself in a still pool for too long. This combination of the Biblical and classical mythology is a common literary device in the humanist school of thought of medieval and renaissance poetry. Poets such as Dante Alighieri developed epics from earlier, non-Christian traditions, and included both allusions to mythical figures and motifs common to older works such as the ironic punishments in Greek mythology, or the invocation of the muse.
The concluding couplet reinforces this duality. Echo, the lover of Narcissus, was reduced to a statue by her one-sided love of Narcissus. While this is portrayed as a moral tragedy, Spenser’s language makes it a Christian triumph by stating it involved the rejection of the temporal (non-religious) world. “All this world’s glory seemeth vain to me,” (Line 13) echoes Christian language about the failings of the mundane world: All beautiful things in this world are temporary—especially when compared to the glory of God.
At the same time, the final two words of the poem “saving she” (Line 14) have a Christian double meaning in addition to the literal one. In one sense, the woman’s beauty is what redeems her, saving her in terms of salvation by demonstrating her proximity to god. In another sense, by accepting the speaker’s advances, she can save him by exempting him from the earlier-mentioned covetousness. To covet is to desire something that is someone else’s, so if the lover was with the speaker, his love of her would not be covetousness.
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By Edmund Spenser
