Edmund Spenser (1552 - 13 January 1599 / London / England)

A lovely poem that speaks the truth

A greate write and honoured to read this

Beautiful Poem. I look up to poets like him. His poems still live, and I hope to be as great and known as him.

This is an exemplar of an artificial 'problem' created and then 'solved' to demonstrate the poet's wit-a basic feature of many Elizabethan courtly-love sonnets.

Robert Bates Graber
Author, PLUTONIC SONNETS

Spenser is the flame which is loving her. She is too cold but this doesn't stop him shining, only the love does not push her away, she simply doesn't care. As his love becomes stronger, it is making her colder, love is a flame which is different to any other emotion, because it cannot melt anything.
LOVLEY POEM, this is just my opinion, im not trying to be clever

In Nature fire can melt ice and melted ice, water can subside fire! But in love force cannot melt ice of love! Wonderful message!

The speaker in Spenser's sonnet 'My Love Is Like to Ice' is the mask the poet adopts, using an ancient rhetorical device. The poet and the speaker (or persona, which literally means 'mask') are not necessarily one and the same. You can consider it the perceiving consciousness, if you prefer; the main thing is to avoid the confusion and misunderstanding that accompanies the error. Please remember that a poet like Spenser was always in complete control of his subject. He was not given to flights of fancy in any way whatsoever!

The poem is a sonnet grouped into three quatrains and a couplet. The rhyme scheme of the first quatrain is ABAB / fire, great, desire, entreat; the second is BCBC / heat, cold, sweat, manifold; the third rhymes CDCD / told, ice, cold, device; and the couplet rhymes EE / mind, kind. The rhyme includes near rhyme in great/entreat and heat/sweat. Keep in mind that in Spenser's day, poetry was considered a rhetorical game more often than not.

The first line is a simile that compares his love/beloved one to ice and the speaker to a fire that for some reason does not thaw his frozen love. The more he pursues her, the faster she flees (the colder she gets!) . There is a 'law of contraries' being created here that defies natural law - those laws like gravity that operate on one and all in normal circumstances. But these are NOT normal times, the speaker alleges. This is a time for miracles in the realm of romance. We are in a foreign place where the usual laws do not apply. The couplet resolves the dilemma by sleight of language - the power of love can overrule natural love and change our very nature. Our 'kind' (mankind) can be changed to its very core.

The landing space is perfect. That tells the essence of the poem.

the hotter he burn with love, the harder the stubborn ice of her emotion (she plays hard to get) . sometimes we fall in love with those that have no fellings for us thus, we burn with pain to no avail...sometimes it becomes important to allow nature to melt this ice so hard for our human fire to dissolve; you allow this ice to melt naturally and flow into the burnt out ashes of your emotions...

Robert Frost's (appropriate name!) 'Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice...' Seems to be contradicted by Spenser's assertion that love and hate are miraculously eternal.