The Full Text of “Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love”
1Since I did leave the presence of my love,
2Many long weary days I have outworn:
3And many nights, that slowly seemed to move
4Their sad protract from evening until morn.
5For when as day the heaven doth adorn,
6I wish that night the noyous day would end:
7And when as night hath us of light forlorn,
8I wish that day would shortly reascend.
9Thus I the time with expectation spend,
10And fain my grief with changes to beguile,
11That further seems his term still to extend,
12And maketh every minute seem a mile.
13So sorrow still doth seem too long to last,
14But joyous hours do fly away too fast.
The Full Text of “Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love”
1Since I did leave the presence of my love,
2Many long weary days I have outworn:
3And many nights, that slowly seemed to move
4Their sad protract from evening until morn.
5For when as day the heaven doth adorn,
6I wish that night the noyous day would end:
7And when as night hath us of light forlorn,
8I wish that day would shortly reascend.
9Thus I the time with expectation spend,
10And fain my grief with changes to beguile,
11That further seems his term still to extend,
12And maketh every minute seem a mile.
13So sorrow still doth seem too long to last,
14But joyous hours do fly away too fast.
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“Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Introduction
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"Since I did leave the presence of my love" is the 87th of Edmund Spenser's 89 Amoretti, a sequence of love sonnets he wrote while courting his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. In this poem, the speaker complains that his life has been a misery since he had to "leave the presence of [his] love." When he's apart from her, he finds that time drags out intolerably. When it's day, he wants it to be night; when it's night, he wants it to be day. Whatever time of day it is, "every minute seem[s] a mile," a long slog through a dreary landscape. Any time of separation from his beloved might as well be an empty infinity: the only "joyous hours" are the ones he spends with her, and those, alas, "fly away too fast."
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“Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Summary
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Since I left my love's side, I've endured many long, tedious days and many nights that seemed to creep sadly from dusk to dawn. For when it's daytime, I wish that night would come along and bring the horrible day to an end. And when it's nighttime, I wish the sun would rise again. I thus spend all my time in anticipation, trying to while away my grief-struck hours by longing for change—only to find that change just makes my grief seem to stretch out further, until every minute feels like it's a mile long. Sorrow thus seems to last too long, while happy hours rush past far too quickly.
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“Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Themes
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Time and Emotion
“Since I did leave the presence of my love,” the 87th in Edmund Spenser’s 89-sonnet sequence Amoretti, describes a speaker’s dull torment at being separated from his beloved. When he can’t be with her, he finds, time crawls painfully. Every single “minute seem[s] a mile,” a vast expanse of desert he just has to slog through. (And that’s a 16th-century mile, not a modern one: a much greater felt distance in a time before the internal combustion engine.)
Worse still, he can find absolutely no way to “beguile” (or while away) this endless period of lonesome grief. He keeps hoping that the next day or the next change of scene will at least distract him a little, but to no avail: when it’s daytime, he wishes that “night the noyous day would end,” and when it’s nighttime, he wishes that “day would shortly reascend.” No “changes” can distract him—because there are no changes for him. When he’s without his beloved, time feels both endless and changeless, a wasteland of unremitting sorrow and boredom.
This, the speaker reflects, is no surprise: one’s emotional state always has a curious effect on the way that one experiences time. While “sorrow still doth seem too long to last” (in other words, sorrow always seems to go on forever), “joyous hours do fly away too fast.” If time flies when you’re having fun, then, it slows to a terrible crawl when you’re not. And for this speaker, the only “joyous hours” to be had in the world are the ones he shares with his lady. Beyond being a reflection on the way that our feelings affect our perception of time, then, this is a fervent love poem—one that suggests every second the speaker spends without his beloved is a vast emptiness to him.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love”
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Lines 1-4
Since I did leave the presence of my love,
Many long weary days I have outworn:
And many nights, that slowly seemed to move
Their sad protract from evening until morn.This poem starts out with one of the classic poet’s complaints: the speaker has been separated from his beloved, and he’s suffering over it. Every day he spends without her is a “long weary” one, a day he has to “out[wear]” rather than really living it. His life has become an endurance test, and every minute drags.
The way he frames this complaint reveals exactly how slow, how torturous life without his love feels. His diacope on the word “many”—“many long weary days,” “many nights”—both tells how long it’s been and also stresses how repetitive his purposeless days feel. Why bother to find a new word when the days and nights are all the same?
Then, there’s his description of his nights, which:
[…] slowly seemed to move
Their sad protract from evening until morn.His language again mirrors his experience. What he’s saying is that the nights feel long. How he’s saying it is at great length, stretching the same sort of idea he previously delivered in three words (“long weary days”) into a line and a half of complaint. That drawn-out complaint further suggests that the speaker hasn’t been getting much sleep. He’s measured out every minute in the journey “from evening until morn” as it drags out its “sad protract,” its miserable length.
Though this speaker is hurting, he manages to make his suffering sound elegant. The gentle chime of consonance in “since I did leave the presence of my love,” for instance, gives the first line an artful harmony.
And then there’s the controlled elegance of the sonnet form itself. This is the 87th of Spenser’s Amoretti, a group of sonnets he wrote while he was courting his beloved second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. In the Amoretti, Spenser mostly sticks to the traditional sonnet form: 14 lines written in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Since I | did leave | the pre- | sence of | my love”). But he introduces a rhyme scheme of his own.
Rather than using the ABAB CDCD EFEF GG pattern of the English sonnet, Spenser uses rhymes that wend through the poem, with one quatrain (or four-line passage) handing off a rhyme to the next: ABAB BCBC CDCD EE. This pattern adds an extra little flourish to an already rigorous shape. Not merely an explosion of frustration and sorrow, this poem is a well-wrought love token, technically impressive as well as emotive.
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Lines 5-8
For when as day the heaven doth adorn,
I wish that night the noyous day would end:
And when as night hath us of light forlorn,
I wish that day would shortly reascend. -
Lines 9-12
Thus I the time with expectation spend,
And fain my grief with changes to beguile,
That further seems his term still to extend,
And maketh every minute seem a mile. -
Lines 13-14
So sorrow still doth seem too long to last,
But joyous hours do fly away too fast.
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“Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
A simile in line 12 gives a familiar figure of speech a strange new life. The poem’s speaker, describing how impossible it is to distract himself from his “grief” over his beloved’s absence, laments that the changing days and nights only make the time of separation seem longer: “every minute seem[s] a mile,” he sighs.
Representing time as space is so common in English that people do it all the time without noticing they’re using a metaphor. (For instance, saying that something takes “a long time” hardly even registers as figurative language!) But to this suffering, impatient speaker, this relationship between time and space feels especially real and lively.
If every minute seems like a mile, then every minute looks like an awfully long way to trudge—especially when you consider that there’s another minute after that one, and another, and another. Even if there were only, say, 30 more minutes to go until the speaker saw his beloved again, she’d feel as if she were so distant he couldn’t reach her in a day’s walking. And the speaker is, the reader can gather, probably considerably more than 30 minutes away from seeing his lady again. His longing for her leaves him stranded in a vast wasteland of time. (It might help, in getting into this speaker’s frame of mind, to remember that Spenser is writing in a time when the fastest available overland vehicle would be a horse. A mile means something different in a time before planes, trains, and automobiles.)
The simile thus invites readers to imagine the speaker as a wanderer, perhaps a pilgrim, making his long, painful way back to his lady over miles and miles and miles of dull, depressing hours. The image also suggests the literal space that must currently separate the lovers. It’s that distance that transforms the speaker’s time into this desert of space.
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Personification
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Parallelism
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Consonance
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"Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Outworn
- Protract
- Noyous
- Forlorn
- Fain
- Beguile
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Used up, worn out. The image is of the speaker trudging through his days, wearing through them as if through shoe leather.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love”
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Form
"Since I did leave the presence of my love" is a type of sonnet—one known (as readers might not be surprised to learn) as a Spenserian sonnet.
Like other kinds of sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet is 14 lines long. Those lines are divided into three quatrains (or four-line stanzas) and a final couplet (or two-line stanza). Typically, the quatrains examine the speaker's situation or dilemma: in this case, the unpleasant fact that the speaker and his love are separated, and every minute they're apart seems dreadful to him. The couplet then caps the poem, sometimes by introducing a surprising new idea, sometimes by elegantly summing up what has come before.
In all these qualities, the Spenserian sonnet works in the same way as the Shakespearean or English sonnet. What sets the Spenserian sonnet apart is its interlocking rhyme scheme. The quatrains pass rhymes off to each other: the B rhyme of the first quatrain turns up again in the second, the C rhyme of the second quatrain turns up again in the third. (More on this under the Rhyme Scheme section of this guide.)
This distinctive pattern of rhyme gives the Spenserian sonnet a harmonious, elegant quality (even when the speaker is writhing through yet another "noyous day" of separation from his beloved).
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Meter
Like most sonnets, "Since I did leave the presence of my love" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that each of its lines uses five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
Since I | did leave | the pres- | ence of | my love,
The easy iambic da-DUM often gets compared to the pulse of a heart—a quality that makes it especially fitting for love poems like this one. It's also simply a natural choice for English-language poetry: lots of spoken English falls into a roughly iambic rhythm.
There's a little variation here, too. Line 2 starts with a trochee, the opposite foot to the iamb (with a DUM-da rhythm), and continues with a spondee (an emphatic foot with a DUM-DUM rhythm):
Many | long wear- | y days | I have | outworn:
These more emphatic, stress-first sounds make the speaker's days sound particularly long and weary; readers can hear the frustration in his voice. Notice, though, that the line's rhythm doesn't feel too jolting. That's because it uses the same number of syllables as the lines around it: a crisp and even ten. The poem's overall metrical effect remains measured; this is a poet in control of himself, even in the depths of his longing.
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Rhyme Scheme
Like other Spenserian sonnets, this poem uses this distinctive rhyme scheme:
ABAB BCBC CDCD EE
Each of the poem's quatrains uses an alternating pattern of rhymes (rather as the Shakespearean sonnet does). But there's something else going on here, too. Unlike in the Shakespearean sonnet, every quatrain's rhymes also interlock with the rhymes of the quatrain that follows. For example, the B rhyme of the first quatrain, outworn / morn, spills over into the second stanza's adorn / forlorn. The poem then ends with a crisp rhyming couplet that uses an entirely new rhyme.
The interlocking rhymes give the poem a thoughtful, harmonious flow, with each quatrain holding hands with the one that came before. The closing couplet then offers a neat capper to the whole poem, summing up what has come before with a striking new sound.
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“Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Speaker
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The speaker of this sonnet seems likely to be a voice for Spenser himself. This poem is the 87th of a sequence of 89 sonnets (known as the Amoretti) that Spenser wrote about his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.
Whether or not readers take the speaker to be Spenser, they can certainly tell he's a man desperately in love. Temporarily separated from his beloved, this speaker squirms with impatience to be with her again. Every time the sun comes up, he wishes it were already night; every time the night comes, he wishes it were already day again. There's simply no way for him to get comfortable: no matter what's happening around him, all that really matters is that he's not with his beloved, and any time spent not with his beloved is unendurable.
A passionate lover, this speaker also seems like a reflective, philosophical sort. Observing that the more impatient he feels, the longer time seems to stretch in front of him, he judges that it's always thus. All times of sorrow "still doth seem too long to last," he concludes; it's the "joyous hours" that pass all too quickly. Presumably, he's already relished a lot of those joyous hours with the woman he so longs to be reunited with.
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“Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Setting
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This poem of time and place is, in a funny sense, timeless and placeless. In any country and any era that lovers have longed impatiently to be reunited, this poem makes perfect sense. (For that matter, the speaker's broader conclusion—that happy hours go too fast, and sad ones too slowly—is universal and eternal, too.)
Of course, readers familiar with Spenser's life can guess that this particular speaker (a voice for the besotted poet himself) is a man living in 16th-century England. Aside from the fact that Spenser wrote this poem as one of a sequence about his courtship of his wife, the poem's form reveals its context. Sonnets were a wildly popular form for love poetry during Spenser's era, and Spenser was only one writer among many who served Queen Elizabeth I to compress his joy and pain into 14 elegant lines.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love”
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Literary Context
The English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser (1552/53–1599) is best known for his epic poem The Faerie Queene, a grand, fantastical, and romantic tribute to Queen Elizabeth I. This tale of allegorical knights and heroic quests was the poem in which Spenser invented his signature (and profoundly influential) verse form, the Spenserian stanza.
"Since I did leave the presence of my love" is the 87th poem in another of Spenser's long works: an 89-sonnet sequence titled Amoretti (Italian for "little loves"). These poems were inspired by Spenser's courtship with his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. While Spenser put his own twist on the sonnet form with his interlocking rhyme scheme, his themes were pretty common for the genre: sonnets got their start in the 13th century as poems about courtly love.
Despite their familiar themes, the Amoretti are also unusual among Renaissance sonnet sequences because they culminate in marriage—making them the story of a successful love affair rather than a failed, betrayed, or tormented one. (Most sonneteers were not so lucky.)
Spenser published the Amoretti sequence in 1595 as part of a book: Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser. Along with the 89 sonnets of Amoretti, the volume included an ode to Spenser's wife titled "Epithalamion." Today, only six complete first editions survive.
Historical Context
Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle, the beloved addressee of the Amoretti, in 1594, the same year that his first wife died. Boyle was Anglo-Irish and a relative of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork; Spenser met her while serving as a government functionary in Ireland. The Amoretti sequence describes the arc of Boyle's and Spenser's love affair, including moments of frustration and rejection (as in "My Love is like to ice, and I to fire") and their eventual marriage.
Spenser wrote during the English Renaissance—a golden age of art and literature that stretched from the late 15th to the early 17th century. More specifically, he wrote during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a period that produced many writers of enduring and profound fame. Elizabeth, as well as being a shrewd and formidable politician, was a great patron of the arts.
Spenser became a prominent and popular figure in Elizabeth's court, not least because his greatest work, The Faerie Queene, was devoted to her glory. One famous story goes that she was so amused (or possibly embarrassed) by a verse he wrote complaining about a lack of payment for his work that she gave him £100—a substantial chunk of change at the time—on the spot.
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More “Amoretti 87: Since I did leave the presence of my love” Resources
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External Resources
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Spenser's Legacy — Watch one of Spenser's biographers discussing Spenser's literary and cultural afterlife.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Spenser.
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Spenser's Grave — Take a look at Spenser's monument in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.
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A Video Introduction — Watch a short video in which a Spenser scholar introduces the poet.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Edmund Spenser
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