The Full Text of “Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire”
1My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
2How comes it then that this her cold so great
3Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
4But harder grows the more I her entreat?
5Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
6Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
7But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
8And feel my flames augmented manifold?
9What more miraculous thing may be told,
10That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
11And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,
12Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
13Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
14That it can alter all the course of kind.
The Full Text of “Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire”
1My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
2How comes it then that this her cold so great
3Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
4But harder grows the more I her entreat?
5Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
6Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
7But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
8And feel my flames augmented manifold?
9What more miraculous thing may be told,
10That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
11And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,
12Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
13Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
14That it can alter all the course of kind.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Introduction
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"My Love is like to ice, and I to fire," also known as "Amoretti XXX," is number 30 in Edmund Spenser's 1595 sonnet sequence about his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. In this poem, the speaker describes how he loves his beloved with fiery passion even as she meets his desire with cold disinterest. The speaker struggles to understand the intensity of his love, which only grows stronger the more his beloved resists.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Summary
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The woman I love is as cold as ice, and I am as warm and passionate as fire. So why, then, doesn't my burning desire thaw her coldness? Why does she become even more frozen when I ask her for her love? Or why doesn't my own burning desire lessen through contact with her cold, frozen heart? How is it that my love grows even hotter—so hot that my sweat boils and I feel consumed by burning flames that get bigger and bigger? Is there anything more miraculous than the fact that my desire—which should melt ice with its fiery heat—instead makes my beloved even colder toward me? And isn't it incredible that her ice, somehow, makes my fire burn even hotter? Love has such power, such influence over the human mind, that it can make elements act against the laws of nature.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Themes
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The Power of Love
Edmund Spenser's "Amoretti XXX" is a poem about the relationship between love, desire, and disinterest. The speaker marvels, with clear frustration, at the fact that his burning passion for his beloved only makes her colder toward him, while her cool disinterest simply stokes the flames of his desire. Casting his own love as "fire" and his beloved's as "ice," the speaker tries to wrap his head around what feels like a natural impossibility: how can fire make ice colder, and ice make fire burn more brightly? To the speaker, the contrast between himself and his beloved is ultimately a testament to the power of love itself. Love is so "miraculous," he argues in the poem's end, that it can change the very laws of nature: like ice kindling fire, his beloved’s coolness just makes the speaker’s unrequited love grow stronger.
The speaker repeatedly describes himself as fiery and his lover as icy. He's "hot" with a passion for her that she coldly resists, meeting the "exceeding heat" of his love with indifference or rejection.
The speaker struggles to understand how this can be: he reasons that his heat should melt his lover’s "ice," or else her "ice" should extinguish his "fire." In other words, his passion should bring him and his lover closer together: either she should warm to him, or his desire should cool so that their attitudes align.
Instead, the opposite happens: his beloved’s coldness just makes his passion burn even hotter, in turn making her freeze even more solidly. It's as though they're trapped in a vicious cycle, their opposing desires feeding off each other.
Despite the seeming agony that this situation causes the speaker (who describes his sweat as "boiling" and depicts himself as engulfed in ever-growing, multiplying "flames"), by the poem's end his confusion is replaced by wonder at "the power of love." Love, he marvels, is a supreme, nature-altering force. He even compares his romantic situation to something "miraculous" (fire hardening ice; ice igniting fire). Ultimately, then, the speaker presents love as having the incredible power to fuel intense, even irrational passions.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire”
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Lines 1-4
My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?In the first line of the poem, the speaker sets up an important contrast between himself and his beloved. Using a simile, he says that his beloved is "like to ice"—presumably meaning that she's cold, distant, and unwilling to "warm" to his love. By contrast, the speaker compares himself to "fire." This suggests that the speaker is burning with desire for his beloved, consumed with lust and passion.
The two are opposites then, at least in terms of their attitudes toward each other. And by ending the first line with a colon, the speaker presents this opposition as the crux of the poem: the fact that he and his beloved are as different as "fire" and "ice" is what gives this sonnet its central conceit.
The speaker spends the following lines trying to understand how "ice" can make "fire" burn hotter—in other words, how his beloved's disinterest only makes his own desire stronger. How is it possible, he asks, that his "so hot desire" doesn't simply melt her "cold so great"? Note the repetition of the word "so" here, which emphasizes the division between the speaker and his beloved: her feelings are just as cold as his own are hot.
The speaker is clearly frustrated by this, expressing that he is "entreating" his beloved, or begging her, even though she only grows "harder" in her resolve, like ice growing harder as temperatures drop. By framing his thoughts as a rhetorical question, the speaker further captures his vexation and his amazement at his beloved's enduring coldness.
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Lines 5-8
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold? -
Lines 9-12
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? -
Lines 13-14
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Symbols
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Ice
Throughout "Amoretti XXX," the speaker uses "ice" to symbolize his beloved's coldness and aloofness. Whereas the speaker burns like "fire" with his affection and desire, his beloved is cool and disinterested. All this icy imagery implies that the speaker's love is unrequited. Like ice, his beloved's heart is "frozen" and "cold." She doesn't warm to his advances, or "melt" when touched by his fire. This opposition between fire and ice is central to the poem: it's a contrast that maddens the speaker, who wants to soften his beloved—but he also seems to find her coldness strangely attractive, as it only makes his own fire burn hotter.
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Fire
If his beloved is "ice," then the speaker, of course, is "fire"—ice's opposite. This fire symbolizes the burning intensity of the speaker's love. The speaker is consumed by desire, affection, lust; he wants his beloved to "melt," to accept his love and abandon her stubborn coldness. But she only grows colder, and that somehow makes the speaker "burn much more in boiling sweat," as if consumed by blazing flames. In other words, his beloved's disinterest makes the speaker's love more intense, until he feels like he's engulfed by fiery desire that he cannot escape.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The speaker uses a simile to open the poem and set up the contrast between himself and his beloved. In line 1, the speaker says, "My love is like to ice, and I to fire." In other words, the speaker's love burns hot inside him, like fire. His beloved, meanwhile, remains cool and disinterested, as cold as "ice."
This simile shapes everything that follows, establishing that this couple simply couldn't be more dissimilar in their affections. Ice and fire are incompatible: fire should either melt ice, or ice should snuff out fire. One would assume, then, that the speaker's passion would convince his beloved to be with him, or that her own resistance would put a damper on his desire.
Of course, that's not what happens in the poem! The speaker marvels at how his fiery passion only serves to push his beloved away, to make her even icier; that coldness, in turn, just stokes the flames of his love. Using a simile (which turns into an elaborate conceit by the poem's end) allows the speaker to visualize and relate the strange, frustrating, bewildering dynamic he perceives between himself and the object of his affections.
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Metaphor
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Assonance
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Alliteration
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Caesura
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Paradox
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Rhetorical Question
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"Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" 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.
- Entreat
- Exceeding
- Allayed
- Heart-frozen
- Augmented
- Manifold
- Congeal'd
- Wonderful
- Device
- Gentle
- Kind
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To ask or plead. In this case, the speaker suggests he has begged his beloved to return his affections.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire”
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Form
"My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" is a Spenserian sonnet. That means that it has 14 lines broken up into three quatrains, or four-line stanzas, and a final couplet, or two-line stanza. As is the case for most sonnets, those quatrains pose a question or problem to which the poem's final couplet then responds. This moment is called the poem's turn or volta.
Readers might recognize that this is also the pattern for a Shakespearean or English sonnet. What's different here is the poem's interlocking rhyme scheme: certain rhymes cascade down throughout the quatrains, linking them together on the level of sound (more on that in the Rhyme Scheme section of this guide).
The quatrains are also linked thematically here: each consists of a rhetorical question in which the speaker asks how his burning desire makes his beloved grow colder, while her coldness only makes his love grow stronger.
With this repetition of both sound and content, it's like each quatrain, each question, is building on the one that came before, generating suspense and excitement throughout the poem. These three quatrains eventually culminate in the final couplet, in which the speaker answers his own question, remarking that it's "the power of love" that causes "fire" and "ice" to behave in such a remarkable way—in other words, to make opposites attract.
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Meter
Like most sonnets, "My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" is written in a meter called iambic pentameter. This means that each line contains five iambs, poetic units consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Here are lines 1-2 as an example of this meter in action:
My Love | is like | to ice, | and I | to fire:
How comes | it then | that this | her cold | so greatIambic pentameter is a very common meter in English-language poetry because it sounds a lot like the way people naturally talk. The sound of iambic pentameter is also frequently likened to a heartbeat (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM), thus making it a fitting choice for romantic poetry like "Amoretti XXX," in which the speaker discusses his passionate and unrequited love for a woman as cold as "ice."
There are no notable deviations from iambic pentameter in this sonnet. Spenser sticks to the meter throughout the poem, creating a measured and even rhythm.
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Rhyme Scheme
Like other Spenserian sonnets, this poem features the following rhyme scheme:
ABAB BCBC CDCD EE
Rhymes alternate within the poem's quatrains, while the poem's final two lines form a neat rhyming couplet (technically something called a heroic couplet, because these lines are also written in iambic pentameter). Readers should also notice how each quatrain is "interlocked" with the next through repeating rhyme sounds. For example, "entreat" in the first quatrain rhymes with "heat" in the second. This interlocking helps the poem flow as one cohesive unit, with each quatrain building off the previous. This, in turn, increases the speaker's sense of excitement, wonder, and even bewilderment.
However, the final couplet stands alone: "mind" and "kind" don't rhyme with any of the other end rhymes in the poem. This distinction sets the couplet apart, which makes sense: the three quatrains—each consisting of a rhetorical question—culminate in one final answer about love's power.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Speaker
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Readers might interpret the speaker of "My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" as being the poet, Edmund Spenser, himself. This poem, also known as "Amoretti XXX," was number 30 in a series of 89 sonnets that Spenser wrote about his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle.
Of course, readers don't have to take the speaker as Spenser to make sense of the poem. In fact, the speaker never actually tells readers much about himself (or herself) within the poem text. What readers do know is that the speaker is someone struggling with unrequited love: he has clearly expressed his affection for his beloved, but she has met his advances with cold, "ice"-like indifference, or perhaps outright rejection. Accordingly, the speaker here expresses a mix of desperation, passion, and amazement; he's amazed that his love remains so strong, and in fact increasingly strong, despite his beloved's coldness.
For this speaker, love manifests as a visceral, physical longing: a fire that consumes him with "flames" and "boiling sweat." The speaker's attitude shifts subtly throughout the poem, as his incredulity or frustration gives way to awe at "the power of love." Above all, the speaker believes that love is powerful enough to change the laws of nature—even though love also causes him agony at this stage of his relationship.
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“Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Setting
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Spenser's sonnet has no clear or defined setting. It's a timeless poem about love, which might describe an affair in Renaissance England—the setting of its original publication—as well as an affair in the contemporary world. That is, the poem itself does not give any indication of when or where it takes place.
Of course, Spenser published this poem as part of the "Amoretti" sequence in 1595, in London. Given that Spenser wrote the poem in reference to his own relationship with Elizabeth Boyle, readers can (but don't have to) interpret the poem's setting as Spenser's own society in early-modern England.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire”
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Literary Context
The English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser is best known for his epic poem "The Faerie Queene," which is generally read as an allegory about Queen Elizabeth I. This is also the poem in which Spenser invented his signature verse form, the Spenserian stanza.
"My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" is the 30th poem in Spenser's less-famous 89-sonnet sequence titled "Amoretti," inspired by Spenser's relationship with his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. While Spenser put an interesting twist on the sonnet form with his interlocking rhyme scheme (more on that in the Form and Rhyme Scheme sections of this guide), his themes were pretty common for the genre: sonnets got their start in the 13th century as poems about courtly love. The Italian poet Petrarch perfected the form in the 14th century, and Spenser at times follows the Petrarchan tradition of casting his beloved as a distant and cruel tormentor (in "Amoretti XXX," for instance, the speaker's beloved is "cold" and "heart-frozen" as "ice").
Despite their common themes, the "Amoretti" poems are also unusual among Renaissance sonnet sequences because they culminate in marriage—making them the story of a successful love affair! (Most sonneteers were not so lucky.)
"Amoretti" came midway through Spenser's literary career. He published the sequence in 1595, in London, as part of a volume titled "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, six complete copies of this volume remain.
Historical Context
Spenser wrote this sonnet sequence about his relationship with Elizabeth Boyle. Spenser married Boyle in 1594, the same year that his first wife died. Boyle was Anglo-Irish and a relative of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. The "Amoretti" sequence describes the arc of her 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 was, of course, also writing during the English Renaissance—a golden age of art and literature usually dated from the late 15th to the early 17th century. More specifically, he wrote during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a time of relative peace and prosperity, as well as of increasing literacy.
Spenser was actually living in Ireland when composing Amoretti, where he worked in service of the English government. (Ireland was then ruled by England.) He died in London in 1599.
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More “Amoretti XXX: My Love is like to ice, and I to fire” Resources
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External Resources
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"Amoretti" Sonnet Cycle — Read more about "Amoretti," the sequence in which "My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" appears as number 30.
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The Sonnet Form — Learn more about the history of this famous poetic form, including the Spenserian variety.
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Edmund Spenser Biography — Read up on Edmund Spenser's life and literary works.
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Love Poetry in Renaissance England — Spenser wasn't alone in writing about the passions of the heart. Learn more about Renaissance love poetry here.
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"My Love is like to ice, and I to fire" Read Aloud — Listen to a recording of the sonnet.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Edmund Spenser
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