Poem of the Day: ‘Fresh Spring the Herald’

Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599), author of the allegorical Tudor-celebrating epic “The Faerie Queene,” was also one of the early innovators of the sonnet form in English. Imported from the Italian chiefly through the work of the diplomat-poet Thomas Wyatt, the sonnet had already begun to assume what we now generally call its Shakespearean form via the experimentations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Spenser, in the generation following Wyatt and Surrey, developed his own variation on the sonnet pattern, with the rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee. “The Amoretti,” a cycle of 89 such sonnets, chronicles his courtship of and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. Here, in the 70th sonnet of that cycle, the speaker exhorts his lover to wake up and follow in Love’s springtime entourage while it briefly tarries.