Sonnet Analysis: Spenser II

Today I have decided to look at another classic sonnet and see what makes it tick. This is from Edmund Spenser's Amoretti:

Fair is my love, when her fair golden hairs

With the loose wind ye waving chance to mark:

Fair, when the rose in her red cheeks appears,

Or in her eyes the fire of love does spark:

Fair, when her breast, like a rich laden bark

With precious merchandise she forth doth lay:

Fair, when that cloud of pride, which oft doth dark

Her goodly light, with smiles she drives away

But fairest she, when so she doth display

The gate with pearls and rubies richly dight,

Through which her words so wise do make their way,

To bear the message of her gentle sprite.

The rest be works of nature's wonderment,

But this the work of heart's astonishment.

Triumphs:

The anaphora is strong in this one. The repeated use of "fair" may start off as annoying to some readers, but it is powerful enough to lull that critical part of the mind and become instead simply a part of the structure, especially on repeated readings. It contributes to the sonnet's octave-sestet division, as the change from "Fair" to "But fairest" signals the poet's turn from contemplating multiple parts of his mistress in sequence to exploring one aspect in more depth. Spenser's distinctive rhyme scheme (ababbcbccdcdee) is in full flower here, and with the partial exception of "dight" (slightly archaic even in his own time), the words are common enough that they pass unnoticed except as a pleasant rhythm, which is, in my opinion, how that rhyme scheme should sound at its best, avoiding the cloying over-rhyme-y feeling it can sometimes fall into. The sudden change from one and two syllable words to the "wonderment" and "astonishment" of the final couplet is powerful as well, strengthening the importance of those two words in the imagination. This compensates for the weakness of the actual rhyme (using the -ment suffix as the only rhyming element in a multisyllabic word). 

Imperfections:

As just mentioned, the last rhyme is weak in itself; like using a rhyme on -ly, a rhyme on -ment is strongest when the penultimate syllable would be a rhyme without the suffix. This is worse in the case of -ment because it is a less common sound and therefore draws attention to itself, whereas -ly is common enough that it can pass without inspection in most cases. This is definitely a sonnet that wants to be read repeatedly, so that the awkwardness of that rhyme, the initial resistance that can be posed by such extended anaphora, and the weakness of "dight" can all recede and the poem's strong concept and rhythm can rise to the fore. It also suffers from feeling trite in a modern context--although the existence of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 should remind us that this sort of sentiment quickly became trite in the early modern period too--and  from using metaphors that are less recognizable to modern ears (pearls and rubies for the teeth and lips). The use of "fair" outside the anaphora may also be criticized, since it adds to the potential exhaustion of that term without contributing directly to the rhetorical effect.