Edmund Spenser

Sonnet 67 (Spenser)

'''Sonnet LXVII'''

Extended simile structure

The entire first eight lines are setup—a huntsman giving up the chase. The actual courtship story doesn't start until line 9.

Like as a huntsman after weary chase,
Seeing the game from him escaped away,
sits down to rest him in some shady place,
with panting hounds, beguiled of their prey:
So, after long pursuit and vain assay,
when I all weary had the chase forsook,
the gentle deer returned the self-same way,

Petrarchan reversal

Traditional love sonnets show endless pursuit of the unavailable lady. Here she returns voluntarily—Spenser's marriage poem subverts the convention.

thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke.
There she, beholding me with milder look,
sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide,
till I in hand her yet half trembling took,

Active consent

Not captured by force—'her own good will' appears twice. This is about mutual choice, unusual for 1590s love poetry.

and with her own good will her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild,
so goodly won, with her own will beguiled.

Paradox of choice

'Beguiled' means both 'charmed' and 'deceived.' The final line questions whether her willing surrender is freedom or entrapment.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Amoretti Context

This is Sonnet 67 from Amoretti (1595), Spenser's courtship sequence written to Elizabeth Boyle, whom he married in 1594. Unlike Petrarchan sequences where the lady remains forever unattainable, the Amoretti tells a story that ends in marriage—the sequence culminates in Epithalamion, Spenser's wedding ode.

The deer hunt metaphor was conventional (Petrarch, Wyatt's 'Whoso List to Hunt'), but traditionally the deer escapes forever. Spenser inverts this: the huntsman gives up, and the deer *returns on her own*. This reversal reflects Protestant marriage ideology—mutual consent rather than courtly conquest. The poem appears late in the sequence, suggesting real progress in the courtship.

CONTEXT Spenser was 42 when he married Elizabeth Boyle, his second wife. He was an established poet living in Ireland, writing these sonnets during the actual courtship. The Amoretti's narrative arc—from pursuit to mutual love to marriage—was innovative for the sonnet sequence form.

The Volta That Isn't

Spenser uses the Spenserian sonnet form (abab bcbc cdcd ee), not the Italian octave/sestet divide. But he still structures this poem around a turn at line 9: the first eight lines are all simile ('Like as a huntsman...'), and line 9 begins the actual event ('There she, beholding me...').

Watch the shift from passive to active. Lines 1-8: the huntsman 'sits down,' has 'forsook' the chase—he's done nothing but quit. Line 9: 'There she'—suddenly she's the grammatical subject. She beholds, she chooses not to fly, she allows herself to be taken. The poem's power is in her agency, not his.

The final couplet's 'beguiled' is the puzzle. Does it mean she was tricked into loving him, or that she's charmingly deluded by love itself? The word appears twice—line 4 (the hounds 'beguiled of their prey') and line 14 ('with her own will beguiled'). The repetition links her willing surrender to the hounds' disappointment, suggesting even mutual love contains elements of beautiful self-deception.