Amoretti XXXV: "My hungry eyes, through greedy covetize"

Spenser’s Sonnet XXXV, or Sonnet 35, has four sections: three quatrains (four-line sections) and a concluding couplet (two lines). Each section ends with a period and contains a complex thought structured around a central idea. Overall, the poem focuses on the imagery of the eyes. Eyes are given abilities beyond what they can realistically do (e.g., they hunger like the stomach), and they represent the speaker (a device called synecdoche). Eyes are used as a way to explore the speaker’s obsession with their beloved. The poem is considered autobiographical, so the speaker is generally read as Spenser.

The first quatrain qualifies the hunger of the speaker’s eyes as insatiable. No matter how much the eyes consume—or see—their beloved, it is never enough. Spenser uses the archaic word “covetise” (Line 1)— covetousness or the desire for ownership—to describe the eyes. Furthermore, this initial quatrain sets up the paradox of pain and pleasure. When the eyes look at their beloved, she is considered “the object of their pain” (Line 2). In other words, the beloved is so beautiful it hurts to look at her. Part of this pain comes from not being able to see enough, or find “contentment” (Line 3). The speaker’s eyes always desire more. In Line 4, the eyes “complain” if they do not see their beloved, and the measure of these complaints increases in the next section.

Quatrains one and two mirror one another. While the first quatrain investigates “having” before “having not” (Line 4), the second quatrain reverses this to “lacking it” (Line 5) then “having it” (Line 6), as if a mirror was placed between the quatrains. While the speaker asserts that his eyes will die if they are unable to see the beloved, seeing her only enhances the desire to look. This is a paradoxical obsession. Pain comes from being unable to see enough, and Spenser uses a kind of synesthesia (a crossing of sensory experiences) to describe this feeling—transforming seeing to consuming.

The speaker turns to Greek mythology to develop the conceit (central metaphor) of hungry eyes. Echoing the mirroring of quatrains discussed above, the story of Narcissus includes the mirror-like surface of the water at which he gazes. He spends so long looking at his reflection that he does not eat: “whose eyes him starv’d” (Line 8). The speaker compares looking at his beloved with Narcissus looking at himself. Both the figure from myth and the speaker cannot consume what they find beautiful. This allusion explicitly raises a concern about vanity, which returns in the final concluding couplet.

Eyes are paradoxically hungry and filled in the third quatrain, furthering the duality of having and not having from the previous two quatrains. The speaker’s eyes are “so filled with the store / Of that fair sight” (Lines 9-10). This invokes the imagery of memory as well as food. Memories and food are things that are stored, or put away for future use. The speaker’s stock of images of the beloved is so built up that they cannot “brook” (Line 10) anything else. Brook means tolerate or stand, but another implication with the storage imagery is that adding more will cause the storage to overflow. This adds to the idea of seeing the beloved as painful: The speaker is already full of stored images.

The theme about obsessive love is further developed in the third quatrain. Seeing the beloved transforms the speaker’s eyes. While the beloved offers the paradox of pain and pleasure, what used to bring pleasure now inspires loathe. The speaker’s eyes “loathe the things which they did like before” (Line 11). The noun “things” is broad enough to offer several interpretations. One reading is that the speaker is repulsed by former lovers, rejecting past attraction, and only desiring the current beloved. Another reading is that the speaker’s obsession with the beloved has caused him to be repulsed by other visual stimuli. Joy, and painful pleasure, only come from seeing the beloved. Seeing anything else his eyes “like” (Line 11) is not just an inferior experience to seeing the beloved, but one that cannot be endured.

The concluding couplet compares the beloved to the rest of the world, and values her over everything else. Everything, not only staring at oneself like Narcissus, is inferior: “All this world’s glory seemeth vain to me” (Line 13). Achieving any other kind of glory, such as fighting in wars or receiving awards, is like staring into one’s reflection. Personal accomplishments and accolades are about the self rather than about another person. The speaker elevates the courtship of his beloved because it involves another human being. Obsessive love is cast as selfless, or the opposite of vanity. Spenser ends the poem with the word “she” (Line 14), illuminating the speaker’s focus. She, the beloved, is the ultimate end-goal: who the speaker wants to live for and marry.