My love is like to ice, and I to fire: how comes it then that this her cold so great is not dissolv'd through my so hot desire, but harder grows, the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat is not delayed by her heart frozen cold, but that I burn much more in boiling sweat, and feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told that fire, which all thing melts, should harden ice: and ice which is congealed with senseless cold, should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the pow'r of love in gentle mind that it can alter all the course of kind.
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📖 About this poem
Spenser builds this sonnet on a single puzzle: how can fire and ice meet without either one winning? He's the fire, hot with wanting; she's the ice, cold and unmoved, and logic says one should melt the other. Instead, his heat only hardens her, and her cold only makes him burn hotter. That reversal is the whole engine of the poem, and he states it plainly before marveling at it in the final couplet, where love is called a force strong enough to "alter all the course of kind" — to break nature's own rules.
The music helps the argument along. Spenser's interlocking rhyme scheme links each quatrain to the next, so the poem feels like one unbroken thought rather than four separate ones, mirroring how the lovers' opposite states stay locked together.
It still lands because anyone who has wanted someone unreachable knows this exact, maddening physics: desire growing precisely because it isn't returned.
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