Milli mála - 2021, Page 208
MILLI MÁLA
Milli mála 13/2021 207
volume is also a matter of conjecture. The poet was intimately in-
volved in the production of his books throughout the 1590s.91 Yet
Ponsonby’s dedication of the Amoretti volume to Sir Robart Needham
explicitly acknowledges that Spenser’s “sweete conceited Sonets”
will appear “in [the poet’s] absence.”92 I thus consider the Amoretti
as a work pursuing its own lyric agenda, even though it undoubt-
edly plays off the other texts in the 1595 volume, both imagina-
tively and materially.
Spenser’s sequence is bracketed by striking images of books.
Sonnet I stages an encounter between the poems and their ideal
reader, the lady:
Happy ye leaues when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might
shall handle you and hold in loues soft bands,
lyke captiues trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she deriued is,
when ye behold the Angels blessed looke,
my souls long lacked foode, my heauens bliss.
Leaues, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none.
This apostrophic sonnet outlines a markedly corporeal procedure
for reading the Amoretti: not just the lady’s mind, but her whole
body (hands, fingers, eyes), her various senses (touch, sight, hear-
ing), the book’s verbal and non-verbal elements are involved in the
process of reading. To read the Amoretti is not only to grasp the
meaning of the words and respond to its sensuous cues; it is also to
hold the book in your hands before your eyes (given its octavo size
that would have been the default method of reading), turning its
91 See Weiss, “Watermark Evidence and Inference.”
92 Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion, n.p.
DANILA SOKOLOV