The power of poetry is a culture-shaping power. Its symbolic language cultivates in us the ability to read the world, and ourselves, rightly, to understand that we live in a symbolic world rich with allusion and meaning. Nowhere is this truth more clearly seen than in the poetry of love and marriage. Poets of the past beheld the beauty of marital love and saw through it to the love of Christ for His bride. They recognized its mysterious and sacramental nature, that marriage itself was a visible manifestation of an invisible reality.

Edmund Spenser, one of the greatest poets of the Elizabethan age, composed a number of love poems in which he identified and celebrated this deeper significance. With an introduction by Dr. Joe Carlson explaining the liturgical nature of Spenser’s Amoretti, Epithalamion, Four Hymns, and Prothalamion, this volume presents the reader with some of the greatest love poetry ever written, poetry that faithfully represents the nature and fount of all human love.

LOVE, lift me up upon thy golden wings
From this base world unto thy heaven’s height,
Where I may see those admirable things
Which there thou workest by thy sovereign might,
Far above feeble reach of earthly sight,
That I thereof an heavenly hymn may sing
Unto the God of Love, high heaven’s king.