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 whole sonnet on a single stubborn paradox: he's fire, she's ice, and love isn't melting or freezing anyone the way it should. Instead the heat makes her harder and the cold makes him burn hotter — logic turned inside out by feeling. That's the pleasure of the poem, watching him worry the contradiction from every angle before landing on the only explanation left: love itself bends nature's rules.
Musically, it moves in his signature interlocking rhyme scheme, each quatrain passing an idea to the next like a hand-off, so the argument builds instead of just repeating. The strongest image is fire hardening ice and ice kindling fire — a small, vivid impossibility that makes the emotional confusion feel almost scientific.
It still lands because anyone who's wanted someone unmoved by their wanting knows this exact bewilderment: why does trying harder only make them colder, and why does that coldness only make you want them more.
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