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
This little sonnet turns a single paradox over and over, admiring how it catches the light differently each time. The speaker burns, his love stays icy — yet instead of one melting the other, his fire grows fiercer and her cold grows harder. Spenser builds this on his signature interlocking rhyme scheme, where each quatrain hands off a rhyme to the next, so the poem feels like it's arguing with itself in one continuous breath, echoing forward rather than settling into separate stanzas.
The strongest image is the reversal: fire that melts everything else instead hardens ice, and ice that should smother flame somehow feeds it. It's a small, elegant impossibility, stated plainly rather than fussed over.
What keeps it alive is the feeling underneath the logic puzzle — that ache of wanting someone whose indifference only sharpens your want. Anyone who has loved a person who wouldn't warm up knows exactly this weather.
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