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 stubborn paradox: he burns, she stays cold, and yet neither element behaves the way fire and ice should. His heat should melt her; instead she hardens. Her chill should cool him; instead he scorches more. The poem spends its octave marveling at this contradiction, then in the sestet steps back to call it miraculous — ice kindling fire, fire hardening ice, a small impossible magic trick performed by love.
The music helps sell the wonder. Spenser's interlocking rhyme scheme (his signature "Spenserian" chain, where each quatrain's final rhyme seeds the next) gives the poem a rolling, almost obsessive momentum, mirroring the lover's circular fixation.
What still lands is the honesty underneath the wordplay: anyone who's wanted someone unmoved by their wanting recognizes this exact, maddening physics. The closing couplet's shrug — love simply rewrites nature's rules — feels less like an excuse and more like the plain truth of the thing.
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