Epithalamion
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1595
- Era
- Renaissance
- Form
- Lyric poetry
- Language
- English
- Length
- Short · 25 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThe Shorter PoemsPenguin Classics, 1999Richard McCabe's edition of everything but The Faerie Queene, with the Amoretti sonnets printed alongside as Spenser intended.
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A wedding song Spenser wrote for his own marriage to Elizabeth Boyle in 1594, published with the Amoretti sonnets. Its twenty-four stanzas follow the wedding day from the poet waking the bride before dawn, through the procession, the church service and the feast, to nightfall and the wedding bed, ending with a prayer for children. The structure tracks the hours of the day and the year, and the refrain about the woods echoing changes as night falls.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Epithalamion are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
