Epithalamion
Twenty-four stanzas for the twenty-four hours of a midsummer wedding day, calling the nymphs out before dawn, waking the bride, walking her to the church door and then counting the light back out of the sky. The refrain turns as the day turns, the woods answering and then no longer answering, and the solstice hours of southern Ireland in 1594 are worked into the count of the lines. Spenser wrote it for his own marriage to Elizabeth Boyle and printed it behind the sonnet sequence that led up to it.
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Lineage
- companion to ↑ Amoretti
Attributes
Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 52% · 10 shared
- 52% · 10 shared
- 52% · 10 shared
- 49% · 9 shared
- 49% · 9 shared
- 49% · 9 shared