thus arranged slightly differently, the same concept applies.

Spenser's ending couplet is as follows: "Leaves, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone, / Whom if ye please, I care for other none" (lines 13–14). Sidney's speaker, in comparison, will "employ the remnant of my wit" (line 12) "To make me self believe that all is well, / While, with a feeling skill, I paint my hell" (lines 13–14). Already, we know from these two poems that the enduring sentiment of Spenser's opening poem is one of selfless love while Sidney's is one of self-pitying lost love. Here, Spenser is more focused on his love interest's happiness, and Sidney is more preoccupied with his own unhappiness.

Now, to get a sense of the journey the sonnet cycles go through, let us examine the last lines of the last poems in the collections. This brings us to Amoretti LXXXIV by Spenser and "Leave me, O love . . ." by Sidney. Spenser's couplet is "Dark is my day, whyles her fayre light I mis, / And dead my life that wants such lovely blis" (lines 13–14). Sidney's is "Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see: / Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me" (lines 13–14).

At first glance, this is easily a reversal in sentiment for both of them. By the end, Spenser is less satisfied with his love's happiness and is dearly missing his own, as Sidney was in the beginning. Sidney, meanwhile, appears to have found some sort of faith in love to last forever, as opposed to lamenting his failure with it as he did at the beginning. Though the speakers of both poems have lost love and both speak of death, their last lines contain opposite words: "dead" for Spenser and "eternal" for Sidney.

Over the course of these sonnet cycles, Spenser has traveled from selfless peace to a painful death of the selfhood he now inhabits, and Sidney has travelled from self-centered sorrow to, dare I say, enlightened acceptance. Two failed love stories, two different reactions over time.

As I say, these are two entire collections of poetry. See the reference links for the complete sonnet cycles. I am sure I have only begun to scrape the surface.

Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella are both sonnet collections written in the Renaissance. The main difference between the themes of the two collections stems from the authors' own experiences with love. Spenser's sonnets are written to his wife, while Sidney's are written to and about a woman to whom he was previously engaged but who married another man. Therefore, Spenser's poems celebrate the love he feels for his wife, while Sidney's poems exude much more complex emotions that fit more easily into the traditional sonnet traditions begun by Petrarch during the Italian Renaissance.

Spenser's Amoretti are dedicated to his wife, and we see in the poems his love and devotion to her. A representative poem is Sonnet 75, "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand." In the poem, Spenser describes a scenario wherein he writes his lover's name on the beach, but the tide washes it away. His beloved says it's foolish to attempt to make immortal something that is inherently mortal; since they are human, they will inevitably die, and their love with them. Spenser begs to differ, though, asserting that he will immortalize his wife and their love through his poetry. The final section of the poem reads as follows:

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew." (9–14)