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This may not be the most famous sonnet the Bard ever wrote, but it’s one of the best poetic meditations on the meaning of beauty.įor skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow įor rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim įresh-firecoal chestnut-falls finches’ wings ‘O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, / By that sweet ornament which truth doth give! / The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem / For that sweet odour which doth in it live.’ Over two centuries before John Keats (see below), Shakespeare was arguing that there is a strong link between truth and beauty. This poem supposedly had its roots in Sidney’s own unrequited love for the beautiful Penelope Rich, who was married to another man. For the poet, Stella is more beautiful than Narcissus, who was so attractive he fell in love with his own beauty when gazing upon it in the ‘watery glass’ of the stream, and more beautiful than the Roman goddess Venus, whom the Trojan prince, Paris, saw naked. The poem sees ‘Astrophil’ admiring the beauty of ‘Stella’ – and, specifically, the beauty of her lips, which he likens to cherries in a garden. So begins this fine sonnet taken from the first long sonnet sequence written in English. Spenser wrote a number of longer poems about ‘heavenly beauty’, but this shorter poem is our choice here: ‘The sovereign beauty which I do admire, / Witness the world how worthy to be praised: / The light whereof hath kindled heavenly fire / In my frail spirit, by her from baseness raised…’ We begin this pick of classic poems about beauty and all things beautiful with some Elizabethan sonnets – this one taken from Amoretti, written by Edmund Spenser, the author of The Faerie Queene. We hope you enjoy these beautiful poems.Įdmund Spenser, ‘ The sovereign beauty which I do admire’. But what are the best poems about beauty? In this post, we’ve suggested ten of the finest poems about the beautiful, ranging from the Elizabethan era to the contemporary, and taking in, among other things, the relationship between Truth and Beauty, the link between beauty and desire, and the various kinds of beauty – from intellectual beauty to the beauty found in the natural world. Poets are often concerned with beauty and the beautiful.