Edmund Spenser, best known for his narrative poem The Faerie Queen, lived from approximately 1552 until 1599. He wrote the Amoretti, a collection of 88 sonnets which reflect largely upon his ideas about love, while he courted Elizabeth Boyle whom he married in 1594 ("Spenser, Edmund"). Sonnet 75 of the Amoretti describes a man on a beach tracing his lover's name into the sand, writing it afresh after the tide erases it. When his lover chastises him for his "vain assay," stating that she will someday die just as her name will inevitably be erased by the tide, the man refutes her statement and avows that she will live forever because "My verse your virtues rare shall eternize."

The poem addresses immortality using a common archetypal symbol: the ebb and flow of the ocean, which usually represents immortality as a cycle of life, death and rebirth, rather than a static continued existence. The poem also uses an archetypal motif of submersion into cyclical, suggesting that submitting to that life-death-rebirth cycle leads to immortality, as demonstrated in the last two lines of the poem. While "death shall all the world subdue" their love, immortalized by poetry, allows for "later life [to] renew." This personification of death subduing the world illustrates death as a hunter, and this hunter image occurs earlier in the poem with the tide making the man's efforts to write in the sand "his prey." This image of the writing in the sand parallels the cycle described at the end of the poem, with the tide acting as death and the man's hand, like poetry, forever writing her name in the sands of time. Spenser demonstrates a tendency towards idealism, emphasizing that while the lovers' flesh may be impermanent, the idea of their love transcends.

After fruitlessly pursuing a deer, the huntsman described in Sonnet 67 abandons his chase, and while he rests, he notices the deer who has returned to drink from a stream. The deer then allows the hunter to capture her, deciding not to bolt though shaking when the huntsman does confine her. This sonnet addresses love more directly than Sonnet 75, comparing the pursuit of one's beloved to a hunter's pursuit of his prey. However, the poem calls this chase "vain assay" and indicates that love, rather than being sought, should happen upon one. The poem's portrayal of females in love suggests that women will not yield to aggressive persistence, but are rather "goodly won with her own will beguiled," meaning that women must fall in love by their own reasoning.

In Sonnet 67, the archetypal image of the river could signify the possibility of death and rebirth. The "shady place" at which the huntsman comes to rest may represent a return to the womb, or a figurative death, and then the river, associated with baptism in myth, represents a rebirth. Since the "lovers" in this poem meet at the river, perhaps the poem suggests that one may find rebirth through love. "One day I wrote her name·" presents a different, though by no means contradictory, representation of love, depicting it as transcendent with the dialogue between the lovers conveying love as reasonable rather than irrational. The natural settings of both poems also suggest that love has an idyllic quality due to the main characters' ability to harmonize with nature by submitting to the natural rhythms of life in Sonnet 75 and yielding to nature's intent in Sonnet 67. Both of the poems reveal Spenser's idealism; while both could be considered love poems, they discuss the idea of love rather than recite a woman's virtues that would induce love. The poems, especially Sonnet 75, also reveal Spenser's ideas about art, that of art's universality, not temporality.