How is the concept of love portrayed differently in Amoretti and Astrophil and Stella?

's
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)

He tells his lover that "baser
things" can fade away, but she, her beauty, and their love are not "baser
things." They are higher, and they will be "eternize[d]" in his
"verse." While mortal things die all around them, their love will live on through the
immortal words of the poet.

Sidney's poems
feature a much different tone, as his speaker is a man tortured by love. Like Petrarch in the
original sonnets about Laura, Sidney feels pleasure from love and from his beloved's beauty.
However, her rejection of him and/or his inability to be with her creates great pain that he
also expresses in his poems. One representative poem is the sonnet addressed to sleep, Sonnet 39
in the sonnet sequence, "Come Sleep, O Sleep, thy certain knot of peace." In this
poem, Sidney addresses sleep in apostrophe and personifies it as a person who can help assuage
his pain. He wants sleep to come to him and to wrap him in darkness and silence, so he can have
some respite from thinking about Stella. He warns sleep at the end of the poem that if sleep
does not aid him,

thou shalt in me,

Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. (13€“14)

Not being allowed to sleep and escape Stella will result in greater pain, as his
wakefulness will only exacerbate his thoughts and his pain. This is much different from the
sentiment we see in Spenser's Sonnet 75. He wants his love to be remembered forever, while
Sidney hopes to shut out any thought of his beloved.