Time & Perspective Quote by Edmund Spenser

A poet complaining about not getting his due is almost a genre unto itself, but Spenser makes it sting by turning grievance into a perfectly balanced little trap. The line plays like a legal brief written in couplets: I was promised X at time A; from A to now, I got neither X nor its justification. The wit isn’t decorative. It’s evidence. By echoing the proverbial "rhyme or reason" and then flipping it into "reason for my rhyme", Spenser suggests he’s been asked to perform artistry first and earn legitimacy later - an arrangement every patronage economy loves, because it keeps the artist dependent.

The intent reads as pointed petition: a reminder to a patron (or an institution) that a pledge was made and that the delay has become a kind of insult. "Season" is doing quiet work here, implying not just time passing, but the proper moment ripening and then spoiling. Promises have their harvest window. Miss it, and what’s left is resentment.

Subtext: Spenser’s talent isn’t the issue; the system is. In Elizabethan England, poets often wrote toward favor, offices, pensions - the mundane scaffolding that made lofty verse possible. Spenser, who knew bureaucratic waiting and courtly deferral, turns that experience into a tight antithesis: rhyme without reason is empty; reason without rhyme is pointless; to receive neither is to be denied both livelihood and dignity.

The brilliance is how self-contained the complaint is. It doesn’t beg. It tallies. The music becomes the audit.