Wealth & Money Quote by Edmund Spenser

A poet of empire and allegory, Spenser is selling a bracingly Protestant kind of interior sovereignty: the claim that circumstance is never the final author of your life. “Maketh” does double duty here. It’s creation language, almost Genesis-like, implying the mind doesn’t merely interpret reality; it manufactures it. Ill becomes “good,” poverty becomes “rich,” misery becomes “happy” not through material change but through a spiritual and cognitive one. The line flatters its reader with agency, then tightens the screw: if you’re wretched, that’s also a making, and the maker lives in your skull.

The subtext is a moral economy disguised as psychology. Spenser’s world is hierarchical, anxious about disorder, and invested in discipline - of the self, the nation, the soul. This sentiment fits the Elizabethan project: cultivate subjects who can endure hardship, justify inequality, and frame deprivation as a test of virtue rather than a political failure. In that sense it’s both empowering and quietly coercive. It offers consolation while inoculating power against critique.

Poetically, the rhythm and parallelism act like a spell. By stacking opposites - wretch/happy, rich/poor - Spenser collapses social categories into mental states, turning external status into an internal verdict. It’s an early-modern version of the mindset doctrine, but with sharper stakes: salvation, not self-help. The intent isn’t to deny suffering; it’s to domesticate it, to make the mind a fortress where fortune can’t get the last word.