Full little knowest thou that hast not tried,
What hell it is, in suing long to bide:
To lose good days, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed today, to be put back tomorrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow.

These lines come from Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence *Amoretti* (1595), written during his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, whom he later married. Like many Elizabethan love sonnets, the sequence dramatizes the lover’s emotional trials—especially the delays, uncertainties, and humiliations of “suit” (wooing) under the conventions of courtly love. Spenser, a poet closely connected to the ambitions and frustrations of court life, frames romantic pursuit in terms familiar to anyone who has waited on favor: days and nights consumed by anxious anticipation, alternating hope and setback. The speaker addresses someone who has not experienced such prolonged petitioning and therefore cannot understand its torment.

The speaker insists that only those who have endured prolonged “suit” can grasp its psychological misery. Spenser casts waiting as a kind of self-inflicted inferno: time is squandered (“lose good days”), sleep is replaced by brooding (“pensive discontent”), and progress is repeatedly reversed (“to speed today, to be put back tomorrow”). The emotional economy is unstable—hope sustains the lover even as fear and sorrow consume him. Beyond romance, the passage resonates as a critique of dependency and delay: when one’s happiness hinges on another’s decision, life becomes a cycle of expectation and disappointment, with time itself experienced as punishment.