And painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain.

Spenser’s line captures a familiar Renaissance paradox of desire: intense feeling collapses the boundary between pleasure and pain until each seems to transform into the other. The phrase suggests an emotional state—often associated with love, longing, or erotic fascination—in which suffering is experienced as alluring, and delight carries an ache. The chiasmic reversal (“painful pleasure” / “pleasing pain”) emphasizes how passion can invert ordinary moral or bodily categories, making what should repel instead attract. In Spenser’s poetic world, such paradoxes frequently signal the destabilizing power of appetite and the psychological complexity of courtly love.