For of the soul the body form doth take:
For soul is form, and doth the body make.

In these lines Spenser voices a Renaissance (and broadly Aristotelian/Neoplatonic) conception of “form”: the soul is not merely housed in the body but is the shaping principle that gives the body its intelligible structure and identity. The claim “soul is form” suggests that what we recognize as a person’s bodily presence is, in a profound sense, an outward expression of an inward, animating essence. Read in Spenser’s moral and allegorical register, the couplet can also imply that inner virtue or vice impresses itself upon outward appearance and action—character makes the “body” of a life. The phrasing compresses metaphysics into epigram, aligning spiritual reality with the visible world.