Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my Song.

This line is the refrain of Edmund Spenser’s pastoral poem “Prothalamion” (1596), written to celebrate the double betrothal of Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset, daughters of the Earl of Worcester. Spenser frames the occasion as a ceremonial river-journey along the Thames, invoking the river as a classical-style tutelary presence and asking it to flow gently while he completes his nuptial song. The poem was composed late in Spenser’s career, after his major epic The Faerie Queene, and it blends courtly compliment with pastoral and mythological ornament, using the Thames as both a real London landscape and a symbolic conduit for harmony and celebration.

Addressing the Thames directly, Spenser turns the river into an attentive listener and participant in the poem’s music. The request that it “run softly” suggests an ideal of measured, harmonious motion—nature keeping time with art—so that the poet’s “Song” can unfold without disturbance. As a refrain, the line also functions like a musical cadence, repeatedly returning the reader to the poem’s central setting and mood. More broadly, it exemplifies Spenser’s habit of fusing English topography with classical pastoral convention: the Thames becomes both a specific national river and a mythic, almost sacred space suited to ritual praise and the ordering of social life through poetry.