A name can be a gift, and Spenser treats one as exactly that. The speaker addresses the letters of a name as if they were living things, "most happy letters, fram'd by skilful trade", and then counts what they have brought him. The name itself is held back until the final couplet, where it arrives with a flourish: "Ye three Elizabeths". The poem works like a riddle with its answer saved for the end. Three women share the name. One gave him life, one is his "sovereign Queen", and one is "my love". The central idea is that his existence, standing and happiness all come from people who answer to the same name, so a few letters carry a whole life.
The poem is carefully organised. Line 4 promises "gifts of body, fortune, and of mind", and the next eight lines hand these out in the same order. The mother gives "my being", the body, "by due descent", a phrase that sounds almost legal. The Queen gives fortune: "honour and large richesse". Her verb is "lent", which quietly implies that worldly rank can be taken back. Only the third woman touches the spirit: "By whom my spirit out of dust was raised." The mother and the Queen get two lines each, but the beloved gets four, and the poem's feeling gathers around her. "Dust" recalls the biblical language of creation and resurrection, so love here is a kind of remaking. Calling her "my life's last ornament" suggests a finishing touch that completes what the others began.
The form reinforces this. The rhyme scheme (abab bcbc cdcd ee) is the interlocking pattern now called the Spenserian sonnet. Each quatrain hooks into the next: "mind" leads to "kind", and "lent" to "ornament". The rhymes link up like the letters of a name. Even the repetition of "kind" is clever. In line 5 it means "nature" ("by kind"), and two lines later it means "gracious" ("most kind"), so one word covers both the mother's natural gift and the Queen's generosity. At the end, "raised" and "praised" rhyme across the third quatrain, which suggests a trade. She raised him, and now his verse praises her. The line "To speak her praise and glory excellent" admits that the poem is itself that praise.
The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, formal and courtly, but Spenser lets it thicken at the key moment. In "three times thrice happy hath me made" the heavy monosyllables crowd together and slow the line, so the reader has to dwell on the counting. The word "happy" appears three times in the first three lines, as insistently as a toast. "Three times thrice" also makes nine, and "Elizabeth" has nine letters. We can't know whether Spenser planned this, but the coincidence suits a poem that plays with letters and numbers so openly.
The poem is also notable for what it leaves out. Love sonnets of this tradition often dwell on a distant or disdainful beloved and the lover's longing. This one offers settled, public gratitude. Placing his beloved beside his mother and his monarch is a bold compliment. It lifts private love to the level of family duty and loyalty to the crown, and it does so through wordplay rather than argument. The couplet then turns thanks into a blessing: "for ever live". Poetry is the means of that survival, since the Elizabeths will keep living as long as someone reads the poem. A small joke about a shared name ends as a claim about what verse can preserve.