Spenser's "Easter" begins like a trumpet blast and ends like a classroom. In the first line Christ is the "Most glorious Lord of Lyfe," conqueror of "death and sin." By the last line he is a teacher, and the subject is one simple "lesson": love. The poem's central idea lies in that shift, from what Christ has done to what we are meant to do about it. The victory of Easter is not just something to admire. It creates a debt, and the debt is repaid in how people treat each other.
The opening lines pack the Easter story into a few strokes. "Having harrowd hell" refers to the old tradition that Christ descended into the underworld to free the souls held there. "Harrowed" is a rougher word than "visited." It suggests raiding and plundering, and it also names a farm tool that tears up the ground. Then comes the paradox of "Captivity thence captive," a phrase that echoes the Bible. The repetition makes the reversal audible: the thing that took prisoners is itself taken prisoner.
After this burst of narrative, the poem turns to prayer. The main request, "grant that we," is held back until line six, so the first eight lines read as one long sentence, as if praise cannot stop for breath. The wish that the day begin "with joy" repeats the word almost greedily ("joyous day… joy"). The image of being "clene washt from sin" with "deare blood" is a paradox, since blood normally stains. Sin also appears twice as a line-ending rhyme, in lines two and seven. I read this as the poem coming back to its enemy at the moment of cleansing, to show it has lost its grip.
The word "deare" does a great deal of work. It appears in "deare Lord," "deare blood," "all lyke deare didst buy," and finally "deare Love." In Spenser's English it can mean both "beloved" and "costly," and the poem plays on both. "Buy" and "weighing worthily" bring in the language of markets and scales. Christ bought everyone "lyke deare," at the same price, so no one is worth less than anyone else. Our love is then weighed against his and returned "againe." The poem gives this arithmetic a moral turn. What we owe is not coins but the habit of welcoming one another, which seems to be the sense of "entertayne" here.
The form carries the same idea of linking and answering. The fourteen lines follow an interlocking rhyme scheme, abab bcbc cdcd ee, the pattern associated with Spenser's name. Each quatrain hands a rhyme on to the next, so "sin" ties the first quatrain to the second. A run of -y sounds (dye, felicity, worthily, buy) then spreads across lines six to eleven. The rhymes work like links in a chain, much as the poem argues that Christ's love should be passed on. Only in the final couplet do the rhymes pair off neatly, with "ought" and "taught," as if the lesson has finally been put in plain words.
The rhythm is a steady iambic pentameter, which keeps the tone calm even in praise. Spenser breaks it at the edges. The first line opens on a stressed "MOST," a fanfare of a word, and the last line opens just as firmly on "Love." So the poem starts on the biggest superlative available and finishes on the thing it considers biggest of all. The couplet also drives the point home by repetition: "love" three times in a line and a half, the way a lesson is learned. Calling Christ "deare Love" blurs the line between the one who teaches and the thing taught. It also quietly draws "Lord," the poem's first title for him, toward "Love," its last.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in so small a space. It holds a theology of rescue, an argument about debt and repayment, and a practical instruction in a single sentence-and-a-half of ethics. It would have been easy for an Easter poem to stay in celebration. Spenser lets the celebration run to its natural end, which is a demand. The old spellings ("Lyfe," "clene," "entertayne") give the poem a worn, hand-held quality, like a prayer that has been said many times. Its final point is that the proper answer to a cosmic victory is ordinary kindness between neighbours.