Eyes, in medieval and renaissance literature, were deeply connected to love. The act of seeing, and being seen, was considered extremely powerful. For instance, in the Arthurian legends by Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot regains strength in a sword fight by turning to look upon Gwenevere, who is high above him in a tower. Spenser’s friend Philip Sidney wrote a prose piece called Arcadia, which features the character Pyrocles falling in love with Philoclea after simply viewing a painting of her. Sonnet XXXV is inspired by how these works symbolically connect eyes to beauty and love.

The word “eyes” is repeated three times in Spenser’s poem: twice to refer to the speaker’s eyes (Lines 1 and 9), and once to refer to Narcissus’s eyes (Line 8). Most of the repeated pronouns in the poem—they/their—also refer to the speaker’s eyes. This makes the eyes the central subject of the poem. Symbolically, the eyes illustrate the speaker’s feelings of obsessive love, and to establish that his love was born from “sight” (Line 10).