prothalamion

Estimated CEFR level: C2 — Proficiency

Estimated from word frequency; not an official CEFR classification.

Definition

After Prothalamion, title of a 16th-century poem by Edmund Spenser, from Ancient Greek πρό (pró, “for”) + thalamion, as in epithalamion.

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his Prothalamion and Epithalamion. — From Chaucer to Tennyson: With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors, Henry A. (Henry Augustin) Beers
Amoretti, Epithalamion, Hymns 1595 Johnston's Seven Champions of Christendom. Astrophel, Prothalamion, 1596 Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. — Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I, Edmund Spenser
323 ff., and the recurrent lines in Spenser’s Prothalamion and Epithalamium, which, of course, are on the same artistic plane with that marriage-song of Peleus and Thetis. — The Beginnings of Poetry, Francis Barton Gummere

prothalamium

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