- One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
- But came the waves and washed it away:
- Again I wrote it with a second hand,
- But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
- Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay
- A mortal thing so to immortalize,
- For I myself shall like to this decay,
- And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
- Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
- To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
- My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
- And in the heavens write your glorious name.
- Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue,
- Out love shall live, and later life renew.
POETIC / LITERARY DEVICES
1.
Imagery
-
“One day I wrote her
name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:”
2.
Alliteration
-
“die in dust,” “verse
your virtue,” “love shall live,” “later life,”
3.
Repetitive
-
“decay,” “die,” “death,”
4.
Symbolism
-
The sea alludes to the
distance that is between the lover and his beloved which is causing pain to the
lover.
-
The writing on the
sand refers to the lover’s insistence on making a worldly impact on his
beloved.
-
The waves are a
constant reminder of the cruelty of love, haunting again and again. By washing
away the name of the beloved, the waves act as torrents of torture. The waves
also signify time. The erasing of the name by water signifies the transient
nature of human life.
-
The sea-side or beach
also symbolizes a peaceful, comfortable place where the lover unreservedly
expresses himself.
-
The lover’s writing on the sand can be a
reference to man’s inherent desire to eternalize his being to be remembered
forever.
5.
Personification
-
But came the waves and
“washed” it away
-
But came the tide, and
my “pains” his prey
STANZA BY STANZA ANALYSIS
STANZA
1: The first quatrain describes the poet writing his lover’s name on the
sand. Yet, the very next moment, the waves swallow them up and the letters
vanish away. In the verse “Again I wrote it with a second hand”(line 4), we can
see how the poet strives once more to leave his writing upon the beach, only to
see it quickly disappear. We can understand the poet’s endless, but futile
effort to immortalize something that is mortal. At the same time the
writing of the lady's name, which is the central image of the poem, is
transferred from earth to heaven. Here we learn that time is the destroyer of
all things but even so, the poet perseveres with determination to engrave his
love on the walls of time itself.
STANZA
2: In this quatrain, the poem states that the poet's lover did not have the
confidence in his efforts of trying to immortalize his love towards her. She
argued it is a mere waste of time and effort as love is a mortal thing as the
phrase "A mortal thing so to immortalize". She will be “washed away”
just like her name was washed away by the tide. The lover tell the poet that he
needs to stop what he is doing and is vain for his efforts as everyone in the
world will eventually have to die as time and tide waits for no man. She wanted
him to know that his actions were only futile and that there is nothing he
could do to control the immortality of their love because immortality itself
does not exist. The lover only meant for her partner to accept the cruel and
harsh realities of life that nothing can last forever.
STANZA
3: In the third quatrain, the poet claims that he can make their
love last forever despite mortality. He says he can do this by using his verse.
He goes on to say that when people die, (because people do die because they are
mortal) that everyone will still have knowledge of their love because it will
be eternal. The line “My verse your virtues rare shall
eternize". Despite the fact of the poet's beloved discouraging him, he
never did give up but instead he proved his point by immortalising his love
towards his wife through his words and writing elements. And now even though
both he and his wife are long gone from the phase of this earth, but the
everlasting love the poet had towards his wife will always be known and
remembered for more generations to come. Just as he promised, to use his verse
as a tool to immortalize her virtue for as long as it will be.
FINAL
COUPLET: Shows a contrast between their immortal love and other things that
will die with the passage of time. The capitalized world “Death” shows how it
will brutally destroy all other things except for their love, which will be
renewed by the presence of the sonnet. This couplet embraces the theme of the
poem that their love will not fade away like other mortal things on earth.
CRITICAL APPRECIATION
In
Sonnet 75 by Edmund Spenser, the speaker tells a brief tale about himself and
his mistress, debating about mortality one day at the beach. As we know, love
is a mortal thing when one, or both partners depart from this earth, their love
will slowly fade from the consciousness of people. Through this poem, the
speaker is trying to let the readers know of his efforts to immortalize his
beloved. Even as time passes and when they're long gone, their love would still
be known throughout the ages. The sonnet is written in the pursuit of a
woman whom he loves.
The poet desires to commemorate the beloved by inscription. He tries taking writing off the page to the outdoors, leads to a lover's debate about death & time. Here we know that his lover believes that everything will subdue to the power of nature and everyone will die just like everything else on the earth but the poet believes otherwise. He feels that their love will stay alive forever and she will be famous (you shall live by fame). The poet wants to immortalise their love through his writings and it will be known until the heavens.
The poet desires to commemorate the beloved by inscription. He tries taking writing off the page to the outdoors, leads to a lover's debate about death & time. Here we know that his lover believes that everything will subdue to the power of nature and everyone will die just like everything else on the earth but the poet believes otherwise. He feels that their love will stay alive forever and she will be famous (you shall live by fame). The poet wants to immortalise their love through his writings and it will be known until the heavens.
Even
though death might separate them for the time being, but the poet strongly
reaffirmed that they will be together again after death because he believed in
life after death and that the love he had for his wife could never tear them
apart.
READING MATERIAL
Sonnet 75 is taken from Edmund Spenser’s poem Amoretti which was published in
1595. The poem has been fragmented into 89 short sonnets that combined make up
the whole of the poem. The name Amoretti itself means “little notes” or “little
cupids.” This poem is said to have been written on Spenser’s love affair and
eventual marriage to Elizabeth Boyle, his second wife. Sonnet 75 centres on the
immortality of spiritual love and the temporarily of physical love.
Poetic images can be surprisingly persistent over time. Spenser's Sonnet 75 opens with the striking image of a man writing his beloved's name in the sand, only to see the waves wash it away again. Anyone who listened to the radio in the 1950's would have heard a hit song by Pat Boone, called "Love Letters in the Sand." In a very general sense, the images are the same, as they suggest how ephemeral a gesture of love can be. If we look more closely though, we begin to see differences. The speaker in Spenser's sonnet is not a pop singer whose girl has left him. Spenser is in fact setting the speaker up for a rebuke from his beloved, who charges him with the vanity of ignoring his own human mortality. The lover in his turn is then able to raise the argument to a still higher plane, as he asserts that their love will triumph over death.
Poetic images can be surprisingly persistent over time. Spenser's Sonnet 75 opens with the striking image of a man writing his beloved's name in the sand, only to see the waves wash it away again. Anyone who listened to the radio in the 1950's would have heard a hit song by Pat Boone, called "Love Letters in the Sand." In a very general sense, the images are the same, as they suggest how ephemeral a gesture of love can be. If we look more closely though, we begin to see differences. The speaker in Spenser's sonnet is not a pop singer whose girl has left him. Spenser is in fact setting the speaker up for a rebuke from his beloved, who charges him with the vanity of ignoring his own human mortality. The lover in his turn is then able to raise the argument to a still higher plane, as he asserts that their love will triumph over death.
When the sonnet begins to deepen, it
does so by invoking a variety of issues characteristic of the sixteenth
century: the intense awareness of death, a continued sense of pride as a sin
(even among protestants), the Petrarchan notion that mortal love can lead
upward to divine love, the attempt to define a new kind of sacred married love.
The image of writing a name in the sand doesn't have any absolute meaning of
its own, certainly not one that transcends time. But like any image it is
available to be used in a way that serves the needs of a
particular moment in history. Sometimes it's just those images which seem to
have the shock of familiarity that we need to look at twice. They might give us
a way of getting inside an experience that happened 400 years ago, if it
happened at all. But they may also show us that when history repeats itself, it
does so differently.
Overall, Sonnet 75 is a poem about a man promising eternal love to his
beloved one. He eschews his lover’s realistic worries about the loss of love
due to death with enchanting words. His elaborate and detailed use of language
creates a rhythm and deepens the meaning as it goes along with the tone of the
verses. Thus, as the poet had anticipated, as long as people read and recite
this poem, it will last eternally as a beautiful sonnet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Great analysis. Thanks a lot :)
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