Edmund Spenser's Amoretti

Edmund Spenser's Amoretti - Sonnet 75

Introduction

Sonnet 75 is part of Amoretti, a sonnet cycle that describes Spenser’s courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. Amoretti was published in 1595 and it included 89 sonnets and a series of short poems called Anacreontics and Epithalamion. The volume was titled “Amoretti and Epithalamion Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser”. Particularly, Sonnet 75 depicts the lyrical voice’s attempts to make his loved one immortal. A scene is described in which the lyrical voice has a conversation with his loved one about this particular topic. This poem is a Spenserian sonnet, formed by three interlocked quatrains and a couplet. It has an ABAB BCBC CDCD EE rhyme scheme and it is written in iambic pentameter. The main themes in Sonnet 75 are immortality and love.

Text

Amoretti LXXV

One Day I Wrote her Name

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 dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."