From Amoretti

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     Sonnet 75 (1595)

     One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
     But came the waves and washed it away:
     Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
     But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
5     Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,
     A mortall thing so to immortalize,
     For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
     And eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.
     Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize
10     To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
     My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
     And in the hevens wryte your glorious name.
     Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
     Our love shall live, and later life renew.

Editor´s Comments

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.

Historical Considerations

As a poet, Spenser looked to the future, while remaining intensely aware of the past. It was his manner to use the old as a way to explore the new. His poem The Shepheardes Calender begins with a dedication by "E.K." which honors Chaucer: "Uncouthe unkiste, sayde the olde famous Poete Chaucer: whom for his excellencie and wonderfull skil in making, his scholler Lidgage, a worthy scholler of so excellent a maister, calleth the Loadestarre of our Language." The poem seeks to create a new kind of English poetry by using conventions from the classical world to inaugurate a new Renaissance fashion for pastoral. The language of the poem was intentionally old-fashioned and the illustrations were executed in the manner of the woodcut, which had already been superseded by newer technologies of printing.

To see the illustration for April from The Shepheardes Calender, click here.

Spenser also played with the sonnet form to create new poetic possibilities. Sonnet 75, for example, part of the Amoretti, makes use of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence that began with Petrarch's Canzoniere, an exploration of the love relationship between a lover and an unattainable beloved. Like others who appropriated Petrarch- Wyatt (who with Surrey introduced the sonnet to England), Sidney, Shakespeare, and Drayton- Spenser delighted in the task of inventing new variations on the familiar themes, criticizing the conventions, pushing them to new extremes, even parodying them. To read an Elizabethan sonnet sprung out of such interplay can therefore be a highly intertextual exercise, because any given sonnet may be in complex dialogue with countless other absent poems.

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