Robert J. Lindley, 7-26-2020
Rhyme, ( The Dreams And Sweetest Wishes Of Youth )
Syllables Per Line:
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12 12 12 0 12 12
Total # Syllables:264
Total # Words::::178
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(1.)
NOTE:
https://interestingliterature.com/2018/09/a-short-analysis-of-edmund-spensers-amoretti-lxxv-one-day-i-wrote-her-name-upon-the-strand/
LITERATURE
A Short Analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti LXXV: ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’
Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti is one of the greatest of the Elizabethan sonnet sequences; after Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (which was the first great sonnet sequence in English), it is perhaps the greatest of all. Sonnet LXXV from Amoretti, beginning ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’, is probably the most famous poem in the cycle, and deserves closer analysis for its innovative use of a popular conceit.
Amoretti LXXV
by Edmund Spenser
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.’
‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’ addresses one of the key themes of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence: the struggle of the poet to immortalise his beloved, the woman his sonnets are written in praise of. In summary, Spenser tells us that he wrote his beloved’s name on the beach one day, but the waves came in and washed the name away. He wrote his beloved’s name out a second time, but again the tide came in and obliterated it, as if deliberately targeting the poet’s efforts (‘pains’) with its destructive waves.