Spenserian sonnet: Sonnet 75

For my Spenserian sonnet, I chose Sonnet 75 by Edmund Spenser, an audio reading of which you can find here.

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 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,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.

A Spenserian sonnet is characterized by the rhyme scheme ababbcbccdcdee. The carrying of a rhyme from one quatrain to the next lends itself to a 12-line "body" which develops 3 related ideas (one in each quatrain) and a final couplet that presents a different idea or commentary.

The first quatrain of this poem depicts the speaker trying to write out his beloved's name, just to have it washed away by the ocean. Nature steps in to prevent him from doing this, an idea which continues in the next quatrain. The speaker's lover reprimands him for wanting "in vain...a mortal thing so to immortalize." She tells him that both she and her name will eventually die, as is the way the world works, and they will go away so there is no use in his actions. The third quatrain gives the speaker's response, that though she will die, she will live on in reputation and in the poems he has written about her. The final couplet summarizes and generalizes the main point of the poem: even in death, love survives and brings life.

To support the romanticism of the subjects' philosophical musings, Spenser utilizes euphony. Euphony is a sound pattern that creates a pleasant, smooth quality by using vowels and semi-vowels like l, m, n, r, y, w.