Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote Her Name

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), “the poet’s poet” is best known for his romantic and national epic The Faerie Queene, he wrote poems of a number of other types as well and his development of the special form of sonnet bears his name—Spenserian Sonnet. As a widower approaching his fourties, he fell in love with a young woman, Elisabeth Boyle and courted her. On 11th June 1594, the couple were married, an event celebrated in Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion, published in London in the following year. “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” is number 75 in Amoretti, a sequence of sonnets about a courtship addressed to Elisabeth Boyle.

Sonnet 75 particularly tells about a day of the two lovers at the beach, reporting a conversation between the poet and his beloved. With his sonnet Spenser struggles with a problem of love, the problem of limited existence, just as he struggles with the sand and ocean thus claiming to bestow immortality upon his beloved. Lines 3 and 4 tell how he rewrote the name and the sea repeated the act of erasure. Here, the time is given as an erasing tide, which is a simile. These first four lines in a way indicate the uselessness of writing. The water washes away the writing, acts as a predator hunting on the lover’s pains, a personification of death. However, water may also be a life giver. The ebb and flow of the ocean is a symbol for immortality- death and rebirth.
The second quatrine indicates that the lady is with him. She scoffs at him for his "vain assay’ to make what is mortal immortal. She states that she will someday die just as her name, needless to say, is erased by the tide, an allusion to the Christian doctrine in which mortality is an inevitable part of human existence.

However; later on the poet refutes the woman’s statement with his confidence in the immortality of poetry. Thoroughout the third quatrine and the couplet, the lover speaks with a tone of triumph, both over his lover and the transience of their life, their love. He introduces the image of dust like a sudden feeling of thirst, contrasting it to water , but immediately pulls the reader from it and ensures his lover’s existence: “you shall live in fame”
Talking about his lady’s virtues but not of her beauty complements Spenser’s views about immortality. Beauty lies in virtue itself even being more effective in terms of immortality. The poet must be intentionally writing her glorious name in the heavens, the epitome of beautiful places, in order to show that inner beauty is more important than physical beauty (although he never mentions it directly.)
Spenser ends his sonnet by relating to Christian resurrection and afterlife : ”…later life renew” by this statement , He could also mean that he and his lover will marry and have children, through the lineage of whom their love shall live. The last two lines also touch the mutuality of love, by saying: “our love shall live…”
Because Spenser himself studied platonic love it can be inferred that the heavenly love, in a platonic concept, expands and transcends the physical world of sand and sea. The poet comes over the problem of limited existence, every time we read this sonnet, their love will become eternal.

Composed of three quatrins and a couplet, the prosodic form of Spenser’s Amoretti is a sonnet, there are no breaks between the quatrains and the final rhyming couplet. He used the metrical line of iambic pentameter, a meter in which there are five iambs (pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables) in each line. He prefers abab bcbc cdcd ee, interlocking rhyme, rather than rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. In other words sonnet 75 is a typical Spenserian sonnet. If you stand on a beach and watch the tide roll, you will see that the old waves are overtaken by coming waves and they bring new current in, as does sonnet 75 by its interlocking nature.

Away-prey-assay-decay’’, ‘’immortalize-likewize-devize-eternize’’, ‘’strand-hand’’, ‘’fame-name’’ and ‘’subdew-renew’’ are the rhymes of this sonnet, streaming easily, enabling the flow of the poem. Spenser made great use of alliteration: "waves and washed", "wrote it with", "paynes his pray", "dy in dust", "verse your vertues", "Where whenas", "love shall live" and "later life". Especially the alliteration of “waves and washed” is associated with the sound of the waves. Also when Spenser writes "my paynes his pray" the repetition of the "p" sound reflects the difficulty the lover feels. All the lines end with a grammatical break (comma, colons etc.) except for the 9th, which is an enjambment, rather than an end line.

Through the poet’s undaunted denial of the mistress’s prediction it may seem that the lover is rather celebrating his poetry than the love actually.But isn’t the purest love the he is trying to immortalize?We all know that immortality through poetry is nothing new in literature.The theme of carpediem haunts the poets to commemorate their shared emotions may it be love or poetry.
In this poem the lovers know the inexorable time’s ‘winged Charriot’ is hurrying near to devour everything in its way.But the poet’s verse would be so pregnant with adoration;that their love would leave an indelible impression on the sands of eternity for the lovers of posterity to follow.The beloved’s name may be washed away being a mere sign of mortal movement;but not be the expression of love,they experienced.Thus the love they once made will be renewed through generations as an ideal,contemplative one.

Usually a lyric is subjective and the objectivity of a drama is not found in it.It is true of the sonnet sequence Amoretti . But the seventy fifth sonnet of Spenser in the sequence is dramatic in tone. The lover here speaks not in a monologue as it happens in a love lyric. The lover appears to be romantic in his activities and optimism. His beloved speaks instead of being a silent listener .She also counters the lover's arguments. The lover says he will immortalise her by writing her name on the sandy stretch of the sea beach. But the beloved argues , and pertinently argues that it is not possible to immortalise a person by writing her name. Her body will be decayed in death. Likewise ,love for her will also be forgotten after her death. The beloved is a realistic minded person. Nevertheless the lover counters the argument and establishes the fact of immortality in love through verse. In the poetry of Horace and Ovid such immortality through verse is a theme. In medieval alchemy there is the theory of pure substance. Mutual love which is like pure substance because of the lack of heterogeneity is deathless. Thus the whole lyrical framework of the poem is marked by a dramatic tone. Till the last line the readers wait for the conclusion to be drawn. Who will win - the lover or the beloved? This is how the lyric is distinguished from other poems in the sonnet sequence , nay the whole range of Elizabethan sonnets, save those of Shakespeare who also used the dramatic suspense in his sonnets.
Dr.Ratan Bhattacharjee