Today’s Poem: One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand

Edmund Spenser, the Spenserian sonnet, and the fond argument of lovers

Antoni Piotrowski, Obraz Murze burzliwe na Helu, 1913 (Wikimedia Commons)

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One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand

by Edmund Spenser

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washéd 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 wipéd out likewise.”             ◦ eke = also
“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.”

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The Amoretti, a sequence of 89 sonnets by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (c.1552–1599), joins Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as one of two great contributions to an English tradition undergoing significant developmental leaps forward at the end of the 16th century. Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, published posthumously in 1591, followed by the Amoretti in 1595, both embed in that developing tradition the idea not only of the sonnet as a form, imported from Italy and Petrarch (1304–1374) via the diplomatic journeys of Henry VIII’s courtier Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), but of the sonnet cycle as an extended, unified form developing a theme.

Already, thanks to Petrarch and his early-16th-century English translators, the sonnet had established itself as poetic venue for meditations, particularly on romantic love. Both Sidney’s and Spenser’s sonnet cycles examine and enlarge on that theme. In his sonnets, Sidney (1554–1586) also pays homage to the formal pattern we attribute to Petrarch, with its distinctive abbaabbacdecde rhyme scheme—though with various innovations. Spenser’s own innovations nod a little more faintly in the direction of Italy, while  asserting their distinctive Englishness. 

Unknown artist, Edmund Spenser (Wikimedia Commons)

Of course there is a form denominated the “English sonnet,” or more commonly,  the “Shakespearean sonnet,” despite the fact that Henry Howard, the unfortunate Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), actually invented it. That form has eclipsed what we now know, when we care to remember it, as the Spenserian sonnet. 

Today’s Poem is one such sonnet: the 75th installment in a sequence written to commemorate the poet’s courtship with his second wife, Elizabeth, interweaving the time leading up to their wedding with the calendar of the liturgical year. This particular sonnet takes up a trope that will become familiar in the sonnets of Shakespeare: the brevity of human life juxtaposed with the immortalizing superpower that is verse. Here the juxtaposition is presented as the kind of fond quarrel in which people in love are apt to engage. 

We ought to pay special attention to Spenser’s own hybrid of the Petrarchan and the better-known English forms, if for no other reason than that we think often of Shakespeare, but seldom of Spenser. The quatrains here mimic the structure of an English or “Shakespearean” sonnet, with its abab rhyme scheme. The sonnet ends with the standard Shakespearean couplet, to clinch the poem’s argument. So far, so English, we might think. 

The homage to Petrarch occurs subtly, in the carrying-forward of each quatrain’s second rhyme into the subsequent quatrain, so that instead of the Shakespearean rhyme scheme of  ababcdcdefefgg, this sonnet’s scheme is ababbcbccdcdee. The three quatrains are far more interlocked than the same quatrains are in a Shakespearean sonnet. The formal whole, with its conversation between language traditions and its insistence on internal unity, makes a striking reflection of the poem’s argument, safely conducted within the unifying boundaries of mutual love. 

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