A Sonnet a Day # 5: Edmund Spenser

Son of a weaver and cloth-merchant, Edmund Spenser was born in London in 1552 and died there in 1599. As a colonial administrator in Ireland during the Nine Years’ War he witnessed, and indeed defended in print, the atrocious depredations of the English armies. We’ve already met his neighbour in Ireland, Walter Raleigh, but for Spenser poetry was more than a gentlemanly pursuit: he made it his life’s work to civilise English verse just as Elizabeth’s armies were civilising the Irish.

He is best-known for his huge masterpiece The Faerie Queen, a piece of allegorical propaganda on behalf of Elizabeth I. But today’s poem comes from his sonnet sequence Amoretti, whose ‘little loves’ chronicle and celebrate his courtship of and marriage to his Anglo-Irish wife Elizabeth Boyle. (A departure from the courtly love tradition where the love-object is typically unattainable.)

Spenser develops a rhyme-scheme for the sonnet that now bears his name, accentuating the interwoven structure of the three quatrains that precede the closing couplet: abab bcbc cdcd ee. The motif – that art has power to immortalize its subject – we’ll meet again in Spenser’s contemporary sonneteer, Shakespeare. In fact, the theme was a stock one, a ‘device’, which will have helped populate the sequence when the muse had a day off. The dialogue structure was also commonplace in Elizabethan verse, and is underpinned by the octave-sestet architecture.

Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name

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."

There’s more about Spenser at (once again) the poetry foundation

These short bite-sized essayettes on the great fourteen-liners in English are part of an ongoing conversation with a friend. If you're interested, the earlier instalments are here, here, here and here.