Written in the Sand, Whispered to the Sky

AMORETTI, SONNET #75

By Edmund Spenser

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I write it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Vain man, said she, that doest 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, (quod 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.

Name in the Sand 

                                             

   The love that comes in summer is immortalized in many poems and songs.

Amoretti is an Elizabethan sonnet-cycle, a series of interconnected poems which conventionally trace a man's attempt to woo his beloved, the moment she capitulates to him and returns his love, and his sorrow at somehow losing her again. Spenser's sonnet-cycle divides readily into these three sections: his pursuit of the beloved extends from Sonnet 1 to Sonnet 57. Sonnets 58 through 77 mostly dwell upon the speaker's humility at having won his beloved's heart and his own impatience to consummate the relationship. Sonnets 78 through 89 focus primarily on the speaker's longing for his beloved, who is absent for some reason, while comforting himself with his poetry's ability to immortalize her.

    It is very likely Edmund Spencer intended these poems to be a wedding gift to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. The sequence of eighty-nine sonnets, entitled
 Amoretti and Epithalmion, still hold up today even though they were written in 1595.

                                                  Singer, Sophie B. Hawkins   

 As the song by Sophie B.Hawkins shows, whether you whisper your lovers's name upon the wind or write messages on the sand, art will immortalize love.