“Amoretti”,
Sonnet No. 75 “One day I wrote her name”; is one of the finest specimens
of Elizabethan love poetry which has for
its theme the traditional conflict between the contradictory factors- love and
mortality, transience and permanence, temporality and eternity, evanescence and
timelessness. {Though we do not find in Spenser, Sidney’s unquietness or
Shakespeare’s complaint against his fair friend or mistress, Spenser is unique
in his amalgamation of the lyrical with the dramatic and shift from subjective
experience to a universal celebration of poetic creation.
The
surface narrative of the poem is about Spenser expressing his love towards
Elizabeth Boyle whom he married later. However, the poem is actually about the
conflict of all destructive time and death with love and beauty. The poem also
encapsulates the power of language and the mastery of poets to manipulate
language to make love and beauty eternal in an essentially transient world.
The
sonnet begins in a perfectly romantic setting in dramatic manner where the poet
and his beloved are chilling at the seashore in an amorous mood. The poet-lover
gets all romantic and tries to make a worldly impact upon his beloved by
inscribing her name upon the seashore but the waves come and washes it away. As
the poet repeat his task: “Again I wrote with a second hand…”,the tides come
and do the same. These lines showcase the poet’s pessimism and the meditative
quality of humanity to counter mortality. The lover refers to his writings as
“my pains”, which becomes the prey of the cruel waves. He imagines that the
waves and the tide which are the agents of time are like a mean predator just
waiting to pounce upon defenseless human activities. {The image of time as a
merciless predator has found a similar memorable expression in Shakespeare’s
“Troilus and Cressida”: “Time hath, my lord a wallet at his back/ Whereinhe
puts alms for oblivion”.
The
second quatrain highlights the dramatic tone when the beloved chides the poet
for his childish, silly and futile activity. She raises a voice of protest that
she is an ordinary, fragile and transitory creature and neither her name nor
her persona can claim beyond death. in fact the lover’s bid for immortality is an narcissistic activity
out of vanity and self-satisfaction. “Vain man said she/… And eek my name be
wiped out likewise”.
In
the third quatrain the poem undergoes a classic ‘volte-face’ in which the poem
suddenly changes its theme. Being romantic and idealist, the poet asserts that
the gross, insignificant and sordid might be the part of the transient world
but his beloved’s beauty and her personality is a subject of immortality: “Not
so quod I, let base things devise/ To die in dust, but you shall live by fame”.
Here the poet alludes to the Biblical message of “memento-mori” by his
reference to the dust, as “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt depart”, runs
the Biblical adage. There no fallacy in the poets contention, for mortality
might be the ‘cul-de-sac’ of the human world bringing inevitable catastrophe,
but the world of poetic art has the way to permanence and eternity. The poet
boldly and proudly declares that as a poet he has the faith in his own ability
to immortalize the glorious name ans the spiritual loveliness of his beloved
through his immortal verses. “My verse your virtues rare shall eternize/ And in
the heavens write your glorious name”.
In
the final couplet the poet-lover reaffirms that his beloved will live a
deathless life being remembered by later lovers of poetry all over the world.
Further, their love would serve as an epitome to be initiated and followed by
later generations of lovers. “Where wheneas death shall all the world subdue/
Our love shall live and later life renew”.
Thus
Spenser carves out a unique position in the realm of love sonnets in spite of
following the age –old tradition of triumph of poetry over time, by virtue of
his amalgamation of the lyrical with the dramatic and the subjective with the
universal.
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