Menegazzo - Virardi

One day I wrote her name uponthestrandA But camethewaves and washed it away:B Again I wrote it with a second hand,A But camethetideand made mypainshis prey.B "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain essayC A mortal thing so to immortalize;D For I myself shall like to this decay,C And eke my name be wiped out likewise.D "Not so," quoth I; "let baser things deviseE To lie in dust, butyoushall live by fame;F My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,E And intheheavens writeyouglorious name:F Where, whenas Death shall alltheworld subdue,G Our love shall live, and later life renew.G

The rhyme scheme follows the usual pattern of Elizabethan sonnet

as a matter of fact the rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg

One Day I Wrote Her Name is composed by an octave and a sestet.

In the octave the poet explains his feelings and talks about destructive properties of time.In the sestet poet would find a solution, he is hopeful that his verses will be able to eternize the memory of the beauty of the beloved and transfigure her into a heavenly being.

The principal themes mentioned in the sonnet are:

The expressions that indicate the inevitability of time and also indicate the power of poetry to give eternal life

Time- Destroys feelings Poetry (love)- Will eternize feelings

immortalize, eternize, again , mortal , decay, fame , heaven.

In the first quatrain the poet created a very realistic image of what he feels; Spenser begins the sonnet with a symbolic act on the part of a lover.

One day I wrote her name uponthestrandBut camethewaves and washed it away Again I wrote it with a second hand,But camethetideand made mypainshis prey

The poet highlights this act with the repetition of certain words like the verbs wrote and came and adjectives like one day and again

There are some etymological figures in Spensers sonnet

They consist of the repetition of some words that are not indentical but they convey the same effect.

At line 5 : "Vain man that dost in vain essayAt line 6: A mortal thing so to immortalize;At line 14: Our love shall live, and later life renew."

Readers might normally expect a contraddiction between lover/lady

but this sonnet is characterised by the contraddiction between time and poetry (love).

This makes the poem of universal value.

The central contrast in the sonnet is expressed as

Life/Death A mortal thing so to immortalize; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wiped out likewise

These are the words of the woman that wants the man understand that everything is mortal and so it is not possible to write the name on the sand because it will disappear, as everything in the world.

One day I wrote her name uponthestrand /But camethewaves and washed it away

Write the name on the sand shows the wish to transform something mortal into something immortal. Because when the waves cames, the name will disappear.And intheheavens writeyouglorious name

The poet wants to write the ladys name in the heavens because he wants to make his love eternal and with his verse he want to eternize the virtue of his beloved. So this is something eternal, that remains forever.

According to the Renaissance cosmology the universe was made of four elements. In this text we could find three.

WATER> things that decayEART > things that recurAIR > higher, more refined things