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Analysis Of Sonnet 75 By Edmund Spenser

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A sonnet is a fourteen line poem written in iambic pentameter using formal rhyme schemes. “Sonnet 75” is a sonnet written by Edmund Spenser, who is a famous English poet and is most known for his long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene which invented the Spenserian stanza. “Sonnet 75” is written as a Spenserian sonnet, which is a poem divided into three quatrains followed by a couplet. Edmund Spenser is the speaker of the poem as he is telling his lover that their love will live on forever through the lines of his poems. His lover thinks that he is vain for trying to immortalize their love through his poetry. She says that she is too mortal and will wash away one day. The theme of “Sonnet 75” is that no one can live forever, but the speaker is going to try to immortalize his lover’s virtues. It is through the analysis of Spenser’s frequent use of metaphors, alliteration, and personification that the reader can understand his strong effort of immortalizing their love through his poetry.
In the first quatrain, Spenser describes his efforts of preserving their love and his frustration when he isn’t successful. He describes writing his lover’s name in the sand and watching it wash away with the waves twice. He is trying to immortalize something that is mortal, which supports the theme that no one can live forever. Spenser uses a metaphor to describe their mortal love and his attempts to immortalize it when he says, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand / But came the waves and washed it away” (1-2). Spenser uses alliteration, “waves and washed”, to help emphasize that the waves are responsible for washing, removing, his lover and displaying her mortality (2). He then uses personification when he says, “But came the tide and made my pains his prey,” to personify the tides as time, which is the enemy (4). The first quatrain is very important in the development of the theme that no one lives forever because time is against them.
In the second quatrain, the speaker’s lover claims that he is vain for trying to immortalize their mortal love by writing her name over and over in the sand, as he knows she will wash away one day. His lover states that he is a “vain man,” because he thinks his writing is more powerful

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