preview

Wings of Fire

Decent Essays
Open Document

Lecture 8 Edmond Spenser (1552 – 1599) Edmund Spenser’s ‘‘Sonnet 75’’ was published in 1595 as part of the larger work, Amoretti and Epithalamion. Amoretti are small love poems, in this case, sonnets, and an epithalamion is a wedding song. The work as a whole was written by Spenser to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, whom he arried in 1594. In ‘‘Sonnet 75,’’ the speaker is a poetic version of Spenser and the Lover to and about whom he is writing is Elizabeth. The subject of ‘‘Sonnet 75’’ is the immortality of love. In this sonnet, the speaker recounts his effort to immortalize Elizabeth and his love for her. Despite his lover’s doubts about his ability to do this, Spenser assures his lover (and the reader) that through his poetry, her …show more content…

In a sense, the speaker’s intention to immortalize his lover through his poetry validates his lover’s accusation that he is vain.His boasts about his ability to create such lasting fame for her reveals his grand opinion of his skill as a poet. Despite this vanity, however, the final lines of the poem make clear the depth of his love and his belief that the feelings they share will live on after death. Spenserian Sonnet : Spenser, through the poems in Amoretti and Epithalamion, developed a style of sonnet that incorporated the use of an interlocking rhyme scheme; this became known as the Spenserian sonnet. In such a rhyme scheme, the rhyming words at the end of each line (or end rhymes) form a pattern in which each section of the poem is linked with the following section through the repetition of the rhyming words. When discussing rhyme schemes, lines are assigned a letter in order to show the repetition of the rhyme. The Spenserian sonnet rhyme scheme is: abab bcbc cdcd ee. (All lines with an ‘‘a’’ designation rhyme with one another, all lines with a ‘‘b’’designation rhyme with one another and feature an end rhyme different from the ‘‘a’’ lines, and so on.) ‫مهم‬ The effect of this rhyme scheme is a structuring of the poem into three quatrains (a section of a poem consisting of four lines of verse) and a couplet (a section consisting of two lines of verse). This physical Structure relates to the poem’s meaning. The first quatrain describes the speaker’s actions on the

Get Access