That sith thy Muse first since thy turning back Had all the Shepherds Nation by thy lack?Īnd I, poor Swain, of many, greatest Cross: But there’s a twist (and a turn, or a volta, as in most sonnets): here we have another take on the popular Renaissance conceit that the poet’s sonnet will immortalise his beloved.Ĭolin, my Life! my Life! how great a Loss He wrote his beloved’s name out a second time, but again the tide came in and obliterated it, as if deliberately targeting the poet’s efforts (‘pains’) with its destructive waves. Spenser tells us that he wrote his beloved’s name on the beach one day, but the waves came in and washed the name away. Even when using these established forms – and the sonnet had been in England for half a century when Spenser wrote his – he saw fit to innovate with it. The best-known poem from Spenser’s 1595 sonnet sequence Amoretti, which he wrote for his second wife Elizabeth Boyle (of whom more below), this one is rhymed ababbcbccdcdee, making this a Spenserian sonnet, a sort of halfway house between the original Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, with its octave and sestet, and the English or Shakespearean sonnet, which also ends with a rhyming couplet, as Spenser’s does.
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