my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,and in the heuens wryte your glorious name. Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, our love shall live, and later life renew.
my verse your vertues(virtue) rare shall eternize,and in the heuens(heaven) wryte (write)your glorious name. Where whenas death shall all the world subdew(subdue), our love shall live, and later life renew.
The passage under explanation has been taken from Spenser's Sonnet No.75 .The third quatrain presents the lyrical voice’s response to what his loved one said.In this stanza, there is a volta and the tone of Sonnet 75 changes. Up to this moment, both the lyrical voice and his loved one emphasized on the mortal nature of them and their creations.(The lyrical voice, a poet, will immortalize his loved one in his poems and, because of that, she will live forever in heaven.)The speaker also says that his verse will eternize his beloved's virtues, and that it will write her name in the heavens, not in the sand. His poetry will be so awesome that it will make her immortal.The poet wants to write the beloved's glorious name in the sky (in the heavens). He wants to do so because the region of pure air in the sky lies beyond the reach of time and death and so he will succeed in rescuing his beloved from the ravages of time (his beloved's name written on the strand is wiped out by tide and waves). He rejects the pessimistic ironical tone of the beloved who says that it is futile to try to immortalise a mortal thing. He asserts the supremacy of poetry. The lover will celebrate the rare virtues of the beloved in poetry and her name will shine through ages. Death will subdue all the world, but their love will remain permanent in poetry. Their life will be renewed through love. The poem has simple music and rhythmic flow of lines. Indeed, the poet has created remarkable music by simple words, with liquid vowel sounds and soft consonants wrote, strand, tide, vain etc. The lines are written in Iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme-abab bcbc cdcd ee. In the couplet the first line has choppy quality with harsh sound like where, whenas, death, subdew. But the last line has soft and lifting music by the use of soft vowel sounds and alliteration-love, live, life. The use of puns, colloquialism and archaisms like vayne, vaine, eek, quod enhance the conversational ease and simplicity and add to the dramatic structure of the beautiful sonnet..
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