Perhaps I'm being perversely literal, but given that Amoretti is a sonnet
sequence, I get a whiff of resurrection in the body (in the mode of Donne)
here and of the Dante getting getting to see Beatrice again in
purgatory. In Petrarch and Dante Laura and Beatrice first refuse the
poets' advances and then die, thus setting up the "teen angel motiff" or,
if you prefer, the platonic ascension from the beautiful object to the idea
of beauty and its creator. Spenser's--Protestant, maybe even bourgeois) is
to portrary a consummated (or as least consummatable) relationship and
still get to heaven. So, the love preserved in Amoretti will not be
purchased at the expense of fruition--it will be preserved in the poems as
a record of how one can have his love and children and heaven too. There
mortal life will go the way of a name in the sand, but they will be
together in the resurrection to renew a love that extends beyond life AND
the sonnets will explain it to others and so be corrective to those morbid
Italians. The claim that the poem will write the name in the heavens
remains puzzling, but again could be construed to assert a the continuity
of eros and agape within a tradition that generally purchases the latter at
the expense of the former. There union and his celebration of it will be
holy and so be appreciated by Heaven (except for St. Paul, who will
grudgingly admit that it's better than burning.)
Or am I just being silly?
At 09:18 AM 2/20/2004, Martin Leigh Harrison wrote:
>Someone has asked me a question about the following of Spenser's
>_Amoretti_: not an earth-shakingly important question!, but a fun puzzle I
>think:
>
>Sonnet LXXV
>
>One day I wrote her name upon the strand;
>But came the waves, and washed it away.
>Agayne, I wrote it with a second hand;
>But came the tyde, and made my paynes his prey.
>Vayne man! sayd she, that doest in vaine assay
>A mortall thing so to immortalize;
>For I my selfe shall lyke to this decay,
>And eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.
>Not so (quod I); let baser things devize
>To dy in dust, but you shall live in fame:
>My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
>And in the hevens wryte your glorious name;
> Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
> Our love shall live, and later life renew.
>
>Namely, what does the last clause of the last line ("and later life
>renew") /really mean/? I've always thought it was pretty clear, but when I
>try to think about it I can't pin it down. Here are some possible meanings
>(surely not all valid) that I could think of:
>
>~
>Our love shall later renew [our] life
>Life shall later renew our love
>/Later life/ (think Yeats) shall renew itself
>Later life shall renew our love
>Life will renew later
>Our love shall renew Life [i.e. life altogether for "all the world"] ~
>
>Can you think of other meanings? Which are likely to have been intended by
>Spenser, if any? Can anything in the other sonnets or in someone else's
>works or some strange tidbit of Neoplatonistic trivia/lore help illuminate
>the clause in question? I'm sure we've seen Spenser use ambiguity like
>this elsewhere: where? Leigh Harrison
Marshall Grossman
Professor of English
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
301 405 9651
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