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
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