One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon The Strand Analysis

Overwhelmed by the fondness you have for your beloved, you often try to finds ways to preserve it. In Edmund Spenser's poem, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,” the speaker uses imagery, metaphors, and personification to illustrate how love can be immortalized through poetry.
The poem begins with the speaker using vivid imagery to depict a romantic setting on the beach with his beloved. To express his passionate feelings towards her, he, “[writes] her name upon the strand” (1). However, as he does this, “came the waves and washéd it away” (2). Reluctant to give up, he continues to write her name on the sand, “Again I wrote it with a second hand” (3). Tired from using his regular hand, the speaker mentions himself switching to his “second hand,” which gives the reader an idea of how long he has been writing her name on the beach. To express his frustration, the speaker uses personification by

Not flattered by his gesture, the beloved is saying to the speaker is that he should just give up and stop trying to write her name on the sand, because no matter what he does, the forces of nature are much more powerful than his writing. “‘Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay,/ A mortal thing so to immortalize’” (5-6). In line 5, the beloved uses the word “vain” twice, however, with two completely different meanings. By calling the speaker a “vain man,” she is saying how he is too full of himself to think that his writing is more powerful than the waves. She then calls his actions a “vain assay,” in other words, saying how his attempts are useless. The beloved’s dialogue continues in the following two lines as she says, “‘For I myself shall like to this decay,/ And eke my name be wiped out likewise’” (7-8). Unconvinced that she can become immortalized through his writing, she recognizes how she will eventually die and fade away just like her name on the