Edmund Spenser lived from 1552 to 1599. He's most famous for writing The Fairie Queen, apparently one of the longest poems ever written. This poem, luckily for us, is much shorter than that, but still quite powerful.
One day I wrote her name upon the strand
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
"Vain man," said she, "that does in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise."
"Not so," quoth I, "let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."
How many of us have sat on the beach writing things in the sand and watching them wash away? It's a powerful symbol of how life goes on and how what we have will fade and vanish from sight. We also have the matching thought here, that we've seen in other poems - that the act of writing a poem can make something immortal, long after their physical body is gone.
July - A Poem A Day
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