This is in regard to this article from 2019 about: Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti LXXV: ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’

My reaction to this poem might be mostly about how different the spelling is from the 1500s. Then when people first came to the U.S. in 1620 spellings started to slowly change from the original English. YOu can see how different things were said then compared to now. So, though we might understand the words somewhat it might have meant something quite different with the word meanings in those times than now.

However, basically we get the general Idea of what he is saying I feel too.

 This is about the following article I quoted in 2019. The link is below in likely purple or blue on your computer or other device:

• Edward Spencer- a Contemporary of Elizabeth I- died 1599

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 dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.’
‘Not so,’ (quod I); ‘let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues 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.’

end quote:

A more modern interpretation of this poem also in the link above:

begin partial quote:

‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’ addresses one of the key themes of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence: the struggle of the poet to immortalise his beloved, the woman his sonnets are written in praise of. In summary, Spenser tells us that he wrote his beloved’s name on the beach one day, but the waves came in and washed the name away. He wrote his beloved’s name out a second time, but again the tide came in and obliterated it, as if deliberately targeting the poet’s efforts (‘pains’) with its destructive waves.

Spenser’s beloved chastises him for his hubris and arrogance in seeking to immortalise her in this way, when she is but a woman, and only mortal. Her body will itself decay one day, much as her name has disappeared from the sand; her ‘name’, as in all memory of her, will be wiped out, just as her (literal) name has been erased from the shore.

But then there comes the volta or ‘turn’ which often comes at this point (the beginning of the ninth line) in a sonnet: Spenser responds to his beloved, arguing that whilst it is truer that less beautiful and fine things are mortal and will perish, someone as beautiful as she is deserves to live forever – not literally, but through lasting fame. Her name will live on thanks to his writing. My poetry, he concludes in the final four lines, will immortalise your rare qualities, and write your name in the heavens; so that in the afterlife together we will have a richer life, because I have praised your name so.

end partial quote from:

 Edward Spencer- a Contemporary of Elizabeth I- died 1599