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Compare Edmund Spencer's Amoretti Sonnet 75 to Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.
Quick answer:
Both Spenser's "Amoretti Sonnet 75" and Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" explore the theme of achieving immortality through poetry, despite the ravages of time. Spenser depicts the beloved's name erased by waves, suggesting her eventual oblivion, but asserts the sonnet will preserve her virtues eternally. Shakespeare contrasts the beloved's beauty with fleeting nature, concluding the sonnet is a perfect vessel for eternal remembrance. Spenser uses narrative, while Shakespeare begins with a rhetorical question.
The two sonnets both suggest that poetry is the superior mode by which a beloved's fame or perfection may endure time and nature's decay. In Spender, the waves obliterate the beloved's name written on the sand, to which she draws the inference that time will do the same for her. Her body, her "fame," and her reputation will be forgotten in time. The resolution in the poem comes as the speaker declares that the sonnet itself will outlast the beloved and will outlast the type of damage time can do to ephemeral writings, such as those made in sand. He even offers a heavenly immortality based on his poetry:
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.
In Shakespeare's sonnet, Time or entropy again becomes an adversary to the speaker's and the beloved's goals. First, Nature is deemed an unworthy conceit since it is subject to change and decay. The resolution in this poem is the poem itself. In every way, the poem follows perfectly the rules of the Shakespearean sonnet tradition, and in that perfection contains a fitting vessel by which the beloved's perfections will be eternally remembered.
While both poems are Shakespearean sonnets in form, Shakespeare's follows a slightly different approach to its origin. Spenser begins by narrating a brief action from which the poem's message is drawn. Shakespeare's begins as an almost throw away thought experiment: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day." From that question, the meditation on time and poetry follows. In Spenser, the conflict lies between the beloved and the speaker while in Shakespeare the conflict exists within the mind of the speaker.
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