FAITH IN POWER OF VERSE: SPENSER AND SHAKESPEARE

   Spenser and Shakespeare, the two great Elizabethans, both had farm faith in the power of their verse. The similarity lies in their preoccupation with the conflict between Love and Time. While Love is beautiful and tender, Time is fleeting and corrosive. Almost no object can escape the wreck of Time. But only powerful verse which records the beautiful experiences of love or the charm of one's beloved can possibly survive. And thus verse can make Love immortal. Let us look at the similarity between these two well-known sonnets:


1.
   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 pray.
   “Vayne man”, sayd she, “That dost in vaine assay,
   A mortall thing so to immortalize,
   For I myselve shall lyke to this decay,
   And eek my name bee wiped out lykewize”.


   “Not so”, quod I, “Let baser things devize
   To dye in dust but you shall live by fame;
   My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
   And in the hevens wryte your glorious name.
   Where as death shall all the world subdew,
   Our love shall live, and later life renew”.


                     --Spenser, Sonnet No. 75


2.
   Shall I compare thee to a Sumer’s day?
   Thou art more lovely and more temperate
   Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
   And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:


   Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
   And often is his gold complexion dimm’d:
   And every fair from fair sometime declines,
   By chance, or natures changing course untrimm’d;


   But thy eternal Summer shall not fade,
   Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
   Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade
   When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.


   So long a man can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


                     --Shakespeare, Sonnet No. 18