One day I wrote her name upon the strand (Sonnet 75) Analysis

While the sonnet had been around for a few hundred years before Spenser wrote Amoretti, he definitely made the form his own. Spenser's big innovation to the 14-line sonnet was a new rhyme scheme. I...

Here's what we know about the speaker:1. He's pretty in love with his gal. 2. He's a poet.3. We don't want to assume that the speaker is necessarily Edmund Spenser himself, but he's definitely a Sp...

Our speaker and his girlfriend are hanging out on the strand—also known as the beach. We're not picturing a Caribbean island here. Our pals probably aren't chilling in Jamaica with little umbrell...

"Sonnet 75" has some cool dialogue going on, so we're going to go ahead and encourage you to read it out loud with a friend. If you do, you'll realize that the speaker is really into alliteration;...

This poem is the seventy-fifth in Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti, so we call it "Sonnet 75" (no big surprises there). The sequence is a poeticized version of Spenser's successful courtship of E...

Spenser created a whole new sonnet form for his Amoretti sonnet sequence. His form became so famous that we call it the "Spenserian sonnet." (Some other types of sonnets that you might be familiar...

"Sonnet 75" has some unfamiliar words ("assay," "eke,"), but once you get past those little buggers with our Shmoopy assistance (or with a helpful dictionary), this poem should be smooth sailing.

Spenser's actual birthdate isn't documented, but, based on some autobiographical poems, scholars suspect that he was born in 1552. (Source.)Karl Marx (yep, that Karl Marx), referred to Spenser as "...

This love poem's a sweet one, not a dirty one. Check out Shakespeare if you're looking for a salacious sonnet, gang.