One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Sand
Edmund Spenser
- (a) One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
- (b) But came the waves and washed it away:
- (a) Again I wrote it with a second hand,
- (b) But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
- (b) Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay
- (c) A mortal thing so to immortalize!
- (b) For I myself shall like to this decay,
- (c) And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
- (c) Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
- (d) To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
- (c) My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
- (d) And in the heavens write your glorious name;
- (e) Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue,
- (e) Our love shall live, and later life renew.
The first stanza of The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayses having slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.
The First Verse of The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats
St. Agnes Eve–Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.
Also see:
Others include:
- Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
- Felicia Hemans in “The Forest Sanctuary“
- John Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes
- Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and Adonaïs
- Sir Walter Scott in The Vision of Don Roderick.
- Robert Burns in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” which shows his ability to use English forms while praising Scotland.
- William Wordsworth in “The Female Vagrant”, included in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Lotos-Eaters, in the first part of the poem.