Literary Devices In Sonnet 75 By Edmund Spenser

“Sonnet 75”, by Edmund Spenser, is a love poem about a girl who knows that all things will come to an end, even though she does not want it to happen, and a guy who loves this girl and wants to give her immortality through his sonnets so that no everything has to come to an end. The theme of love and death and the overall haughty tone of the sonnet is revealed by the speakers’ use of literary devices. Metaphor, dialogue, and diction are the literary devices that play an important role in developing the overall theme and tone. The use of Metaphors throughout this Sonnet helps to reveal the haughty tone of the speaker. Spenser has the speaker, in the first quatrain, compare his love’s mortality with the waves washing away her name on the sand, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand,/ But came the waves and washed it away.” (1-2). When he writes …show more content…
This sonnet has lines four and two rhyme, and they have lines five and seven rhyme with them. Its a very unique way to structure the rhymes. Rhyming “immortalize” (6) with “likewise” (8) and then again with “devise” (9), and “eternize” (11), links the two different parts together. The words “immortalized” and “likewise” are said by one speaker, the woman, while “devise” and “eternize” are said by the other speaker. The way these are rhymed together like this, because they are talking about their different views on immortality. She believes that him making them immortal is like making them superior and that he is doing this all in vain, he believes that he is doing a good thing trying to immortalize them. He thinks that they can and will be remembered through his poetry. This helps express the haughty tone especially since he does not realize that he is acting superior and vain. If he knew and realized that he was in fact, as she said, acting in vain, then this would not have as much of a haughty tone as it