Writing is elsewhere. It is an act of displacement. Here becomes there. The inscription separates.
As Edmund Spenser writes at the beginning of Sonnet 75 in Amoretti, “One day I wrote her name upon the strand, / But came the waves and washed it away.” To begin with, the writing scene that the speaker describes must differ from the scene in which he writes, for what he describes would not yield such an artifact as would make its way into a print shop to be subjected to the work of the press. Such relatively permanent modes of impression as writing and print are of some urgency since after all the poem’s “she” is quite correct when she asserts the world’s impermanence: “‘Vayne man,’ said she, ‘that doest in vaine assay, / A mortall thing so to immortalize, / For I my selve shall lyke to this decay / And eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.'” She is as subject to death as the inscription of her name “upon the strand” is subject to the waves. In fact, within the space of this poem, her name does not appear. And even if her name were somehow to appear and its inscription to survive, what could differentiate it from the same name belonging to someone else? The signifier would float upon the waves that wash the sand.
In the poem’s opening image, the scene of writing fully accords with the view of the world that the beloved “she” asserts; all is impermanence; no sooner does the poet inscribe her name (which does not make its way into the poem) than it is washed away by the natural force of the world’s flux. In response, the poet makes a second attempt: “Agayne I wrote it with a second hand, / But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.” Given the significance of the “second hand” as a second mode or style of handwriting–and given the early modern, as well as contemporary, association between handwriting and identity–it is fair to note that the writer himself is washed away by the time he bends to write the beloved’s name a second time. Writing with a “second hand,” he is himself as caught up in the world’s flux as the ocean sand, much associated with the passing sands of time.
Given the experience of radical impermanence, both of self and of inscribed surface, it is curious that the speaker goes on to claim that he will “in the hevens wryte your glorious name.” How will he write her name in the stars if he cannot even make her name remain in the earthly sand? What the two scenes of writing–writing in the sand and writing in the stars–have in common is that they occur elsewhere. It is in the dynamics of writing as always elsewhere that the hope for “fame” lies.
A crucial moment in the poem is precisely the speaker’s assertion that his beloved will “live by fame,” a term that comes from the Latin word fama, meaning talk or report. It is in the dynamics of talk that hope for the permanence of writing lies. For writing remains but dead marks on a page unless it is brought into life, in a real sense brought into existence, by the act of reading, and therefore turned back into the human language that is the language as spoken, as breathed, as thought by a living and breathing being. To survive, writing must be written so as to remain relevant to, alive to, urgent for the human lifeworld. It must continue to circulate apart from its writer and the scene of its writing. It must generate talk. At the same time, if a piece of writing is to generate the interest of talk, it must not only feel relevant to the world of a given time and place, it must also have the effect of carrying news from elsewhere. If, in its relation to the present, it does not also promise something that the present context does not already have, then why read it?
The ambiguity of the sonnet’s closing lines adverts to this sense of how a piece of writing’s life, liveliness, and relevance occur. As the speaker asserts to his beloved, his writing will have the effect of allowing the news of their love to survive: “Where whenas death shall all the world subdew / Our love shall live, and later life renew.” It seems to me that, given the slipperiness of early modern poetic syntax, it is not too much of a stretch to read the final phrase in two ways. Thus, one may read the “later life” of this phrase as the object of the verb “renew,” meaning that “our love” will renew later life. But then one may also read “later life” as the subject of the verb “renew,” meaning that later life, those living in a later time, will renew their love by reading about it. By this latter reading, it is the later world of readers that will guarantee the ongoing life of their love by giving life, breath, back to the sonneteer’s poems about their love. As long as the poems are written as news from elsewhere, the fabled couple’s love may live by being read.