One Day I Wrote Her Name Analysis

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To be remembered for all of time is an amazing feat that very few manage to accomplish on a grand scale. However, the average person can be immortalized through friends or family. Simply a memory or eulogy can bring one back to life. Essentially, it is something we all subconsciously do in very simple ways. Whether it is writing about them or simply thinking or remembering about them, they are being brought back into reality once more. Simply a memory or eulogy can bring them back to life. In terms of writing, poetry in particular is useful in immortalization. In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Edmund Spencer’s “One Day I Wrote her Name”, the idea of immortalization is greatly focused on and demonstrates that poetry can primarily be utilized as a device of immortalization.
In poet Edmund Spencer’s Amoretti series, the idea of immortalization is focused upon greatly, with more focus being allocated towards the future memory. His
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His treatment of writing shows that memory can primarily be used to bring one back from the past. The narrator constantly refers to events of his past, one by one, creating the image of his presumably late father and the daily obstacles he overcame: “Sundays too my father got up early / and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, / then with cracked hands…”(1-3). He brings this man of the past to life through his detailed memory. He is successful because he allows the readers themselves to envision the character that is his father and create his essence in our own image. The memory of a person serves as a bank of experiences. A location where you can acquire any moment that has passed and brings it back to the present. That is the power that memory holds and remembrance and this is what Hayden hopes to portray within his writing. As long as there is an experience with said person and it is remembered, it will live on