When I was about midway through my second decade and starting to take an interest in poetry, I was one day leafing through an anthology of English poetry when my eye caught a poem called ‘The Lover Showeth How He is Forsaken of such as He Sometime Enjoyed’.
They flee from me, that sometime did me
seek,
With naked foot stalking within my
chamber:
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember,
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand ; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.
Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special
In thin arraye after a pleasant guise
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?
It was no dream ; for I lay broad awaking:
But all is turn'd now through my gentleness,
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness;
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served:
How like you this, what hath she now deserved?
The poem’s author was Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1552 ). Wyatt was not only a poet, but an ambassador in the service of Henry VIII, a dangerous occupation due to the violent character of the king and his single-minded concern with getting a male heir. His father had emerged victorious after the bloody civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses, but Henry knew unless he could provide a son, England could be plunged back into war.
Wyatt’s first major diplomatic task was to Rome to persuade Pope Clement VII to annul the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that Henry could marry Anne Boleyn. Although the Pope refused, in 1535 Wyatt was knighted for his efforts.
The next year – 1536 – Wyatt’s world fell apart. In order to marry Anne Boleyn, Henry had broken with the Church of Rome. But Anne’s only surviving child was a girl, later to become Elizabeth I. Henry determined to rid himself of his queen, charging her with adultery with a number of men, including her own brother. And Sir Thomas Wyatt.
While there is no proof of this charge, it seems that Wyatt, whose marriage was not happy, fell in love with Anne during the early 1520s. Wyatt’s grandson, in his life of the executed queen, said that from the moment Sir Thomas had seen “this new beauty” in the winter of 1522, he had fallen in love with her. Two of his poems, in particular, have been linked with Anne Boleyn, the one quoted above, and “Whoso list to Hunt”, the final lines of which appear to refer to Henry’s claim to her.
“Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an
hind!
But as for me, alas! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer ; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I, may spend his time in vain!
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about;
' Noli me tangere; for Cæsar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.'
Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower of London and only escaped execution through his father’s friendship with the king’s chancellor, Thomas Cromwell. But it is possible he witnessed the queen’s execution on May 19, 1536 from his cell window.
Although he seems to have been restored to favour and was indeed granted lands from the dissolved Boxley Abbey, in 1541 he was charged with treason, the charges only lifted through the intervention of Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Early the next year, Wyatt fell ill and died on October 11, 1542 at the age of 39.
Sir Thomas Wyatt is held by many to be the father of English poetry, although none of his poems was published during his lifetime, and the first book to feature his verse was printed a full 15 years after his death. His sonnets and odes are have a delicacy and beauty that stands in sharp contrast to the bloody, dangerous age in which he lived his brief and adventurous life.
Barnaby ffrench
