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Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was a prolific poet of the 16th century whose literary work became famous after his death. Wyatt is credited for helping develop the English sonnet by adapting Italian forms. He popularized an English sonnet style based on the work of the early Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch. Using Petrarchan style, he featured allegorical themes while using Italian metrical forms like terza rima, sestine, and canzoni. Wyatt was a courtier in the court of Henry VIII, and he was thus acquainted with Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn. One of his most memorable poems,
Wyatt was born at Arlington Castle in Kent, England in 1503, where his father served in the courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII. He began his education at St. Johns College at the University of Cambridge. During his youth, Wyatt was known for being tall, handsome, skilled with music, and proficient at the courtly sport of jousting. Beginning in the 1520s, he served on diplomatic missions for Henry VIII, some of which dealt with Henry’s request to divorce Catherine of Aragon.
Wyatt married and had two children, but his marriage ended in scandal in 1525 when he charged his wife Elizabeth Brooke with adultery. Wyatt soon developed a love interest in Henry VIII’s paramour and later Queen, Anne Boleyn, for which he was eventually sent the Tower of London in 1535. From his cell window, Wyatt witnessed her execution in 1536. This inspired his poem,
During the 16th century, poets like Wyatt began experimenting in English by adapting classical and Italian poetic forms. Wyatt also found inspiration from the late medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who first used the word
Wyatt’s most famous poem
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, With naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild, and do not remember That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be Fortune it hath been otherwise, Twenty times better; but once in special, In thin array, after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small, And therewith all sweetly did me kiss And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?
It was no dream, I lay broad waking. But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go, of her goodness, And she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindely am served, I fain should know what she hath deserved.
During his life, Wyatt did not sign his full name in his work. As was the custom for gentlemen poets of the era, he circulated his poems in manuscript to friends, who then might copy a poem and send it to another friend or connection. The British Library holds one poem in his handwriting today.
According to scholar Jason Powell,
(261). Furthermore, his work was not published in book form until after his death. The majority of poems attributed to Wyatt appeared in a collection called approved
fifty-nine of the poems as finished copies by marking them with his signature (Tho
” in the margin; in the later parts of the manuscript, he entered a number of his own poems himself