Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

I’m feeling a little sad tonight, and I can’t sleep, though at least for once I know why.

So I decided to post one of my favourite poems of all time. I’ve been watching the series The Tudors and the last episode I just (I have already seen it) Sir Thomas Wyatt, a Henrican poet is discussing lines he is writing to a composer called Thomas Tallis. Now, none of the actual encounter is historically accurate at all, but it makes me gleeful just to hear Wyatt say those glorious lines…

I wish I could post it in the early modern English but that would be unfair (and perhaps showing off, though I promise it is so much more beautiful but does take some time getting used to - even more so than Shakespeare)

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 themself 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;
Therewithall 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 kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

I’d love to post another one, about how Anne Boleyn, Wyatt’s one-time lover, now ‘belongs’ to another (Henry VIII) - if you want to look it up it’s called ‘Whoso list to hunt’. I’ve very fond memories of that one, and an Elizabethan literature class I took at uni.

I think I might have to make up a poetry category because a lot lately I seem to be posting a lot of poems I’ve read - I’ve come across so many wonderful ones I wouldn’t otherwise encounter.