by Thomas Wyatt
In the autumn of 1542, an embassy from the emperor being expected to arrange for a war with France, Henry ordered Wyatt to meet it at Falmouth, and conduct it to London. Hasting to obey the royal mandate, our poet went through most unfavourable weather to Sherborne, overheated himself, and was seized with a malignant fever. Horsey, one of his most intimate friends, who lived close at hand, came to his aid, but in vain. His constitution speedily yielded to the disease, and he expired on the 10th or 11th of October 1542, at the early age of thirty-nine. Horsey closed his eyes, and his body being unfit for removal, buried him in his own vault in the Great Church at Sherborne, where he lies without monument or inscription. He left an only son, Sir Thomas Wyatt, called usually Wyatt the younger, who, in 1554, having joined in the Lady Jane Grey conspiracy, was condemned and executed for high treason.
Thus prematurely perished the graceful, accomplished, eloquent, and gifted Wyatt the elder. He died regretted by all, except the Roman Catholics, who had long known his leaning to the Protestant faith. He seems to have been altogether a most admirable character — generous and brave, true to his friends, liberal to his dependants, full of varied learning, and actuated in his general conduct by high moral and Christian principle. In his defence he confesses, indeed, that he was not immaculate — saying, “I grant I do not profess chastity; but yet I use not abomination.” In his attachment to Anne Boleyn he was to be pitied as much as blamed, and there is no other stain, whether deep or faint, upon his escutcheon.
We come now to a few remarks on his poetry. It is manifestly but a small extract from the large nature of the man; but in its smallness forms an exquisitely finished miniature of its author. It naturally and logically divides itself into three parts, answering in a remarkable manner to the various epochs in the history of the writer. We have first his Love-poetry, then his Satires, and finally his Paraphrase of David’s Penitential Psalms. His Love-poetry is remarkable for its purity. The passion is clothed and disguised under the innumerable quaintnesses of expression, like Eve under her fantastic attire of fig-leaves. The love of Wyatt is neither, on the one hand, the merely animal feeling to be found in Dryden, and under a guise of refinement and a classical costume in Horace also, and Anacreon; nor is it, on the other hand, the fine etherealised rapture of a Crashaw or a Shelley — it partakes in some measure of both, and unites them into a tertium quid, blended of warm enthusiasm and homely natural feeling of the poetical and the subduedly sensuous. Such, we think, was the general character of the love-poetry of the Reformation age, as we find it in Surrey, in Spenser, and in almost all the plays of Shakspeare. It is never contaminated by corruption, and yet it never condescends to wear a gauzy veil of sentimentalism. It is plain-spoken, yet pure. Its extravagances are sincere in their very absurdity. A certain chivalric fervour and grace mingle with its most fervid expressions. It is the love of Piercie Shafton, than whom Scott seldom drew a truer and better character, for the Miller’s daughter, without his coxcombry. To Wyatt and those other writers of his day his beloved is a goddess indeed; but a goddess stooping from heaven into his ardent embrace, and in embracing her he himself becomes in part divine. Some may object to the minuteness with which he anatomises his love feelings, and to the endless repetitions and refrains of his amorous song, but none can deny the sincerity of the songster; and the curious and quaint modes in which he expresses his affections remind you pleasantly of Arcadia and its poetical lovers; or of Shakspeare’s Arcadia of Arden, where his Rosalinds and Orlandos were wont to “fleet their time, as in the golden world.” Every little song and madrigal of Wyatt’s seems as if it had been first carved on the bark of a forest-tree, or perchance inscribed on the sand of the sea-shore, and thence transferred to his immortal verse.
In his Satires we find what we may call a mellowed souredness of spirit, like the taste of the plum or sloe when touched by the first frosts. There is no fury, no rancour, and but little bitterness. You have simply a good and great man, who has left the public arena early and without stain, giving the results of his experience, and deliberately preferring the life of rural simplicity and peace to that of courtly etiquette and diplomatic falsehood. How different from the savage and almost fiendish eye of retrospect such men as Swift and Byron cast upon a world which they have spurned, and which, with quite as much justice, has spumed them! Wyatt and the world, on the other hand, part fair foes, and shake hands ere they diverge from each other’s paths for ever.
In his version of the Seven Penitential Psalms, some have fancied that they see a tacit acknowledgment, on our poet’s part, of some special criminality. If it were so, it would only prove that he resembled one of the noblest characters in history in his repentance as well as in his sin. But we agree with Nott in thinking, that Wyatt’s choice of such a theme for his muse arose merely from that growing solemnity and seriousness of mind which often distinguish a man in middle life more than in advanced years. As it is, his version of these psalms is very striking, more deeply impregnated with evangelical truth than anything in that age’s poetry, and when he speaks at the close, in his own person, he approaches the sublime. Listen to the following picture of David in the cave: —
“He seemed in that place
A marble image, of singular reverence
Carved in the rock, with eyes and hand on high,
Made as by craft to plain, to sob, to sigh.
Thus while a beam that Bright Sun forth sends,
That sun the which was never cloud could hide,
Pierceth the cave, and on the harp descends,
Whose glancing light the cords did over glide,
And such lustre upon the harp extends
As light of lamp upon the gold clean tried,
The lome whereof into his eyes did start,
Surprised with joy by penance of the heart.”
.Our readers will observe in this extract, and throughout his poems, a certain ruggedness of versification and style; but they will not fail also to notice in every part of the volume traces of the ingenuity, eloquence, earnestness, fancy, and fire, which combine to constitute a true, if not a transcendent, poet.
Wyatt died on 11 October 1542 while staying with his friend Sir John Horsey at Clifton Maybank House in Dorset.
Sherborne Abbey, Dorset — Wyatt’s final resting place
Inside the Abbey
Wyatt’s tomb: the inscription reads: In Memory of Sir Thomas Wyat, poet and statesman, who died at Clifton Maybank, the house of his friend, Sir John Horsey, 11th Oct. 1542 and was buried in the vault in this chapel. “Wyat resteth here, that quick could never rest.”