Wyatt Thomas - Thomas Wyatt: the hearts forest

A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

To keep a measure of the distance between then and now, between him and us, his language of heart and mind and ours, in all that follows Thomas Wyatts words in his letters and his verse are kept very close to the original scribal version, sometimes his own autograph. Grammar , punctuation and spelling were not yet fixed. We will find that, in his travels, even Wyatts name was mutable Wiot, Wiat, Wyett, Vugiat, Wyato, Guiett, Huyet. Hoping to come closer to him in his lonely strangeness, I have transcribed poems from the manuscripts most closely associated with him. Reading him in his own English, in his spelling, with his punctuation, or lack of it, may be more challenging , but is the way to find him as he was, revolutionary and alive. That is the judgement of one poet upon another, of Alice Oswald upon Wyatt. no concession: anyone who would not persevere, I wolde he shulde nat rede this boke. Farewell.

In this book Wyatts intransigence is tempered. Any editorial change may compromise the text but may also make it less rebarbative. Contractions and abbreviations have been silently expanded, ff becomes F, and i and j and u and v have been given their modern forms. Wyatts virgule / becomes a comma, and his ampersand & becomes and. Scribal flourishes are eliminated. Since punctuation imposes certainty where Wyatt often meant ambivalence, I have intruded none, leaving the syntax sometimes uncertain, as he intended. Here the indentation, line breaks and capitalization almost always follow the manuscripts. Wyatts The Quyete of mynde, and his Declaration and Defence, written at moments of danger, with his heart in press, follow the same rule of modernization as his verse. His diplomatic letters to his king and to Thomas Cromwell, exercises in persuasion , are extensively quoted in later chapters, and although they, too, were written under great pressure , inward and outward, they are modernized here in the interests of some narrative flow. This book is to be read alongside Jason Powells splendid new edition of Wyatts prose works, The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, vol. i, which is forthcoming. Wyatts friends and back friends, the envious enemies, whose story this is also, are reported in modern English.

In references to manuscripts in foreign archives the writer, the intended recipient, the date and place of composition are given. Not so for manuscripts in English archives, which are more readily accessible. References to LP, CSPMilan and CSPVen are to document numbers, unless otherwise stated. I diarii di Marino Sanuto is cited by column numbers . Folio references are always to recto, unless otherwise stated.
In anticipation of Jason Powells authoritative Collected Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, vol. i, which was not available to me as I wrote, I have given references to Wyatts letters in this edition. For Wyatts Declaration and Defence I have referred to an older edition: K. Muir, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963).

Sir Thomas Wyatt: Poems selected by Alice Oswald (2008), pp. xi, xviii.

Devonshire, fo. 81.

Hans Holbein the younger, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Black and coloured chalks, pen and ink on pink prepared paper, 37.3 x 27.2 cm. The Royal Collection , The Royal Library, Windsor

Panorama of London, c.1544. Pen and ink and chalk on paper. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Place of publication is London, unless otherwise specified.