Poem of the Day: ‘My Heart I Gave Thee, Not to Do It Pain’
We remember Wyatt chiefly as the conduit by which the sonnet made its way from Italy to England, to take hold as an enduring form in the English poetic tradition.
Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), courtier and diplomat under Henry VIII, began his translation of Petrarch’s Italian sonnets into English at the behest of Henry’s original queen, Catherine of Aragon. As he rode the waves of Henry’s tumultuous reign, alternating bouts of imprisonment with diplomatic missions to the Continent, watching Henry’s marriages wax and wane, Wyatt continued as a poet in the courtly tradition and a translator of Italian poetry. We remember him chiefly as the conduit by which the sonnet made its way from Italy to England, to take hold as an enduring form in the English poetic tradition. Today’s Poem of the Day, continuing the Sun’s week-long celebration of the sonnet, reflects both Wyatt’s Italian influence and the transfiguration of that influence into something uniquely English. A variation on the Petrarchan sonnet, with a rhyme scheme of abbaabba cddcee and varying pentameter and tetrameter lines, the poem takes as its subject a common theme in courtly-love poetry: the lover whose faithfulness goes unrequited.
My Heart I Gave Thee, Not to Do It Pain
by Thomas Wyatt
My heart I gave thee, not to do it pain;
But to preserve, it was to thee taken.
I served thee, not to be forsaken,
But that I should be rewarded again.
I was content thy servant to remain
But not to be paid under this fashion.
Now since in thee is none other reason,
Displease thee not if that I do refrain,
Unsatiate of my woe and thy desire,
Assured by craft to excuse thy fault.
But since it please thee to feign a default,
Farewell, I say, parting from the fire:
For he that believeth bearing in hand,
Plougheth in water and soweth in the sand.
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
