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The Direct Source of Wyatt's Epigram: In Dowtfull Brest…
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
Every reader of Wyatt's poems will, I am sure, have no difficulty in recalling the epigram, In dowtfull brest…, which he himself furnished with the caption: ‘Of the mother that eat her childe at the siege of Jerusalem’. I quote from the Egerton manuscript version as given by Kenneth Muir, the latest editor of his verse, in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 61.
- In dowtfull brest, whilst moderly pitie
- With furyous famyn stondith at debate,
- Sayth thebrew moder: O child vnhappye,
- Retorne thi blowd where thow hadst milk of late.
- Yeld me those lymns that I made unto thi,
- And entre there where thou wert generate,
- For of on body agaynst all nature
- to a nothr must I mak sepulture.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1956
References
1 Curiously, in referring to the Wyatt epigram in note 80, p. 228, of his La Poesia di Sir Thomas Wyatt (Florence, 1952), Prof. Sergio Baldi writes, ‘Cfr. Leone Ebreo, The Wars of the Jews, vi, iii, 4, in Works, ed. Whiston, II (1825), 465-466.’ In calling his attention to the fact that Josephus, not Leone Ebreo, is the real author of the Works, I also asked him to explain how the name of the author of the Dialoghi d'Amore came to be cited by him. He has answered that he does not recall. There is, however, scarcely any doubt but that the use of the name is either a lapsus calami or a lapsus memoriae.