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A Note on Wyatt and Serafino D'Aquilano

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Annabel M. Endicott
Annabel M. Endicott*
Affiliation:
Victoria College, University of Toronto
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Extract

Among the poems edited by Professor Kenneth Muir from the Blage manuscript of early Tudor poetry there appears the following octave (XXXIX):

      Thou slepest ffast; and I with woffull hart
      Stand here alone, syghing, and cannot ffleye.
      Thou slepyst ffast, when crewell love his darte
      On me dothe cast, Alas! so paynefullye.
      Thou slepyst fast, and I all ffull of smart
      To the my fo in vayn do call and crye.
      And yet methinkes, thou that slepyst ffast,
      Thou dremyst styll whiche way my lyf to wast.

This poem had previously appeared as anonymous in Norman Ault's Elizabethan Lyrics, and Professor Muir does not definitely ascribe it to Wyatt, in spite of the evidence of the verse form. Wyatt was the only early Tudor poet who thoroughly explored the possibilities of the Italian ottava.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , Winter 1964 , pp. 301 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1964

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References

1 Wyatt, Thomas and his circle, Unpublished Poems, ed. Muir, Kenneth (Liverpool, 1961)Google Scholar.

2 This is the manuscript reading of this line.

3 Ottava rima apparently did not interest Wyatt's immediate successors. Surrey uses it only twice, Gascoigne not at all, and Googe avoids it even when closely imitating a Wyatt epigram. The stanza had to be virtually rediscovered in the 1590's, and then the inspiration was not Serafino and the epigram, but Ariosto and the epic.

4 ‘Nature, that gave the bee so feet a grace’ (68); ‘From thes hye hilles as when a spryng doth fall’ (94); ‘A face that shuld content me wonders well’ (171). Arabic numbers here and elsewhere refer to Professor Muir's, edition of Wyatt's Collected Poems (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

5 de Ciminelli, Serafino (Aquilano), Opere (Florence: P. de Giunta, 1516)Google Scholar, fol. 132.