Bookish

I'm about half way through Wolf Hall now, and one character who seems to crop up more and more is the young poet Thomas Wyatt: charmer of women, protege of Cromwell, and former lover of Anne Boleyn, who now so bewitches the King. This arrestingly modern poem, “The Lover Recounteth the Variable Fancy of his Fickle Mistress,” taketh on new significance when read in the context of Wyatt's court life. It's ostensibly about his mistress, but it might also be about the fickle favour of a capricious monarch - in this case a monarch with his beady eye on the poet's ex. It treats of lover's quarrels, but it might also reference the fierce and murderous debates over religion, which after all were knottily entwined with the ‘king's matter’: his licence to set his wife aside, and with her all Roman Catholic sway. It's a whinge from a jealous suitor, but it might also speak to a prevailing mood of certainties being unhinged. Man the paragon is really a fractured creature, subject to conscious as well as unconscious forces; all weakness, all weathercock variability, all wayward mutability are possible now in women and in men.

Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
So cruel intent,
So hasty heat and so soon spent,
From love to hate, and thence for to relent?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
To spy it in an eye
That turns as oft as chance on die,
The truth whereof can any try?
Is it possible?

Is it possible?
For to turn so oft,
To bring that lowest which was most aloft,
And to fall highest yet to light soft:
It is possible.

All is possible
Whoso list believe.
Trust therefore first, and after preve,
As men wed ladies by licence and leave.
All is possible.