It’s difficult to believe that this poem was written nearly five hundred years ago; some of the language and phrases may be distanced from us by time, but the images, the sentiment and meaning are the same as any writer might express. Dreams are such false friends; even if they are benign, they trick you into a parallel world for those moments that they flicker around us as we sleep.
Thomas Wyatt, born in 1503, lived an extraordinary but dangerous life, and died when he was just thirty-nine years old. How amazed he would have been if he had known that today we still appreciate and share his work:
Unstable dream, according to the place,
Be steadfast once, or else at least be true;
By tasted sweetness make me not to rue
The sudden loss of thy false feigned grace.
By good respect in such a dangerous case,
Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew,
But madest my sprite live, my care to renew,
My body in tempest her succour to embrace.
The body dead, the sprite had his desire,
Painless was th’ one, th’ other in delight.
Why then, alas, did it not keep it right,
Returning, to leap into the fire?
And where it was at wish, it could not remain,
Such mocks of dreams they turn to deadly pain.
Lois Elsden 