Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss

If you’re a BBC Radio 4 listener, or if you love poetry, you may already know that tomorrow’s episode (9th May, 024, 9:00 am) of ‘In Our Time’ is all about the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. He is one of my favourites, if not top of my favourite poets, so I shall be ready for presenter Melvyn Bragg, Brian Cummings of York University, Susan Brigden of Oxford University , and Laura Ashe also of Oxford, to tell me more about Thomas. This is the introductory blurb:

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ‘the greatest poet of his age’, Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542), who brought the poetry of the Italian Renaissance into the English Tudor world, especially the sonnet, so preparing the way for Shakespeare and Donne. As an ambassador to Henry VIII and, allegedly, too close to Anne Boleyn, he experienced great privilege under intense scrutiny. Some of Wyatt’s poems, such as They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek, are astonishingly fresh and conversational and yet he wrote them under the tightest constraints, when a syllable out of place could have condemned him to the Tower.

This is more about the guests:

• Brian Cummings: 50th Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York
• Susan Brigden: Retired Fellow at Lincoln College, University of Oxford
• Laura Ashe: Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Here is one of his most famous poems:

They flee from me

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
There withall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

 It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.