I guess it happens to many people who read a great deal, and especially those who’ve studied what others have written, pored over texts and verse and words in various combinations – that out of nowhere a phrase comes swimming into your mind, and goes round and round like water going down a plughole. The couple of lines which floated into my mind, as I was thinking of an idea which I might write about, was this: It was no dream: I lay broad waking. It was there, and I was thinking of it in the context of the scene in my head – but of course I knew it came from the sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt.
It’s amazing to think it was written five hundred years ago, it’s so vivid, so accessible, so easy familiar. The line comes from the last verse of the sonnet, and you can imagine Thomas lying awake, images churning in his mind, memories, imaginings, wonderings, as he thinks of his love – probably Anne Boleyn. A dangerous liaison indeed – that phrase was not one of Wyatt’s, it was the title of a novel(Les Liaisons Dangereuses in its original French) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, published in 1782.
I’m sure most of us have done foolish things for or because of love – or maybe “love”; my foolish things have been on the mild to harmless scale, silly and ridiculous – and to be honest, naive! Thomas however risked losing his head as well as his heart, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and possibly seeing the execution of Anne from his prison window. I’m sure many of us have lain awake thinking about our beloved, either in rapturous imaginings, or jealous thoughts seething, or our broken hearts dissolving with bitter tears.
Yes, I’ve shared the poem a dozen times, but here it is again:
Lois Elsden 