Fashioning Faith to Forms (Im)mutable: The Rondeau and Trust in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt

Abstract

That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison And holdeth me not yet can I scape no wise Can one fashion faith from words? Are there faithful forms offering, if not the certainty, at least the possibility to hold on to moments of trust and belief? And are there alternatives to seemingly stable structures should these disappoint in the quest for surety? An investigation of Wyatt’s exploration of the rondeau as ‘faithful form’ helps uncover not only the way the poet’s mind worked, but also the emotional and cognitive structures of his culture. Sir Thomas Wyatt was a courtier, an ambassador, a musician, a lover, a philosopher, a Protestant, a satirist, a speaker of plain English, a prisoner. He was also a poet, writing in a vast diversity of lyric forms, including the sonnet, the rondeau, terza rima, ottava rima, rime royale, and free forms with various invented rhyme schemes. The multitude of experiences captured in these structures – bibliographical or otherwise – give rise to, and themselves arise from, Wyatt’s wide-ranging poetical explorations. A constant concern is the conjunction between structure and content, at times mutually supportive, or tense and struggling against each other.