Stephen wrote:
> The "Now..." is much less definitive than "Farewell..." which suggests a
> genuine, no "ifs" or "buts", closure. "Now" implies there might still be a
> future moment in which to change one's mind. Robin, are the "laws"
referred
> to ones of meter or ones of State or both. (T.S. Eliot, I think, was
> convinced that there was a web of coherence between State, High Church and
> poetic meter.)
Well, in the poem, Wyatt is referring to the laws of Eros. At this time
metrical rules hadn't been formally codified -- for that we have to wait for
the late 16thC and Gascoigne and various others.
Most of the changes Wyatt makes (like dropping the original "Now") seem to
be for metrical reasons, but there's at least one case where it's mostly
semantic.
My own feeling is that when Wyatt wrote the "Now" version, he was
fluctuating between stress metre and syllable accent, with the only
constraint the number of syllables in the line. Hey, cut him some slack --
no one had written a sonnet in English before.
When Wyatt revised in the "Farewell" version, he gets everything into iambic
pentameter *except* the line, "Hath taught me to set in trifles no store."
Curiously, the idiot Grimald actually manages to resolve this: "Taught me in
trifles that I set no store".
There's also the genre question -- it's part of the Renunciation of Love
(subvariety: sonnet) schema, of which my favourite is Fulke Greville's
"Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth ," ending with the marvelous
couplet:
But Cupid now farewell, I will go play me,
With thoughts that please me less, and less betray me.
Robin
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