Poem of the Day: ‘My Heart I Gave Thee, Not to Do It Pain’

Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), courtier and diplomat under Henry VIII, began his translation of Petrarch’s Italian sonnets into English at the behest of Henry’s original queen, Catherine of Aragon. As he rode the waves of Henry’s tumultuous reign, alternating bouts of imprisonment with diplomatic missions to the Continent, watching Henry’s marriages wax and wane, Wyatt continued as a poet in the courtly tradition and a translator of Italian poetry. We remember him chiefly as the conduit by which the sonnet made its way from Italy to England, to take hold as an enduring form in the English poetic tradition. Today’s Poem of the Day, continuing the Sun’s week-long celebration of the sonnet, reflects both Wyatt’s Italian influence and the transfiguration of that influence into something uniquely English. A variation on the Petrarchan sonnet, with a rhyme scheme of abbaabba cddcee and varying pentameter and tetrameter lines, the poem takes as its subject a common theme in courtly-love poetry: the lover whose faithfulness goes unrequited.