Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

 

Patience, Though I Have Not

Patience, though I have not 

   The thing that I require, 

I must of force, God wot, 

   Forbear my most desire; 

For no ways can I find   

To sail against the wind. 

Patience, do what they will 

   To work me woe or spite, 

I shall content me still 

   To think both day and night, 

To think and hold my peace, 

Since there is no redress. 

Patience, withouten blame, 

   For I offended nought; 

I know they know the same, 

   Though they have changed their thought. 

Was ever thought so moved 

To hate that it hath loved? 

Patience of all my harm, 

   For fortune is my foe; 

Patience must be the charm 

   To heal me of my woe: 

Patience without offence 

Is a painful patience.   

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

 

Hans Holbein the Younger. Chalk and pen on paper

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; 
Therewithall 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.

John Clare (1793-1864)

I AM

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, 

My friends forsake me like a memory lost; 
I am the self-consumer of my woes, 
They rise and vanish in oblivious host, 
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; 
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost 

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 
Into the living sea of waking dreams, 
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, 
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; 
And e'en the dearest- that I loved the best- 
Are strange- nay, rather stranger than the rest. 

I long for scenes where man has never trod; 
A place where woman never smil'd or wept; 
There to abide with my creator, God, 
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: 
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie; 
The grass below- above the vaulted sky.