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: : : To explicate this poem (which I had assigned to group 9, a group not presently populated), I am copying it here from the Calendar’s source along with the notes provided by the editors. I suggest that you do the same when preparing your explications. : : : : : : 1 I abide and abide and better abide, : : : 2 And after the old proverb, the happy day; : : : 3 And ever my lady to me doth say, : : : 4 "Let me alone and I will provide." : : : 5 I abide and abide and tarry the tide, : : : 6 And with abiding speed well ye may. : : : 7 Thus do I abide I wot alway, : : : 8 Nother obtaining nor yet denied. : : : 9 Ay me! this long abiding : : : 10 Seemeth to me, as who sayeth, : : : 11 A prolonging of a dying death, : : : 12 Or a refusing of a desir'd thing. : : : 13 Much were it better for to be plain : : : 14 Than to say "abide" and yet shall not obtain. : : : 1. First printed by Nott. : : : 2. old proverb. This proverb is found in the Envoy to the "Plaint," once attributed to Chaucer: "Better is it to suffer and fortune abide/Than hastily to clime and sodenly to slyde." : : : 5. tarry the tide: bide my time, wait (proverbial). : : : 6. Wyatt ironically observes that the lady ("ye") does fine with her "abiding speed" ("continuing success"). : : : 7. I wot alway: forever, for all I know. : : : 8. Nother: neither. : : : 10. as who sayeth: what one might call, as they say. : : : 13. to be plain: say her mind, not equivocate, i.e., reject him. : : : and yet shall not obtain: and I shall continue not gaining your favour. : : : The purpose of any explication (defined by <I>The American Heritage of the English Language (AHEL)</I> as “Exhaustive exposition and elucidation” as in explication de texte “A method of literary criticism in which a detailed reading and analysis of a given text in each of its linguistic, compositional, and expressive parts and aspects is followed by a synthesizing exposition of these with relation to each other and to the whole work.”) is to elucidate, to make clear and understandable. : : : Thus, looking at the linguistic elements of this poem, we need to check the meanings of the words of the poem, preferably in the <I>Oxford English Dictionary</I> or other dictionary organized on “historical” principles so that the meaning of the word that we look for is, we hope, the meaning of the word as understood by the poet. Since Wyatt wrote about 450 years ago, we might well assume that his meanings are not necessarily our meanings. On very useful aspect of the University of Toronto texts is the footnotes, which sometimes include lexical information (as well as other information) to aid our understanding. But looking at the AHEL can also teach us much. “Abide,” for instance, may mean “endure” in some of the usages in the poem; in others it may mean “bide” or “wait.” Thus the narrator reports that he is obeying his Lady’s command that he both endure await, that he is getting very good at waiting and is making excellent progress in his waiting “forever, for all I know,” for his Lady. He can’t have her but, on the other hand, he is not being told to go away, that his suit is hopeless. (Do we recognize this situation?) Thus denied success or closure, he claims that his state is like a long dying, neither life nor death. Such a complaint or “construction” of the lover is a typical conceit or posture of the Petrarchan lover (so called because the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca [1304-1374] made extensive use of this sort of loyal, dogged, unsuccessful, and poetically complaining lover in his “sonnets,” 14-line poems rhyming abba abba cdcdcd with (usually) a stop (period) at the end of line 8 marking the end of the octave and a “turn” in line 9 to mark the beginning of the sestet, the final 6 lines of the poem). : : : In Wyatt’s poem we see the “stop” at the end of line 8 and a kind of exclamatory “turn” in the form of “Ay me!” at the beginning of line 9 which marks the narrator’s growing awareness that he’s wasting his time with this lady who will say neither “yes” nor “no.” She wants to keep him dangling on the string. One hopes that his articulating his condition in this poem will clarify his thinking sufficiently to allow him to (in the words of T.S. Eliot a few years later) “push the moment to its crisis.” : : : W. H. Auden has noted somewhere that a poem is a “marvelous verbal contraption”; thus, when we read and re-read we need to take account of the relationships of all its parts, to see how the contraption is put together and how it works. In a sonnet, we have its syntactic structure, the sentences and the way they are constructed; the sound structures including its rhyme scheme, the sounds of the ends of lines; and internal sound patterning, assonance and consonance, the repeating of vowel sounds and consonantal sounds within the lines. (Reading the poem aloud several times does more to reveal to the ear and thus the mind these sorts of structures and thus the meaning, than just about any other analytical strategy.) And we must also be aware of key word repetition, not just in this poem but in any poem. In this poem, “abide” in one form or another is repeated in lines 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 14; “obtain” in lines 8 and 14, perhaps suggesting not too subtly that the narrator is much more likely to “abide” than he is to “obtain.” The poem is further laced together with the repeated “d” (voiced alveolar dentals, about as close to kissing as he’s gotten or is likely to get) sounds of “day,” “abiding,” “doth,” “denied,” “dying,” “desired,” and “death.” I think we can by paying attention to such details of sound and syntax discover not only the meaning but the art of the poet and thus enhance our own aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual responses to the poem.