Structurally, the poem is a Tuscan STRAMBOTTO (eight
lines, rhyming abababcc), the brevity of which form
greatly appealed to Wyatt, who used it often. The sing-
song rhyme of the strambotto form lends itself to fl ip-
pancy, as do riddles, yet here that lightheartedness sits
alongside a sense of gravity which stems from the
poem’s reminding the reader of their own mortality:
the choice between taking a life or losing one’s own
hangs in the balance of a couplet. Such a balance would
have been a daily occurrence to Wyatt as a courtier in
the scene of HENRY VIII, whose jealousy and temper
were both easily provoked.
Critics have also noted that the early Tudor percep-
tion of women as potential adulterers is also evident in
the poem’s organization. As “Vulcan” noticeably pre-
cedes both the goddess “Minerva” and feminized
“Nature,” so masculinity symbolically precedes femi-
ninity in the poem, just as it did in actuality. Henry
VIII’s brutality in part stemmed from his desire for a
male heir (or, rather, his disappointment at producing
female heirs). From this perspective, the poem signifi es
success: the gun’s voice is unmistakably male, as is its
environment (the battlefi eld), and it produces “chil-
dren dear” of its own. Ironically, this instrument of
death produces life, which is a reproduction of itself,
and therefore death. Life and death, represented by
levity and gravity, do not exchange places so much as
fuse into a unity that Wyatt declares inseparable.
FURTHER READING
Daalder, Joost, ed. Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Rebholz, R. A., ed. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems.
Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin, 1978.
William T. Rossiter“VULCAN BEGAT ME” 453