The Journal Wk. 22
The Mirror and the Light: Wreckage (II)
Richard says, ‘I do not know if these are Wyatt’s own verses, but whoever made them, he knows what passed. You see there is no mention of the lady.’
None is needed, he thinks. Anne is always in the room.
Richard says, ‘Perhaps Wyatt wrote it after all. With his left hand.’
Or his double heart. ‘It changes nothing,’ he says. The axe is home, your heads be in the street. It is only one man’s opinion. But it is one more blow to our faith in our judgement. We did thus, and thus: we might have done less, and let guilty tongues speak for themselves.
He watches as Richard draws the papers together. Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone.
The Mirror and the Light, pp. 218-19
Nothing haunts the room so economic as a ghost
These silent ghosts who watch and wait and speak not but in dreams;
Gracious, courteous, and cozening, you are the perfect host –
You think that you are king, yet in your mind they reign supreme.
Double heart, beating twice
For the living and the dead
Traitorous heart, false heart
Lacking a head
The mirror shows what you would not see,
The double self you never freed,
Sorrows and old twisted pains,
The crows flying in your train –
Pray for dead souls
That in time, you be made whole.
Where will you end, but here?
…. Autumn will come, the days shortening, and the shade of Harry Norris will slide back to his tasks, bobbing in the corner like a spider on his silk. There is a place, a sequestered place in the imagination, where the eel boy is always waiting to be whipped, where George Boleyn is always in his prison room, always rising in welcome: Master Cromwell, I knew you would come….
…. He has an image in his mind — and either it is a distant memory, or it is inserted there by a verse — of Wyatt’s hands scratched and bleeding, a tangle of roses in his grasp.
But surely, he thinks, it is Wriothesley I remember, at Canonbury: standing at the foot of the tower in the garden, the light fading, a sheaf of peonies in his hand….
The Mirror and the Light, 224; 244-5
The dead return to their places
Taking up their old familiar occupations;
They are grave, now, they do not laugh at you
And through the night they labour on
Until they are shadows scattered by the dawn.
You have forgot, and remembered new
All the things they used to do;
The walls of your remembrance are ill-manned
When bloody roses turn to peonies in hand.
The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:
