In looking at poetry of the English Renaissance one is often confronted with an odd picture of love as the one emotion incomparable with the rest for its ability to take a person up to the highest plateau of affection and down into the lowest pits of despondency. This ambivalent attitude toward love is a theme often explored by Sir Thomas Wyatt. In his poem “My Lute, awake!” he treats the problem of unrequited love in a similar and indeterminate way, often cloaking his true meanings and negating what he actually means to say.
The central rhetorical mechanism of the poem is a half-contradiction that we are reminded of in each stanza as a refrain. The incongruity comes as the speaker states over and over, “I have done,” but is obviously not wholly finished as he is singing this song to his beloved. If he were done there would be no song at all. The theme of his song is that though his beloved now spurns his advances, there will come a time when she will regret what she has done. This theme implies a moral message that can with some work be gleaned from the poem as if there were some sort of celestial evener the poet evokes by stating this eventual recompense.
Another interesting strategy used by Wyatt to layer the possible meanings of his work is that though the poem is about/for a woman, the speaker only begins to address the beloved in the fourth stanza, conversing with his lute for the first three. The lute functions to for speaker in some ways as a shield but also lends a performing feature to the work, as if it is not just some private musing but a public renunciation of the beloved and her actions. The poem does not seem to be simply a statement of regret or despair for the ambiguities caused by love but also suggests that a moral or lesson is to be taken from it. The lute also adds to the general strategy of contravention as Wyatt sometimes stresses or seems preoccupied with what is less important to obliquely show what is most important. This is evidenced in the lyric form that comprises the poem. The rhymes, metaphors, and word-choices which are often simple, contrast the seriousness of the poem and therefore cause the reader to consider more earnestly the message and aim of the speaker.
The first section of the poem is most filled with the ambivalence that eventually fades as the speaker begins to find his voice. Within the first five lines the confusion felt the speaker is made entirely clear, he begins by calling, “My lute, awake!” (1) then soon changes his mind saying “My lute be still” (5). He refers to the song they shall sing as “labor” that is a “waste” (2), ironically meaning that it is not rubbish or futile toiling at all but cherished obligation to which he happily applies himself. The device of the lute works to establish a distance between the speaker and his actions and also to illustrate that the situation is so significant as to cause a man to speak to an inanimate object and to cause the same inanimate thing to spring to life in contempt.
Continuing his dialogue with his instrument, the speaker again muses on the apparent futility of what he and his lute are doing. The song is “to be heard where ear is none” (6) and he admonishes the lute that they should not “sing or sigh or moan” (9) at all, for the beloved will never be affected by it. Again contributing to the quality of the poem and its action as uncensorable, the notion that it must be heard. The impossible affectation of the beloved is described as a heart being pierced, an image that appears again in the poem though not as something hopeless “as lead to grave in marble stone” (7), but as an act that frequently occurs and will again. Wyatt’s constant use of contradiction, while it sometimes feels overdone, actually opens up the poem’s words and symbols for multiple meanings.
In the first stanza that is not directly addressed to the lute, Wyatt uses the image of rocks “cruelly” (11) repulsing the waves to describe the manner of the beloved’s repulsing of the speaker and ending the stanza with a slight variation on the refrain, “So that I am past remedy/ Whereby my lute and I have done” (14-15). The image of the waves on rocks is noteworthy because of the never ending nature of such an action. The waves are still coming in: again the opposition of the words of the speaker, “I have done” (15), to his actions show his true intent.
The ironic use of words and images is a characteristic of the poem throughout. When admonishing the beloved in the fourth stanza, the “hearts” that she has won are referred to as “simple” (17), while he actually means the opposite, that he is in fact not guileless and harmless but about to make very clear how complex he is. In this same stanza we are given the image of “Love’s shot” as piercing hearts, but with a commonality that refutes the images earlier mention.
By the fifth stanza the speaker no longer addresses the lute at all and begins to rail directly against the beloved for her actions and attitude. The main rhetorical strategy switches at this point from veiled irony and metaphor to imagery as we are given scenes of the once beloved’s ruin. The most active of these images is that of the woman lying “withered and old/ The winter nights that are so cold/ Plaining in vain unto the moon” (26-28). This illustrates the degeneration which the speaker associates with the actions of the woman and leads to the first non-ironic refrain of the work: “Care then who list, for I have done.” Here we see the implied moral or ethical message of the work, an image easily relatable to some Christian idea’s on sin and depravity of the time. Using words such as “repent” (31) and calling the woman’s time with her “lovers” (33) “lost and spent” (32), we are given an image of repentance that comes too late and a sort of shameful finger-pointing that does not seem contradictory as most of the poem does.
The final stanza of the work restates the words of the first but in the past tense returning to the ironic tone that characterizes its first half. The speaker again refers to his “labor” as “waste” (37), but instead of the contradiction coming between the first and last lines with “be still” (5) and “awake” (1), the lines are “now cease” (36) and “be still” (40).
As said above, the most distinct aspect of the poem’s form is its refrain, given at the end of eight stanzas emphasizing that though the speaker may be “done,” his words and song must come out anyway. This contradiction imparts the poem with a sort of desperation, making it not only more relatable but also more authentic. The poem is rife with pointed inconsistencies that add to its meanings an ironic sense that is hard to ignore. Though much of the poem can be interpreted to a discernible end, one problem I reached was differentiating the voice of the speaker from that of Wyatt, more specifically if he himself believes the moral stance espoused in the poem and of wether or not the problem of the work was a product of his mind or based on a true experience in his life.

The main theme of the poem seems to be that though the speaker’s beloved enjoys much affection from various suitors now, there will come a time when this will not be so, and they will turn away much as he has and be “done.”