The Fruit of All the Service That I Serve
by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

  1  (a)  The fruit of all the service that I serve
  2  (b)  Despair doth reap, such hapless hap have I.
  3  (a)  But though he have no power to make me swerve,
  4  (b)  Yet, by the fire, for cold I feel I die.
  5  (a)  In paradise, for hunger still I sterve;
  6  (b)  And, in the flood, for thirst to death I dry.
  7  (c)  So Tantalus am I, and in worse pain
  8  (c)  Amids my help, and helpless doth remain.

* This form is sometimes also called ottava rima or ottava Toscana. Scholars differ in their descriptions of the strambotto, in part because the form itself seems to have changed over time. Ernest H. Wilkins states emphatically that "the only normal type of the strambotto" is the earlier, Sicilian form, which has an abababab rhyme scheme and which is usually written in hendecasylabic lines. However, Patricia Thomson and Joseph Fucilla also use "strambotto" for the later, Tuscan variant of the form, which has a rhyme scheme of abababcc. To make matters more confusing, many sources call the eight-line form with this abababcc rhyme scheme "ottava rima," although Thomson avers that ottava rima and the Tuscan variant of the strombotto are different forms with different origins. For more details on these scholars' views of the strambotto, see Wilkins' The Derivation of the Canzone, Modern Philology, v. 12, No. 9 (March 915), 527-558;Thompson's Wyatt and the School of Serafino, Comparative Literature, v. 13, no. 4 (Autumn, 1961), 289-315; and Fucilla's A Rhetorical Pattern in Renaissance and Baroque Poetry, Studies in the Renaissance, v. 3 (1956), 23-48.