In this poem, Howard presents a highly attractive image of Wyatt, depicting him not merely as an ideal "Renaissance man"

but
also as an almost flawless human being who lived his life as God would want any Christian to live. Howard describes Wyatt as
virtuous (3), wise (5), patriotic (6-8), virtuous again (10), and stoic in his ability to deal appropriately with the fluctuations of
fortune (11-12). Howard also presents Wyatt as poetically talented (13-16), multilingual (17), and as a talented foreign
diplomat (17). According to Howard, Wyatt was a good mentor to English youth on their trips to Europe (19-20), and he was
also a man who always sought to bring out the best in people because he was himself highly virtuous and never deceitful (21-
24). Howard presents Wyatt as brave, truthful, outspoken in defense of truth, and sensible, stable, and mature (25-28). Wyatt
is described as having been both strong and attractive (29). He was almost a perfect human being, yet even such a good man
(Howard laments) had his enemies (31-33). Wyatt was, according to Howard, almost Christlike in his virtues, but, like Christ, he
was not properly treated during his time on earth (33-38).
This is the longer of the two elegies Surrey wrote for Wyatt. Its form is similar to “So cruel prison” – four line stanzas with a
short two-line couplet at the end. The poem concentrates on eulogizing of Wyatt’s virtues, not only as a poet, but also as a
courtier and a virtuous man. The following stanzas begin with the list of various parts of Wyatt’s body, each of which stands as
a metonymy (or maybe metaphor? sometimes the boundary is blurry) for his various positive features: his head was full of
wisdom, his face expressing the condemnation of vice and admiration of virtue, his hand that wrote poetry and so on. He ends
the list with his corpse (body), uniting both force and beauty. In the final stanza, Wyatt becomes almost a Christ figure:
Wyatt’s innocent soul is now gone to heaven, leaving us his testimony of faith that was not recognized properly “sent for our
health, but not received so.”
Quatrains, abab, until the concluding couplet. The title alone gets the hesitating contradiction - Wyatt lived, but now he has
died. In praise of Wyatt, dividing him into body parts - head, visage, hand, tongue, eye, heart, and then the "valiant corpse,"
the body as a whole. Each part serves to deliver some measure of virtue. The body then turns to the heavens after the famous
lines about Nature losing the mold. Finally, it turns back to the speaker, lamenting the loss "for our guilt."