Metrical Variation in a Lyric by Thomas Wyatt

 

 

Alas, Madam, for Stealing of a Kiss

Sir Thomas Wyatt

 

Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss

Have I so much your mind there offended?

Have I then done so grievously amiss

That by no means it may be amended?

 

Then revenge you, and the next way is this:

Another kiss shall have my life ended,

For to my mouth the first my heart did suck;

The next shall clean out of my breast it pluck.

 

 

 

     The difference between vers libre and metered forms is often exaggerated; it is never more than a matter of degree.  The freest of free verse has inevitably in English stress accents which will sometimes affect the reader’s impression.  On the other hand, the most rigorous of prosodists cannot make a pentameter of perfectly matching iambs as both ictus and remiss may have several levels of stress.  Considerations of pitch, duration, alliteration, and assonance complicate the picture further. 

     The significant question for writers who adopt any level of sonic organization in poetry is whether the sound effects contribute to the poem’s effect, whatever that might be.  While readers would differ from one another only in detail in a line’s scansion, far less consensus is probable about aesthetic effects.  One critic’s account of reactions might be inconsistent with another’s, yet over time a degree of common responses is likely to emerge.

     Metrical effects range from undeniable to vanishingly subtle, but they constitute a major part of the music of poetry.  Even a brief and simple lyric with what seems a transparent theme can prove elusive under close reading.  A brief, song-like lyric by Thomas Wyatt “Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss” may seem direct and explicit in form, its meter a straightforward iambic pentameter and its rhyme-scheme a simple abab abcc.  The alternate rhymes concluding with a couplet makes the poem resemble in part a truncated English sonnet.

     The first line establishes a clear pattern as it begins with three strong and clearly iambic feet.  Yet any reader will perceive that the “of” in the fourth foot receives less emphasis than the other stressed syllables (the second, fourth, sixth, and tenth), speeding the line’s conclusion and thus enacting the furtive and hasty theft of a kiss. 

     The same fourth foot is disturbed in the second line.  Whereas “of” in the first was weak enough to make “-ing of” a pyrrhic, this time the rhythm is reversed and the fourth foot (“there of-“) is a trochee, as is the fifth (“-fended”).  This arrangement not only continues the sense of something out of order, amiss, while drawing greater attention to the offense with the emphasis on the word “there” and the highlighting of the key syllable of “offended.”

     The same pattern of irregularity, sounding something like syncopation, recurs in the third line with the pyrrhic fourth foot, and then in the fourth where the reader finds yet another pyrrhic as the fourth foot (“be a-“) and a trochee as the fifth (“-mended”) as in line two.  Thus the stanza is tied into a tight package while at the same time the cadences indicate continued instability.

     The second stanza opens dramatically with a more irregular line which might be read as opening with two trochees (“Then revenge you”) followed by a pyrrhic (“and the”) only to recover the rhythm with two concluding iambs (“next way is this”).  The drumbeat continues for three more iambs in line 6 (“another kiss shall have my life”) which the ends in another reversal, the trochaic fifth foot (“ended”). 

     Resolution come with the final couplet.  The seventh line is a unambiguous iambic pentameter as though confidently setting forth a harmonization of the man’s and woman’s wishes (“For to my mouth the first my heart did suck”) with the new rhyme word, the harsh and unpleasant-sounding “suck.”  The final line begins with two regular feet followed by a pyrrhic (“out of”) which skips forward in a little rapid hop toward the two final iambs (“my breast it pluck”) and the grating final sound.  That concluding rhyme settles the matter but its croak suggests that all may not be solved. 

     The poem’s claim is clearly a rhetorical one, meant to impress the woman with a witty display indicating the author’s courtly savoir-faire, yet he dies in the end, victim of his heart’s exiting his body.  In literal terms, his second kiss would be his last, but it is unlikely that his ambitions were to halt so soon.  The ingenious verbal show is, of course, not for the lady alone, but for the court and today's reader as well, containing perhaps a bit of self-satire by the lover who does not realize he has promised his own extinction as a sign of devotion.  In the end it is a charming little game in which, at least in the seducer’s game book, she will grant a second kiss and a third and both can then wonder at his continued survival as love-making proceeds.

     This metrical variation is only a portion of the sonic structure of the poem, what Pound called melopoeia.  Apart from the metrical control suggested by this analysis, Wyatt also deploys rhyme to heighten both melody and meaning.  Thus “kiss” is paired with “amiss,” since the act is viewed as a trespass, and then settled by chiming with “this,” the proposed solution to the offense.  The rhyming of “offended” with “amended” imply a possible remedy to answer the complaint which is then resolved through the speaker’s theatrical pretense of a demise with “ended.”  He uses alliteration, for instance in the repeated uses of the letter m in the first four lines all associated with the  beloved (including the punning “amiss”). 

     In addition, apart from  the sound patterns, issues of source arise, first of all from the fact that the verse is based on Serafino Aquilano’s poem beginning “Incolpa donna amor se troppo io uolsi,” and instances of both Wyatt’s following his original and deviating from it are significant.  Petrarchans do not provide the sole influence.  The image of the heart rising during a kiss, for instance, is a trope familiar from the Greek Anthology.

     Even this small, apparently casual lyric, part of a sophisticated court’s play between the sexes, couched in a simple meter, not so distant from conversation, derives its effects from complex structures of sound, sense, and thought.  All must be unified or else, for good reason, jarring, with every element serving the reproduction of a moment of imagined consciousness: a person might have once felt this way.  Meter plays the role of a steady background beat against which every variation is perceptible and significant.  The poet need not, of course, be conscious of the means by which the poem works; an accomplished writer can often work from intuition like a skilled jazz soloist while for the reader or listener as well, the effects need not be understood to work well.