Every Reader’s Raleigh

 

   

     The story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s laying down his coat for Queen Elizabeth to cross a puddle was not recorded until eighty years after his death but it signifies his courtly style at a time when members of the ruling class were expected to display both politesse and aesthetic refinement as well as political discernment and military valor.  Like others of his age, he was only by the way a poet.  An active courtier, he endured military service and hazardous voyages of exploration in service to the crown, though his public role under powerful and jealous rulers led him to be imprisoned for several months by Elizabeth and later for thirteen years by James I who ultimately beheaded him.   As a diplomat and a military man, he held influential positions that enabled him to reinforce British rule over Ireland, defend England against Spain, and develop colonies in North America.

     His adventures on behalf of his country are recorded in part in his The Discovery of Guiana, which mixed reportage of his experiences in  the New World with fanciful tales of natives with faces in their chests (highlighted by depiction in the book’s frontispiece) as well as of the gold-rich city of El Dorado.  With the involuntary leisure of his imprisonment he also began a compendious History of the World, admired yet as a monument of English prose if not of historiography. 

      Much of his poetry is written in the comparatively conversational mode called the plain style, eschewing elaborate conceits and dense classical allusions to create the impression of sincerity and passion.  This relatively realistic vision is illustrated by Raleigh’s response to Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” a seduction poem in which the man offers his beloved endless “pleasures” and “delights” might she only “live with me, and be my love.”  Raleigh’s canny lady is well aware that love is not always such an unmixed blessing.   

 

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

 

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares to come.

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,

To wayward winter reckoning yields,

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

 

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

 

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,

The Coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

 

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Each of the blandishments so invitingly catalogued by Marlowe is questioned.  A “honey tongue” may conceal a “heart of gall.”  Material objects are all subject to dessication or rot, people grow old and love fades, time changes all things.  The sole classical reference here is more like a hand grenade than a decorative posy.  Philomel was raped and then suffered her tongue being cut out to prevent her disclosing the crime, a horrific example of sexual violence here concealed in an allusion.

     Raleigh’s sober realism coexists with the most fanciful figures of speech.  Raleigh’s “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk” constructs a fine filigree of imagination idealizing the beloved only to dismiss that pleasing illusion. 

 

Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk

 

Nature, that washed her hands in milk,

And had forgot to dry them,

Instead of earth took snow and silk,

At love’s request to try them,

If she a mistress could compose

To please love’s fancy out of those.

 

Her eyes he would should be of light,

A violet breath, and lips of jelly;

Her hair not black, nor overbright,

And of the softest down her belly;

As for her inside he’d have it

Only of wantonness and wit.

 

At love’s entreaty such a one

Nature made, but with her beauty

She hath framed a heart of stone;

So as love, by ill destiny,

Must die for her whom nature gave him,

Because her darling would not save him.

 

But time (which nature doth despise,

And rudely gives her love the lie,

Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise)

His hands do neither wash nor dry;

But being made of steel and rust,

Turns snow and silk and milk to dust.

 

The light, the belly, lips, and breath,

He dims, discolors, and destroys;

With those he feeds but fills not death,

Which sometimes were the food of joys.

Yea, time doth dull each lively wit,

And dries all wantonness with it.

 

Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

 

 

     Whereas Adam and Eve were made from earth, the beloved cannot be so common; she, the poet says, is composed of finer things: milk, snow, and silk.  She has eyes of light, a floral breath, and lips of jelly!  Yet this perfect creature refuses her devoted lover, having “a heart of stone.”  Her loss thereby is evident as time turns all her charms in the end  to dust.  Her physical charms and her “wanton” spirit cannot last, since decline comes to all and death and everyone’s story ends with the same lamentable conclusion.  The ubi sunt (‘where has gone  . . .”} theme is here allied with the advice to “seize the day” (carpe diem), advising lovers to make the most of their youth since it will soon vanish. 

     The same ironic realism is apparent in “The Lie,” denouncing what Kenneth Rexroth called the Social Lie, the set of assumptions that ratifies social order, each element of which Raleigh disputes. 

 

The Lie

 

 Go, Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others' action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honour how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favour how it falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

 

Tell faith it's fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity

And virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.       

 

     Relentlessly in stanza after stanza Raleigh exposes the pretensions of the world.  At his trial Socrates denounced his accusers declaring that proximity to death brings prophetic power, and Raleigh dares likewise to turn accuser before his execution with the honesty that nearness to the grave lends.  The court’s glamor, he says, is specious, and the power of rulers depends upon “factions,” while the nobles are themselves hateful and self-interested.  Raleigh then moves toward a more general cynicism, declaring zeal to be hollow and all love merely lust.  The flesh is ashes and everyone is moving steadily toward the grave.  Intelligence, he says, is only ingenuity and science arrogance, charity is phony, and law nothing but wrangling.  Academics even want “soundness” and depend only on “seeming.”  Both faith and morality have “fled.”  Even  his own mantic denunciations are only in the end “blabbing,” though to let the cat out of the bag, to admit mankind’s hypocrisy, is a capital offense.

    Though the poem is utterly cynical, it concludes on a defiantly positive note, declaring “no stab the soul can kill.”  The reader may well suspect that Raleigh had more in mind his preservation of dignified equanimity rather than Christian salvation.  He had asked that his beheading be public and he impressed onlookers calling the ax “sharp medicine” and, when executioner hesitated, saying “What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!”  His reputation was such that one of his judges later said, “The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh.”

     Skilled as he was at satire and ironic realism. Raleigh was also capable of spinning courtly sentiments, elegant if not exactly aureate, even making specific reference to Petrarch.   

 

A Vision upon the Fairy Queen

 

Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,

Within the Temple, where the vestall flame

Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,

To see that buried dust of living fame,

Whose tombe faire love and fairer vertue kept;

 

All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:

At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;

And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,

For they this Queene attended: in whose steed

Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse:

Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,

And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse,

Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,

And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

 

 

 

     Here Raleigh applauds his friend Edmund Spenser for his monumental allegorical epic The Faery Queene.  Raleigh’s witty compliment is based on  the conceit that Spenser’s queen, representing Elizabeth I, has beauty and virtues that put Petrarch’s lover Laura in the shade.  The Italian poet breaks into tears when the arrival of the living queen so outshines the earlier lady that Laura is cast into “oblivion.”  This substitution of one female ideal with another disturbs even buried ghosts, including that of Homer as obsolete poetic practices and the women praised by earlier poets are displaced by the new queen. This ingenuity and literary shop-talk befits the poem’s place in the introductory material to an edition  of The Faery Queen where it is accompanied by a lengthy letter from Raleigh to Spenser commending and commenting on the method of his friend’s vast poem.

     Raleigh’s life story is the history of his age in courtly rivalries, Realpolitik among nations, and colonial expansion.  His poetry likewise is part of the fabric of his times, representing a late development of courtly love influenced by Italian poets, but with a distinctively British tone of realism and irony that makes many of his pieces appeal to the contemporary reader.   

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.

  

Two Poems by Mellin de Saint Gelais

The French texts are appended.

 

     While great work may occur at any stage of literary history, often the first practitioners of a form possess a fresh richness and ingenuity that soon vanishes.  I find this “early morning” quality in William IX among Troubadours, for instance, and in the greatness of the first generation of Mississippi Delta blues.  A similar glow is perceptible in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt who imported Continental verse forms to English poetry, most significantly the sonnet, a generation or two after their introduction in France.    

    Mellin de Saint-Gelais (c. 1491-1558) played a significant role in the process of adapting Italian models into French poetry.  He is said to have mocked Ronsard and was in turn attacked by du Bellay, but these quarrels have little relevance to the pleasure of a modern reader coming across the wit and ingenuity that first brought the author into favor with Francis I whom he served as court poet,  chaplain, and librarian. 

     I use the text from the 1873 edition Oeuvres complètes de Melin de Sainct-Gelays edited by Prosper Blanchemain which prints as a note another version with many variations, the most significant of which are the substitution of English trickery and Lombard usurers for African monsters and “opinions en une republique” in the penultimate triplet.  This poem was set to music by André Jolivet using the title “Sonnet à une lunaticque” (1951).

 

There aren’t in Venice near as many boats,

Or Bourgian oysters,  or Champagne’s fine hares,

Fewer Breton calves, Savoyard bears

Or white swans up and down the Thames afloat,

 

Or liaisons that were begun at mass,

Or fighting among petty German states,

Or Spanish grandees thinking they are great,

Or courtly lies told by the highest class,

 

Or  prodigies in Africa’s hot clime,

Opinions in a democratic time,

Or Papal pardons on each feast day signed,

 

Not so much greed among men of affairs

Or academic quarrels splitting hairs,

As my beloved’s notions in  her mind.

 

      I like the unpredictable catalogue, reminiscent of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book,  of “things of which there are many,” which holds the reader in  suspense until the punch line, an affectionate (if patronizing and misogynistic) remark.  The author begins with the reputations of various regions that would be immediately recognizable to readers, but, in the second stanza, moves to scattershot social satire: the supposedly pious are really cruising for lovers in church, the Germans are a somewhat absurd collection of petty principalities, the Spanish lords are egotistical, and everyone lies in court.  The third stanza mixes these two elements with every characteristic having a satirical edge.  The last tercet moves to matters of the mind, first the rapacious avarice of economic life, then the fierce rivalries in the Sorbonne (mentioned by name in the original), to subtly prepare the way for the vagaries of thought of the lover.  Surely here the lover has proven his imagination as whimsical and wandering as that of his beloved.

     He may have written the first French sonnets, but the form was at the time fluid.  Here is a poem with  thirteen lines

 

Thirteener

 

In sea’s wide waters, far from any port,

lascivious sirens swim about and sport,

and there they comb their long and golden hair.

Their voices of serene and pleasant sort

can grab the mast and seize the hull’s support,

and then make mighty waves halt in the air.

So stormy tempests sink ships they have snared.

No different is the case with life so dear.

A fickle mermaid may make disappear

quite all our joy, the sweetness of life’s stream.

When death brings shipwreck and a watery bier,

we’re nothing but a rumor one might hear, 

less than a wind or shadow, smoke, or dream

 

      The poem begins with what might seem a romantic literary reference to mermaids, but this is a magician’s move to distract the reader.  The initial references reproduce the sirens’ allure by mentioning their “lasciviousness” and the beauty of their hair and voices, but, in a volta with a vengeance, their charms are revealed as treacherous and deadly.  The conclusion, with its wistful list of insubstantial things, recalls the dramatic conclusion of the Diamond Sutra.

 

Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;

Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

                                                                           (tr. Alex Johnson)

 

 

  

Il n'est point tant de barques à Venize,

D'huystres à Bourg, de festuz en Champagne,

De differentz aux peuples d'Allemagne,

De cygnes blancz au long de la Tamise;

 

Ne tant d'amours se traictent en l'eglise,

Ne tant de veaux se treuvent en Bretagne,

Ne tant de gloire en un signor d'Espagne,

Ny en la Court tant y a de faintise;

 

N'en ces Anglois a tant de cornardise,

Ne de pardons à Rome un jour de feste,

Ny d'usuriers en toute Lombardie;

 

Ny de travaulx à vaincre femme honneste,

Ne dans Auvergne animaulx d'Arcadie,

Que vous avez de lunes en la teste.

 

 

 

Treizain

 

Par l'ample mer, loin des ports et arènes

S'en vont nageant les lascives sirènes

En déployant leurs chevelures blondes,

Et de leurs voix plaisantes et sereines,

Les plus hauts mâts et plus basses carènes

Font arrêter aux plus mobiles ondes,

Et souvent perdre en tempêtes profondes;

Ainsi la vie, à nous si délectable,

Comme sirène affectée et muable,

En ses douceurs nous enveloppe et plonge,

Tant que la Mort rompe aviron et câble,

Et puis de nous ne reste qu'une fable,

Un moins que vent, ombre, fumée et songe.

The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers

  

This essay is an attempt to be more popular and journalistic than usual.  I shall be curious to see what readership the following piece attracts. I am contemplating a similar article on the scandals of the Romantic poets.

  

     Were an Elizabethan or Jacobean sonneteer to appear in a cartoon strip, he would probably be depicted as a mincing aesthete, a sort of Percy Dovetonsils in doublet and breeches, yet anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of history would know that poetry was associated with powerful men in those days.   The sonnet form in particular was associated with courtiers who were, of course, warriors as well, suffering the chances of combat, including becoming prisoners of war.  In addition a significant percentage of prominent poets in Elizabeth’s time were imprisoned at home by their own queen, always on the lookout for signs of opposition to her will, while others fell afoul of the ordinary criminal laws.  The life expectancy of members of the ruling class was limited by the fact that under an absolute monarchy in which the will of the ruler is law, a court will inevitably be filled with back-biting and tale-telling among ambitious aristocrats quite willing to sacrifice their rivals while seeking to advance their own prospects.

     The link between high nobility and the arts was emphasized in Castiglione’s The Courtier, published in English translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561, which emphasized that the best courtier, the noblest aristocrat, must cultivate excellence of all sorts, not only athletic and martial abilities, but aesthetic skills as well, including the practice of music, painting, and poetry.  Verbal skills, honed by literary study, Castiglione argues, allow the courtier to be at once more beautiful and more persuasive.    

     Since his own time, Sir Philip Sidney has been considered the embodiment of Castiglione’s ideal.  Strikingly handsome, valorous in war and accomplished in sports, quick and clever in conversation yet discerning in judgement, he was always the faithful servant of the queen.  The center of his career was his work as parliamentarian, soldier, ambassador, and counsellor to Elizabeth.  His masterful sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella was not published until five years after his death and then only because faulty pirated editions were already circulating. 

     Dead before his thirty-second birthday from a wound received at the Battle of Zutphen, his character inspired legends immediately.  He was said to have removed the thigh armor that could have prevented his mortal injury when he noticed that one of the men under his command had incomplete armor.  As he lay bleeding, water was brought which he was said to have declined, offering it to a comrade with the words "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

     Despite his conformity to his culture’s standards, even Sidney might have suffered an even earlier end due to his bold advocacy in a time of customs that seem today savage.  Though at the age of eighteen he was a member of the embassy sent to seek to arrange Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic Duke of Alençon, as a Protestant partisan he fervently opposed the union and quarreled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to the point of challenging de Vere to a duel.  Fortunately for literary history the queen ordered that they not fight.  The young Sidney persisted in writing a letter detailing his strong opposition to the match, attracting her disapproval of his presumption and prompting his temporary absence at court. 

    The sonnet form had been introduced in England by Sir Thomas Wyatt with translations of Petrarch and original compositions.  Though his father had been incarcerated and tortured under Richard III, the elder Wyatt then became Privy Counsellor when Henry VII and after him Henry VIII succeeded.   By his late teens the son was already a prominent figure in court, taking a ceremonial role, for instance, as the champion of the Castle of Loyalty during the Christmas celebrations of 1526.  As a teenager he was named Esquire of the Body serving as a personal attendant and confidant of the king and a few years later acquired the remarkable title of Sewer Extraordinary. 

     Though popular, Wyatt was known as an impulsive, headstrong individual, and, from the testimony of his contemporaries as well as from his poetry, a passionate lover.  With a reputation as a ladies’ man, he surprised no one when he separated from his wife after three years and accused her of adultery while conceding as well his own infidelity. 

     He was meanwhile active as a negotiator, ambassador, and advisor to the throne.  On a mission to Italy in 1527 he insisted on parting with his company, saying he was “desirous to see the country” and was taken prisoner by forces controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who demanded a substantial ransom for his release.  A captive of unpredictable soldiers on the edge of mutiny, he was certainly in mortal danger, but he did go free.  It is unclear if the money was paid – some think he was repaying the debt for years --  or if perhaps he escaped, but he did manage to return to his own country unscathed.

    Before long however, he aroused Henry’s ire.  He had been a childhood friend of Anne Boleyn, and some whispered that he was paying particular her attention even when she was the queen consort.  The unfortunate Boleyn had given birth to Elizabeth but subsequently suffered three miscarriages, trying the king’s patience.  Henry turned his attentions to Jane Seymour and sought to remove Boleyn.  She was seized and placed in the Tower of London, accused of a series of ill-documented crimes including treason, and beheaded.

     Doubtless suspicious about the dashing courtier’s relationship with his wife, and likely thinking that he could at any rate get some useful information about her from Wyatt, Henry had the poet put into the Tower of London, accused of an affair with her.  From his cell, Wyatt probably witnessed Boleyn’s death and must have felt that his own survival was again in doubt. 

     Surely shaken by this experience, Wyatt stayed out of trouble for a time, but in a few years he was again arrested and himself charged with treason.  The poet’s charm may have saved his life, as the current queen consort Catherine Howard intervened on his behalf and obtained his release with the condition that he must reconcile with his wife.  It was not long before Howard in her turn was led to the executioner’s block.   After her death, it was whispered that the king had his eye on Wyatt’s wife, but, as it happened, Wyatt died of natural causes shortly thereafter.  (His sole legitimate son, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, was executed under Queen Mary.)

     Though Wyatt managed to avoid the headsman, the other poet credited with introducing sonnets to the English language (and the originator of the English or Shakespearean sonnet rhyme pattern) the contentious Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, did not.  The poet, well aware of the dangers of royal service as a first cousin of both Boleyn and Howard, was made Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land and fought in France.

    His pride and temper were as well-known as his gallantry under fire.  Though he (and his father as well) had taken the crown’s part in opposing the Lincolnshire rebels who had taken up arms against the dissolution of the monasteries, a fellow courtier suggested that he had been in fact sympathetic to their cause.  Offended, Surrey struck the man in the park at Hampton Court and was imprisoned for breaking the peace in the king’s domain. 

     After his release he was for a time absent from court but he returned to royal favor after a few years.  In 1543 he was accused by the Privy Council of a nighttime adventure in which he (in company with Wyatt and others) broke windows of London homes using a sort of crossbow that could hurl stones in what must have been a drunken revel, and a second charge – eating meat during Lent – was added.  Once again, his friends were able to secure his release.  In “A Satire on London” he makes the unlikely claim that his disorderly actions were meant to awaken the citizens to their sins. 

    The poet’s ego, however, led eventually to his downfall.  Though immensely proud of his descent from the Plantagenets, he and his family had long been loyal to Henry and the Tudors.  As the king aged, afflicted by health problems, he became increasingly suspicious that Surrey meant to usurp the throne from his son, the future Edward VI.  When Surrey’s sister, Mary FitzRoy, widow of Henry’s illegitimate son, was to be married to Jane’s brother Thomas Seymour with the blessings of her father and of the king, she and Surrey objected and the match was called off.  According to her statements, Surrey then tried to persuade her to seduce the king, suggesting that she might as a palace mistress "wield as much influence on him as Madame d'Etampes doth about the French King."  In response, she flatly declared that she “would sooner cut her own throat.”

     With the tensions over succession rising, in 1546 at Kenninghall Surrey chose to include on his quartered shield (quartering allowed more visible connections to highly placed lines of descent) the arms of Edward the Confessor.  In spite of the fact that the rules of heraldry allowed this usage and that Surrey had collared the leopards in the royal arms and placed them in the secondary quarter of his shield, he was arrested on the excuse that he had symbolically indicated his own ambitions on the throne.  Once he was prisoner, he was questioned not about his arms but only about his attempted use of his sister as an informer, his supposed plans to depose Henry, claims of his heterodoxy, and his preparations to leave the country.  He mounted a full defense of his innocence, yet was executed.  His father would have been beheaded as well had Henry VII not died whereupon the Privy Council removed the death penalty but seized his lands and kept him locked up for years.  

     Another of the group known as the “silver poets” for their eloquence was Sir Walter Ralegh, whose name is known in this hemisphere for his role in early colonization.  He campaigned in France for the Huguenots, and for his service in suppressing the Irish received considerable estates there, but he had little success in inducing English tenants to emigrate.  He turned his attention to the New World, sponsoring the failed settlement that became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.   Dubious about his ability to fund settlements that, beyond being self-supporting, could make him rich, he set out to find El Dorado in South America but there too had little success. 

    A few years before his South American venture, he had impregnated and secretly married one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting.  When their relationship was discovered, he and his wife were sent to the Tower.  He was temporarily released to oversee the spoils of a ship captured from Spain, but then returned to the Tower, only to be again set free and assume a seat in Parliament.  His influence rose once more, though he was accused (and acquitted) of atheistic views.  He fought to capture Cadiz, to repel the Armada, and became governor of the Isle of Jersey.

     Yet, with the demise of Queen Elizabeth, his loyalty to James was suspected, and he was arrested for involvement in the “Main Plot” to replace James with Lady Arbella Stuart.  The evidence was slight, and Ralegh claimed he could exonerate himself if he were allowed to question his friend the Baron Cobham, the main witness against him, but this was not allowed and he was incarcerated for thirteen years during which he worked on his Historie of the World.  Even in this scholarly enterprise he attracted the doubts of the king who found the book "too sawcie in censuring Princes."

     He was freed in 1617 after thirteen years confinement to lead another expedition to South America during which men commanded by his friend Lawrence Kemys attacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé de Guayana in violation of the Anglo-Spanish treaty and Ralegh’s instructions.  In this conflict his son Walter was killed and Ralegh was arrested when he returned, having spurned chances to flee into exile.  The Spanish demanded his execution, and he was beheaded.  (His subordinate Kemys committed suicide.)

     A sonneteer might encounter all manner of other calamities.  Virtually every biography includes episodes of violence of harsh legal judgements.  The account of all these tumultuous events would be voluminous.  Some are entertaining enough to seem as though written for the stage.  Attorney and Parliamentarian as well as sonneteer, John Davies was disbarred for attacking a colleague with a cudgel upon which he promptly repaired to Oxford for the next year where he devoted himself to literature.  He was later made attorney-general of Ireland.  In 1613 he was the king’s candidate for speaker of the Irish Parliament but was opposed by the Catholic members who instead proposed Sir John Everard.  The dispute led to an absurd scene in which Everard seized the speaker’s chair, refusing to vacate it until Davies’ supporters carried the stout poet and placed him on Everard’s lap.  Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Petrarchan Amoretti, was also an Irish landlord whose castle in North Cork was taken and burned by rebels after which the writer died in London “for want of bread,” according to Ben Jonson (though this statement is surely inaccurate).  Politics also made Henry Constable a convict, largely over his urging of toleration of Catholics.  The prolific Samuel Daniel was praised for his sequence of love sonnets Delia but called before the Privy Council for supposedly seditious implications of his play The Tragedy of Philotas.

     Several were at least suspected of common crimes including murder.  Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sequence called Parthenophil and Parthenophe (Virgin-lover and Virgin-voiced), engaged in ferocious pamphleteering polemics and was tried for attempting to poison a man, though he escaped custody and was never recaptured, doubtless due to the influence of powerful friends.  The prolific George Gascoigne who came between Wyatt and Surrey, was a noble soldier when taken prisoner during the Siege of Leiden, but a common criminal as well, arrested more than once for debts and apparently also for attempted murder.  He had served in Parliament, but in a re-election bid was disqualified as a man not only “noted for manslaughter" but also "a common Rymer.”  A poet might also be a crime victim.  Fulke Greville, a protégé of Sidney, was stabbed by a servant.  His learned physicians filled the wound with pig fat and he died a lingering death.  A number of writers, including William Percy, the writer of Sonnets to Coelia, and the middle-class Henry Lok who wrote religious sonnets were imprisoned simply for debt.

     A few years later after the tumultuous careers of these poets Hobbes was to describe human life in general as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” characterized by “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”  While everyone half a millennium ago suffered equally from the lack of effective medical knowledge and the draconian, often arbitrary, legal system, and the poor contended with a constant fear of malnutrition, belonging to the power elite was no guarantee of longevity.  Those at the top faced the perils of war, but combat was hardly a greater threat to them than their own monarch’s disfavor.  Perhaps the beauties of their poetry, and the sonnet during this period became one of the most subtle and expressive forms in all of literature, far from conflicting with a hazardous life, proved the best response to uncertainty and danger.  Many of us who are far from courtiers in the great chain  of being have found that, for us as well as them, love and art can make an otherwise intolerable life worth living.

Every Reader's Wyatt

This is the second of a series of essays meant to engage non-specialists, indeed, non-English majors, with the work of important poets. In spite of my own inclination toward the abstruse I mean to limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography. I vow to avoid tempting byways and to include no footnotes whatsoever.


    Like other sixteenth century poets, Wyatt might be said to be an incidental author. None of his poetry was published until fifteen years after his death. He spent his life as a courtier, beginning with the post of Sewer Extraordinary to Henry VIII (nothing to do with waterworks) and serving in such roles as Marshal of Calais, Sheriff of Kent, Ambassador to Spain, and factotum. Proximity to power was not only rewarding, but dangerous as well; Wyatt was three times imprisoned. He very narrowly avoided the fate of his contemporary Surrey, famed as the perfect courtier, and the later Raleigh, both of whom were executed.
     A courtier in Wyatt’s day was a soldier and a statesman, but he was also expected to be a cultivated man with musical and artistic accomplishments and a mastery of elegant and sophisticated flirtation and love. Palace intrigues were erotic and personal as well as political, and, under the rule of an almost absolute monarch, each of these activities had its perils. In 1536 Wyatt fell under suspicion of adultery with Anne Boleyn and was imprisoned in the Bell Tower at the Tower of London. From his window he witnessed her execution and that of five of her reputed lovers. Surely only through the influence of powerful friends did the poet avoid the same scaffold. Anne Boleyn is commonly regarded as the subject of one of his most lovely and haunting poems.


Who so list to hount I know where is an hynde
but as for me helas I may no more,
the vayne travaill hath weried me so sore.
I ame of theim that farthest cometh behind;
yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde
drawe from the Deere but as she fleeth afore,
faynting I folowe. I leve of therefor.
sithens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.
Who list her hount I put him owte of dowbte,
as well as I may spend his tyme in vain;
and graven with Diamondes in letters plain
There is written her faier neck rounde abowte;
noli me tangere, for Caesar's I ame;
and wylde for to hold though I seme tame.


     Thomas Wyatt (and Surrey) introduced the sonnet in English sometimes using what came to be called the English rhyme scheme. This poem is in part derived from Petrach’s 190th sonnet, “Una candida cerva,” but it is far from a translation. The initial ambiguity of love as hunting (like love as war) is balanced and heightened by the poet’s fruitless exhausted devotion, the picture of the Ovidian or courtly lover. To him joy in love is as unlikely as seeking to hold the wind in a net. The Latin tag “do not touch me” is often regarded as evidence that the beloved lady is already claimed by the king, but many lovers far from royal courts might experience the same frustration. Another might express similar sentiments as, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The original use of “noli me tangere” spoken by Christ to Mary Magdalene in the Latin Bible in a scene painted by Fra Angelico, Botticelli and many others, is complicated by its use (according to Solinus) as a warning to poachers against taking Caesar’s deer. The concluding line is a beautiful expression of the fierce emotion that necessarily accompanies tender feelings.
     Wyatt in another poem delineating the subtle ambivalences of desire figures the beloved as a wild beast once more. The mysterious evocative power of those lovers who “with naked foot” “stalked in my chamber” is outdone by the straightforwardness of the natural encounter of the second stanza. The lady, her gown falling off her shoulder in “a pleasant manner,” kisses the poet and asks “How like you this?” To me the conclusion, which lapses into a mild resentment, is anticlimactic, but the first two stanzas are sublime.


They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
With naked fote stalking in my chambre.
I have sene theim gentill, tame, and meke
That nowe are wyld and do not remembre
That sometyme they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Besely seking with a continuell chaunge.

Thancked be fortune it hath ben othrewise
Twenty tymes better, but ons in speciall,
In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse,
When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her armes long and small,
Therewithall swetely did me kysse,
And softely said "dere hert, howe like you this?"

It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.
But all is torned thorough my gentilnes
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking;
And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,
And she also to vse new fangilnes.
But syns that I so kyndely ame served,
I would fain knowe what she hath deserved.

 

     These are the poems I most remember, though Wyatt’s importance as a translator and importer of Continental forms and conventions to England had immense historical consequences. His first publisher Tottel said the country owed to him and Surrey “that our tong is able in that kynde [the French or Italian style] to do as praiseworthy as ye rest.” Tottel was speaking of what amounted to nearly the last gasp of courtly love, yet when Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, memorialized Wyatt, he mentioned only his translations of the Psalms. To Thomas Warton he was the “first polished English satirist,” and his most “pleasing” work was moralizing on “the felicities of retirement” as in “Mine owne John Poynz” (a poem of over a hundred lines appended to this essay). If Wyatt’s love poetry represents a late efflorescence of the troubadour tradition, the lines addressed to John Poynz look forward to the measured pentameters of Dryden and then the masterful Pope.
     Like many another writer of sublime love poetry, Wyatt could also advocate an abstemious withdrawal. When obliged to leave the court he expressed what might be regarded as admirable detachment (philosophic or, in terms of poetry, Horatian, perhaps) though he had no hesitation about returning as soon as he was able. Assuredly a literary convention – he sticks fairly close to Luigi Alamanni’s tenth satire and uses the Italian’s terza rima (the first instance in English) – the praise of a life of retirement is doubtless also true, at least as true as the same man’s delight in the complex rivalries and games he here ridicules. One thinks of the magnificent Chinese poems reflecting on the civil service and, for some, the greater wisdom of a solitary life in the mountains, not for fear of losing innocence, but because one is sated and yet not satisfied with having had altogether too much of court life. The Wyatt who wrote these lines would have understood Yuán Méi, who at the age of thirty-two, resigned his post and spent the remainder of his career writing books of poetry and travel and cooking. If Wyatt is expressing sour grapes over his involuntary rustication, he has made as fine a wine of it as he had done with the sweets of love.


Myne owne John Poynz, sins ye delight to know
The cause why that homeward I me drawe,
And fle the presse of courtes wher soo they goo,
Rather then to lyve thrall, under the awe
Of lordly lokes, wrappid within my cloke,
To will and lust learning to set a lawe;
It is not for becawse I skorne or moke
The powar of them, to whome fortune hath lent
Change over us, of Right, to strike the stroke:
But true it is that I have allwais ment
Lesse to estime them then the common sort,
Of outward thinges that juge in their intent,
Withowt regarde what dothe inwarde resort.
I grawnt sumtime that of glorye the fyar
Dothe touche my hart: me lyst not to report
Blame by honour and honour to desyar.
But how may I this honour now atayne
That cannot dy the coloure blak a lyer?

My Poynz, I cannot frame me tune to fayne,
To cloke the trothe for praisse withowt desart,
Of them that lyst all vice for to retayne.
I cannot honour them that settes their part
With Venus and Baccus all theire lyf long;
Nor holld my pece of them allthoo I smart.
I cannot crowche nor knelle to do so grete a wrong,
To worship them, lyke gode on erthe alone,
That ar as wollffes thes sely lambes among.
I cannot with my wordes complayne and mone,
And suffer nought; nor smart wythout complaynt,
Nor torne the worde that from my mouthe is gone.

I cannot speke and loke lyke a saynct,
Use wiles for witt and make deceyt a pleasure,
And call crafft counsell, for proffet styll to paint.
I cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer
With innocent blode to fede my sellff fat,
And doo most hurt where most hellp I offer.
I am not he that can alow the state
Off highe Cesar and dam Cato to dye,
That with his dethe dyd skape owt off the gate
From Cesares handes (if Lyve do not lye)
And wolld not lyve whar lyberty was lost:
So did his hert the commonn wele aplye.
I am not he suche eloquence to boste,
To make the crow singing as the swane,
Nor call the lyon of cowarde bestes the moste
That cannot take a mows as the cat can:
And he that dithe for hunger of the golld
Call him Alessaundre; and say that Pan
Passithe Apollo in muske manyfolld;
Praysse Syr Thopas for a nobyll talle,
And skorne the story that the knyght tolld.
Praise him for counceill that is droncke of ale;
Grynee when he laugheth that bereth all the swaye,
Frowne when he frowneth and grone when he is pale;
On othres lust to hang boeth nyght and daye:
None of these pyntes would ever frame in me;
My wit is nought--I cannot lerne the waye.
And much the lesse of thinges that greater be,
That asken helpe of colours of devise
To joyne the mene with eche extremitie,
With the neryst vertue to cloke always the vise:
And as to pourpose like wise it shall fall,
To presse the vertue that it may not rise;
As dronkenes good felloweshippe to call;
The frendly ffoo with his dowble face
Say he is gentill and courtois therewithall;
And say that Favell hath a goodly grace
In eloquence; and crueltie to name
Zele of justice and chaunge in tyme and place;
And he that suffreth offence withoute blame
Call him pitefull; and him true and playn
That raileth rekles to every mans shame.
Say he is rude that cannot lye and fayn;
The letcher a lover; and tirannye
To be the right of a prynces reigne.
I cannot, I. No, no, it will not be.
This is the cause that I could never yet
Hang on their slevis that way as thou maist se
A chippe of chaunce more then a pownde of witt.
This maketh me at home to hounte and to hawke
And in fowle weder at my booke to sitt.
In frost and snowe then with my bow to stawke,
No man doeth marke where so I ride or goo;
In lusty lees at libertie I walke,
And of these newes I fele nor wele nor woo,
Sauf that a clogg doeth hang yet at my hele:
No force for that for it is ordered so,
That I may lepe boeth hedge and dike full well.
I ame not now in Ffraunce to judge the wyne,
With saffry sauce the delicates to fele;
Nor yet in Spaigne where oon must him inclyne
Rather then to be, owtewerdly to seme.
I meddill not with wittes that be so fyne,
No Fflaunders chiere letteth not my sight to deme
Of black and white, nor taketh my wit awaye
With bestylnes, they beeste do so esteme;

Nor I ame not where Christe is geven in pray
For mony, poison and traison at Rome,
A commune practise used nyght and daie:
But here I ame in Kent and Christendome
Emong the muses where I rede and ryme;
Where if thou list, my Poynz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my tyme.