[In the following essay, Davis examines Surrey's “concern for wholeness, for singleness of effect” in his poetry.]

In his pioneering essay “The Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Hallett Smith drew attention to Wyatt's superiority over Surrey by comparison of the former's “The longe love that in my thought doeth harbar” and the latter's “Love that doth raine and live within my thought,” both translations of Petrarch's “Amor, che nel penser” (CXL); Wyatt's superiority, he noted, lay in the greater clarity of his imagery and the forcefulness of his syntax.¹ More recently, Maurice Evans has rephrased the contrast in order to emphasize both sides of the coin: “Surrey's sonnet is both less precise in wording and less faithful in content, but at the same time more fluid in movement,” or, in other words, while Wyatt conveys the intensity of an experience by vividness and roughness, Surrey is concerned with an effect of wholeness, for the sonnet as a unit rather than placing—or displacing—attention on its parts.²

Older critics, perhaps as early as Richard Tottel (who tried to assimilate Wyatt to Surrey by regularizing his meter), used to lament the fact that Wyatt was not like Surrey; it has become the fashion in more recent years to lament the fact that Surrey was not more like Wyatt. Still more recently, Maurice Evans and Emrys Jones have sought to even the balance, and what comes forth as the peculiar mark of Surrey as poet is his concern for wholeness, for singleness of effect; it is this quality and its implications that the present essay will explore.

Evans truly remarks that Surrey “had a feeling for nature and a power of natural description which is unique among the poets of his age,”³ and cites the sonnet “The soote season” for evidence; that sonnet is a free adaptation of Petrarch's “Zefiro torna” (CCCX), and it is informative to note what Surrey did with his original. Petrarch had used the octave-sestet division to contrast the rebirth of all nature in spring with the lover's unrelieved grief; Surrey, on the other hand, utilizing the “English” form of three quatrains and a couplet, laid down a vivid twelve-line description of natural resurgence, emphasizing the ubiquity of the event by repeated examples of the same process in the nightingale, the turtle-dove, the hart, the buck, the fishes, the adder, the swallow, the bee, and the flowers (stressing unity of effect by repeating the rime on “bringes” through all three quatrains), and introduced only at the end the contrasting state of the lover, with the ironic suggestion that he, too, has a sort of “spring”: “And thus I see among these pleasant thinges / Eche care decayes, and yet my sorow springes.”⁴ Surrey here did not merely evoke nature vividly, but managed as well to create a full and complex relation between the lover and his natural surroundings. “Alas, so all thinges” also shows this stress; its original, Petrarch's sonnet CLXIV, began:

Or che 'l ciel e la terra e 'l vento tace
E le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena,
Notte il carro stellato in giro mena,
E nel suo letto il mar senz'onda giace.

Surrey extended the natural description one line further before introducing the lover's contrasting state:

Alas, so all thinges nowe doe holde their peace,
Heaven and earth disturbed in nothing;
The beastes, the ayer, the birdes their song doe cease;
The nightes chare the starres aboute dothe bring.
Calme is the sea, the waves worke lesse and lesse.

Moreover, he chose to disregard Petrarch's metaphor of the sea lying in its bed (“nel suo letto”) in favor of evoking its “working” vividly, just as, at the end of the sonnet, he replaced Petrarch's metaphor of shipwreck with a literal statement of the lover's pain. An examination of this sonnet, together with “The soote season,” suggests an expansion and revision of Smith's contrast: that Surrey was less interested in metaphor, in projecting the self onto nature, than in seeing the self in relation to nature.

The interrelation of the individual human being with his natural context is of extreme importance to Surrey. Frequently, in fact, that nexus calls into question the identity of the self, as in “The sonne hath twyse.” Here, the vivid evocation of the disparity between the lover's continued pain and the earth's constant rebirths issues in a sense of isolation, even of “Straunge kynd of death, in lief” (l. 17), and that sense, in turn, produces withdrawal into a new and monstrous landscape of the mind:

I wishe for night, more covertlye to playne
          And me withdrawe from everie haunted place,
          Lest in my chere my chaunce should pere to playne;
And with my mynd I measure paas by paas
          To seke that place where I my self hadd lost.

(ll. 31-35)

Withdrawal into the self is not a means of psychological exploration, but merely deprivation; imprisonment in the mind is in fact the loss of self, and so the poem can end only on the hope of re-establishing mental balance by communication, by going out of the self in relating to another:

                                                                      And I maye playne my fill
Unto my self, oneles this carefull song
Prynt in your hert some percell of my will.

(ll. 49-51)

This state of mind is quite different from the usual Petrarchan one. There the poet projected the self outward in order to pull nature into the mind, in order to make Vauclause full “of my lamenting words,” for example (Petrarch, sonnet CCCI), or in order to make one's self seem to possess a village by saying that it is “huddled” in the hollow of a valley (and hence to corrupt it, as Alain Robbe-Grillet sees it).⁵ Here in Surrey nature is distinct, outside the mind, and the lover wants, not to possess it, but to find some relationship with it. To reduce the matter to a contrast of tropes, we have here the “closed” simile wherein both sides of the comparison are distinct as well as demonstrably related, instead of the metaphor which blends the two.

It is simile and its related effects rather than metaphor that dominates English neoclassical verse, and perhaps Surrey's concern for wholeness and harmony—whether it be for the total effect of a poem rather than attention to sharp detail, or for seeing the individual in relation to larger matters surrounding him—can best be summed up in Thomas Warton's statement in 1781 that Surrey was “the first English classical poet.”⁶ One element essential to what we understand by classicism is a sense of the past—especially the distant past of Greece and Rome—and an attempt to relate the present to that past. This we can see most directly in Surrey's attempt to domesticate Virgil by reproducing his Latin in English verse.

Emrys Jones has shown, by comparing the translation of Books II and IV of the Aeneid with Gavin Douglas's, that Surrey was the first translator of Latin verse to reproduce the style, especially the syntax, of his original. Douglas made of the Aeneid a rapidly moving and exciting narrative poem, but it is arguable that what we have in Surrey is Virgil in English. There is first, of course, blank verse as an approximation to the unrimed hexameter of Latin. There is also an attempt to capture the periodic sweep of Virgil by saving the main verb and creating balance within and between individual lines (marked by the copulative “and”) until that verb appears, as in II.12-17:

And loe, moist night now from the welkin falles,
And sterres declining counsel us to rest.
But sins so great is thy desire to here
Of our mishaps, and Troyes last decay,
Though to record the same my minde abhorres
And plaint eschues, yet thus will I begyn.

In a detailed analysis of II.29-66 (with appropriate contrasts to Douglas), Jones shows how Surrey has captured Virgil's verbal texture:⁷ the difference between the balanced narrative style of ll. 29-53 and the broken and vigorous oratorical style of Laocoon's speech in ll. 54-66, for example. Within the former passage, he notes such Virgilian tricks of style as balance within the line by syntax, as in “Here Pyrrhus band, there ferce Achilles pight” and balance between lines by the more subtle means of syllabic echoes, as in ll. 32-33:

Hether them secretly the Grekes withdrew,
Shrouding themselves under the desert shore.

He also draws attention to Surrey's ability to focus on contrast by syntactical displacement, as in “Hether them secretly … / … / And, wening we they had ben fled and gone”; and his imitation of Virgil's syllabic symmetry as in the following line wherein monosyllables separate the disyllabic words placed carefully at the beginning, middle, and end of the line: “Behight by vow unto the chast Minerve” (l. 43).

Jones notes Surrey's reproduction of Virgil's “intricate balancing system, composed of varied yet predictably recurring patterns” in his metrics,⁸ his ability to recapture, “as closely as was consistent with the idiom of an uninflected language, the disposition of sense-masses and the figures of speech of the Latin,”⁹ and concludes:

What clearly emerges from a study of these translations is the importance in them of the strictly aesthetic element in the arrangements of words: the importance assumed by the phrasal shapes and patterns. … There is an increase in the element of pure verbality: words, phrases, and sentences occupy more attention, they themselves become aesthetic objects. The reader senses a continual striving after balance, parallelism, antithesis, symmetry, and pleasurable asymmetry. Even while his attention is given to the narrative, he is aware of the continual sympathetic enactment of the words so that, compared with his predecessors', Surrey's verse seems to enjoy a more intimate relation between matter and manner.¹⁰

Moreover, Surrey is by no means insensitive to Virgil's larger effects; for example, the passage Jones analyzes begins with an evocation of Troy as it now stands waste:

There stands in sight an isle hight Tenedon,
Rich and of fame while Priams kingdom stood:
Now but a bay, and rode unsure for ship.

(ll. 29-31)

Then, after Laocoon's attempt to save Troy has failed, Surrey (following Virgil) reinforces the importance of that attempt and the result of its failure in sealing the fall of Troy by echoing the opening:

And but for faites and for our blind forcast,
The Grekes devise and guile had he discried,
Troy yet had stand and Priams toures so hie.

(ll. 71-73)¹¹

Likewise, Surrey is sensitive (as the modern translator Rolfe Humphries is not) to the fact that “Virgil throughout the Aeneid is not so much picturing something as pressing towards or enacting something,”¹² hence stressing as does Virgil the verbs of leaving and returning (so central to the action of the poem) even in the similes:

Like when Apollo leaveth Lycia,
His wintring place, and Xanthus floods likewise,
To viset Delos his mothers mansion,
Repairing eft and furnishing her quire.

(IV.182-85)

If we turn from Surrey's direct attempt to reproduce the language and feeling of an ancient poet in his own verse to a more inclusive classical sense in his own original verse, we shall find the key, I think, in a phrase Reuben Brower has used of John Dryden: “an allusion to Europe.”¹³ Broadly speaking, classicism (as we see it in Sidney, Jonson, and Dryden, for example) is motivated by a desire to present the individual event in as broad a temporal context as possible, to set an event in relation to other events past and present, to see the present moment in relation to past moments, to see the affairs of one nation in relation to past and present affairs of other nations (eighteenth-century England and Augustan Rome, for example), or to see the relation of an idea to a whole tradition of thought. Thus in many of Surrey's poems we find temporal context as important as we found the spatial context of nature to be in poems we examined earlier.

A concise example of Surrey's concern to relate the remote past to his present is afforded by his sonnet on Sardanapalus:

Th' Assyryans king, in peas with fowle desyre
And filthye luste that staynd his regall harte,
In warr that should sett pryncelye hertes afyre
Vanquyshd dyd yeld for want of martyall arte.
…
When he hadd lost his honor and hys right,
          Prowde tyme of welthe, in stormes appawld with drede,
          Murdred hym selfe to shew some manfull dede.

(ll. 1-4, 12-14)

Sardanapalus had of course been long considered an example of degeneracy, and had been presented as such, along with countless other examples from antiquity, by Gower and Lydgate among others. But what strikes one in this sonnet is that he is not a mere exemplum drawn from the store of ancient history; he has been isolated, and the full weight of the chivalric values so important to the poet and his time has come to rest on him (so much so that Jones entertains a covert allusion to Henry VIII),¹⁴ though without the effect of making him seem a modern like “Dan Homer.” The result is the past brought to life, an intensity of scorn in a modern response to an event buried in time by seeing both its pastness and the view of a modern; such scorn is best illustrated in ll. 5-8, with their vivid tactile imagery:

The dent of swordes from kysses semed straunge,
And harder then hys ladyes syde his targe;
From glotton feastes to sowldyers fare a chaunge,
His helmet far above a garlandes charge.

“When ragyng love” goes further than the Sardanapalus sonnet in showing, not merely an intense response to the past, but (in a manner not unlike the famous elegy on Richmond) the way in which such a response can alter one's sense of the present. Despite the editorial punctuation, the poem shows a remarkable syntactical fluidity, proceeding through three periodic sentences (the first three stanzas, the fourth, and the fifth)¹⁵ in a clear argumentative flow of condition, analogy, and conclusion:

When ragyng love with extreme payne
Most cruelly distrains my hart;
When that my teares, as floudes of rayne,
Beare witnes of my wofull smart;
When sighes have wasted so my breath
That I lye at the poynte of death:
I call to minde the navye greate
That the Grekes brought to Troye towne,
And how the boysteous windes did beate
Their shyps, and rente their sayles adowne,
Till Agamemnons daughters bloode
Appeasde the goddes that them withstode.
And how that in those ten yeres warre
Full manye a bloudye dede was done,
And manye a lord, that came full farre,
There caught his bane, alas, to sone,
And many a good knight overronne,
Before the Grekes had Helene wonne.
Then thinke I thus: sithe suche repayre,
So longe time warre of valiant men,
Was all to winne a ladye fayre,
Shall I not learne to suffer then,
And thinke my life well spent to be
Servying a worthier wight then she?
Therfore I never will repent,
But paynes contented stil endure:
For like as when, rough winter spent,
The pleasant spring straight draweth in ure,
So after ragyng stormes of care
Joyful at length may be my fare.

The first stanza evokes the lover's predicament in terms of the usual metaphor of the wounded warrior: his “extreme payne” (i.e., at the extremity of pain), his “wofull smart,” and finally his lying “at the poynte of death.” But then an act of memory calls up scores of literally wounded warriors caught in the classical example par excellence of the world well lost for love, and that past event is made most vivid in the poem by its extensive detailing, reinforced by such rhetorical means as lists marked by anaphora and echoes (“daughters bloode” and “bloudye dede,” for example). That the sharp image from the past has affected the lover's sense of his situation can be seen in the fact that the condition of the Greeks has become a metaphor (replacing the opening battle metaphor) for his state, in his “ragyng stormes of care” and the prospect of a life “well spent” like that of the heroes. And the lover's sense of the relevance of a classical situation to his issues in an act of choice: he will assimilate himself to the ancients insofar as chivalric values apply to the faith and problems of a love affair. So vivid has been his sense of the past that it has changed his lament into a firm resolution.

“Laid in my quyett bedd” works in a manner complementary to that of “When ragyng love,” for in this poem it is personal experience that modifies consideration of matters outside the self. Here the speaker begins by running through the three ages of childhood, youth, and age in his meditation, showing how each wishes to change his estate for that of the other, and responding with objective humor: “Wheare at full ofte I smylde” (l. 11). But then the rather distant stance he has assumed comes to bear on his own case, and he imagines his own face, separated as it were from himself by being projected into time future of old age, addressing him:

          Thus thoughtfull as I laye, I saw my witheryd skynne,
How it doth shew my dynted jawes, the flesshe was worne so thynne,
          And eke my tothelesse chapps, the gates of my right way
That opes and shuttes as I do speake, do thus unto me say.

(ll. 15-18)

With l. 18 the poem becomes an action instead of an expositive examination: the speaker in his present case merges with the speaking death's head in the future, and, as this happens, the speaker becomes his own poem. His aged face forces him to consider his present gray hairs as “lynes of true belief” in presaging age, and it asks him to feel his beard, the hairs of which “do wryte twoe ages past.” As objective musings have led the speaker to see himself as his own book, the message changes (as does the implication of the opening—“Laid in my quyett bedd”—which now acquires an ironic tinge in presaging death). He must say farewell to the joys of youth, and this farewell ends with an urgent appeal to the child with whom his meditation had begun: since the boy's “tyme moste happie is,” he must use that time to the full.

Surrey uses several different sorts of contexts in his poetry, and with a variety of effects. Whereas “When ragyng love” used the classical past to redefine a present condition, “Laid in my quyett bedd” used the present condition, when seen in the light of the whole life of man, to reverse the speaker's reaction to the entire situation. The context of “Wrapt in my carelesse cloke” is social. As the careless man strolls to and fro in court observing the various effects of love, he is enabled to see beneath appearances and eventually to realize how the external gestures of a particular woman on whom his attention comes to focus belie her actual feelings: how her smiling “come-on” belies indifference (ll. 11-14), and how the man who, less perceptive than the speaker, takes these gestures at their face value may suffer lovelorn. The companion to this poem, the woman's reply “Gyrtt in my giltlesse gowne,” expands context and hence consciousness by means of the woman's observations on the careless man. Not only does she defend herself against his charge, but, claiming with her “indifferent eyes” (l. 5) an even more objective stance than his, declares that his carelessness is in itself a pose deeper than the one he accused her of; she finds that “where playnesse seemes to haunte, nothing but craft appeare,” and that he himself, in fact, is attempting a seduction by reverse strategy:

          And to declare more playne, the tyme flyttes not so fast
But I can beare right well in mynd the song now sung and past.
          The auctour whearof cam, wrapt in a craftye cloke,
In will to force a flamyng fyre wheare he could rayse no smoke.

(ll. 13-16)

Not only does this companion piece expand “Wrapt in my carelesse cloke” by an additional consciousness, but it goes further to end with the biblical analogy of Susanna and the elders both to reinforce its point and to intensify the irony in which it has enmeshed the first poem. “O happy dames,” a dramatic monologue of a woman whose beloved is out at sea, employs a double context, one natural and the other social, in a complex placing of her situation. The social context is evoked for dramatic contrast: her female companions, secure in their loves, are asked to turn their situation into a motive for sympathy and “help to fill my moorning voyce” (l. 7). In a kind of cross-relationship, the natural context of the sea which threatens her lover and her happiness becomes a metaphorical extension of her mind: when the sea storms, her fears arise; when it calms, “doubtfull hope” arises in her breast; in an anatomy of the lover's voyage, his ship is fraught with memory, his sails filled with her sights that, she hopes, will carry him back the sooner (ll. 8-14). Isolated from her companions by her grief, with eyes only for the ocean that both threatens her happiness and expresses her fears, she cries, “Lo, what a mariner love hath made me!”

Even critics like Douglas Peterson who are unsympathetic to Surrey's mode of poetry find it possible to praise his elegiac pieces,¹⁶ for in them we find an impressive fusion of broad objectivity with intense personal feeling. The epitaph on his squire Thomas Clere is set in a rich classical tradition by such means as the Latinism of its twelfth line and the deliberate allusion to Virgil's supposed epitaph for himself,

Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc
          Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.(17)

But more saliently, the social and political world about him (as in the sonnet on Geraldine, “From Tuscan cam my ladies worthi race”) is evoked to give his life and hence his early death fullness of meaning:

Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
Clere of the County of Cleremont though hight;
Within the wombe of Ormondes race thou bread,
And sawest thy cosine crowned in thy sight.
Shelton for love, Surrey for Lord thou chase:
Ay me, while life did last that league was tender;
Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsall blaze,
Laundersey burnt, and battered Bullen render.
At Muttrell gates, hopeles of all recure,
Thine Earle halfe dead gave in thy hand his Will;
Which cause did thee this pining death procure,
Ere Sommers four times seaven thou couldest fulfill.
          Ah Clere, if love had booted, care, or cost,
          Heaven had not wonn, nor Earth so timely lost.

The poem begins by locating Clere geographically, his birth at his father's seat at Ormesby in Norfolk, his resting place in the Howard's chapel at Lambeth; the places are rich in association, and set in motion a principal theme of the poem, the societal unity effected by Clere's attachment of himself to the Howards. Thus in the second line the place, Cleremont, seems to give him his name; and in the next line time and space meet in the great family that dominates the land of his birth, a meeting intensified by the use of “wombe” which implies continuance through time (and contrasts pathetically with the tomb that now “holds” him). The first quatrain concerns itself with the potentialities Clere's birth held for him, and so ends by citing as an example his blood-relationship to Anne Boleyn. The second quatrain, which begins by echoing the first line rhetorically, locates Clere among people, stresses personal relationships rather than the promises of family, and in doing so also puts him into the chivalric world of love and arms proper to young manhood (and by calling the league with Surrey “tender,” implying their unity in a noble life). Interestingly, Surrey distances himself by the third person here in order to show, by narrative, the closeness of the two men; and he gives to the chivalric effort a tragic irony by citing the destructions of Kelsall, Landrecy, and Boulogne which the now-dead soldier saw in victory (as, in the first quatrain, he saw courtly preferment made possible in his cousin's coronation). The irony is intensified in the third quatrain by stressing the picture of Surrey himself, rather than Clere, lying “hopeles” at death's door, giving into Clere's hand his will, even as now he presents the corpse with this epitaph. The sonnet has enveloped Clere in a world crowded with places, places rich in historical meaning, in familial ties, in personal meaning, in order to convey a full sense of the man's importance to others both close and distant, and hence a sense of the promises life held out for him as well as the promise he represented to others. Now, at the couplet, Surrey draws away from the formal almost heraldic depiction of his squire's historical place to reveal the informal voice of deep personal feeling, the mere meaning of the man to the poet his lord, “Ah Clere, if love had booted. …” Here the fusion of objectively rendered situation and felt personal response serves to unite the living and the dead fully, to stress their meaning for each other rather than merely the virtues of the dead or the grief of the living.

In “So crewell prison,” an elegy wherein the imprisoned Surrey laments the death of Henry VIII's natural son, Henry, Duke of Richmond (who had died the year before at seventeen), the memory of the past with its rich associations manages to affect the sense of the present so deeply as to change it entirely (and, by so doing, to imply the elusive fluidity of any moment supposedly fixed or stable). The theme of past changing the present is stated at the outset:

So crewell prison howe could betyde, alas,
As prowde Wyndsour, where I in lust and joye
With a kinges soon my childishe yeres did passe,
In greater feast then Priams sonnes of Troye;
Where eche swete place retournes a tast full sowre.
The large grene courtes, where we wer wont to hove,
With eyes cast upp unto the maydens towre,
And easye syghes, such as folke drawe in love.

Past pleasure, heightened by the epic allusion whereby Surrey and the King's son approach the status of Priam's sons (and perhaps face their fate, as well), instead of lightening present pain, only intensifies it by the very fact of its irretrievability; the resultant attitude is complex, for we have in this moment combined the pain of disgrace, the possible pleasure afforded by “eche swete place” in what would normally be a pleasant enough “prison,” and the denial of that pleasure by the memory of pleasures that are no more.

The past that the poem goes on to evoke is bright and gay, brilliant with the exercises of chivalry—dances, games, tourneys “with swordes and frendlye hertes”—and carefree in the leisure of nobility. The two boys inhabiting that past space are viewed objectively and with humor, whether the humor be that of exaggerating their love-play by keeping the terms they themselves might have used, “The daunces short, long tales of great delight, / With wordes and lookes that tygers could but rewe” (ll. 10-11), or that of analytic commentary on the complex strategems of innocent love:

The palme playe, where, dispoyled for the game,
With dased eyes oft we by gleames of love
Have mist the ball and got sight of our dame
To bayte her eyes which kept the leddes above.

(ll. 13-16)

The wit of this “game,” where by missing the ball one gets something better, and where that act of missing is itself a ploy, makes their past life seem both light and brilliant (and introduces the theme of loss which will turn to tragedy at the poem's ending). The elegy proceeds quatrain-by-quatrain through courtly entertainments (9-12), tennis (13-16), jousts (17-20), “active games” of sport (21-24), wandering through “secret groves” in love-lament (25-28), hunting in the “wyld forest” (29-32), to sleep and mutual confidences at the end of the day (33-40). As it does so, it moves, not only through an imagined day in time, but spatially away from the “voyd walles” that now form his prison out into the fields and the forest, to end at the end of the day within those walls once more. And, as this process goes on, the boys' companionship in love and arms fades before the personal love they bore each other; the ceremonial love-making with which the description began (and its lightness of tone) ends with a deeper friendship between the boys:

The secret thoughtes imparted with such trust,
The wanton talke, the dyvers chaung of playe,
The frendshipp sworne, eche promise kept so just,
Wherwith we past the winter nightes awaye.
And with this thought the blood forsakes my face,
The teares berayne my cheke of dedlye hewe.

(ll. 37-42)

With the return to the present, the tone and style of the poem change abruptly; what we have at the end is, in fact, reminiscent of a lament over unrequited love, with “teares,” “sobbing sighes,” and the cheek “of dedlye hewe” depicting the bereft speaker who cries:

O place of blisse, renewer of my woos,
Geve me accompt wher is my noble fere.

(ll. 45-46)

Douglas Peterson finds this “sudden shift from a language which is styleless in its simplicity, and therefore fresh, to the diction of eloquence”¹⁸ a sign of weakness in the poem, as though Surrey had available to him no other language but that of the bereaved lover to express grief. But we have seen a shift from the love-games of two boys to the love between them within the “simplicity” of the description of the past; and that fact suggests that the phraseology is deliberate, even deliberately allusive; that Surrey's feelings for Richmond have the same intensity as a man's love for a woman; and that, further, the death of a friend with whom one has had such intense pleasure may well be seen by the survivor as a kind of unrequited love. It is out of such depth of feeling that the final realization comes, that Richmond's death has made his imprisonment seem inconsequential but that such a fact results in even greater pain:

And with remembraunce of the greater greif,
To bannishe the lesse I fynde my chief releif.

Of the two elegies on Wyatt, “W. resteth here” demonstrates the older poet's unity of being, both in the perfection within each of his parts—head, face, hand, tongue, eye, heart, body, and soul—and among all the parts as a complete man. But the more brief elegy illustrates a full unity between the poet and his dead friend:

Dyvers thy death doo dyverslye bemone.
Some that in presence of that livelye hedd
Lurked, whose brestes envye with hate had sowne,
Yeld Cesars teres uppon Pompeius hedd.
Some that watched with the murdrers knyfe
With egre thurst to drynke thy guyltless blood,
Whose practyse brake by happye end of lyfe,
Weape envyous teares to here thy fame so good.
But I that knowe what harbourd in that head,
What vertues rare were tempred in that brest,
Honour the place that such a jewell bredd,
And kysse the ground where as thy coorse doth rest
          With vaporde eyes; from whence such streames avayle
          As Pyramus did on Thisbes brest bewayle.

By adapting the form of a love-sonnet to an elegy (as in the piece on Clere), Surrey turned the dynamics of contrast between octave and sestet into a mode of intensifying his response to his friend's death. The contrasts are several. Most obvious is that between diversity of response and a single one, and that is made to signify disunity of being in those who feel one thing and show another on the one hand and the simple unity in the friend who feels what he shows on the other. The movement from disintegration to integration in turn rests on a contrast between the external, those who merely “Lurked” about “that livelye hedd,” and the internal response of the man who knows “what harbourd in that hedd,” between the context of court life and that of the private inner life that was as important to Wyatt himself as to his elegist.¹⁹ The sonnet, then, moves from the public Wyatt, mourned by diverse who cloak their hatred and envy in tears, to the private man over whom Surrey weeps with the tears of true love. That movement is marked by a change in style, for the sestet is couched in the terms of a love-lament and concludes with an allusion to Pyramus' tears over Thisbe; as in the elegy on Richmond, its force is to intensify the love between man and man by relating it to that between man and woman. The final allusion is both apt and functional; the sonnet has, after all, been concerned to differentiate between court-tears and real tears, and it has done so by allusion: those whose tears cloak envy and hate have been compared to Caesar weeping over the head of Pompey, while the true man's tears are like those of romantic love, depicting the lover bent in grief over the breast of his beloved. Moreover, the sestet's style serves to evoke the full amorous nature of the love-sonnet whose content as well as form Surrey has appropriated for the elegy (much as, later, Donne was to apply the erotic background of the sonnet to love of God in his “Holy Sonnets”).

Deliberate allusiveness extends to the entire poem, for it is based on one of Wyatt's own sonnets which likewise had exploited the difference between a real reaction to loss and various conventional reactions:

Dyvers dothe vse as I have hard and kno,
          When that to chaunge ther ladies do beginne,
          To morne and waile, and neuer for to lynne,
          Hoping therbye to pease ther painefull woo.
And some ther be, that when it chanseth soo
          That women change and hate where love hath bene,
          Thei call them fals, and think with woordes to wynne
          The hartes of them wich otherwhere dothe gro.
But as for me, though that by chaunse indede
          Change hath outworne the favor that I had,
          I will not wayle, lament, nor yet be sad;
Nor call her fals that falsley ded me fede:
          But let it passe and think it is of kinde,
          That often chaunge doth plese a womans minde.(20)

The security of stance by means of which Surrey can turn from satirizing hypocritical mourners to asserting his own grief is analogous to, and perhaps derived from, Wyatt's attitude toward accepting loss in love. More obviously, Surrey's allusion to Wyatt offers the elder poet a supreme compliment, and one which even further strengthens the tie of love between the two men. Peterson asserts that “the brevity of the sonnet form here … forces the poet to rely upon general statement, hyperbole, classical allusion, and the elevated connotations of the eloquent manner” instead of the particularities of real emotion to convey his feelings;²¹ but we have seen that such brevity is the result of extreme compression that relies in large part upon the reader's alertness to a variety of allusions—to another poem, to differing contexts and styles, to a whole world of experience touched on rather than let into the poem.

Surrey is indeed a classical poet. The richness of his poetic output depends, not on the delineation of intense feeling detached from context in order to be fully explored, but rather upon the evocation of context in order to examine feelings in their fullest light. It is to this end that his poetry becomes “an allusion to Europe” and much more: it reaches out to include in its scope past times both distant and near, the world of nature, and the nature of poetic traditions; it resounds with the voices of other men and other poems. Surrey's poetry thus creates a special world that pulls into its orbit the greater world outside individual experience in order to give extraordinary relevance to each such experience.

Notes

1. Hallett Smith, “The Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” HLQ, [Huntington Library Quarterly] 9 (1945-46), 332-37.

2. Maurice Evans, English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York, 1967), p. 76. The contrast is similar to that which seventeenth-century classicists like Hobbes and Dryden drew between the “strong lines” of the metaphysical school and their own sense of the wholeness of a poem.

3. Evans, p. 77.

4. Quotations are taken from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems, ed. Emrys Jones (Oxford, 1964).

5. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism, Tragedy” in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965), pp. 54-55.

6. Thomas Warton, A History of English Poetry (1781), section XXXVIII; quoted in Jones, p.xxx. It is possible that Sir Philip Sidney was the first to recognize the classical or Virgilian strain in Surrey, for the poets of his own time whom he singled out for praise in The Defence of Poesie are Sackville, who derived his “Induction” to A Mirrour for Magistrates from Virgil's description of Hades in Aeneid VI.268-81; Spenser, who modeled his Shepheardes Calender on Virgil's Eclogues; and Surrey (see The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols., 2nd printing [Cambridge, 1962], III, 37).

7. Jones, pp. 132-40.

8. Jones, p. xiii.

9. Jones, p. xiv.

10. Jones, pp. xvi-xvii.

11. Compare Aeneid II.22 and 56: “dives opum, Priami dum regna manebant,” “Troiaque nunc staret, Priamique arx alta maneres.”

12. R. W. B. Lewis, “On Translating the Aeneid: Yif that I Can,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 10 (1961), 13.

13. Reuben A. Brower, “An Allusion to Europe: Dryden and Tradition,” ELH, 19 (1952), 38-48.

14. Jones, p. 127.

15. See Evans, p. 82.

16. Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton, 1967), p. 66.

17. Jones, p. 129.

18. Peterson, p. 71.

19. For example, see Wyatt's first Satire, No. 196, in Kenneth Muir, ed., Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (London, 1949).

20. No. 145 in Muir's edition.

21. Peterson, p. 69.