SOURCE: Tromly, Frederic B. “Surrey's Fidelity to Wyatt in ‘Wyatt Resteth Here.’” Studies in Philology 77, no. 4 (fall 1980): 376-87.

Surrey's hour seems to have come round (again) at last. In recent years a number of studies have rehabilitated his reputation by removing him from Wyatt's steadily lengthening shadow.¹ By dissociating the two poets, Surrey's admirers have made it difficult to continue to regard, or rather disregard, him as merely an incompetent Wyatt. Their insistence on Surrey's separate identity has allowed attention to be focussed on his characteristic strengths: mastery of rhetoric and form, elegant diction, and rich allusiveness. Unfortunately, this desire to dissociate the two poets has inclined Surrey's champions to underestimate the significance of the closest point of literary contact between them, his epitaph “Wyatt Resteth Here.” Though critics have often praised it in passing as one of Surrey's finest poems, the epitaph has received only two detailed readings—neither of which examines closely the implied relationship of Surrey to Wyatt in the poem.²

The epitaph for Wyatt is a central poem in Surrey's canon because it defines his norm by deviating from it; it is his least characteristic poem. The anomalies of “Wyatt Resteth Here” can best be understood if we regard it as an act of remarkable fidelity to the dead poet. Surrey's fidelity manifests itself most obviously in the careful objectivity with which he depicts Wyatt, but it also reveals itself more subtly through Surrey's pervasive implication that Wyatt himself is the creator of the poem. In his standard biography of Surrey, Edwin Casady authorized a deeply misleading impression of the epitaph when he complained that it is a “merely conventional” expression of sorrow which “might well have been written at the death of any prominent man by a poet having only a slight knowledge of his subject.”³

Like most Renaissance epitaphs, “Wyatt Resteth Here” attempts to memorialize the dead. But Surrey's intention is more ambitious and exacting: his aim is to create an accurate, objective embodiment of Wyatt. The “Wyatt resteth here” phrase of the opening line repeats of course the familiar hic requiescit epitaph formula, but it also points to Surrey's attempt to capture the presence of Wyatt. The epitaph no less than the grave contains the man. Also, the exoskeleton of the poem is a blazon which baldly catalogues Wyatt's bodily parts and thus quite literally incarnates him into the poem.⁴ In a further sense Wyatt's body is coextensive with the body of the poem because, as Fowler noticed, the thirty-eight line structure of the poem corresponds to the number of Wyatt's years.⁵

Surrey's concern to depict Wyatt accurately accounts for the poem's severely impersonal voice, which is quite unlike the tone of Surrey's other four elegies. In these poems Surrey dramatizes his bereavement by gestures of personal sorrow which recall his favorite role in the amatory lyrics of bereft but loyal lover. One of the mortuary sonnets for Wyatt, for instance, concludes with Surrey insisting on his sense of loss; playing Pyramus to Wyatt's Thisbe, he professes to “kysse the ground where as thy coorse doth rest / With vaporde eyes” (“Dyvers Thy Death”). The figure of Surrey also looms large in his epitaph for Thomas Clere, as the poet recalls how “Surrey for Lord thou chase [chose]” and evokes the dramatic scene when “Thine Earle halfe dead gave in thy hand his Will” (“Norfolk Sprang Thee”). The epitaph for Clere ends, predictably, with a sigh of longing: “Ah Clere, if love had booted, care, or cost, / Heaven had not wonn, nor Earth so timely lost.” And the elegy on the Duke of Richmond ends with Surrey again talking about himself: “Thus I alone, where all my fredome grew, / In pryson pyne with bondage and restraynt” (“So Crewell Prison”).⁶

“Wyatt Resteth Here,” however, is a poem without an “I”; its few first person pronouns are plural and confined to the closing consolation (ll. 36-7). Also, in sharp contrast to Surrey's other elegiac poems, the epitaph for Wyatt refers to its subject in the third person, alludes to no shared experience with him, and, with the exception of a single half-suppressed “alas” (l. 30), expresses no personal grief at his demise. This uncharacteristic objectivity can be understood, with Casady, as betraying Surrey's lack of feeling for and knowledge about Wyatt, but such a literal-minded reading does not consider the possibility that the impersonal rendering is a conscious artistic strategy. Surrey deliberately effaced himself from the epitaph, I believe, because of his respect for Wyatt's otherness; he recognized that to write Wyatt into his poem necessitated writing himself out of it.

The portrait of Wyatt which the poem creates is exclusively a moral depiction. The epitaph identifies Wyatt as an exemplar of virtue and defines that virtue with exceptional consistency and detail. When the opening line contrasts the sepulchral repose of Wyatt's corpse to his ceaseless activity while alive (“Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest”), it probably alludes to the fact that Wyatt died soon after returning to England from an exhausting diplomatic mission. But, more important, the line points concisely to the thrust of Surrey's depiction, which centers on how Wyatt was quick not only because he was alive but also “full of vigour, energy, or activity” (OED). Surrey's treatment thus accords well with the characteristic Humanist depreciation of the contemplative life because “virtue consists in action.”⁷ Repeatedly the poem attributes to Wyatt intense activity which reveals his spiritual force. Surrey images even Wyatt's thinking processes in terms of vigorous physical action; Wyatt had a head

Whose hammers bet styll in that lively brayn
As on a stithe, where that some work of fame
Was dayly wrought to turne to Britaines gayn.

(ll. 6-8)

The lines deepen our impression of how Wyatt “could never rest” when they stress how the hammers beat “styll” and wrought their labor “dayly.”

Surrey's blacksmith image is intended to call to mind a similar figure which Wyatt used (another indication of Surrey's knowledge of Wyatt's life and work).⁸ In one of his love lyrics Wyatt wearily asserts that

Such hammers worke within my hed
That sounde noght else vnto my eris
But faste at borde and wake abed.(9)

Surrey changes the significance of Wyatt's complaint by ignoring its amatory context (the poem makes no allusion to Wyatt the courtly lover) and specifying that the products of his labor were intended “to turne to Britaines gayn.” This is the first of a number of important references to Wyatt's self-sacrifice for the public weal.

Throughout the poem Surrey emphasizes that Wyatt's virtue was not only quick but also quickening: Wyatt's presence had a kinetic effect on those around him. When in stanza six Surrey refers to Wyatt's “mynde” being “reposed,” he may seem to contradict the blacksmith image of stanza two. But he specifies that Wyatt's mental repose expressed itself affectively and dynamically through a “persing loke” which had the Orphic power “Frendes to allure, and foes to reconcile” (ll. 22-3), as if his mere glance sufficed to draw people together. Surrey's stress on the activating power of Wyatt's virtue appears again in the following stanza, where he states that Wyatt refused to hide thoughts that “might the trouth avance” (l. 26); Wyatt did not simply maintain the truth but furthered its progress.

Surrey's most emphatic treatment of Wyatt's energetic and energizing force occurs in the fifth stanza:

A toung that served in forein realmes his king;
Whose courteous talke to vertue did enflame
Eche noble hart; a worthy guide to bring
Our English youth by travail unto fame.

We see again Wyatt's galvanizing force; he did not merely incline people to virtue but inflamed them to pursue it. Surrey's description calls to mind the way Castiglione's ideal courtier would use courteous talk to lead those around him, and especially his prince, to virtue. But it is the difference between the two treatments which is important. The aim of the courtier is to make goodness easy and pleasant by beguiling his followers and sweetening virtue's bitter pill; he will strew the path of virtue with pretty flowers (p. 294). Surrey, however, stresses that Wyatt led English youth “by travail” to fame. The travail apparently belongs to both Wyatt and the English youth whom he led, and it reminds us of the “work” performed by his mind in stanza two. As it often does in Tudor literature, “travail” also carries the meaning of “travel” (the OED's citations indicate that the two meanings were not orthographically distinguished until the eighteenth century). The sense of travail as travel glances back to Wyatt's missions “in forein realmes” in the first line of the stanza and is supported by the reference to him as a “worthy guide.” For both Wyatt and those whom he led, virtue is inseparable from uncloistered hardship and its precondition is conflict, not courtly diversion.

Surrey repeatedly indicates that Wyatt's virtue stems from his manly confrontation with a world which finds goodness offensive. The compressed and slightly cryptic first stanza presents the dialectic governing virtue which runs through the poem:

Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest;
Whose heavenly giftes encreased by disdayn
And vertue sank the deper in his brest:
Such profit he by envy could obtain.

(ll. 1-4)

Though commentators have usually assumed that the “disdayn” in line two is an attribute of Wyatt (that he disdained either his own gifts or his enemies), the stanza makes better sense if we understand the disdain as expressed toward rather than by Wyatt.¹⁰ The meaning seems to be that the disdain and envy of his enemies increased and deepened his virtue. A contemporary Tudor translation of Plutarch's De capienda ex inimicis utilitate spells out the moral philosophy implicit in Surrey's lines: “So who that perceyeuethe / that he hath a disdayner, both of his name and of his lyuynge, taketh better hede to hym selfe / he examinethe all his dedes, and redresseth all his lyfe.”¹¹ Just as Wyatt's virtue inspired his friends to goodness, it awakened malice in his enemies; but, ironically, this disdainful envy spurred him on to yet greater virtue.

Surrey's emphasis on how Wyatt profited from his enemies is intended to recall the dead poet's frequent insistence on the benefits of adversity. In his important essay The Quyete of Mind (a translation of Budé's Latin version of Plutarch's De tranquillitate et securitate animi), Wyatt observed that “of very vnhandsome thynges / Oft tymes they [wise men] chuse out some handsome and profytable thynges to them. which thing wolde be moche thought on / & laboured with great exercise of the mynde.”¹² Wyatt's phrase “laboured with great exercise of the mynde” nicely describes the strenuous mental activity of his poems as he strives to discover “handsome and profytable thynges” in disappointment. Surrey's description of Wyatt profiting from disdain has an especially close application to his subject's love poems, where the depressingly frequent disdain of ladies jolts him into a reassessment of the world and leads to a new sense of his own integrity. In the complaint “Alas the greiff, and dedly wofull smert,” for instance, Wyatt's realization that his lady's “crueltie and disdayn / Have set at noght a faithfull true intent” leads him to “qwite th'entreprise of that that I have lost …”¹³

Unlike Surrey's two mortuary sonnets, which are devoted to castigating Wyatt's envious enemies at court, the epitaph mentions Wyatt's personal foes only in the first stanza and in line 30: “Happy, alas, to[o] happy, but for foes.” Surrey's main emphasis falls on the larger, impersonal forces which were Wyatt's antagonists. One of these forces was time, which caused Wyatt's verse to remain “unparfited” (l. 15), suggesting that he was cut off before reaching his prime (and perhaps also that he did not have enough leisure in which to work).

It is, however, fortune which Surrey identifies as Wyatt's primary enemy. When he describes Wyatt as one “Amid great stormes whom grace assured so / To lyue upright and smile at fortunes choyce” (ll. 11-12), Surrey concisely expresses the stoic commonplace that the good man must withstand the rage of fortune by maintaining his composure in her storm. As Philosophy explained to Boethius, “The serene man who has ordered his life stands above menacing fate and unflinchingly faces good and bad fortune. This virtuous man can hold up his head unconquered. The threatening and raging ocean storms which churn the waves cannot shake him …”¹⁴ Surrey makes a slight but significant change in the Boethian formulation by placing Wyatt amid fortune's storm but granting him a contemptuous smile which manifests his inner mastery. He shows the same disdain toward fortune which his enemies express toward him.

Surrey emphasizes the stoical cast of Wyatt's virtue most heavily in stanzas six and seven, where he attributes to him “An eye, whose judgement none affect could blinde” (l. 21) and

A hart, where drede was never so imprest
To hyde the thought that might the trouth avance;
In neyther fortune loft nor yet represt,
To swell in wealth, or yeld unto mischance.

(ll. 25-28)

Here the description is couched in negative terms to emphasize Wyatt's resistance to passion (“affect”) and fortune's power. Wyatt's virtue is not imaged, as elsewhere in the poem, in terms of motion but rather as resistance to pressure (neither “imprest” nor “represt”) and as steadfastness (neither swelling nor yielding). The parallel antitheses in lines 27 and 28 suggest the state of stoical ataraxy, where the mind is self-possessed and in equilibrium; Wyatt remains unmoved by the blandishments of good fortune and the threats of ill fortune. In the next stanza, Surrey removes Wyatt again from the tyranny of fortune when he translates the “vixi, et, quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi” of Dido's lament (Aeneid, 4.653) as “Lived and ran the race that nature set” (l. 31).¹⁵ Surrey is careful to avoid the implication that Wyatt was fortune's creature.

Surrey's emphasis throughout the poem on Wyatt's manly fortitude, honesty, and faithful service accords remarkably well with the older poet's recurrent, almost obsessive, characterization of himself in his verse and prose. The stoical coloration of Surrey's portrait is especially apposite, for Wyatt seems to have been a stoic by temperament as well as study; the strong ethical thrust of his writing (including the love poems) centers on his attempt to preserve (or, often, regain) his self-possession amidst the snares of fortune and passion.¹⁶ Among ancient philosophers he found Seneca, Plutarch, and Boethius most congenial, and it is surely no coincidence that these same philosophers provide the moral framework of Surrey's depiction. Casady's argument that Surrey's portrait is not appropriate specifically to Wyatt because it employs commonplaces ignores the crucial fact that Wyatt himself found these commonplaces immensely meaningful.

In his closing lines Surrey shifts his angle of vision and presents a Christian consolation for Wyatt. Throughout the body of the poem secular moral philosophy has provided the basis for Surrey's depiction (the word “vertue” occurs four times); the only references to distinctly Christian values are the “heavenly giftes” of line 2 and the “grace” in line 11 which supported Wyatt in fortune's storms. Now, at the close, Surrey depicts Wyatt as a faithful believer martyred by a world unworthy of him:

But to the heavens that simple soule is fled,
Which left with such as covet Christ to know
Witnesse of faith that never shall be ded;
Sent for our helth, but not received so.

These lines culminate Surrey's definition of Wyatt's goodness in terms of his own activity and the active response (both good and evil) which it begot in others. Wyatt's last vigorous action is not in the world but from it; he “is fled” to heaven, suggesting the relief with which he left a world that refused to receive him and denied him all rest. But despite their emphasis on the world's guilty rejection of Wyatt (which carries us back to his enemies' envy in the first stanza), the lines hold out the hope that true Christians may be moved by his example. The phrase “witnesse of faith” associates Wyatt with St. Paul's Old Testament heroes of faith “Of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11: 38). Also, Paul's emphasis on the constant conflict and trial which his faithful believers underwent parallels the epitaph's stress on Wyatt's struggles with a world which martyrs innocence. Surrey's implication is that Wyatt has joined the “cloud of witnesses” whose example should encourage the living to “run with patience the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12: 1). Even in death Wyatt may exert a positive influence and “the trouth avance” (l. 26).

“Wyatt resteth here” can be characterized as an act of fidelity to Wyatt because, as we have seen, it depicts him in the terms he used to describe himself. But the poem bespeaks its fidelity to Wyatt in a deeper and more resonant sense. Surrey's emphasis on the power of Wyatt's virtue to stimulate virtuous acts in others invites us to see the poem itself as an expression of Wyatt's moral force. The terms which Surrey uses to characterize Wyatt's poetry clearly imply the epitaph's indebtedness to the older poet:

A hand that taught what might be sayd in ryme;
That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit;
A mark the which, unparfited for time,
Some may approache, but never none shall hit.

(ll. 13-16)

Here as throughout the poem, Surrey defines Wyatt in terms of his effect on others. Instead of discussing, as we might expect, the intrinsic truth and beauty of Wyatt's poetry, he stresses its affective power: Wyatt “taught what might be sayd in ryme.” The significance of Wyatt's verse is public and pedagogical. The archery image in the third and fourth lines of the quatrain emphasizes that Wyatt's educative poetry will issue in an active response by stimulating emulation. Surrey's implication is that, just as Wyatt was aroused to poetic power by the example of Chaucer, so the poem itself owes its inspiration to Wyatt. Through the act of writing the poem, then, Surrey tacitly and poignantly places himself among those of “our English youth” whom Wyatt brought “by travail unto fame” (ll. 19-20).

Surrey effaces himself from his poem and deviates so markedly from his customary mode because of his fidelity to his subject's spirit. He does not attempt, however, to write a close imitation or parody of the surface qualities of Wyatt's verse but rather to capture the deeper moral concerns which inform it.¹⁷ His aim is to make his poem actively emulate the virtues which it depicts in Wyatt. Thus, the epitaph not only discusses how Wyatt inspired people to virtuous action, but it implicitly adduces itself as evidence of that force by acting in a Wyatt-like manner. There is, that is to say, an intensely reflexive relationship between the matter and the manner of the epitaph, between what it says and what it does.

The reflexivity of the poem is apparent in Surrey's treatment of Wyatt's judgment; the epitaph assesses Wyatt with the same weighty judgment which it attributes to him. Stanza six simultaneously depicts and enacts Wyatt:

An eye, whose judgement none affect coulde blinde,
Frendes to allure, and foes to reconcile;
Whose persing loke did represent a mynde
With vertue fraught, reposed, voyd of gyle.

(ll. 21-4)

The eye whose judgment passion cannot blind belongs to this uncharacteristically (for Surrey) objective poem as well as to Wyatt. Similarly, the “persing loke” which “did represent a mynde / With vertue fraught” belongs to the living as well as the dead poet. The word “represent” points to two levels of reference; in addition to its primary meaning (applicable to Wyatt) of “To show, exhibit, or display to the eye,” it also means “to portray, depict, delineate” (OED), which comments on the artistic process of the poem. And the final line (“With vertue fraught, reposed, voyde of gyle”), with its two heavy caesurae, clustered stresses, and weighty monosyllables, enacts the grave deliberation of the mind which it characterizes. Though “Wyatt resteth here” is, like most Renaissance epitaphs, eulogistic, it impresses us more as a sustained act of judgment than a conventional parade of praises. As a critic has attested who usually faults Surrey for lack of thinking, the poem's moral commonplaces “have been made the occasion for serious reflection; they are not a substitute for it.”¹⁸ The poem says nothing critical of Wyatt, yet it contrives to convince us that it would have if there had been criticisms to be made.

Another virtue which Surrey ascribes to Wyatt actively informs the texture of the poem. In the context of Surrey's canon, the epitaph is noticeably deficient in polish and elegance, blunt to the point of awkwardness. But this lack of polish is appropriate and significant, despite C. S. Lewis' stricture that the poem is “a little clumsy and a little too like a catalogue.”¹⁹ The bluntness of the poem emulates the artless forthrightness which it repeatedly attributes to Wyatt. Surrey characterizes Wyatt's mind as “voyde of gyle” (l. 24) and describes his “hart, where drede was never so imprest / To hyde the thought that might the trouth avance” (l.26). More emphatically, his climactic characterization depicts Wyatt as a “simple soule” (l.33), a phrase which suggests not only Wyatt's purity of spirit but also his freedom from guile and his artless, unadorned behavior (OED). Surrey's customary elegancies implicitly would have belied his portrait of an artless Wyatt. Instead, he writes a poem of statement which eschews ornament for substance; its unmannered directness enacts the manly forthrightness with which Wyatt addressed the world. Like Wyatt, the poem refuses to sacrifice truth to expedient artifice. In Wyatt's phrase, “alwaye the naked trouthe ys the goodlyeste perswation.”²⁰

The epitaph for Wyatt deviates from Surrey's mode in another way that merits comment. The urgency created by its dense verbal texture and terse rhythms is in marked contrast to the leisurely, spacious articulation of such typical Surreyan lyrics as “Geve Place, Ye Lovers,” “When Ragying Love,” and “So Crewell Prison.” In “Wyatt Resteth Here” Surrey's versification approximates the muscular labor of the blacksmith rather than the limpid dreaming of the courtly lover. Unlike most of Surrey's verse, it is a poem in which beauty meets force. The epitaph is a poem stripped of transitions; in the manner of its abrupt first line, it progresses in elliptical, jagged spurts. Not only is each stanza totally discrete and self-contained, but the lines comprising each stanza are usually not related by such syntactical niceties as conjunctions. Stanza eight, for instance, is intelligible only when its ellipses are supplied:

A valiant corps, where force and beawty met;
Happy, alas, to[o] happy, but for foes;
Lived and ran the race that nature set;
Of manhodes shape, where she the molde did lose.

(ll. 29-32)

The syncopated rhythms and choppy, telescoped syntax create the feel of the urgent pressures which prevented Wyatt from resting in the world. Surrey's epitaph is deliberately constructed to convey the sense that, like Wyatt's verse, it is a poem “unparfited for time” (l. 15). The poem witnesses that Surrey has followed in Wyatt's footsteps and that he shares the same moral engagement with a world antagonistic to virtue and poetry.

“Wyatt Resteth Here” differs from Surrey's canon in so many ways because Wyatt is in a real sense its author as well as its subject. The process of embodiment to which Surrey committed himself required the forfeiture of his own poetic identity and resulted in a remarkable act of negative capability. Paradoxically, this most un-Surreyan poem eloquently attests to the power of Surrey's imagination. Despite its lack of explicit personal feeling for Wyatt, “Wyatt Resteth Here” tacitly bespeaks its author's deep admiration and respect. Surrey pays Wyatt the greatest tribute one poet can bestow upon another: to write the epitaph that the speechless poet might have written for himself.²¹

Notes

1. See John Buxton, A Tradition of Poetry (London, 1967), pp. 18-35; Alicia Ostriker, “Thomas Wyatt and Henry Surrey: Dissonance and Harmony in Lyric Form,” NLH [New Literary History], I (1970), 387-407; C. W. Jentoft, “Surrey's Four ‘Orations’ and the Influence of Rhetoric on Dramatic Effect,’ PLL, [Papers or Language and Literature] IX (1973), 250-62; and Walter R. Davis, “Contexts in Surrey's Poetry,” ELR [English Literary Renaissanee], IV (1974), 40-55.

2. In “Surrey's Five Elegies: Rhetoric, Structure, and the Poetry of Praise,” PMLA, XCI (1976), 25-7, C. W. Jentoft concentrates on Surrey's manipulation of traditional rhetorical patterns. More provocative is the analysis in Alastair Fowler, Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of Renaissance Poems (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 25-30, which correlates stanzas two through eight with the “Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost” (cf. “heavenly gifts” in line two). Fowler's argument is weakened by the fact that some stanzas do not fit the pattern in an obvious way; with characteristic forthrightness he concedes, for instance, that “In stanza 7, only recognition of the Gift involved (timor dei, ‘dread’) allows us to appreciate the primary meaning” (p. 28).

3. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (New York, 1938), p. 95. Casady repeats his charge verbatim on p. 241.

4. In a more superficial way Surrey incorporates Wyatt into his lyric “When Ragyng Love,” where the first letter of each stanza spells WIATT. Curiously, the content of the poem seems to have nothing to do with Wyatt.

5. Conceitful Thought, p. 30.

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

7. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York, 1959), p. 329. Surrey extensively annotated a copy of the 1541 Aldine edition of Castiglione's treatise (Bent Juel-Jensen, “The Poet Earl of Surrey's Library,” Book Collector, V (1956), 172), which he may have been reading around the time that news of Wyatt's death (11 October 1542) reached him.

8. As Casady has pointed out (pp. 223-4), Surrey was separated from Wyatt by differences in political and religious commitment as well as by a span of about fifteen years in age, and there is no evidence that they were personally acquainted. But Surrey nevertheless knew a good deal about Wyatt, as the epitaph reveals.

9. Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), p. 215.

10. For Wyatt disdaining his own gifts, see Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder Rollins (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1966), II, 156. For Wyatt disdaining his enemies, see S. Gorley Putt, “A Suppressed Hendiadys in a Poem by Surrey,” MLR, [Modern Language Review] XXXIV (1939), 67. Jones (p. 123) supports what I take to be the proper reading.

11. How one may take profite of his enmyes, sig. A5. STC 20052. The revised STC supplies the date of “1531?” and the name of “Sir T. Elyot?” as translator.

12. Collected Poems of Wyatt, p. 445.

13. Collected Poems of Wyatt, pp. 3-4.

14. The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (New York, 1962), p. 9 (Book 1, Poem 4).

15. Surrey's formal translation of Aeneid 4 renders the line as “I lived and ranne the course fortune did graunt” (Jones, p. 86).

16. For Wyatt's stoicism, see Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (London, 1964), pp. 79-98 and Donald M. Friedman, “The ‘Thing’ in Wyatt's Mind,” EIC, [Essays in Criticism] XVI (1966), 375-81. Friedman notes that in addition to the emphasis on self-mastery in the love lyrics, “Wyatt also transported his secular stoic doctrine into the devotional atmosphere of the Psalm translations …” (p. 377). The mixture of secular ethics and Christian eschatology in “Wyatt Resteth Here” mirrors their conflation in Wyatt.

17. For elegies on poets which, unlike Surrey's, employ conspicuous stylistic imitation, see Michael Murrin, “Poetry as Literary Criticism,” MP, [Modern Philology] LXV (1968), 202-7 and Avon Jack Murphy, “The Critical Elegy of Earlier Seventeenth-Century England,” Genre, V (1972), 91-2 and “Appendix,” passim.

18. Douglas Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton, 1969), p. 68.

19. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 232.

20. Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963), p. 188.

21. The research for this paper was completed while I was a Fellow at the Huntington Library; I am also indebted to my colleague Zailig Pollock for incisive suggestions.