SOURCE: Halasz, Alexandra. “Wyatt's David.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30, No. 3 (Fall 1988): 320-44.

[In the essay below, Halasz examines the importance of political and religious concerns in the Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms.]

          Era intagliato lì nel marmo stesso
lo carro e' buoi traendo l'arca santa
per che si teme officio non commesso.

(Purgatorio 10.55-57)

Sir Thomas Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms consists of the seven penitential psalms set into a narrative drawn from the biblical story of David. In a sonnet inserted as a preface to the Paraphrase, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, raised the question of where or how to place Wyatt's poem:¹

The great Macedon that out of Perse chasyd
Darius of whose huge power all Asy Rang,
In the riche arke if Homers rymes he placyd,
Who fayned gestes of hethen Prynces sang,
What holly grave, what wourthy sepulture,
To Wyates Psalmes shulde Christians purchace?

(1-6)

Surrey's opening stanza rehearses a poetic desire to address, if not surpass, political concerns: to speak of Alexander's devotion to Homer's verse is to envision a world in which the greatest princes accord poetry a sacred place. The matter is complicated by the question that follows. Heathen poems may be valorized by princes, but the value of Wyatt's poem depends on “Christians purchace.” On the one hand, Surrey's question suggests that the allocation of sacred place is not a courtly concern, while on the other, it is posed in a courtly manuscript and in relation to a princely exemplar. I want to suggest that Surrey is not simply offering a consoling fantasy of poetic accomplishment but rather also indicating that a consideration of political and poetic concerns is a precondition for determining the place of Wyatt's poem, even as a religious one.

Surrey does not answer his question; rather, he goes on to call attention to the figure of David and to the exemplum contained in the narrative links:

Wher he [Wyatt] dothe paynte the lyvely faythe and pure,
The stedfast hoope, the swete returne to grace
Of iust Davyd by parfit penytence,
Where Rewlers may se in a myrrour clere
The bitter frewte of false concupyscence,
How Jewry bought Vryas death full dere

(7-12)

The story of David turns out to be divided: on the one hand, it is the story of “the swete return to grace of iust Davyd by parfit penytence,” on the other, of “the bitter frewte of false concupyscence” and wasteful death. The two aspects of David are at odds with each other, and the final couplet implies that the story is not ended, but awaits resolution: “In Prynces hartes goddes scourge yprynted depe / Myght them awake out of their synfull slepe.” Surrey substitutes the divided story of David for an answer to his question about the place of Wyatt's Paraphrase; the substitution exposes a fault line between the traditional idealization of a penitential David and the negative political example of his story. The sonnet progresses from question to fault line to the equivocation of the final couplet: the question remains posed but not answered. Yet the progress suggests that we need to examine the figure of David in Wyatt's narrative if we are to understand the political, religious, and poetic implications of Wyatt's poem.

It may seem tendentious to make a fault line out of what is an obvious seam in the extrabiblical composition of David's story. The association of psalms and story was by no means unique to Wyatt; David was traditionally idealized as the author of the Psalms and his biblical story often used to concretize the more abstract meditations of the prayers. Wyatt's poem is derived from a similar work by Pietro Aretino that presents David as a penitential exemplar. In the final narrative prologue, Aretino's David has a vision of the Redemption; his biblical story has been left behind; and he is the David of the early Christian exegetes, the progenitor of Christ, a figure to be fulfilled by the incarnation and a guarantor of the providential order. Aretino's poem is typical of the extrabiblical development of David's story in which the penitential example of the psalms provides concrete evidence that David merits redemption and is therefore an appropriate model for (Catholic) Christian conduct. Wyatt's narrative follows Aretino's closely, but the final stanzas of his story continue beyond the vision of redemption.² They present David speaking to himself:

Whereby he frames this reason in his heart:
“That goodness which doth not forbear his son
From death for me and can thereby convert
My death to life, my sin to salvation,
Both can and will a smaller grace depart
To him that sueth by humble supplication.
And since I have his larger grace assayed,
To ask this thing why am I then afraid?
“He granteth most to them that most do crave
And he delights in suit without respect.
Alas, my son pursues me to the grave,
Suffered by God my sin for to correct.
But of my sin since I my pardon have,
My son's pursuit shall shortly be reject.
Then will I crave with sured confidence.”
And thus begins the suit of his pretence.

(711-26)

David's request recalls his biblical story yet again. Absalom's rebellion and death are the return of David's sin, its visitation on him in the form of loss, as prophesied by Nathan in the Bathsheba episode.³ But Wyatt's David construes his sin as already expiated (“But of my sin since I my pardon have”) and foresees the end of Absalom's rebellion not as a loss but as the occasion of future benefit (“Then will I crave with sured confidence”). David's words cannot be made to fit either the logic of his biblical story or the tradition of his idealization as the repentant psalmist. The “reason” David frames in his heart is a parodic allusion to the promise of redemption. Because redemption has been secured, David reasons, he can ask a small favor from God: first, the preservation of his earthly power (“My son's pursuit shall shortly be reject”) and, then, whatever else he might crave. Against the predisposition to read David as an idealized figure, as a surrogate in penitential prayer, his words belatedly present an unregenerate David. Both the belatedness and the indirection of David's unmasking raise the question of his status, as well as the poem's. The final stanza of the narrative recalls the divided characterization of David that Surrey substitutes for an answer to his question about the place of the Paraphrase. The logic of Surrey's displacement of his question is affirmed by Wyatt's final stanza: we must place the problematic figure of David before we can place the poem.

The perspicuous agent of David's unmasking is the narrator of the Paraphrase, who has ventriloquized David's speech/prayer since the first psalm. For most of the Paraphrase, the narrator respects the boundary between the story, which is his to tell, and the prayer, the sacred text he is paraphrasing.⁴ But in the final stanzas of his narrative, he gives words to David within his story and makes those words resonate against the sacred words associated with the psalms. He crosses the boundary between his text and the psalmic text and shows David's ostensibly sacred words to be shaped by another moment of David's private discourse, not his discourse with God, but with himself and his own interests. The David unmasked by his own final words in the narrative is at odds with his biblical original and with the singer-self of the psalms. Placing him requires that we place the narrator as well if we are to understand how this David, created within the context of the traditional association of biblical narrative and psalm sequence, is made to appear as the knowing user of the cultural values attached to and expressed by the psalm sequence.

Modern critics have understood the Paraphrase as a devotional work and identified it as a powerful, anguished, and Protestant voice in the theological discourse of its time. Their attention to the religious issues in the poem necessarily places their readings within a penitential interpretation. The psalm sequence has its own, long-established implied teleology, a gradual reconciliation to a forgiving God, that even a critic like Stephen Greenblatt, committed to widening the context of interpretation, acknowledges: “Each of the psalms thus expresses a version of the whole, but in graded degrees of intensity and elaboration; the movement is at once repetitive and linear. … The poems express a single, unified process which we may describe in religious terms as penitence or in psychological terms as loving submission to domination.”⁵ As we have seen, however, Wyatt's narrative frame finally presents an unregenerate David. In other words, the teleology of Wyatt's representation of David opposes the implied teleology of the psalm sequence. Critics reading the Paraphrase have, in fact, been sensitive to a certain tension in the poem. H. A. Mason formulated the tension in terms of the figure of David: “anything put into the mouth of such a pictorially conceived puppet as the David of this [the opening] prologue would only sound insincere if not blasphemous.”⁶ Mason recuperates the tension by making it dramatic and by making the drama work in the interest of David's repentance, in short, by calling on the traditional hegemony of the penitential interpretation when story and psalms are presented together. Robert G. Twombly investigates the theological issues and sources of the paraphrase of the psalms and locates David within the existential complexity of proto-Protestant belief. Thus, while he too is bothered by moments that seem parodic, he can read them, following and correcting Mason, as the dramatic example of the felt need for grace, for what he calls “moral rehabilitation.”⁷ What is interesting about this critical history is that both Mason and Twombly freely acknowledge their discomfort with the figure of David and then, perhaps in response to that discomfort and the moral ambiguity it implies, proceed, counterintuitively, to redeem David. Greenblatt refocuses the Protestant “inwardness” of the Paraphrase by considering it in the context of Wyatt's other poems and his participation in the courtly milieu. He suggests that “the invocation of David may glance, slyly and indirectly, at Henry VIII himself” (121), but does not pursue the implication of his remark because of his larger argument:

I would suggest that there is no privileged sphere of individuality in Wyatt, set off from linguistic convention, from the social pressure, from the shaping force of religious and political power. Wyatt may complain about the abuses of the court, he may declare his independence from a corrupting sexual or political entanglement, but he always does so from within a context governed by the essential values of a system of power that has an absolute monarch as head of both church and state.

(120)

Within this larger argument, neither David nor the narrator are important. Indeed, though Greenblatt asserts that “the voice seems unmistakably Wyatt's” (122), he is primarily interested in the “speaker of the psalms” to whom he often refers as “the psalmist.” What is important for his argument are the circumstances that shape the psalmic voice and allow Greenblatt to make the descriptive equation I quoted earlier between a religious and psychological understanding of the psalm sequence. Perhaps the most telling consequence of this critical move is the restriction of poetic space to a psychologized inwardness: not only are Wyatt, the narrator, and David collapsed into “the psalmist” anxiously petitioning his powerful God but the figure of determining power can be indifferently filled by God, Henry VIII, the Reformation, or the generalized system of power. In a circular system there is only “inward” room. While I find Greenblatt's argument provocative, I think his reduction of the voice of the Paraphrase to that of “the psalmist” does both the poem and his argument a disservice. While I grant the interpenetration of various cultural forces in Wyatt's production, I think Wyatt creates a perspective in his poem from which “the values of a system that has an absolute monarch as head of both church and state” can be judged, the power of the monarch notwithstanding. His ability to do so depends on the initial distinctions he establishes between himself, the narrator, and David. I will demonstrate that Wyatt inscribes not only this “privileged” perspective in his poem but also its cost. As a poet, he addresses the king with a consciousness of loss. He can call the king to account, but he cannot do so from a position of innocence or spiritual purity.

The Paraphrase was written between 1534 and 1542, a period that encompasses the deaths by execution of Thomas More, John Fisher, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell.⁸ An episode from Wyatt's life illustrates the complexity of determining the place of Wyatt's poem. In 1541, imprisoned and accused, among other things, of sympathy with Reginald Pole, Wyatt defended himself by specifying his religious opinion:⁹ “ye bring in now that I shulde have this intelligens with Pole by cawse of our opinions that are lyke and that I am papyste. I thynke I shulde have much more adoe with a greate sorte in Inglonde to purge my selfe of suspecte of a Lutherane than of a Papyst.” The self-characterization, more Lutheran than Catholic but not definitively either, indicates discretion and, perhaps more important, suggests the difficulty of specifying precise ideological affiliations among the many-voiced disputations of the Reformation, Henrician and European. Wyatt's circumlocution is noteworthy on other counts as well. It not only serves as a defense but as a protection of Wyatt's private opinion. He will not, as Pole did, publically oppose the king's position, yet he does not denounce Pole. He is a faithful servant of his king: “God be thanked, he is no tyrant. He woll no such thynges agaynst mens consciens. He will but his lawes and his lawes with mercie.” Such a statement from a former intimate of Thomas Cromwell (and possibly of Anne Boleyn) testifies to a marked discretion as well as an ability to survive and remain effective in spite of the confusion around him. It also underscores the fact that Wyatt's opinion, religious or otherwise, is not a simple matter. Similarly, the decision to imitate Aretino's poem is not a simple matter; it can be aptly characterized as overdetermined. The literary work of psalmic paraphrase, drawn out of both Catholic and Protestant sources and set into the tacitly, if not explicitly, politicized narrative of David's kingship, mimics Wyatt's diplomatic work of negotiating the political interests of Protestant, Catholic, and vacillating kings (Henry VIII, Charles V, and Francis I).¹⁰ In the discourse of reformation, David's figuration as the political and religious leader of the chosen people was obviously useful and appropriated by all sides.¹¹ In the Henrician context, the story of his lust and its effect on his kingdom were, to say the least, apposite. Finally, David's extrabiblical identification as the psalmist suited Wyatt's purposes, as we will see. With this overdetermination and complexity in mind, we can return to the Paraphrase and trace its operation against the ground of David's biblical story.

The Paraphrase opens with a rendition of the story of adultery and murder. In the biblical story David sees Bathsheba bathing, sends for her, has sexual intercourse with her, and then sends her away. Later, when he learns that she is pregnant, he sends for Uriah that he might come home, sleep with his wife, and be the putative father of Bathsheba's child. Uriah comes, but on his soldier's honor and for the glory of Israel and Judah, he refuses to sleep in his wife's house. Angered at the failure of his scheme, David sends Uriah back to battle with the latter that is, in effect, his death warrant. Uriah is killed in battle, and David takes Bathsheba as one of his wives. God sends Nathan to indicate David's sin and punishment. The first child of David and Bathsheba, conceived in adultery and fathered by murder, dies. The rest of Nathan's prophecies, the visitation of David's sin upon other members of his house and its return to him in the form of loss, await fulfillment on the history of David's reign.¹² The initial sin emerges out of sexual desire; compounded by murder, it becomes unavoidable tragedy for David and his people.

Wyatt's opening line suggests the cause of David's adultery with Bathsheba: “Love, to give law unto his subject hearts, / Stood in the eyes of Barsabe the bright” (1-2). It is not clear, however, whether this Love should be read as a first cause, a divine Love upon which a moral order could be predicated, or simply as a force that imposes its control on “subject hearts.” The first reading is consonant with the later psalmic voice that tells us that “God seeks love” and suggests a testing situation typical of the Old Testament. The second reading anticipates the compulsion of David's adultery with Bathsheba, suggesting not only an already determined outcome but also a Petrarchan tradition. The succeeding lines push us toward and beyond the second reading; this is the tyrant Cupid imposing himself:

And in a look anon himself converts
Cruelly pleasant before King David sight;
First dazed his eyes, and furtherforth he starts
With venomed breath, as softly as he might
Touched his senses, and overruns his bones
With creeping fire sparpled for the nonce.

(3-8)

Love's action, “with venomed breath” and “creeping fire” recalls Satan's story in a radically compressed form: initially at one with divinity, by a willful act he becomes opposed and by a second willful act, he transforms himself into the serpent who tempts. The syntax of line 3 leaves the question of agency unresolved. Is it David's look that converts love? Or Bathsheba's? Or is Love a Manichaean God who converts himself into his opposite? Once the satanic allusions are made, however, it is clear that David takes this “converted” love as his own: “The form that Love had printed in his breast / He honour'th it as thing of things best” (15-16). The first reading of the opening is displaced by the accumulating force of the second, and our sense of both a predetermined outcome and David's willfulness is reinforced by the precipitousness of the murder: it is accomplished not, as in the biblical story, after the adultery but before, in order to facilitate the adultery.

So that forgot the wisdom and forecast
(Which woe to realms when that these kings doth lack)
Forgetting eke God's majesty as fast,
Yea, and his own, forthwith he doth to make
Urie to go into the field in haste—
Urie I say, that was his idol's make—
Under pretence of certain victory,
For en'mies' swords a ready prey to die.
Whereby he may enjoy her out of doubt
Whom more than God or himself he mindeth.

(17-26)

Repeating Uriah's name, the narrator individuates himself out of the impersonal voice that opened the poem; he calls out the name of the victim as he narrates the murder. His narration of the murder is framed by terms that reintroduce the perspective of a moral order. This order of “wisdom,” “forecast,” and “God's majesty” enlarges and alters our sense of the predetermined outcome by providing for the extrabiblical development of David's story: here is the divine order to which David returns by the penitential work of the psalms, the Love to which the opening line momentarily seemed to allude. As if enabled by the establishment of a fuller, more authoritative frame of interpretation, the narrator now calls David's act by its unequivocal name:

And of that lust possessed himself he findeth
That hath and doth reverse and clean turn out
Kings from kingdoms and cities undermindeth,
He, blinded, thinks this train so blind and close
To blind all thing, that naught may it disclose.

(28-32)

Though David is blinded, the narrator implies that he is also aware he has something to hide, that he is conscious of his sin as sin.

Nathan comes not only, as in the biblical story, to tell David that he has sinned but to tell him that he has been found out:

But Nathan hath spied out this treachery
With rueful cheer and sets afore his face
The great offence, outrage, and injury
That he hath done to God as in this case—
By murder for to cloak adultery.

(33-37)

Nathan's words are unspoken in the narrative. Instead of an agent of God who foresees the future, we have a man who investigates David's secrets and before whom David throws himself to the ground when the treachery is brought into the open. Confronted by Nathan, David is converted into the penitent. Both Nathan's normalized status, that is, his appearance as some sort of peer, and David's quick conversion from the arrogance of thinking he can act with impunity (“so blind and close … that naught may it disclose”) to the abject posture of a penitent (“His purple pall, his sceptre he lets fall / And to the ground he throw'th himself withal,” 47-48) foreground David's story as one being played out in the temporal world, that is, without divine intercession. The urgency of the narrative, emphatically indicated in Uriah's precipitate murder, here is directed away from the events of David's biblical story and toward close scrutiny of the penitential process that he enacts. The stanza that accomplishes this transition establishes a double perspective on the figure of David:

The pompous pride of state and dignity
Forthwith rebates repentant humbleness.
Thinner vile cloth than clotheth poverty
Doth scantily hide and clad his nakedness,
          …
More like was he the selfsame repentance
Than stately prince of worldly governance.

(49-52, 55-56)

David adopts the penitential posture “forthwith,” as quickly as he sends Uriah to his death. This David, the narrator implies, not only knows how to get what he wants but also knows his part in a penitential performance. The stanza, at any rate, clearly establishes the extremes of David's position: repentance versus worldly power.

Nathan sees what David had thought “so blind and close … that naught may it disclose”; David therefore converts and Nathan presumably sees “repentant humbleness” before he disappears from the poem. From the reader's point of view, however, the vision is less clear. Grammatically, the subject and object of “The pompous pride of state and dignity / Forwith rebates repentant humbleness” are interchangeable or reversible. Indeed, the latest edition of Wyatt's poems glosses the meaning of these lines by the reversed order: humbleness brings down pride. The stanza continues with a description of David in the dress of humility and so seems to support the meaning generated by the reversed syntax, a meaning that is also consonant with the traditional association between David and the psalm sequence. While Aretino's “humiliando la superbia de la sua dignita con l'humilitade del pentimiento” leaves no question as to how David's action is to be read, Wyatt's sentence renders that reading difficult. In the syntax of Wyatt's sentence “pride” and “humbleness” are placed in a determinate relation to each other. If “rebates” is read as a diminishment or lessening, as the sentence unfolds, pride acts upon humility, lessening it. Then, realizing the discrepancy between the syntactical unfolding of the sentence and the continuation of the stanza, we must read the sentence again, backward, to fit it to the ostensible meaning of the stanza. Why is this labor made necessary? If “rebates” is read as a hawking metaphor, the reversed reading is telling.¹³ As the sentence unfolds, pride is the falconer, calling humility back and forth as it pleases. In the reversed reading, humility is the falconer, but its action of calling the falcon back and forth as it pleases is one that belongs to pride, to the desire to control and not to be subjugated. Reading “rebates” as a hawking metaphor underscores the primacy of pride and suggests that the sentence provides us with a syntactical model for the difficulty of subordinating pride to humility, one that simultaneously points to the ease with which pride dominates. Moreover, Wyatt's presentation clearly places “pompous pride” at the beginning not only of the sentence but of the stanza. Humility appears in David's dress; then, appropriately clothed, he appears to be like “self-same repentance” rather than “stately prince of worldly governance.” Pride initiates the stanza, and the embodiment of pride, the stately prince, closes it. David's appearance as a humble man is syntactically contained between the pride of state and dignity and the stately prince of worldly governance. There is no question as to David's appearance, but the arrangement of the stanza suggests that the appearance is generated and contained by a proud prince. David's willfulness before Nathan is of a piece with the willfulness of the murder and adultery.

In the second narrative link, the narrator again draws attention to himself. To lines that derive from Aretino and describe David's relief after singing the first psalm, he adds his signature, “I say”:

Whoso hath seen the sick in his fever,
After truce taken with the heat or cold
And that the fit is passed of his fervour,
Draw fainting sighs, let him, I say, behold
Sorrowful David after his langour.

(185-89)

After an interventing stanza, which I will discuss momentarily, the narrator returns to the place where he left David at the end of the first link: a dark cave to which David had withdrawn to pray. There, he repeats the invitation to behold:

For who had seen so kneel within the grave
The chief pastor of th'Hebrews' assemble
Would judge it made, by tears of penitence,
A sacred place worthy of reverence.

(205-08)

The commentary calls attention to a contradiction at work in the narrative, a contradiction that ultimately has its root in the story of David. David's sin is personal or private, but it unfolds itself through, and has consequences for, his princely or public power. The first invitation to behold (“whoso hath seen … let him, I say, behold”) is predicated on David's extrabiblical status as an exemplary penitent, a surrogate for anyone “whoso hath seen” or felt the discomfort of sin; the second depends on and contradicts David's biblical story. In the biblical story David's personal sorrow and contrition, though publically displayed, were of no avail in protecting his kin or his kingdom from the consequences of his sin; yet the personal sorrow and public avowal secured the promise of redemption for future generations. In Wyatt's narrative David's penitence is private, even secret. It is indeed of interest to “th'Hebrews' assemble” if their chief pastor repents, but the narrator's conditional statement emphasizes that the assembly does not see. Here Wyatt departs again from Aretino's narrative, which has David judging the appropriateness of the cave as a penitential place, in order to introduce the hypothetical perspective of an onlooker (“for who had seen”). The conditional “would” does double service: it indicates that the conditions enabling sight, and therefore judgment, do not exist, while at the same time, it offers a perspective and posits a judgment. By the perspective he opens, the narrator acknowledges the reader and places him or her in a position similar to Nathan's in the first link. We presumably see penitence. At the same time the perspective complicates rather than clarifies the narrative: the hypothetical onlooker is at once present, as the reader, and absent, as the Hebrew assembly. The effect of this complication, however, is not to underscore David's willfulness but the narrator's. By his signed and repeated invitation to behold, he does not simply indicate the secrecy of David's penitence, he also supplies publication. He offers his effort in the place of David's. In his first emergence, calling out Uriah's name, the narrator opened a space between himself and David. Here, by suggesting the inadequacy of David's penitence, he begins to dislodge David from the pentential position and to offer his effort in the place of David's. In so doing he becomes fully implicated in the princely David's world. In order to analyze how the narrator dislodges the princely David from his idealized penitential status, however, we must proceed as if the narrator could be distinguished clearly from David.

In the stanza that separates the invitation to behold from its problematizing repetition, the narrator suggests that David is thinking tactically rather than penitently: “Till he had willed to seek for his succour, / Himself accusing, beknowing his case, / Thinking so best his Lord for to appease” (197-99). David's “will” to present his “case” finds psalmic rhetoric congenial. The language of the psalms is dominated by metaphors of economic, legal, and emotional power; the psalmic voice is now abject and pleading, now assured, if not arrogant. When the psalms are understood as David's words and contextualized in terms of his life, they are, furthermore, the words of a man accustomed to the exercise of power. In the amplification of Psalm 6, for example, the dread accompanying David's awareness of his sin alternates with presumption: “Of thee this thing [I] require” (80), he sings and then later suggests that his need or requirement ought to find its complement in God's need to maintain his reputation.

Return, O Lord, O Lord I thee beseech,
Unto thine old wonted benignity.
          …
For if thy righteous hand that is so just
Suffer no sin or strike with damnation,
Thy infinite mercy want needs it must
Subject matter for his operation.
For that in death there is no memory
Among the damned, nor yet no mention
Of thy great name, ground of all glory,
Then if I die and go whereas I fear
To think thereon, how shall thy great mercy
Sound in my mouth unto the world's ear?

(116-17, 127-36)

What is, in the psalmic original, a plea for mercy and an offer of praise (“Return, O Lord, deliver my soul: Oh save me for thy mercies sake. For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?”) becomes, in the paraphrase, a negotiation involving two parties in the operation of justice. The basic plot, “making a deal with God,” is present in the psalmic original, but the amplification, by developing at length why it is in God's interest to forgive David, emphasizes David's presumption. The suitor in this court speaks familiarly of the presiding judge (“thine old wonted benignity”) and presumes to offer him a deal (the glorification of his name and mercy). The deal is made in chambers, as it were, away from the place where David is threatened, that is, away from the center of his princely power, his court. In itself, the amplification does not vitiate the meaning of the psalmic original, but in the context of the narrator's representation of David, it reinforces David's willfulness. The alternation of a single word can align the represented presumption of David and a psalm. In Psalm 51, for example, the biblical half-verse “restore unto me the joy of thy salvation” (v. 12) becomes “render to me joy of thy help and rest” (483). The sense of the passage in the psalm clearly calls for some notion of giving back, of regaining. “Render” allows that meaning but also suggests a sense of obligation, of duty, as in the meaning associated with Christ's words in Mark 12:17: “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.”¹⁴ The distinction between the tribute due worldly power and the tribute due heavenly power is precisely the distinction that eludes Wyatt's David. He not only conflates the worldly and the transcendent but demands both as his due: “render to me.”

David's negotiations are not confined to the psalms. His “case” becomes, not the argument within the psalms, but the use of the psalms to settle his account with God. In the fifth narrative link, the narrator stages a rhetorical crisis in the presentation of David's “case”; David surprises even himself:

Of deep secrets that David here did sing,
Of mercy, of faith, of frailty, of grace,
Of God's goodness, and of justifying,
The greatness did so astone himself a space,
As who might say: “Who hath expressed this thing?
I, sinner, I! What have I said, alas?
That God's goodness would within my song entreat
Let me again consider and repeat.”

(509-16)

The narrator imagines David speaking to himself and acknowledging that the song is not his own, but God's working within him. “As who might say” recalls the “whoso hath seen” and “for who had seen” of the second link, which, by emphasizing the secrecy of David's penitence, suggested that it might be inadequate. The “who” of David's surprise and the stanza in which it appears, evenly split between the catalog of secrets in David's song and the surprise, suggest a separation between the prayer and the “case.” In describing David's reconsideration of the psalmic voice, the narrator emphasizes his appraisal of what that voice does:

And so he doth, but not expressed by word.
But in his heart he turneth and poiseth
Each word that erst his lips might forth afford.
He points, he pauseth, he wonders, he praiseth
The mercy that hides of justice the sword,
The justice that so his promise complisheth
For his words' sake to worthiless desert
That gratis his graces to men doth depart.

(517-24)

David's appreciation of the power of the psalmic voice results in the renewal of his plea: “He dare importune the Lord on every side / (For he know'th well to mercy is ascribed / Respectless labour), importune, cry and call” (537-39). The prayer that follows appears inseparable from David's presumption, as though the issues raised by the first stanza had been resolved by David's reconsideration. But in the stanza that links David's appraisal to his renewed plea, the narrator carefully indicates how David resolved his surprise:

Here hath he comfort when he doth measure
Measureless mercies to measureless fault,
To prodigal sinners infinite treasure,
Treasure termless that never shall default.

(525-28)

The formulation builds on lines added to Psalm 51, which David has just sung, lines referring to measurement (“And for thy mercies' number without end,” 431, and “For unto thee no number can be laid / For to prescribe remissions of offence,” 439-40). Within the psalm these additions can be read as the commonplace expression of the contrast between the finitude of earthly conceptions and the infinitude of heaven, but in the link, the narrator tells us that David is measuring what the psalmic argument insists cannot be measured. He is calculating the value of the prayer. We also should be reminded of the story of David in 2 Samuel 24. There David counts the people of Israel and Judah, a sin of numbering that God punishes by killing twenty thousand people “from Dan to Beersheba.” Unlike the biblical David, this David does not repent; rather he continues to press his “case.”

In the penultimate narrative link, David enacts a final conversion: “And all the glory of his forgiven fault / To God alone he doth it whole convert. / His own merit he findeth in default” (658-60). His “case” has come to its conclusion. Should the forgiveness or remedy be found lacking, the error will rest with the party in possession, God. David knows he is in default and so petitions anew: “Thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow” (667). “Borrow” is Wyatt's addition; the psalmic original calls upon the Lord without specifying in what capacity. The word choice in the psalmic paraphrase concludes an argument elaborated in the narrative link. In the settlement between David and God, David's power is secured by his deal with God according to David's use of psalmic rhetoric. What David lacks, God will provide. Confident, David specifies the last favor, “frames this reason in his heart.” But the narrator, by making us privy to David's reason, has framed David. David's words betray as mere appearance the repentance he has been so concerned to enact. His last request reveals that this David still operates within the train of lust; the order of Love and divine justice is beyond him, though he wishes to subordinate it to contrast, to the needs of his power. In asking the final favor, David condemns himself and dispels the ambiguity of his presentation by suggesting his necessary separation from the spiritual content of his prayer.

The final unmasking necessitates a revision in our reading of the narrative not only to accommodate an unregenerate David but also to accommodate that knowledge to our understanding of the spiritual issues of the psalm sequence. The narrator may expose David's “case,” but in order to make his case against David, the narrator mimics him; he too appropriates the rhetoric of prayer. The historical context of the Paraphrase suggests that the narrator's case against David is, in fact, Wyatt's case against Henry VIII. The association of Henry's lust with David's is obvious; perhaps more important to Wyatt's poem is the Act of Supremacy (1534) in which Henry claimed absolute spiritual and temporal jurisdiction and in protest of which More and Fisher lost their lives. It is no accident that the narrator's “I” emerges by calling out Uriah's name: that murder can be analogized to any number of incidents in which servants or soldiers of the English king went to their deaths in the interest of achieving Henry's desire or protecting his power. Wyatt suggests but does not draw those analogies. The allusion to David's sin of measurement in the fifth link similarly points toward, but does not draw, the analogy to Henry's appropriation of ecclesiastical revenues. The biblical incident is telling. To stop the plague that God has visited on the kingdom in punishment of David's sin, the prophet Gad tells David that he must build an altar on Araunah the Jebusite's threshing floor. Araunah offers to give David the threshing floor as well as sacrificial oxen, but David refuses the gift, saying, “Nay, but surely I will buy it of thee at a price, neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing” (2 Samuel 24:24). Though Henry's appropriation of ecclesiastical revenues, managed by Cromwell, included pay-offs to the church functionaries who ceded those revenues to him, such moneys were not for purchase, but to facilitate appropriation. Working under the patronage of Cromwell, Wyatt was fully implicated in Henry's actions, as his narrator is in David's. The poem's allusiveness does not depend on its date. The execution of More and Fisher (1535) provides a basis for a critique of Henry's power moves, and emotional impetus (as well as sympathy for the Uriah position) can be seen in the execution of Anne Boleyn (1536) if we accept the tradition of Wyatt's involvement with her, but it is in the period between Boleyn's execution and Cromwell's (1540) that the extent of Henry's intention to appropriate religious power and wealth becomes obvious to an observer of courtly affairs. Luther's comment after the executions in 1540 offers an explicit judgment: “Junker Heintz will be God and does whatever he lusts.”¹⁵

The historical context clarifies several aspects of the relation between the narrator and David. First, the narrator's appropriation of the rhetoric of prayer is a reappropriation, an attempt to take back what has been compromised by David's appropriation. Yet the penitential anguish present in the psalmic paraphrase registers the problem of complicity, both the possibility that the narrator also has no claim to spiritual authority or legitimacy and the possibility that his situation is a penitential one. The narrator manipulates his representation of David in order to expose the temporal and spiritual issues caught up in David's position. Yet the arrogant position of the narrator is also questioned, and so is that of the poet, for whom the narrator is a surrogate. Wyatt destabilizes both the narrator and David in order to expose the temporal, spiritual, and poetic issues that the figuration of David allows. In order to trace the poet's effort, we must return to the poem.

Many of the passages I have discussed in setting out the political concerns of the poem can also be read in terms of their poetic concerns. The willfulness shared by David and the narrator is also the poet's as he sets out the claim of his song. David's act of measuring, for example, alludes to the rendering of the psalms in English verse as well as to the biblical story. The ongoing tension between alternate readings invests the poem with its sense of poetic and moral urgency. The figure of David is split across the fault line that Surrey exposed: on the one side, there is a David valorized by the traditional idealization and by Wyatt's desire for sacred song, and, on the other, a negative David whose story testifies to Wyatt's anxious recognition that his desire cannot find fulfillment. In the third narrative link, the poet calls particular attention to the representation of David: “A marble image carved of singular reverence / Carved in the rock with eyes and hands on high, / Made as by craft to plain, to sob, to sigh” (306-08). This particular figure evokes one in Dante's Purgatorio, another David in another penitential context. The allusion to Dante's David has a double resonance. First, as in Aretino's poem, it inscribes the poet's activity within the poem by recalling that David is a figure for the poet. But Aretino's “man de l'arte” becomes Wyatt's “made as by craft.” “Craft” indicates the problematic nature of Wyatt's effort: the word carries the possibility of deceit even as the lines make a poetic as well as a sacred claim for the songs. As we have seen, David craftily subverts the psalms in order to gain material ends, and the narrator craftily subverts David in the hope of separating the songs from their tainted use. Dante's David informs Wyatt's and will allow us to understand not only the poet's relation to his figure but also, finally, the place of his poem.

In Purgatorio 10, Dante sees David carved in a marble frieze:¹⁶

Lì precedeva al benedetto vaso
trescando alzato, l'umile salmista,
e più e men che re era in quel caso.
Di contra, effigïata ad una vista
d'un gran palazzo, Micòl ammirava
Sì come donna dispettosa e trista.

(Purgatorio 10.64-69)

(There the humble psalmist went before the blessed vessel girt up and dancing, and that time he was both more and less than king; opposite, figured at the window of a great palace, Michal looked on, like a woman vexed and scornful.)

This David is an exemplary figure in the first and weightiest of Purgatory's circles, that which purges pride. He is portrayed as he brings the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, the central figure in a representation of the ark narrative of 2 Samuel. As Dante presents the frieze, the ark comes first:

Era intagliato lì nel marmo stesso
lo carro e' buoi traendo l'arca santa
per che si teme officio non commesso.

(Purgatorio 10.55-57)

(There, carved in the same marble, were the cart and the oxen drawing the sacred ark on account of which men fear an office not committed to them.)

The allusion to Uzzah, struck by God for his presumption in touching the ark when the oxen pulling the cart stumbled (2 Samuel 6-7), reminds us that David had recently been impressed by God's power. He dances before “the sacred ark on account of which men fear an office not committed to them” in order to demonstrate his subordination and devotion to God. The frieze ends with the contemptuous Michal, reminding us of David's defense of his action in 2 Samuel 6:21-22:

It was done before the Lord which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord and I will yet be more vile than this and will be base in mine own sight; and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honor.

These are words of a good king, one who knows his power is the gift of and subject to a higher authority. They are also the words of a good king, one who knows that his power and effect will be enhanced if he presents himself in devout subordinate relation to the universal law and power of the God of the covenant. David accompanies the ark into Jerusalem in awe of God's power and conscious of his own as well as their necessary differentiation. The ark narrative precedes the adultery with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel; David does not yet presume, though Michal's angry presence recalls the difficulties of David's reign. Dante also marks the rest of his biblical story by the curt description “that time [quel caso] he was both more and less than a king.” Dante's narrative presents only “quel caso” displayed in the frieze; in Purgatorio, Dante provides the fixed positive exemplum lacking in Wyatt's narrative.

The figure of David in the center of the frieze is also the center of Dante's rendition of David's story. He is mentioned twice before and twice after the circle of pride, but nowhere else is his biblical story represented. Dante's first reference to David (Inferno 4.58) announces unequivocally that he was saved: Christ took “King David, of Israel” when he harrowed hell. Near the end of the Inferno, David's biblical story surfaces in Bertran de Born's explanation of his treachery: “I made rebellion between the father and the son; Achitophel did no worse for Absalom and David with his wicked goadings” (28.136-37). Here David is presented as the victim of another's evil design, not the perpetrator of his own. In fact, David's sin and his culpability in the losses to himself and his people is suppressed in Dante's narrative until the final reference to him. Only when David is recalled among the community of the Celestial Rose does the sin surface: “the singer, who, in grief for his sin, cried: ‘Miserere Mei’” (Paradiso 32.11-12). The sin is excluded until the penitential efficacy of the psalms can testify to David's worthiness. Dante's use of the figure, in accord with the extrabiblical development of David's story, provides concrete evidence of his merit. But in Dante's rendition of David's story, the argument for his merit arises first from the ark narrative, from his kingly devotion.

The frieze depicting David dancing before the ark is the center of the three friezes which, as a group, are framed by two comments addressing the nature of artistic representation. In the fiction of Purgatorio 10, God figures David as an exemplar of perfect worship and as an example of perfect art. Upon seeing the carvings, Dante tells us they were “such that not only Polycletus but nature would be put to shame there” (“esser di marmo candido e adorno / d'intagli sì che non pur Policleto, / ma la natura lì avrebbe scorno,” 30-33). In the narrative of the circle of pride, Dante uses the figure of David, a paradoxical exemplar of humility, to thematize the status of Dante's own art, as the comment closing the frieze indicates:

Colui che mai non vide cosa nova
produsse eso visibile parlare
novello a noi perchè qui non si trova.

(Purgatorio 10.94-96)

(He for whose sight nothing was ever new wrought this visible speech, new to us because it is not found here.)

The only “visible speech” “here” is Dante's own text. The figure of David at the center of the center panel of this carefully framed ekphrasis suggests an analogy between Dante and David that might be stated as follows: Dante is a good artist in the same double manner that David is a good king: he knows his art is less than God's, and he knows his art will be enhanced if he presents it in relation to the creative power of God.

In Paradiso 20, David “shines in the middle for pupil” of the eyes of the eagle of Divine Justice. The eagle says of David to Dante:

Colui che luce in mezzo per pupilla,
fu il cantor dello Spirito Santo,
che l'arca traslatò di villa in villa:
ora conosce il merto del suo canto,
in quanto effecto fu del suo consiglio,
per lo renumerar ch'è altrettanto.

(Paradiso 20.37-42)

(He that shines in the middle for pupil was the singer of the Holy Ghost, who carried the ark from house to house; now he knows the merit of his song so far as it was the fruit of his own counsel, by the reward that is proportioned to it.)

Here David is refigured as an exemplar of the poet. His historical existence is of no importance in Paradise; rather Dante describes the value of poetic activity and particularly the importance of the poet in creating that value. Dante redeems David by separating him from most of the events of his temporal existence and making him into a figure of the poet, by grace of God. When Dante acknowledges the singer of “Miserere Mei,” he not only makes David an exemplary penitent and a figure of the transcendent power of human artistic activity, he also recalls the opening of his poem, his cry as Virgil appears in the desert: “Miserere di me” (Inferno 1.65). Both David's and Dante's songs are valorized by the divine order, the representation of which has been the project of Dante's poem. The final reference to David completes a circular defense of the poet's position.

In Dante's poem, David's temporal authority is explicitly subordinate to his devotion. He dances before the ark he fears to touch because it embodies the spiritual authority of God. He is exemplary because his devotion is transformed into sacred song, but he acquires that status and spiritual authority only after his temporal existence is finished: “now he knows the merit of his song.” While Dante redeems the figure of David in accord with tradition, he also indicates the problematic nature of the figure by defensively (and aggressively) marking the redemption. Dante meets the difficulty of reconciling David's biblical story to his reputation as the psalmist by disassociating David from those events usually associated with the psalms and foregrounding his kingly devotion; he joins the biblical story to David's idealization as the singer of sacred song so that no seams are visible, no dissonance evident. At the same time, he makes David an example of humility in the place of pride; David's presumption surfaces only indirectly in order that Dante may acknowledge his own. Dante's song, like David's, is the fruit of his own counsel; he rewrites David's story from the vantage of a Christian redemptive history. From that vantage the events of David's story in the books of Samuel are not central except insofar as they prefigure Christ's redemption. For Dante, David's biblical story is important because his kingly devotion in the ark narrative adumbrates Dante's desire for a unified religious and political imperium, but his real interest is in David as a poet. Writing after the Redemption, unlike David, Dante knows the value of his song: it inscribes his redemption.

Wyatt's Paraphrase also makes David's song the fruit of his own counsel, but his own counsel is finally revealed to be at odds with his song. When Wyatt separates the princely David from the authority of his song, he joins Dante in the insistence that temporal concerns be subject to spiritual authority, but he cannot redeem the figure of David, who functions in his poem as an object lesson in the unrepentant transgression of the limits of princely power. Like Dante, Wyatt is acutely conscious of the contradictions within the received figure of David; unlike Dante, he does not suppress them. While Wyatt's poem recalls and depends on the shift that Dante traces in The Divine Comedy from David the king to David the poet, his alteration of Aretino's “man de l'arte” to his own “made as by craft” suggests a critique of Dante's, and incidentally Aretino's, use of the figure. Both the dependence and the critique can be seen in Wyatt's paraphrase of Psalm 102.

The penitential anxiety that should be David's is the poet's, and in its expression the poet speaks for the community of which he would be a member, the community of Zion. But he asserts neither the positive existence of the community nor his membership. In the paraphrase of Psalm 102, Zion is defined as “the people that live under thy law” (584), terms that recall the opening of the poem:

In this Zion his holy name to stand
And in Jerusalem his lauds, lasting ay,
When in one church the people of the land
And realms been gathered to serve, to laud, to pray
The Lord above so just and merciful.

(607-11)

The poet not only doubts his membership (“But to this sembly running in the way / My strength faileth to reach it at the full,” 612-13), he indicates that the community is also a matter of doubt, desire, and prayer:

The greatest comfort I can pretend
Is that the children of my servants dear,
That in thy word are got, shall without end
Before thy face be stablished all in fere.

(628-31)

The theological bases of this doubt are quintessentially Protestant: only out of a profound anxiety is faith born. But Wyatt's description of the desired community, “in one church,” indicates the gap between Zion and the England in which he writes and suggests that the theological issues ought not be divided among partisan positions. When Wyatt imagines the community of Zion “before thy face be stablished all in fere,” he takes his cue not from any of the Protestant translations of the Psalms but from Dante's vision in Paradiso.¹⁷ Dante saw the face of God, he tells us, “painted with our likeness.” He also witnesses the community of the saved and notes that not many seats remain for new members. Wyatt's “before thy face be stablished all in fere” is not a vision but a stated hope, “the greatest comfort I can pretend.” “Fere” is a pun, playing on the archaic meaning of “company” and the modern meaning of “fear.” “Face” recalls Dante's vision, while “fere” at once recalls the community of the celestial rose and the possibility that no seats remain. For Dante, spiritual authority is clear: he is witness to the community of the saved, and his David is among them. Dante's clarity is an act of will, a presumption he marks by his strategic use of the figure of David. For Wyatt, spiritual authority is suspended, as it were, between David's attempt to subordinate it to his temporal interests and the narrator's attempt to reclaim its separateness and its transcendent relation to the temporal world. Wyatt does not presume; he does not bear witness to the community of the saved. He bears witness instead to a profound and anxious concern that a place be found for his song. In so doing, he at once aligns himself with Dante's poetic project and distances himself from it. He too wishes to sing a sacred song, but his song is not triumphant, as Dante's is. Rather, by creating the tension in his poem between the narrator and David or, put alternately, between narrative, which works to dislodge David, and the psalm sequence, which works to redeem David, he suggests that redemption cannot be inscribed except by a willful act that refuses to acknowledge the complicity of temporal desire in an utterance that wishes to be spiritually pure.

We may retrospectively identify Wyatt's concerns as Protestant, but we must also acknowledge their historicity. Wyatt's strategic use of the figure marks a crisis, not a solution. Here again, the comparison to Dante is instructive: it is in Wyatt's poetic interest to destabilize the figure of David and to reveal the issues behind its putative coherence. To use David as Dante did, as a figure for a poetic task conceived within a (desired) redemptive history, is to use David's idealization as a touchstone for one's own. To destabilize David is to raise the questions that were once David's and to show that they are David's no longer. In Wyatt's poem the pointing toward political allegory reveals that David's example can be enacted in bad faith, his voice assumed for interested purposes. What is true for the princely David is also true for the singer-self of the psalms. The possibility of bad faith results in the loss of the idealized figure; it necessitates a severance of the figural connection between David and the psalmic voice. If the identity between David and the psalmic voice enabled the inscription of a redemptive history (for the Church Fathers as for Dante), then the disjunction ironizes the figural interpretation that underwrites that redemptive history. David may have once sinned, sung his penitence, and even thereby earned his redemption, but that concrete event does not, in the logic of Wyatt's poem, implicate the future.

The irony resulting from Wyatt's dislocation of David returns the issues of his poem to their own history; the voice that ends the Paraphrase is a voice without a figure, a voice that knows only the urgency of its own problematic historical position. In using the psalmic voice as his ground, Wyatt claims the position of poet as sacred singer, as the one who can call kings to account, counsel kingdoms away from their errors, and articulate the temporal and spiritual desires of a people as well as his own. We have returned to the issues that Surrey identified in the opening stanzas of his sonnet. Yet we would have to conclude that Surrey's invocation of the Homeric precedent was a consoling fantasy; Wyatt's poem has not been accorded the place Surrey suggests it ought to have. Its publication in 1549, for “Christians purchase” (“very pleasaunt & profettable to the godly reader”) removed it from the historical and courtly circumstances of its production and assigned it to the realm of devotional verse.¹⁸ For Wyatt, however, there can be no spiritually pure, simply devotional song, only a song aware of its implication in the temporal world. The poet is also, finally, unregenerate.

Notes

1. Surrey's poem appears as a preface to the Paraphrase in the Egerton manuscript (British Museum Egerton MS 2711; the Paraphrase is in Wyatt's hand, together with autograph revisions. For a brief account of the Egerton manuscript, see Muir and Thomson (n. 2, below), xii. I have used the text of Surrey's poem found in Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patricia Thomson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 28.

2. Aretino's poem is I Sette Salmi de la Penitentia di David (1534). Both modern editions of Wyatt's poems contain bibliographic information and offer passages from Aretino's poem in their commentary: Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969); and Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Collected Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). My citations from the Paraphrase are from the Rebholz edition. The Muir and Thomson edition includes the Italian original of each narrative prologue. Most of the cruxes in my reading of the Paraphrase involve passages in which Wyatt departs, often dramatically, from Aretino's text. Nevertheless, my reading of the Paraphrase suggests that a critical reexamination of Aretino's text might yield equally interesting, though different, results.

3. Muir and Thomson annotate this passage as a reference to the death of the first child (as an infant; see 2 Samuel 12:14-19). Rebholz correctly refers the lines to Absalom's rebellion; the use of “pursues” and “pursuit” does not allow otherwise.

4. See note 18 below.

5. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 117, 126. Further citations are included parenthetically in the text.

6. H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), 202-21, esp. 209.

7. Robert G. Twombly, “Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 12 (1970): 345-80, esp. 346.

8. More and Fisher were executed in 1535, Boleyn in 1536, and Cromwell in 1540. Cromwell's execution was followed two days later by that of three Lutherans and three Catholics, signaling then as it does now, that any opinion on religious authority contrary to the royal opinion could be fatal. See James Kelsey McMonica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), esp. 106-99.

9. Pole published an opinion against the royal supremacy, Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, in 1536. See McMonica for a discussion of his career. See also Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963). The citations from Wyatt's defense are from Muir's text, pages 195-96 and 208 respectively.

10. See the commentary in Muir and Thomson as well as Rebholz for Wyatt's sources. Twombly's discussion of Wyatt's use of his sources is particularly acute. For Wyatt's diplomatic work, see Muir. For a general discussion of Renaissance diplomacy, see Garret Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964).

11. See, for example, the essays collected in The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1980).

12. David's story begins at 1 Samuel 16 and ends at 1 Kings 2. Nathan's prophecies are contained in 2 Samuel 12:11-14; he specifies only the death of the first child. The story of Absalom, beginning with Ammon's incest with Tamar and ending with Absalom's death, is considered to be the fulfillment of Nathan's general prophecy: “Your family shall never again rest from the sword. I will bring trouble upon you from within your own family.” For general purposes of citation, I have used the Authorized Version (1611). In the case of psalmic material, I have checked the Authorized Version against the Coverdale Bible (1535) and the Great Bible (1539) as well as the commentary in Muir and Thomson and Rebholz.

13. See OED, rebate, v¹. The use of “rebate” as a hawking term is the oldest use cited in the OED.

14. As Rebholz notes in his commentary on line 483, Wyatt originally used “restore,” as did all of his sources, and then revised it to “render.”

15. Among those executed following Cromwell was the Lutheran preacher Robert Barnes, who had been prominent in Henry's negotiations with Wittenburg. Luther's comment is quoted by J. J. Scarisbrick in his biography of Henry (Henry VIII [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968], 526) from the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols. (London, 1862-1932), 16 (1540-41): 106.

16. All citations of the Divine Comedy are from the edition and translation by John Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

17. Both the Coverdale Bible and the Great Bible have “in thy sight.” The Authorized Version has simply “before thee.”

18. The Paraphrase was the first of Wyatt's poems to appear in print. For further information and the text of the dedicatory epistle, see Muir and Thomson, xviii, xix. The promise of profit to the godly reader appears on the title page. The printed version emphasizes the boundary between the narrative and the psalms not only by providing the Vulgate titles to each of the psalms (which had been entered in the Egerton manuscript as well), but also by labeling each prologue as belonging to “the auctor.”

I am indebted to Jonathan Crewe, Elizabeth Hanson, Joseph Harrison, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler for their comments on this essay.