SOURCE: Hinely, Jan Lawson. “‘Freedom through Bondage’: Wyatt's Appropriation of the Penitential Psalms of David.” In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White, pp. 148-65. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

[In the excerpt below, Hinely places Wyatt's psalms at the center of the canon of his works and explores their thematic relation to his secular lyrics.]

Critics in general, perhaps discouraged by Tillyard's comment that they are “academic exercises, penitential not merely in matter but to those whose task it is to read them,”¹ have not been noticeably drawn to Wyatt's versions of the Penitential Psalms of David. With the exception of Stephen Greenblatt's chapter in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, little effort has been made to consider the psalms as an integral part of Wyatt's work.² This overlooking or isolating of the psalms, reflective of a larger critical tendency to divide Wyatt's works into disparate factions, native or Italianate, humanist or love poet, has sometimes obscured the essential psychological unity underneath all of Wyatt's poems. In the Egerton manuscript, the cornerstone of the Wyatt canon and the collection of his works that Wyatt himself corrected and preserved, there is no abrupt break between the courtly singer and the “deep-thoughted” Wyatt, nor between the innovative “imitator” of Petrarch and the Protestant “translator” of God's holy word. These Egerton poems, all reflecting the same meditative intelligence and searching mind, provide a stable nucleus for the investigation of Wyatt's achievements.³

The Penitential Psalms, which—except for the unfinished “Sir Thopas”—are the last entries in the Egerton manuscript, probably represent the final poetic achievement of Wyatt's life.⁴ The psalms, rather than indicating Wyatt's abandonment of the concerns of his previous poetry, represent his efforts to recast these concerns in spiritual rather than secular terms. The events of Wyatt's own life, elusively reflected in the Egerton manuscript, chronicle the restless activity and swings in fortune of a courtier centrally involved in the turbulent activities of Henry VIII's court. He died almost literally on horseback, taken with a fever while on a taxing journey for the king. His life, as we know it, matches Surrey's epitaph, “Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest.” But the tranquility that seemed to elude him in life he at last achieved in his art. By merging his own voice with the voice of the psalmist David, he symbolically cast off carnal love, worldly ambition, and the unstable self to attain the long-sought quiet of mind. He could achieve through David's persona the resolution he could not attain with the unmediated poetic self.

Acting as implicit commentary on Wyatt's use of imitation as a means to discover and define his own poetic voice, the psalms stand in a complex and illuminating relationship to the earlier poems. Wyatt's insistent presentation of the historical figure of David as the dramatic singer of the psalms testifies to his interest in exploring the interconnected functions of the public and private voice and thus examining the relationships possible between a poet and his art. Wyatt's habit of altering David's voice to express his own preoccupations exemplifies his earlier poetic practices, notably his reshaping of Petrarchan models according to his own less idealized view of women and love. Thematically, by means of the psalmist's larger experience of alienation from and search for reintegration with God, Wyatt works out his own disillusionment with carnal love and worldly power and his concomitant pursuit of an integrated self. The David of the Penitential Psalms provides Wyatt with an imitative model of the mind of the anguished poet-penitent as Petrarch had provided Wyatt with the definitive model of the enslaved yet analytical mind of the poet/lover. The lover's lute becomes the psalmist's harp.

Wyatt's interest in the interconnections between poem and speaker is signaled by his choice of Aretino's 1534 prose paraphrase, I Sette Salmi de la Penitentia di David, as imitative model. In following Aretino, Wyatt's interest was clearly directed not to Aretino's versions of the psalms themselves (which he often ignores in favor of other models), but to the frame Aretino supplied for these psalms.⁵ Aretino is unique among Wyatt's sources in placing the psalms in the dramatic/historical context of the adulterous love affair between David and Bathsheba and David's indirect murder of Bathsheba's husband, Uriah the Hittite.⁶ Each psalm is prefaced with a prologue supplying a narrative and psychological framework. Within Aretino's frame the seven psalms have the effect of a powerfully condensed sonnet sequence, the narrative prologues sketching a pattern of movement for a dramatic lyric voice that expresses the central experience of guilt and penitence. Thus each poem becomes the personal confession of an anguished poetic persona, David the King, tormented by his vulnerability to sin and his separation from God. Through his art the psalmist hopes to win God's grace as the sonneteer, through comparative expressions of abasement and idealized desire, hopes to win his lady's love.

In Wyatt's version of the Penitential Psalms, David's search for forgiveness from and union with God is pictured as the speaker's efforts to find an unthreatened self, not through finding a way to integrate the discordant elements of his personality but by finding the strength to cast off the “worldly vanity” and “flesh frail” that have led to his alienation from God.⁷ The attempt to renounce the external vanities of carnal love and courtly ambition for freedom and the tranquil mind, a recurring theme in Wyatt's secular lyrics, finds deeper expression in David's recognition that to find the peace of God he must repent and cast out his sin, and that to save the redeemable part of himself he must recognize and overcome the distorted self that was formed through sin.

Aretino's emphatic connection of the Penitential psalms with the figure of David moved the psalms from the status of public prayer to that of private confession. This connection is more fully proposed in the prologues than demonstrated in the paraphrases, but Wyatt, drawn to the relationship Aretino established between speaker and poem, uses his long poem to explore the relationship of the poet, David, to his poetry and to examine in David the psychology of the worldly sinner, distracted by carnal love and ambition and beset by fears of self-division and instability.

David's dependence on art in his search for a savable self and union with God emphasizes the interrelated significance of poetry as both the “private” expression of the inward psychology of the poet and as a “public” statement to and for an external audience. Through art, the songs he composes for his harp, he will express his grief, confront his sin, plead for and win forgiveness from God, and celebrate the glory of God's mercy. His psalms will be the means of his self-discovery and of his ultimate reunification with God. In this process David's poetic stance in the seven psalms moves from the private outpourings of the isolated soul of David the penitent sinner, struggling through art to name his sin and rouse God's mercy, to David the model penitent, whose art, transmuting private anguish to public prayer, can act as conduit from sinner to God.⁸ His final triumphant stance is that of David the seer, whose prophetic art acts as conduit from God to humanity.⁹

The first prologue shows a David lost to grace. Blinded by his love for Bathsheba, he is lulled into a false security: “He blinded thinks this train so blind and close / To blind all thing that nought may it disclose” (“Prologue to First Penitential Psalm,” 30-31). Nathan's words of rebuke, exposing his murder and adultery, show him his sin and reduce him to despair. The first four Penitential Psalms are, in part, David's attempt to understand the psychology of his sin, and the “dark cave” to which he retreats serves as an emblem of the undiscovered self. The first of the Penitential Psalms is dramatically presented as the result of David's retreat and despair. His prayer is an admission of the self-division that makes him vulnerable to temptation. Unless God acts as David's “leech,” which cures by draining away the sinful blood, to “reconcile” soul and body, the soul, in “the great hatred and strife / That it hath ta'en against the flesh,” will destroy the physical self that torments it:

See how my soul doth fret it to the bones:
Inward remorse so sharpth it like a knife
That but thou help the caitiff that bemoans
His great offense, it turns anon to dust.

(122-25)

The significance of David's harp as the agent of his confession is emphasized in the first three prologues. His art will be the means of his self-analysis and reconciliation with God:

His harp he taketh in hand to be his guide,
Wherewith he offerth his plaints his soul to save
That from his heart distils on every side …

(“Prologue to First Penitential Psalm,” 57-59)

The harp is described as the “faithful record of all his sorrows sharp” (“Prologue to Second Penitential Psalm,” 191-92). David's struggles to find the words that will adequately acknowledge his sin and truthfully present his repentance are presented as the efforts of the artist to express the most inward movements of his soul:

His harp again into his hand he raught.
Tuning accord by judgement of his ear,
His heartes bottom for a sigh he sought,
And therewithal upon the hollow tree
With strained voice again thus crieth he …

(“Prologue to Second Penitential Psalm,” 212-16)

This poetry is spontaneous, but also contrived. In the first prologue, when David is almost dead with despair and fear, he seizes his harp as if art alone can bridge the gap between sinner and God:

… and with his harp I say
Afore his breast, fraughted with disease
Of stormy sighs, his cheer coloured like clay,
Dressed upright, seeking to counterpese
His song with sighs and touching of the strings
With tender heart, to thus to God he sings:

(“Prologue to First Penitential Psalm,” 67-72)

The belief that music, in its order and harmony, mirrored the harmonious movement of the spheres and had the power to bring into concord the warring elements of the soul was commonplace in the Renaissance, and the descriptions of David with his harp seem to imply that David, in seeking to achieve the harmony of music, is seeking, by transference, to attain harmony of self. Both pursuits require rigorous attention: as the musician is trained to recognize and avoid the discordant sounds that will mar his music, the penitent must train himself to subdue the sins that bring discord to his soul. Thus he attempts to “counterpese his song,” to establish, that is, an equilibrium or balance between the words, emotion, and music that make up his appeal. He endeavors also to tune “accord by judgement of his ear,” another effort to bring into musical balance things that differ and, untuned, create a chaos rather than harmony of sounds. David the singer and David the sinner unite in their efforts to win God's grace.

By the third prologue David's efforts to recognize and repent his sin and to place his soul in the care of the Lord have brought him closer to absolution. He now finds the cave a refuge, a place of “peace that did rejoice / The soul with mercy …” (297-98). The harp's importance in his struggle is underlined in this prologue. In entering the cave David has fled the light of nature to confront the darkness within himself, but now this inner darkness is illuminated by a light from God, a light that touches, significantly, not David but his harp:

Thus while a beam that bright sun forth sends,
That sun the which was never cloud could hide,
Pierceth the cave, and on the harp descends,
Whose glancing light the cords did overglide,
And such lustre upon the harp extends
As light of lamp upon the gold clear tried, …
The turn whereof into his eyes did start,
Surprised with joy by penance of the heart.

(309-16)

This illuminating of the harp is a clear sign of God's approval and, in the context of the previous psalms, serves to confirm David's lyric role as a psychological and moral model of sinful and repentant humanity. In the first psalm David has argued that God must forgive the repentant sinner because if men were either prevented from sin or automatically damned for sin, “Thy infinite mercy want needs it must subject matter for his operation …” (129-30). David further implies that the art that wins God's grace can, in some sense, repay God for the grace bestowed:

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?

(130-35)

In David's “impertinent” logic,¹⁰ God's damnation of David automatically nullifies God's mercy, and, since the damned by definition cannot love God, it nullifies as well David's ability to “sound” God's “great name” “unto the world's ear.” If God shows mercy, future generations, learning of David's experience through his art, “At me shall take example as of this, / And pray and seek in time for time of grace …” (258-59).

In the third prologue David becomes the visual emblem, a kind of bas relief, of the repentant sinner who seeks and receives mercy:

Right so David, … seemed in that place
Marble image of singular reverence
Carved in the rock with eyes and hands on high,
Made as by craft to plain, to sob, to sigh.

(305-8)

The gilding of the harp occurs at this moment, indicating that David has earned and God has granted him the right to transform his pain and sin by art into a kind of holy poetry, his sin almost justified by the art that God allows him to use for the salvation of others. In this way David the humbled sinner anticipates Christ the sinless: both are used by God for the salvation of humanity.

David's metamorphosis from private to public poet, from the isolated soul pouring out his individual fears and confessing his specific sins to the seer whose lyrics express the universal pleadings of sinful, suffering humanity, is achieved, paradoxically, by his initial rejection of the comforting anonymity of the public voice. The art created by David and his harp is an embodiment of his private truth:

[I] sought forthwith to open in thy sight
My fault, my fear, my filthiness I say,
And not to hide from thee my great unright.

(“Second Penitential Psalm,” 32, 251-53)

This truth is discovered with painful effort: “His voice he strains, and from his heart out brings / This song that I not whether he cries or sings” (“Prologue to Fourth Penitential Psalm,” 425-26). His withdrawal into the solitude of the “close” and “uncouth” cave, where “none but God was record of his pain,” emphasizes the isolation necessary to his endeavor (“Prologue to Fourth Penitential Psalm,” 415-16).

This essential turning inward, however, this retreat into the self's center, is the means by which David gains his “public” voice. In the “Fourth Penitential Psalm” (51), David acknowledges that God “loves the truth of inward heart …” (461). It is in seeking that truth that one discovers the voice that is most private, most true, and, thus, most universal. David has sought this truth, the “Inward Sion, the Sion of the ghost,” the “heart's Jerusalem,” because he recognizes that the Lord “delights not in no such gloze / Of outward deed as men dream and devise” (504-5, 498-99). Thus part of the message of the psalms is the message that God seeks first inward truth and faith and “Then shalt thou take for good these outward deeds / As sacrifice thy pleasure to fulfil” (506-7).

David's assumption in the “Fourth Penitential Psalm” (51) of his role of mediator between God and humanity, “Sinners I shall unto thy ways address, / They shall return to thee and thy grace sue: / My tongue shall praise thy justification …,” is immediately followed by his stunned realization that his songs are now, in part, the expression of a power outside of and greater than 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 astun 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.”

(“Prologue to Fifth Penitential Psalm,” 509-16)

Accepting his desired role as example and interpreter, David discovers with his double role a new self-consciousness about his art. His songs are not now the personal outcries of the isolated sinner, which inadvertently mirror the emotions of all, but the deliberate expressions of one who sees himself as speaking for and to humanity:

… in his heart he turneth and peiseth
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 …

(518-21)

His focus has shifted from his own sin to the mercy of God; though he may understand the first, the second, as a manifestation of God's love and grace, is beyond human comprehension.

In the next psalm, 102, the fifth of the seven Penitential Psalms, David adopts most clearly both sides of his role as spokesman and model, intermediary between God and human beings. He draws the moral of his fall:

For thou didst lift me up to throw me down,
To teach me how to know myself again,
Whereby I knew that helpless I should drown.

(575-77)

But he also sees his transgression as part of human nature, “… this frailty, that yoketh all mankind …” (580). He turns from his prayer for a perfected “inward Sion” of the preceding psalm to make an impassioned plea for the outward Sion, the “Sion that as I find / Is the people that live under thy law” (583-84).

The insistent repetition of I, my, and me in the first confessional psalms is now broadened to include the plural our and us:

To our descent this to be written seemeth,
Of all comforts as consolation best,
And they that then shall be regenerate
Shall praise the Lord therefore, both most and least,
For he hath looked from the height of his estate,
The Lord from heaven in earth hath looked on us …

(597-602)

Significantly, the harp, which played so important a role in the prologues to the first four psalms, is not mentioned in the prologues to the last three. The harp has helped David to discover and formulate the self-conscious voice of the sinner, but as this “single” voice becomes also the voice of outward Sion and of “Israel” (“Sixth Penitential Psalm” 130, 691), David himself becomes the instrument of God:

Because he knew he hath alone expressed
These great things that greater sprite compiled
As shawm or pipe lets out the sound impressed
By music's art forged tofore and filed …

(634-37)

In the last prologue David is the poet turned prophet and seer. In a “trance” that recalls the first prologue's “trance,” during which carnal Love printed the figure of Barsabe in his breast, David foresees the divine love God will show humanity:

Where he beholds the Word that should confound
The sword of death, by humble ear to be
In mortal maid, in mortal habit made,
Eternal life in mortal veil to shade.

(699-702)

In his movement from the poetry of anguished personal confession to the final prophetic vein of the last prologue and psalm, David exemplifies the main functions of the religious lyric voice: the worshiper speaking individually to God; the worshiper as priest speaking to God on behalf of his fellow suppliants; and the prophet speaking not to, but on behalf of God.

The nature of the psalms, particularly the earlier, as simultaneously private outpourings and public prayers has an obvious correspondence to Petrarch's sonnets to Laura and to Wyatt's imitations of these sonnets.¹¹ The primary poetic communication is one to one, sinner to God, lover to adored lady, but both poet/sinner and poet/lover recognize the essential independence of the poem from its creator. Both poets begin with a singular truth, and, if the poem is successful, both will end with a truth liberated from singularity. Petrarch's sonnets and David's psalms will articulate the emotions of love and penitence for those without a self-defined voice. Further, through art, individual truth will become a mirror that creates as well as reflects the truths of its audience. Petrarch's lyrics and David's psalms frame the experiences of love and penitence for readers and for succeeding poets who, like Wyatt, will make imitation their means to self-expression and, at times, to self-definition.

Wyatt's own appropriation of David's experience is most clearly marked by his blending of the psalmist's voice with the lyric voice developed in the Egerton manuscript and by a kind of “internalizing” and “secularization” of David's predicament. Wyatt's psalms both fulfill and transform the thematic concerns of the preceding poems of the Egerton manuscript. The confident trust he could not grant courtly mistress or earthly ruler he can place in God, expressing in David's voice a transference of “hot affect” from carnal love to love of God, a disdain for human “beastliness,” self-division and instability, and a forsaking of the enfeebling illusion of the “foul bondage” of earthly power for the liberty and true power found in submission to God. As in those earlier Egerton poems based on Petarchan models, the lyric voice of the psalms reflects a creative interplay between the poetic consciousness of Wyatt and his imitative models. Even the first three prologues, often discounted because of their dependence on Aretino,¹² point to the ways Wyatt uses Aretino's David as a mask for his own poet/lover. Through thematic and verbal echoes Wyatt connects Aretino's model with the poetic persona previously developed in the Egerton manuscript. Aretino's “sexualization” of David's sin enables Wyatt to use David to confront, perhaps at a psychologically safe distance, aspects of his own carnality and worldliness.

David's ability to function as an alter ego for Wyatt's Petrarchan lover is facilitated by the fact that Aretino also operates within the frame of Petrarchan courtly love. David's fall is particularized as his enslavement by the power of carnal love:

Love to give law unto his subject hearts
Stood in the eyes of Barsabe the bright,
And in a look anon himself converts
Cruelly pleasant before King David's sight;
First dazed his eyes, and further forth he starts
With venomed breath, as softly as he might
Touched his senses, and overruns his bones
With creeping fire, sparpled for the nonce.

(“Prologue to First Penitential Psalm,” 1-8)

Love's triumph over David is imaged as a kind of visual poisoning passed by the eyes of “Barsabe the bright” into the “dazed” eyes of Love's victim. Love's “venomed breath” softly invades David's senses and “overruns his bones” with “creeping fire.”

This portrayal of love as an insidious self-destructive force, though essentially a stereotypical example of courtly love psychology, draws together several images and ideas previously developed by Wyatt. The commonplace that love is an inward poison occurs in such poems as 101, where Wyatt asks, “Within my bones to rankle is assigned / What poison pleasant sweet?” And Wyatt has made the idea of the irresistible power of his lady's eyes his own in several earlier poems. In 24, for example, Love is compared to a “fire bright” and the lover is not able “to withstand her look”; in 29 the lover laments that love resides in “the bright beams of these fair eyes”; in 47 “The lively sparks” of the lady's eyes “Daze man's sight,” and in 92 the poet meditates on the power of “an eye to save or slay / And strike more deep than weapon long. …”

In his love lyrics, Wyatt's poet/lover finds the source of his disturbing enslavement to love within, lamenting the “webs” “wrought” by the “wearied mind” (29). Similarly, Wyatt's religious persona, his poet/penitent, emphasizes the internal warfare that keeps him from union with God. Thus the biblical David, in verse 7 of psalm 6, laments only, “My countenance is changed for very inward grief, I consume away, I have so many enemies,”¹³ but this is expanded in Wyatt's much longer version to,

Thus dry I up among my foe in woe,
That with my fall do rise and grow withal
And me beset even now where I am, so
With secret traps to trouble my penance,
Some do present to my weeping eyes, lo
The cheer, the manner, beauty and countenance
Of her whose look alas did make me blind;
Some other offer to my remembrance
Those pleasant words, now bitter to my mind:
And some show me the power of my armour,
Triumph and conquest, and to my head assigned
Double diadem; some show the favour
Of people frail, palais, pomp, and riches.
To these mermaids and their baits of error
I stop mine ears with help of thy goodness,
And for I feel it cometh alone of thee
That to my heart these foes have none access. …

(“First Penitential Psalm,” 6, 152-68)

The elaboration of detail and, even more significantly, the shift from the external enemies that best David to Wyatt's internal “mermaids and their baits of error,” that “beset” him “even now where I am,” that is, in the solitude of the cave, is striking here. Wyatt found this turn from outward to inward enemies in Aretino, but in his addition of details he personalizes the enemies he finds.¹⁴ In these efforts to break away from sin, as in the earlier carnal enthrallment of the secular lyrics, the “foolish mind” hampers the speaker with memories contrasting “that that is now, with that that hath been …” (31). Wyatt's specific additions to this section of the psalm, with no precedent in his models, picture the sinner tempted from his “penance” by that part of the mind that presents to his “weeping eyes,” “remembrance of” “The cheer, the manner, beauty and countenance / Of her whose look alas did make me blind. …” These lines echo not Aretino, but the distraught mind expressed in an earlier sonnet (24):

For to withstand her look I am not able,
And yet can I not hide me in no dark place,
Remembrance so followeth me of that face;
So that with teary eyes, swollen and unstable,
My destiny to behold her doth me lead …

In contrast to the futility of Wyatt's earlier poetic attempts to abandon love—a futility that led him time and again to seek excuses by blaming hostile fortune—the lover as penitent successfully banishes his inner foes: “I dare them bid: ‘Avoid, wretches, and flee! / The Lord hath heard the voice of my complaint …’” (169-70). The unaided mind, in the earlier poems, is unable to overcome its dreams and memories of the flesh, but by incorporating his own into David's voice the poet can rejoice that the power of the Lord shall “make my senses by constraint / Obey the rule that reason shall express …” (174-75).

In later psalms Wyatt's additions to his sources increase the sense of mental unrest, self-division, and need for the external control of God as compensation for the inadequate powers of the speaker's own virtues. Thus in the “Third Penitential Psalm,” 38, Wyatt adds to the list of torments David suffers because of his “frailful wickedness,” the pangs of a bitter conscience: “by grudging of the worm within / That never dieth, I live withouten rest” (351-52). In continuing the catalogue of afflictions, Coverdale's biblical psalmist declares, “My lovers & friends stand looking upon my trouble, & my kinsmen are gone afar off” (verse 11). Wyatt's additions here point not to the betrayal of friends but to the failure of self:

And when mine enemies did me most assail,
My friends most sure, wherein I set most trust,
Mine own virtues, soonest then did fail,
And stood apart: reason and wit unjust
As kin unkind were farthest gone at need.

(364-68)

Seen in the context of the Egerton manuscript, Wyatt's additions in such passages amount to a renunciation of his earlier efforts to find strength in the philosophical indifference and self-control of Stoicism.¹⁵ Wyatt's portrayal of the plight of the penitent sinner implies that the worst torment is, ultimately, a sense of insecurity, which results not only from specific sin, since forgiveness for sin cannot remove it, but from an innately fallen nature. This emphasis on humanity's essential instability accounts for several of Wyatt's alterations of his sources. Thus, to give only one example, in the Coverdale Bible, one of Wyatt's primary sources for the psalms themselves, verse 3 of psalm 38, reads, “There is no whole part in my body, because of thy displeasure; there is no rest in my bones, by reason of my sins.” In Wyatt this becomes,

… in my flesh for terror of thy ire
Is not one point of firm stability,
Nor in my bones there is no steadfastness,
Such is my dread of mutability,
For that I know my frailful wickeness(16)

(“Third Penitential Psalm,” 38, 336-40)

Wyatt's changes, in this and other psalms, consistently emphasize humanity's innate instability and unquiet mind, implying that only by the constant prayer and effort that will win the unceasing intervention of God can one hope to remain in God's grace.

Wyatt's relatively independent paraphrase of psalm 102 emphasizes dependence on the domination of God. The first eleven verses of this psalm show clearly Wyatt's subsuming of the biblical voice. The psalm begins with the speaker's determined efforts to pass control of self to God:

Lord hear my prayer, and let my cry pass
Unto the Lord without impediment.
Do not from me turn thy merciful face,
Unto myself leaving my government.
In time of trouble and adversity
Incline to me thine ear and thine intent,
And when I call help my necessity;
Readily grant the effect of my desire.
These bold demands do please thy majesty,
And eke my case such haste doth well require …

(541-50)¹⁷

Though Wyatt's versions of these lines contain slight verbal echoes of Aretino and Campensis, the speaker's insistence that God's governance is a necessity is absent from the sources as from the psalm itself. Also Wyatt's is the transforming of the act of submission into an almost aggressive gesture, a “bold demand” that pleases the Lord. This assault on God's mercy is anticipated in the last verse of the preceding prologue, a verse very little connected to Aretino's model, where David, comforting himself that he is “not utterly deprived / From light of grace,” finds the courage to “dare importune the Lord on every side … importune, cry, and call …” (537, 39). Wyatt's penitent pursues the domination of God with “respectless labour.” He or she will win, not merely submit to, God's mastery, seeing in that mastery the only chance for the integrated self that will bring peace.

Later passages are notable for Wyatt's emphasis on the failure of the mind. The mind, far from rescuing the speaker from a state of isolation and misery, “is withered up like hay” (“Third Penitential Psalm,” 553). The “very force of mind” cleaves “to the flesh” (557-58) and keeps the sinner from the truth. In this helpless state one's greatest right is to submit his or her fragmentation to the wholeness of God. “Do me to know what way thou wilt I bend, / For unto thee have I raised up my mind” (760-61). Freedom from foes, particularly, in Wyatt's alterations, from the inward foes of the mind, lies in bondage to God.¹⁸

Through the psalms Wyatt works out the anxieties of the earlier poems. The feared loss of self-control becomes the healing discovery of self controlled by God. Self-knowledge is the acceptance of helplessness, instability, and of the divided and “unquiet mind” as part of the nature of all humanity: “this fraility that yoketh all mankind” (580). But this fraility can become strength since it necessitates God's mercy.

The repetitive yet progressive lyric statements of David's movement from despair to assurance parallel and reverse the Petrarchan lover's movement from hope to desperation. As in a sonnet sequence, each psalm can stand alone but gains psychological and dramatic interest from its juxtaposition with the other psalms. And as with the sonnets, each expresses a universal emotion that is particularized by its context. It is, I think, significant that Wyatt added to Aretino, in the last prologue, two original stanzas (711-25) where he pulls back from the Aretino-based prophetic outcries—“He seeth that Word, when full ripe time should come, / Do 'way that veil, by fervent affection / Torn off with death, for death should have her doom” (703-5)—to remind his reader of the historical persona behind the prophecies. In Wyatt's additions the aging king still suffers from the consequences of his sin with Bathsheba: “Alas, my son [Absalom, son of Bathsheba] pursues me to the grave, / Suffered by God my sin for to correct” (721-22). David's vision of Christ's sacrifice on the cross not only convinces him of pardon for his sins but also reassures him that “My son's pursuit shall shortly be reject” (724). Wyatt's “translations” of the psalms thus consistently emphasize their historical specificity and, by “personalizing” even God-given models, underline Wyatt's need to alter all his models to make them valid expressions of his own experiences. Further, though merging the voice of the psalmist with the voice of the Egerton manuscript, the psalms act as a thematically and poetically appropriate conclusion to Wyatt's own work.

Wyatt's use of the dramatis persona of David to refocus and resolve the emotional tensions of his secular lyrics both crystallizes the limitations inherent in Wyatt's position as innovator and underlines the strength of his accomplishment. Though he discovered his poetic voice by a sometimes laborious grappling with the texts of his poetic models, his essential honesty as a poet and fidelity to his own vision kept him from artistic servility, even when servility was the obvious solution to a technical problem of translation. The features of Wyatt look out of the masks of both Petrarch and David. His recreation of his models becomes a creation of a distinctive poetic self.

Notes

1. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929), 48-49.

2. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 115-56; see also Robert G. Twombly, “Thomas Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12 (1970): 345-80, and Donald Friedman, “The Thing in Wyatt's Mind,” Essays in Criticism 16 (1966): 375-81.

3. A reassessment of the place of Wyatt's psalms in his poetry has been aided by the appearance of Joost Daadler's Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), which presents the Egerton text as the foundation of Wyatt's works, and Richard Harrier's The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), which contains a transcript of the Egerton Manuscript. But see R. A. Rebholz's Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), which groups Wyatt's poems according to genre and questions the preeminence of the Egerton in establishing the Wyatt canon. Citations in my text are to Daadler's edition.

4. Wyatt's psalms were written between the publication of Aretino's Sette Salmi in 1534 and his own death in 1542. The belief that he wrote the psalms in prison suggests 1536 or 1541 as the most likely dates. H. A. Mason, who finds Wyatt's psalms inferior to the satires and who is admittedly influenced by his desire to find a “temporal evolution” in Wyatt's powers, goes to great lengths to establish 1536 as the preferable date; see his Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 202-21. I find his arguments generally unconvincing and follow Sergio Baldi, Sir Thomas Wyatt, trans. F. T. Prince (London: Longmans, 1961); Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963); and Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), in preferring the 1541 dating.

5. Numerous alternatives were available. In his translations of the individual psalms, for instance, Wyatt frequently rejected Aretino's prose models to follow either the Latin prose paraphrase of the psalms by Johannes Campensis (Enchiridion Psalmorum, 1533) or the English versions of Miles Coverdale, who was the author of two prose versions—those he wrote for his 1535 Bible and his revisions of them, later used in the Book of Common Prayer, for the Great Bible of 1539. Wyatt's choice of the terza rime meter was no doubt influenced by Luigi Alamanni's earlier translation. Alamanni follows the common practice of connecting the seven psalms of penance with the Seven Deadly Sins. Wyatt's use of a diversity of models here is one indication of his desire to create his own version of the psalms, one aided but not stifled by his models.

6. Traditionally, only one of these psalms, no. 50, was associated with David's concupiscence and murder. For instance, John Fisher, whose printed sermon This Treatise concernyge the Fruytfull Saynges of Dauyd the Kynge (1508) was apparently consulted by Wyatt, treats the psalms as written in expiation not of lechery but of pride.

7. Cf. the first Penitential Psalm, Psalm 6, 105-6.

8. Greenblatt discusses the status of the Penitential Psalms as public ritual and notes David's function in the Renaissance as a “kind of model penitent whom the worshiper can imitate”; see Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 118.

9. See Barbara K. Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) for discussions of the problems of poetic persona and artistic stance raised by the psalms. Opinions ranged from Augustine's view that the psalms are “the song of the entire corporate church as Body of Christ, contrived not by David but by the Holy Spirit,” to Henry Ainsworth's listing of four “general kinds of personation undertaken by David in the various psalms”: (1) in his own person, (2) as a figure of Christ, (3) as prophet of Christ, (4) as spokesman for or in person of the Church. Aretino's innovation, further elaborated by Wyatt, is in suggesting the interconnections between the kinds of “personations” and how one voice may develop out of another.

10. Twombley, who sets Wyatt's David in the context of the grace vs. works debates of the age, see David as arguing here not against justification by works as such, but, “impertinently,” for his own justification by necessity. He finds Wyatt entirely original in his emphasis on a David who moves from a state of “ambiguity and confusion to a point where he presses a bargain with God, a contrast establishing some sort of permanent and fixed relationship”; “Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms,” 374.

11. Luther recognizes and comments on the grounding of the “public” exemplum function of the psalms in their essential inwardness and privacy when he writes that in the psalms, “The Holy Spirit … himself has drawn up this manual for his disciples: having collected together, as it were, the lives, groans, and experiences of many thousands, whose hearts he alone sees and knows. … You have therein, not only the works and acts of the saints, but their very words and expressions, nay, their sighs and groans to God, and the utterance in which they conversed with him during their temptations … the very hidden treasure of their hearts' feelings—the very inmost sensations and motions of the soul” (quoted in Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 42).

12. Mason comments, for example, that “what most mars [Wyatt's] poem is that, although in the first psalm he broke away from the spirit and the letter of his Italian model, in the next three prologues he carried on with Aretino both in spirit and in letter”; Humanism and Poetry, 209.

13. Psalms are taken from Miles Coverdale's 1535 Bible, one of Wyatt's primary sources for the psalms themselves, quoted in Ernest Clapton, Our Prayer Book Psalter (London: S.P.C.K., 1934). For detailed and useful comparisons of Wyatt's texts to his various sources, see Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, eds., The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969).

14. Aretino thus describes the actions of David's Enemies:

    Alcuno mi rapresenta a gliocchi la imagine di colei, e le cui maniere, e le cui belleze han colmato il souerchio de i miei falli; altri mi fa udire la dolcezza di quelle sue parole, che hora cosi amaramente mi suonano ne l'anima; altri mi mostra i trophei, & le spoglie che debbeno conquiestare le mie arme; chi promette al capo mio doppio diadema; chi a la mia destra nuouno screttro; alcuno mi uuol cerchiare il colio di pretioso monile; alcuno mi pone inanzi il seggio d'oro; i superbi palazzi; i ricchi pauimenti, & le altre pompe Reali; & cosi ciascuno s'ingegna di inebriarmi di gloria uana. Et io, che faccio schermo a gli hami, e ta l'esche de i loro inganno co 'l fiume di questi occhi, chiundendo le orecchie a le Sirene del mondo, spero abattergli in mezo i loro assalti; e de la reti, ch hanno distese insidiosamente spero scampare non per arte mia, ma per la cura che ha lu tua bontade. …

    (Quoted in Muir and Thomson, eds., Collected Poems, 363)

    Lewalski, who characterizes Wyatt's 112-line expansion of the ten verses of Psalm 6 as having a “particularity and specificity quite without textual source in the Psalm itself” (Protestant Poetics, 237), though literally accurate, is perhaps misleading here about the nature of Wyatt's additions.

15. For a discussion of Wyatt's Stoicism see Friedman, “The Thing in Wyatt's Mind.” Examples of Wyatt's assertions of strength gained through Stoic indifference are found in poems like 13, “Farewell Love, and all thy laws for ever!” and 45, “What no, perdie, ye may be sure!”

16. Muir and Thomson see some of Wyatt's alterations as influenced by Aretino, but comment that these “debts are difficult to settle here,” and the passages cited as possible models are tenuous (Collected Poems, 370). See also Greenblatt, who argues that for Wyatt “the penitential experience is marked by a loss of ‘firm stability,’ a sense that the body has no ‘steadfastness’ …” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 123). Greenblatt also connects this psalm with the “obsession with ‘steadfastness,’” “hardly surprising” in the hazardous world of the early Tudors (124).

17. Compare this with Coverdale's translation: (1) “Hear my prayer (O Lord) and let my crying come unto thee. (2) Hide not thy face from me in the time of my trouble: incline thine ear unto me when I call: O hear me & that right soon.”

18. Cf. Greenblatt, who writes that “This ascent through the acceptance of domination from on high is for Wyatt the quintessential penitential experience” (Renassiance Self-Fashioning, 376).