[In the following essay, Kamholtz argues that the interplay between politics and love in Wyatt's poetry expresses the limits of Henry VW's court.]

Wyatt's "He is not ded that sometyme hath a fall" examines various natural consolations for political disgrace.

HE is not ded that sometyme hath a fall.
The Sonne retometh that was vnder the clowd
And when fortune hath spitt oute all her gall
I trust good luck to me shalbe allowd.
For I have sene a shippe into haven fall
After the storme hath broke boeth mast and shrowd;

And eke the willowe that stowpeth with the wynde
Doeth ryse again, and greater wode doeth bynd.¹

Wyatt, closely following his source in Serafino, searches for a satisfactory metaphorical model: by grace of what force can the fallen one be restored?² In considering these various alternatives, the speaker tries to find a way to exert some influence over circumstances that have bereft him of control of his life. As long as the speaker continues to propose comparisons, he stresses the ways that falls are unlike deaths. Activity of the imagination is itself a kind of consolation for political frustration. The speaker's imagination is the most active force in the poem. The images he chooses depict survival as a passive activity: the sun's reemergence depends upon the passing of the clouds, the ship must have luck befall it, and the willow "stowpeth." Yet only the willow, the speaker assures us, "doeth ryse"—although possibly in a different form, lending its strength to those who are greater: but it alone has specifically solved the problem of falling. Presumably by its very nature, it cannot help but be flexible. It is a worthy model for the courtier: it knows when to give.

Wyatt's political poetry is filled with ambiguity about the nature and identity of its heroes. The lyric begins "He is not ded," but by line four, it asserts "I trust good luck to me shalbe allowed." Muir-Thomson note that in the best manuscript, the Egerton, "I am not ded" has been altered in Wyatt's own hand to "He" (p. 312). Though Wyatt's alteration might be the rather obvious subterfuge of politically prudent disguise, the resulting confusion typifies larger problems in Wyatt's court poetry.³ Is Wyatt more concerned with the fall of Henry's great men, content to see himself as poet and observer while men like Cromwell and Wolsey pay for the risks they have taken, or is Wyatt concerned with his own political ups and downs, with himself as actor-victim? In choosing to retreat to the pose of an outsider ("For I have sene a shippe …"), Wyatt suggests that he prefers to be remembered as an observer, a mind that has visited the court and learned its lessons. In altering the manuscript's stoic—and possibly self-pitying—"I am not ded all though I had a fall" to "HE," Wyatt may also be obliquely transforming court politics into another phenomenon from which a shrewd observer—the speaker—can learn, as he did from observing the clouded sun, the battered ship and the bending willow. By alluding to the court but stepping back from it, Wyatt continues to pursue his quest for the still spot in the turning world where he might find quiet of mind.

The editor of Tottel's Miscellany printed the revised version ("He"), but adds a puzzling title: "The lover hopeth of better chance." The editor—the poem's earliest published interpreter and critic—has read the verse as a love lyric. But where is the erotic content?

We know that Tottel's editor altered and possibly warped many poems he printed (the regularization of the rhythm of "They fle from me" is the infamous example). Furthermore, the titles that Tottel's editor assigned the lyrics virtually created the persona of "the lover" through whose complaining lips we hear an enormous number of the anthologized lyrics. The very act of titling—asserting the presence of a speaker and frequently proposing moral sententiae—imposes some distortion on the courtly lyrics, as does the change from manuscript to printed word. The printed poem belongs to a different political context and a different literary tradition.⁴ Perhaps Tottel's editor hoped to infuse bourgeois married love with the highmindedness and sexual sublimation of the courtly love ethos.

Nevertheless, the title suggests that to the sixteenth century ear, "He is not ded" could sound like an amatory poem. Though we should not preclude the possibility that the imagery of rising and falling refers indirectly to the flux of male sexual energy, it seems more likely that the political-amatory correspondence takes place on a more general level: the problems of political flux were seen as being applicable to the flux of love's fortunes as well. The poet then seeks safe harbor from the storms of love as well as those of political controversy and disgrace.

The evidence in Tottel suggests that the poem has a fundamentally dual significance. Courtly love achieves the status of a natural force—and of political forces. Perhaps "the lover" hopes that love places him beyond politics—or that he will fare at least as well as disgraced courtiers, hoping that the same consolations are available to the heartbroken as to the crestfallen. This reading would add new poignance to the female personification of fortune, and to the speaker's humbly passive suit when he deals with his own plight most directly: "I trust good luck to me shalbe allowed." Love and politics may be seen as complementary despotisms. Seeing both the political and erotic implications of the poem suggests the multiplicity of social obligations imposed upon the courtier poet: he can be distant from the fall of others, and yet is destined to love and have to sue politely to a force as powerful and potentially hostile as fortuna.

Raymond Southall, in The Courtly Maker, insists that Wyatt's reader not overlook "the political aspect of the amorous complaint," and notes that the conventions of the courtly love lyric could "express the real character of courtly existence," where, he notes, "the pattern of personal relationships could be kaleidoscoped at any moment by the exigencies of national and international politics" (pp. 49, 25, 8). A review of the situation at court in the opening decades of the sixteenth century will help us understand the political world which Wyatt's love lyrics reflect and express.

Some of the anxieties of Wyatt's poetry may well reflect the political ambiguities that accompanied what has been called the Henrican revolution.⁵ During the Tudor years, England underwent a basic transition from a medieval state, held together by the static, contractual interpersonal relationships of feudal ties, towards a modern state, governed by more impersonal, bureaucratic and fluid bonds. Court attitudes and courtly art forms reflect the transition between these two systems.

The medieval, feudal court depended upon mutual, reciprocal agreements between king and aristocracy; each offered protection to the other. The key term in medieval government, notes G. R. Elton, is the "household," and service to the state centered around the court—which was the royal household—and service to the king's person (p. 19). Security, the goal of the feudal state servant, was attained by being granted a court office, affording the courtier a literal as well as a metaphorical place at court.

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, however, new constituencies sought and found ways to serve the king. Louis B. Wright has called the Tudor monarchy a "bourgeois dynasty" and historians generally agree that members of the increasingly influential middle class rose into positions of greater public importance than ever before—men like Wolsey, Cromwell, More and even Wyatt himself.⁶ Their loyalty was measured not merely by service to the king's person, but by serving the increasingly far-flung national and international network of laws and interests associated with the needs of a strong, centralized state.⁷ Authority was increasingly delegated, and managerial and administrative talents became vital. But with avenues of success open to larger numbers of people, the terrors that accompany competition become of greater concern: fallings follow risings, successful men displace the less successful, factionalism disrupts unity of purpose.

Henry VIII combined the personal authority of the king's medieval role with the legal authority of the modern state. The feudal system had been weakened by years of war and the rise of new sources of economic strength and influence. Thomson notes the increasing fictiveness of traditional medieval roles: "The master-servant link had, in fact, lost much of its feudal strength. At most, the master represented an intermediate loyality between servant and state" (p. 52). In this context, decisions to perpetuate feudal roles become stronger statements about the need for archaic political ideals. Henry was fascinated by medieval culture and kept alive its formal network of symbolic actions, including jousts and state pageants which were a form of public courtly romance. G. R. Elton notes that Henry's own talents and interests were more towards the older system. Henry seems to have rebelled against the bureaucratic state he had helped to create, preferring to exercise personal pleasure over legal needs (pp. 67-71). England's Reformation was itself a curious mixture of assertion of feudal prerogatives and the consolidation of a modern, independent national state.

The transitional nature of the state is reflected in changes, anxieties and pressures on courtly art as well. Even the system of unpublishing courtly amateurs whose poetry circulates in manuscript form is breaking down; nearly a century intervenes between Chaucer's death and the exposure of his poetry to a non-courtly audience, while Wyatt's poetry appears in print within fifteen years of his death.

C. S. Lewis asks us to see Wyatt as a feudal court poet; he notes that a song by Wyatt

was not intended to be read. It has little meaning until it is sung in a room with many ladies present. The whole scene comes before us. The poet did not write for those who would sit down to The Poetical Works of Wyatt. We are having a little music after supper. In that atmosphere all the confessional or autobiographical tone of the songs falls away.…⁸

Lewis reminds us that the ceremonial conversations of the courtly love lyric can be envisioned within the feudal context of household service. But Lewis treats rather unambiguously a role in which Wyatt often seems to feel uncomfortable. The artificer as medieval court servant is perhaps a fading ideal, a nostalgic indulgence, against which to measure the true tone of Wyatt's poetry. The bitterness of Wyatt's songs may not merely be a pose adopted towards ungracious ladies. Songs like "My lute, awake!" (M-T LXVI) and "My pen, take payn" (M-T CLXXIX) hint at an artistic mode on the verge of collapse, for they are lyrics which end symbolically in the silence of the court artist. Wyatt's poetry moves beyond the conventions of court satire and amatory complaint to examine the difficulty he feels in transmitting his words in the sort of context Lewis describes.

Wyatt's love poetry reflects the ambiguity of functioning in a transitional state. Wyatt writes about both the courtly love situation, which depends upon a system of lovers with clear if frustrating hierarchical places, and the Petrarchan love situation, which depicts the lover without an authentic, natural place, thrown back upon, and within, himself. Wyatt complains about the oppressive rigidity of the courtly love setting with its accretion of traditional and restrictive understandings. Yet he equally fears the "newfanglenes" of the second, where lovers serve no system but themselves and their egos. Love is subjected to an unprecedented series of rises and falls. Wyatt sees himself as caught between the oppressions of stasis and the oppressions of change. Through it all, Wyatt seems to be searching for a harbor—for a place at court and a place in the heart, where a truce can be called to the warring competitions between individuals set free from the traditional feudal and courtly roles. In doing so, he wants to be part of a system that he can see is becoming weaker and weaker. Wyatt suggests that contemporary politician and contemporary lover share a common frame of mind: both lack, but need, a place.

The domestication of the Petrarchan paradox offered the early Renaissance poet a shorthand way of describing states of mind to which no known natural state corresponded. Love's freezing fires and burning rains can only be felt by men out of harmony with their world. Nature cannot cure the lover, or suggest a way for him to express himself, so he turns within. Only internally can the lover regain control over his situation, for the imagination, as Sidney was to argue, does not disdain to be bound by the limits of fallen nature's laws.

Wyatt's adaptation of Petrarch's Rime cii, "Caesar, when that the traytour of Egipt" (M-T III), explores the relationship between the paradoxical states of mind of the politician and the lover. We do not expect great men or political heroes to express themselves plainly:

Men who have a political role to play may have to divorce, for reasons of policy, their public selves from their private ones. They either hide or redirect the passions that demand expression.

Tottel's editor entitles the poem "Of others fained sorrow, and the lovers fained mirth." While Muir-Thomson warn that the poem does not need to be read as a love poem (p. 264), the sonnet's sestet seems to focus on amatory, not political, experiences:

In the public world, all passions are masked, but the poet's concern focuses only on the falseness of his expressions of joy. The sonnet is richest when read in a dual context. The sestet shows the poet anchoring the paradoxical style of his love in history, as well as in his emotions; the poet appropriates the unchanging exemplars of history to his argument about love. He has found models in the political world for love's "disdaynfull dowblenes" (M-T V). In so doing, he changes the status of the lover, giving the lover a new, if only partial, heroism: the lover is like a fragmented public hero—more like the conquered Hannibal, however, than the conquering Caesar in that his misery, rather than his mirth is being concealed.

The Miscellany title also suggests that this alliance with the past is accompanied by alienation from the present: "others" feel one way, the lover feels another. The title helps call to mind the competitive stance Wyatt so often adopts toward his fellow courtiers: the audience Wyatt tends to address remains an undifferentiated mass of male consciousness from whom he has detached himself (rather than, say, his friends at court). The alienation also suggests the continuing English Renaissance lyric drama between public calling and private pain. This receives expression in a line of courtier poems that extends from Wyatt's "Ffarewel, Love, and all thy lawes for ever" (M-T XIII) to Sidney's "Your words my friend" or "Having this day my horse" (Astrophil and Stella XXI and XLI). The conflict between the courtier's ambition to be absorbed into the public world and the lover's inability to express himself in publicly useful ways finds form in the deflected feudal imagery of such poems as "The longe love" (M-T IV).

These poems also reflect changes in the traditional expectations of the courtier. Under a feudal system, a young man's public duty was primarily military in nature. But as David Bevington notes:

In its battle against maintenance and feudal autonomy, the Tudor monarchy introduced new criteria for political success in England. No longer supreme was the military warlord with his chivalrous pursuits.…¹⁰

The courtier's new duties were more literate—and even literary. These poems thus complain against a betrayal of political expectations in a transitional state. "The furyous gonne" (M-T LXI)—another poem which Tottel's editor takes to be a drama about "the lover"—can be read in terms of the courtier's fear that love has caused him to betray his calling as a public warrior.

The furyous gonne in his rajing yre,
When that the bowle is rammed in to sore,
And that the flame cannot part from the fire,
Cracketh in sonder, and in the ayre doeth rore
The shevered peces; right so doeth my desire
Whose flame encreseth from more to more,
Wych to let owt I dare not loke nor speke:
So now hard force my hert doeth all to breke.

Love is blocking the traditional public avenues of young men towards success. The lover is left only with selfdestructive inner warfare as a way to release the latent violence of his ambitions—and the violence locked in the experience and language of love.

Wyatt sees both love and politics as a constant process of slipping and falling. He seeks a common goal in both: the desire to stand, to find independent footing. Raymond Southall notes that "experience for Wyatt is a continual search for stability within instability, for a point of rest within a restless world …" (p. 77). This stability is frequently pictured in terms of flexibility, mask and pretense, as well as stoic self-assertion and rigidity; the resolution of "He is not ded," after all, was that a man can do worse that to be like the willow and rise with others, binding the "greater wode" which could not bend.

A similar image of the poet seeking a way to stand appears in M-T CCXXXVI:

Muir-Thomson note that "modern scholars have not followed T[ottel] in labelling this a love poem" (p. 430). They stress the biographical nature of the poem as a response to the falls that threaten public life, especially Wyatt's emotional reaction to the execution of his patron Cromwell and Wyatt's own subsequent incarcęrations.¹¹ And clearly the poem is occasional, but like most occasional poems, it reveals more about the speaker than about his subject. In entitling the sonnet "The lover lamentes the death of his love," Tottel's editor may have been reading the poem against the background of its Petrarchan original, which doubly lamented the losses of both patron and lover (Laura). Moreover, the reading implied in Tottel may suggest the intensity of the bond between courtier and patron; some public ties are private ties as well, just as some forms of public favor—especially those associated with the personal ties of feudalism—can be expressions of love.

While the poem's primary concern with grim political reality seems to have absorbed the amatory aspects of the lyric, Tottel's editor may also have responded to the general similarity of the terms of political and erotic mourning. In both types of poem, Wyatt is torn between dependence and independence—between leaning and standing. In both, the weakness of the individual is compensated for by union with others. Both types of poem depict the restless "unquyet mynde" seeking stability; both types depict the intangible spirit questing for something tangible to rest on.

Muir-Thomson points out that Wyatt has altered the Petrarchan original by focusing the last six lines upon his self-hatred and possible guilt. Perhaps Wyatt has replaced his mourning for a lost love with mourning for himself:

Both love and mourning turn the mind inward. Wyatt depicts the kind of self-conscious, divided self that produces the world of paradox: "I my self my self alwayes to hate." The themes of love and politics both produce a sense of doubleness, of dual selves; the unstable mind is the result of the unstable self, shaken by the fear that all around it is falling.¹²

The political form of Wyatt's fear of slipping and falling is expressed in Wyatt's adaptation of Seneca, "Stond who so list upon the Slipper toppe / Of courtes estates …" (M-T CCXL). The speaker sees himself looking on while others await their imminent fall.¹³ (The fear of falling probably held a special poignance for Wyatt who, as a courtier with middle-class roots, had gotten where he was by rising. Surrey, who was to the manner born, looked upon his misfortunes differently.) Tottel's editor prints an altered version, locating the courtiers on Fortune's "slipper whele." The text of the Arundel manuscript suggests that the place itself, not the machinery of fate, is slippery. Wyatt poses frequently as one who is literally out of place: he is removed, looking out, withdrawn to find some place stabler and more quiet, as he does in "Myne owne John Poyntz" (M-T CV)—even though the place is an exile or prison as often as it is a true harbor.

The language of falling pervades Wyatt's love poetry as well as his political poetry. When Wyatt bids "Farewell, Love, and all thy lawes for ever" (M-T XIII), it is because he "lusteth no lenger rotten boughes to clyme." Love's laws create an insecure place from which the poet might someday fall. One can fall from love despite the faithfulness of one's service, as in "My pen, take payn" (M-T CLXXIX), where the poet asks "Wherefore / To hold so fast and yet to ffall?" In "It may be good, like it who list" (M-T XXI), the poet argues that the paradoxical state of mind itself creates an inherently unstable floor through which to fall:

Alas! I tred an endles maze
That seketh to accorde two contraries;
And hope still, and nothing hase,
Imprisoned in libertes,
As oon unhard and still that cries;
Alwaies thursty and yet nothing I tast:
For dred to fall I stond not fast.

The need to stand and the fear to fall: the poet's private life and public life are brought together by a common language. Wyatt seeks the secure place but finds only pitfalls.

Love and the state both try to subject the courtier to authority. While Wyatt might be willing to be bound by court hierarchy and by "lovers laws" (M-T CCXIV), the laws of neither are plain or immutable. Both offer ways to ascend into favor, but the avenues are insecure and the perches gained are brittle. Wyatt seeks what Shakespeare's Ulysses, in his speech on order in Troilus and Cressida, called an "authentic place"—a place he may securely occupy in both a woman's heart and the world of court service. Wyatt pictures himself as being helpless in the face of political and sexual authority, but those authorities are in turn helpless to create stable order in their world. They are unable to serve those who serve them. Wyatt aspires to both types of preferment because they promise stability; but both are themselves unstable, constantly evolving new rules and creating new favorites. Both authorities are strong because of the intangible (or paradoxical) obligations they impose upon the speaker; both are weak because they can provide no tangible place or harbor for him. In consequence, Wyatt's standing in court and in love feels intangible, while his ensuing fall seems quite tangible.

Wyatt chooses to see himself as a reasoning man in an unreasonable world. Several of his lyrics counterpoint the stalemate of illogic with a brief climactic note of logic:

With "thus," the poet imposes momentary control over his situation, without of course resolving the internalized paradoxes from which many Petrarchan lyrics derive their energy. In "What worde is this" (M-T L), Wyatt tries to solve the problem of the illogic and instability of love by finding a word that will not slide:

What wourde is that that chaungeth not,
Though it be tourned and made in twain?
It is myn aunswer, god it wot,
And eke the causer of my payn.
A love rewardeth with disdain,
Yet is it loved. What would ye more?
It is my helth eke and my sore.

The poem's energy comes from its mixture of stability and paradox. Wyatt's riddle creates a world of paradox for which he hopes to find an "aunswer" in a word that cannot be changed, no matter how it is assaulted by experience and intellectual ingenuity.

The "aunswer," of course, has traditionally been given as "Anna," and the poem is probably correctly read as one of Wyatt's poems to Anne Boleyn.¹⁴ Tottel's editor, who characteristically prefers reason to paradox, agrees; he prints the third line as "It is mine Anna" and entitles the poem "Of his love called Anna"—thus overemphasizing the solution to the experiential and linguistic riddle. The editor is unable to abide Wyatt's question: "What would ye more?" Wyatt's interest is in posing the riddle; unresolvable paradoxes have more weight than their elusive resolutions. He searches for the plain word, and the plain love, but falls short of finding them.

There is a political dimension to love's paradoxes and ciphers in this case as well. In so far as the poem is addressed to Anne Boleyn, Wyatt's love is literally as unutterable as it is unfulfillable. The poet's choice of partial articulateness reflects political pressures. Numerous opaque legends have survived about Henry's jealousy of Wyatt; competition for this love was unthinkable. In noting that love could be "a form of social rebellion," and hence dangerous, Southall notes that "impolitic love, therefore, may be defined as real affection when opposed to the political order of degrees and estates" (p. 24). Prudence in dangerous situations could force the courtierlover to speak in ciphers.¹⁵ Part of the drama of the poem resides in Wyatt's quest for a forbidden word to express a still more forbidden experience. This complicates our reading of Wyatt's intentions and themes. As both courtly and Petrarchan lover, Wyatt would be expected to transform his attachment to others into internal stress. Tottel's emendation is thus considerably less perceptive than Wyatt's own vision of his situation: the correct answer is not the plain word but the paradox, not "Anna" but "It is my helth eke and my sore."

In "Who so list to hounte" (M-T VII), the speaker seeks to create stability and plainness for himself in a world that offers him only instability, paradox, uncertainty, exhaustion and danger. The poem depicts a moment at which the poet's sense of alienation from both court and love first becomes self-conscious and receives articulation. It revolves around an episode of political and sexual self-discovery. The sonnet suggests the kinds of burdens that the courtier's life places upon citizens of Henry's court, reminding the speaker that the fictions of neither courtly love nor Petrarchan love are experienced in a political vacuum.

The sonnet is another of Wyatt's "whoso" poems: one man at court is speaking to a faceless group of others. The poem is filled with reminders that love is a public, not a private, pursuit; the "I" and "thou" of the love unit is cluttered with the presence of others—those "who" are addressed, the group "of theim" with whom the poet shares his plight, and, of course, the implied presence of Caesar.

In the second quatrain, he hints at his paradoxical situation: his mind, as well as his body, has become involved in love, for his mind becomes the wounding arrow. Yet it is the hunter who staggers as if wounded; the experience that seeks to go outward rebounds inwardly.

The resolution proposed is related to that of "I fynde no peace"—the speaker wishes to impose logic on his situation and presumably reassert his mind's control over his life (with the strong "therefore"). The speaker seeks to harness the resolving power of received, traditional language, and offers a proverbial explanation: "In a nett I seke to hold the wynde." Having extricated himself from vain seeking (another characteristic pose), and having found a verbal and even a natural excuse (the image of the wind) to leave off, the poem's personal drama ought to end here.

But the speaker remains haunted by his experience. Petrarch's dream is Wyatt's nightmare. He is dissatisfied with his proverbial solution; as in "Satire III," Wyatt finds the plainness of commonplace to be inconclusive. The sestet reopens the case with almost the same formulation as the octet: "Who list her hount."

The sestet proposes an alternate explanation, one that will put its audience "owte of dowbte" and whose meaning is "plain."

The message he finds is, of course, not at all plain. In Petrarch's version, the collar explained that certain deer were still protected by Caesar even though they had been set free: Caesar's I was, not "for Cesars I ame." The message around her neck describes the complex interplay between obedience due to wordly and otherworldly rulers. The motto is composed of a conflation of the Gospels: John's touch me not, for I have not yet ascended, and Mark's and Luke's render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The final two lines thus offer three possibly distinct reasons for the speaker's failure to hold his love: this beauty is other-wordly and belongs to no one (as in Petrarch's vision); this beauty has already been claimed by Caesar, one who is far more powerful than the speaker; this beauty is a wild thing of nature which no one captures. Stay back, stay back, stay back.

Critical interest has focused upon the middle message, the warning from wordly Caesar, who is usually seen as Henry pursuing his deer, Anne Boleyn, a reading I accept.¹⁶ The poem thus fulfills our dual expectations of Henry's court, filled with hints of wondrous love and despotic terror. The pun on "graven" suggests both the glories of courtly artistic wealth and the morbidity of the tomb. The passive construction ("There is written"), of course, enables us to read the message as having been written by Anne as well. She warns the speaker to note the distinction between appearance and being, exposing the gap between "I ame" and "I seme." This gap was not an issue in the Petrarchan original, where the hind was a vision from start to finish.¹⁷

If, however, we choose to read the message as coming from Henry, the poem becomes more revealing about the relationship between Tudor love and politics. Lovers keep their physical distance because they sublimate their courtly passions, but also because of their obedience to King and state. The lover's alienation affirms the traditional social order and defuses his potential competition and rebellion. He must show reverence for Caesar as well as for the lady. Courtly love engenders a variety of conflicting and overlapping loyalties. The graven collar announces that the woman is the true servant of Caesar; the lover's alienation testifies that he too must primarily be Caesar's servant rather than Anne's.

The poem is about physical space as well as a frame of mind. The poem literally presents a speaker addressing his audience about a place ("I know where is an hynde") where they may see what he has seen. The poem depicts love that has left the ordered confines of the court for the forest wilderness, and in doing so, has lost its bearings. Wandering exhaustedly, the poet discovers that he has no authentic place. His search for a safe harbor has failed and he becomes like Wyatt's friend, Bryan, restless and rootless. The speaker's dreadful experience in the woods is augmented by the horror of court life, which has followed him into the forest: he both seeks endlessly and endlessly falls ("Faynting I folowe").

In the sestet, the message on the collar modifies the images that might explain the speaker's failure. While he wanted to think in terms of having sought "to hold the wynde," the collar reminds him that he cannot touch her because she is "wylde for to hold though I seme tame." Wind is always wild and belongs to no one. But animals that are wild can be made tame, and tame animals can revert back to their wild state (as they do in "They fle from me"). In seeing Anne not as the "wynde" but as something "wylde," Wyatt reminds us that the human order can influence the natural order. This manipulation is the essence of societies, political systems and the arts. As we have seen in "He is not ded," poets use metaphors to imaginatively manipulate nature. So do kings.

This interference in the natural order is a crucial element in considering the relationship between politics and love in Wyatt's lyrics. The Tudor court enclosed a world of symbol makers. "Who so list to hounte" describes the speaker's experience of coming across a symbol that he did not himself create: he has encountered another's metaphor. Part of the poem's impact comes from the speaker's implied discovery that love poetry is not the only means to impose symbolic values on events. Political power creates symbols as well.

Wyatt searches to find through love acceptable images to express his mind's quest for quiet and stability. Sometimes he finds other seekers—other courtly makers—instead. Perhaps Wyatt uses the example of the political powers of King and court to illustrate a general problem of the sixteenth century love poet: there are limits to the extent to which the artist can impose his reason and imagination upon another. There are rival quests to offer explanations for the human mystery. The poet's may be more haunting and even more persuasive, but the King's has more power and takes precedence. The interplay between love and politics in Wyatt's poetry demonstrates some limits to the poet's power to define his world. It is part of Wyatt's continuing struggle to try to see things in a stable way in a world where no one will let him do so.

NOTES

¹ Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, eds., Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1969), poem LX, p. 45. The text of all Wyatt poems is from the Muir-Thomson edition; subsequent references in the text will identify the poem by edition and roman numeral, e. g., M-T LX. The titles from Tottel are from Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., Tottel's Miscellany (1557-1587) (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1928-9).

² Wyatt may have been drawn to Serafino's multiple alternatives, as in "Venemus Thorns" (M-T LXXVI)-part of the logical and rhetorical force Patricia Thomson sees as Wyatt's debt to Serafino. This essay—and any serious work on Wyatt—is much indebted to the full-length studies by Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1964) and Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964).

³ Thomas A. Hannen notes that Wyatt's political verse is frequently "about the difficulty of achieving self-knowledge" in public situations. "The Humanism of Sir Thomas Wyatt" in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton, Thomas O. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington, eds. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 39.

⁴ Significant discussions of this can be found in J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 31-67, and Edwin H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959). More theoretical accounts are given in Marshall MacLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962), and Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 217-51.

⁵ A good general discussion of the policies and ideals of Henry's court may be found in G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953). Also valuable is Wallace T. MacCaffrey, "Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics" in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, S. T. Bindoff et al., eds. (London: Univ. of London Press, 1961), p. 104.

⁶ Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1935; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 5. An important dissenting view may be found in Jack H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (London: Longmans, 1961), pp. 71-116.

⁷ See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1641 (Abridged Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 5-36.

⁸ Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 230. There is an interesting related discussion in H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period: An Essay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 164-65, 172-73.

⁹ While M-T argue for the occasional nature of the poem, Wyatt has explicitly denied the particularity of the occasion: "if I laught, any tyme, or season."

¹⁰ Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), p. 42.

¹¹ There is a detailed account of this episode in Wyatt's life in Mason, pp. 195-98.

¹² Recent articles by Donald M. Friedman have focused upon the mental world of Wyatt's poems; note especially his "The Mind in the Poem: Wyatt's 'They Fle From Me,'" SEL 7 (1967), 1-13.

¹³ Strong readings of this poem can be found in Hannen, p. 39, and Mason, pp. 182-85.

¹⁴ Thomson discusses the relationship between Wyatt and Anne on pp. 18-45, and mentions the possibility of Anne's having written a riddling reply to this poem. Tottel printed a number of other riddling name poems, including "Of his love named White" and "Deserts of Nymphs," an acrostic.

¹⁵ Hannen notes that Henry's court "was a place of deadly serious intrigue where each faction plotted against every other for royal favor. Behind the artificial frivolity and the macabre mask of charm, every work or deed was weighed for the information it could yield …" (p. 43).

¹⁶ M-T summarize the scholarly positions on p. 267.

¹⁷ In concluding his remarks on this poem, Mason argues that "Petrarch's moral world is mediaeval while Wyatt's is Humanist and modern" (p. 190).