[In the following essay, Holahan argues that Wyatt's translations of Petrarch's works altered them from private love poems to public declarations of allegiance.]

My Lord, I see I must be your homager and hold land of your gift; but do you know the manner of doing homage in law? Always it is with a saving of his faith to the King and his other lords; and therefore, my Lord, I can be no more yours than I was, and it must be with the ancient savings.

—Francis Bacon to the Earl of Essex, upon receiving a gift of land¹

Introducing Petrarch to England, Wyatt is assured a place in English literary history. That place is surrounded, however, with charges of indifferent or uncertain translation and with the faintest kind of praise that dismisses him absolutely. Genuine praise has gone to Wyatt's songs, to his satires, or to an individual lyric—“They fle from me”—treated as an isolated jewel.² It is not my purpose here to contest such judgments directly. Instead my aim is to notice some of Wyatt's accomplishments with Petrarchan literary structure, particularly in his version of Rime 140.³ One part of my account will suggest certain extraliterary motives behind this translation of Petrarch; another part will consider Wyatt's invention of a Petrarchan conceit as prelude to his closing use of emblem and motto. The former argument must remain speculative; the latter attempts to link critical analysis and literary history. The two parts converge, I believe, and reveal Wyatt's sonnet as a brief essay in courtliness, suggesting the greater appropriateness of the term Tudor over that of Petrarchan. Surrey's elegy is entirely accurate about Wyatt's courtly service.

A Tonge that served in foraine realmes his king;
Whose curtoise talke to vertue dyd enflame
Eche noble harte, a worthy guyde to brynge
Our Englysshe youth, by travayle unto fame.

(17-20)⁴

I will argue that this quatrain is no bad commentary on “The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar.” Surrey's play on “travayle” (travel, travail) offers an important context for this new sonnet on the role of tongue and heart in the turns of Tudor service.

Wyatt's sonnet is his assurance of continuing service to the King, of a good life that will end in faithfulness. So understood, the sonnet is a public rather than a private poem. It subordinates private matters to public commitments and demonstrates this subordination formally by converting a lyric of personal love into a statement of allegiance, in which the long love is finally a life ending faithfully. Whether or not Wyatt ever presented or performed this sonnet in public, its ideal audience is a court gathering of the sort described in Castiglione's Il Cortegiano.⁵ Before such an English company, the speaker gracefully puts on the mask of the new poetic love from Italy and, offering a translation, refers to various issues related by analogy to intense devotion. More particularly yet, if it can be accepted that Wyatt's sonnets are essentially court poems, and in this way generically as well as thematically distinct from love poems, we may wish to argue further that the true audience is the King in court.⁶ Henry is Wyatt's Prince Love. His figure unites Petrarch's theme of love and metaphor of regal conduct, attracting the speaker's devotion, service, and proper sense of the ancient savings in law.

That Henry would welcome such treatment, encourage it among his courtiers, expect it as due his honor will be apparent to any reader of recent discussions of Henry's attitudes and habits.⁷ He loved shows of pageantry and court ceremony, public displays of secrecy and special favor, all (it hardly needs to be added) with his own considerable self at the center of the drama.

He was a prodigy, a sun-king, a stupor mundi. He lived in, and crowned, a world of lavish allegory, mythology and romance. Soon the great state occasions would be marked by pageants and triumphs full of political meaning, but early in the reign the mood was lighter. Court pageants portrayed the roses and pomegranates of England and Spain growing out of a golden stake, standing on a hillock from which came morris dancers; or an artificial forest of hawthorn, maple, hazel and birch amidst which wandered maidens in distress, foresters and men-at-arms; or the ‘golden arbor in the archyard of pleasure.’ Above all, this was a world of chivalry—of Fame, Renown, Hardiness, of Sir Gallant and Cœur Loyal. Henry had proclaimed himself as the ‘very perfect,’ valorous knight, and the joust and the tourney led directly to that serious business of kingship in which the new king's abundant energy would find perfect release, namely, war.⁸

War or love, diplomacy or sport: Henry delighted in his quick perceptions of the real meaning of things said before him, whether by a courtier presenting a new composition or by a diplomat reporting from abroad. While offering a new translation from Petrarch, Wyatt could act both roles at once: the King's courtier and envoy, recently returned from Italy (May, 1527), reporting now on literary rather than on state affairs. Here a Tudor courtier would need all possible skills, for by May 1527 the mood was not light at all. The divorce was now public policy; love and politics were dangerously entangled. Readers of Wyatt's diplomatic correspondence will realize that he possessed verbal and political skills in abundance as well as a career that repeatedly tested them.⁹ In 1541, while imprisoned in the Tower for the third time, he defended himself successfully against charges of treason. In 1527, in Italy, he extricated himself from arrest by the army of Charles V and managed to escape Rome just before the Imperial sack of the city. In England, upon returning, he undertook a work of translation for Charles's aunt. Catherine asked for Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae; he provided Plutarch's De tranquillitate et securitate animi. The grounds for the substitution may well have been stylistic, as the introductory letter to the Queen states.¹⁰ Yet if translating a classical text for a patron amounted to a formal ceremony of advice, there may have been some prudential considerations. As the policy of divorce became public knowledge, it may well have seemed a wiser course to suggest that Catherine achieve tranquillity of soul rather than devise remedies against fortune. In a similar manner Wyatt's other translations, his sonnets from Petrarch, need to be read in a context that draws significance from the structure and dynamics of the court and courtly decorum.¹¹ When they are so read, certain of their qualities stand out distinctively. They are translations indeed, changing linguistically from one tongue to another, and generically from love poetry to court poetry. As a part of this process, Wyatt deftly changes his role from court lover to faithful courtier before that alert audience Bacon recalls for Essex, “the King and his other lords.”

It remains true, however, that we know very little about the chronology of Wyatt's translations from Petrarch. Composed variously over the last sixteen years of his life, they are clearly the by-product of the diplomatic mission to Italy in 1527, whose aim was to keep the Pope independent of Charles V, and which, as a consequence, allowed Wyatt to meet a number of Italian diplomats who were, like him, literary figures. Pietro Bembo, Lodovico Ariosto, and Niccolo Machiavelli are among the names mentioned.¹² Less spectacular than an earlier diplomatic by-product, Thomas More's Utopia, these sonnets are important examples, nonetheless, of the interchange among national cultures that makes the Renaissance a Continental phenomenon. If the date of 1527 for the origin of sonnet writing in England is accurate, Wyatt returned from Italy with Petrarch to make quite another discovery at home—that his mistress Anne Boleyn was now attached to the King and for practical purposes as dead to him as Laura was to Petrarch after 1348. The story is well-known, and perhaps even true.¹³ Yet the effect of it is to shift attention from Wyatt's own work to the scandal behind the work. This shift of attention and the certain fact that there are Petrarchan originals for most of Wyatt's sonnets combine to diminish any fair sense of Wyatt's achievement. Courtly love and politics are linked as they should be, only outside not inside, these courtly poems. The received story allows history to dominate what the poems have to say, and the priority of Petrarch's work suggests that their meaning has already been established, and by the master. To fix Wyatt's position more securely, we need to grant his sonnets their own place, releasing the grip of history and the authority of Petrarch as determinants of poetic style and meaning.

We may speculate, then, that Wyatt became interested in Petrarch first for reasons of diversion and poetry, and subsequently for reasons bearing on disappointed and denied love. He could find in Petrarch a superb poetic manner and then a vision to set off his own experience. Yet this account of Wyatt's dual attraction to Petrarchan sonnets describes a genesis, not the completion, of his work. His sonnets are no more simple transcriptions of experience than they are literal translations from the Italian. Wyatt's relation to Petrarch is both necessary and important, but not finally as a matter of original and copyist. His few sonnets constitute separate, semi-public performances, many of them evoking not only the role of lover but also Wyatt's other roles as courtier, diplomat, and poet. In “Who so list to hounte,” for example, as we study the hind's collar, “graven with Diamondes in letters plain” (11), we need to register both the deletion of Petrarch's “topazi” (10) and the shadow of Wyatt's first court office as Clerk of the King's Jewels (1524).¹⁴ These first English sonnets indicate a courtly speaker who has served a lady, who has traveled into another country, and who has returned bearing more than the usual dispatches, letters, and summaries of the King's business. They are signs of an imaginative traveling that extends beyond the fact of a literal journey to Italy to a sense of experience that matches Surrey's use of travayle. What is revealed usually concerns the difficult emergence of a new or altered character for the speaker, a shape discovered while quarrying Petrarchan materials. In “The longe love,” I believe, we can trace such a pattern of emergence and altered return, especially if we remember that the sonnet considers the distance between matters Italian and English. To understand the nature and effect of that distance and the conditions of the return, we must look at the report of the poetry itself. Lean and sinewy and a little sad it may be; but if this well-known judgment implies no resonance or depth of literary tissue, then the diagnosis ought to be reconsidered.¹⁵ Wyatt's accomplishment is to accommodate some of the riches of the Continental Renaissance to stylistic traditions of plainness and simplicity and to provide a plausible character and rhetoric for such an accommodation. Once again, Surrey's elegy shows us what can be said of Wyatt as it raises the problem of reception.

But to the heavens that symple soule is fleed;
Which lefte with such, as covert Christ to knowe
Witnes of faith that never shalbe deade:
Sent for our welth, but not received so.

(33-36)

In receiving Wyatt's work, we must be prepared to understand a simplicity that has its own eloquence and a wealth that sets its own standard of value. We must be ready to perceive a sense of individual character that has little to do with modern forms of individualism, “to consider,” as Wyatt put it in a letter to his son, “a mans awne self, what he is and wherfor he is.”¹⁶

II

One “Italy” to which Wyatt traveled is Petrarch's Rime 140. Its most conspicuous device is the extended conceit, the elaborate rhetorical ceremony that attracted Wyatt and later poets of the English Renaissance and that puzzles or irritates modern readers.¹⁷ The point of concern here, however, is Wyatt's use of Petrarch's device and especially his changes in language and rhetoric that mark the journey from one country and sensibility to another. Wyatt is pointedly faithful until that part of his translation which explicitly concerns the issue of faithfulness. There he begins a process of “re-metaphoring” and then clarifying Petrarch's terms. The relationship of the two texts then shifts from translation to imitation, along the axis Thomas Greene has described.¹⁸

Amor, che nel penser mio vive e regna
          e 'l suo seggio maggior nel mio cor tène,
          talor armato ne la fronte vène,
          ivi si loca, et ivi pon sua insegna.
Quella ch'amare e sofferir ne 'nsegna
          e vòl che 'l gran desio, l'accesa spene,
          ragion, vergogna e reverenza affrene,
          di nostro ardir fra se stessa si sdegna.
Onde Amor paventoso fugge al core,
          lasciando ogni sua impresa, e piange, e trema;
          ivi s'asconde, e non appar più fòre.
Che poss'io far, temendo il mio signore,
          se non star seco in fin a l'ora estrema?
          ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more.
The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar
          And in myn hert doeth kepe his residence
          Into my face preseth with bold pretence,
          And therin campeth, spreading his baner.
She that me lerneth to love and suffre
          And will that my trust, and lustes negligence
          Be rayned by reason, shame, and reverence
          With his hardines taketh displeasure.
Wherewithall, vnto the hertes forrest he fleith,
          Leving his entreprise with payne and cry
          And there him hideth and not appereth.
What may I do when my maister fereth,
          But, in the felde, with him to lyve and dye?
          For goode is the liff, ending faithfully.

In reading Rime 140, Wyatt would have noticed the particular relevance of its conceit to a courtier-diplomat such as himself, for the sonnet concerns love in the context or conceit of princely service. The sonnet personifies the speaker's love as a warrior-prince to whom the speaker is subject: “Amor, che nel penser mio vive e regna” (1, my emphasis). It then presents in order, from the inside to the outside, the prince's realm: the regions of thought (“penser,” 1), emotion (“cor,” 2), and visible expression (“fronte,” 3). This development of the conceit creates a tiny narrative concerning princely ambition as well as the pomp and heraldry of a formal military campaign, complete with throne (“seggio maggior,” 2) and banners. All of this is an elaborate way of saying that, under the gathering force of his desires, the speaker blushes. The point of the first quatrain seems clear. The experience that the sonnet refers to is a simple one; the sonnet itself is arch, elaborate, and ceremonial in its treatment of that experience. Petrarch's conceit forces on the reader's awareness the fundamental distinction between poem and experience, art and nature. In the Italian sonnet, of course, the aim is to resolve that distinction as a triumph of art, an aim that Surrey clearly realizes in his own version of Rime 140.¹⁹

Petrarch's lady enters the poem in the second quatrain, after the conceit's personification and tiny narrative have been established. By this delay, which is itself a ceremony of the sonnet's structure, she is kept at a literary distance from the speaker, set within a little world of analogy as a formally anonymous character (“Quella,” 5). There her principal relationship is with the personified Amor rather than with the personifying speaker. The conceit acts as a disjoiner, a rhetorical separation of the lady from the speaker-lover through the substitution of Amor for his emotions. This metonymic structure to the conceit recreates another and larger pattern: the remote and impossible love affair that composes Petrarch's vision, figured in the lovely lady who is beyond reach of any acknowledgement but silent and secret service—“Quella.”²⁰ In this vision of impossibility the lady is austere and commanding; she has not inspired love so much as taught it (“'nsegna,” 5), and that teaching is now associated with pain and the restraints imposed by a trio of ethical and social ideals: “Ragion, vergogna e reverenza” (7). She ends the military campaign of the first quatrain abruptly, for her response to Amor's boldness is a deep and intense disdain. That “sdegna” (8), the rhyme to her instruction (5), crushes the prince's daring, repells his bold advance, and completes for the lady her sentence, her quatrain, and what is now her octave, her field of triumph. Structure and sense italicize both the ceremony and the essential hopelessness of Petrarchan love.

Rime 140's sestet transforms this hopelessness into a new art. Before this aesthetic resolution is achieved, however, the first tercet depicts the utter rout of love. The lady's disdain came from deep within herself (“fra se stessa,” 8), and in parallel fashion Amor flies to a refuge in his heart. The ceremonial advance in quatrain one is totally given over; the prince not only abandons his enterprise, he also deserts his “impresa” (10), the heraldic bearing of the blush that proclaimed his identity as a lover. Never again will he venture outside, “fòre” (11), an adverb of location that Wyatt will turn to new use. In short, the speaker turns forever pale. The disappearance of Amor into the heart now permits the re-emergence of the speaker, who resolves the poem and its dilemmas in the closing tercet. Here the issue is “Che poss'io far … ?” (12). Still fearing his lord (a combination of feudal awe toward the overlord and terror at his fate is no doubt meant), the speaker commits himself to a ghost of vanished love until “l'ora estrema” (13), that last hour at which the lady's true name can safely replace the echo (“l'ora,” Laura). We recognize a movement down a hierarchy of power from the disdainful lady and the bold but vanquished prince to the poem's abject “io” (12). Although last in this sequence, Petrarch's speaker owns the lyric ability of the artist to resolve the impasse of hopeless love. The pathos of the reversal from boldness to terror, blushing to weeping, is given to the figure of Amor; the speaker distills from his fear both that courageous echo of a proper name (13) and an elegant gesture of stoic fidelity (14). This last appears as an epigram of generalizing significance that can close the sonnet appropriately: “ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more” (14). Adapting Kenneth Burke's dictum about practical and symbolic actions, we can distinguish between love's abjectness and writing a poem about love's abjectness.²¹ The rhetorical structures of Rime 140 dramatize just this distinction as artfulness subsumes natural experience, transforming the temporal adverb “fin” (13) into the noun phrase “bel fin” (14). There is a triumph of art in the concluding sententia with its intricate pattern of consonants, its emphasis on endings, its conjoining of love and death (“ben amando more”) as the enactment of “bel fin,” and the final use of echo to gather up the lyric's start (“Amor,” 1) in its close (“—o more,” 14). Compressed within the final verse and sentence, these poetic elements demonstrate the ability of the conceited imagination to reform all experience—love and war, life and death—within the artful boundaries of the sonnet, whose echoing lines convert a hopeless love into stylish closure.²²

Petrarch's confidence in his art shows the mark of the master, drawing both imitation and emulation. Warton, Nott, and Berdan have variously noted, and condemned, Wyatt's imitation of Petrarch's most conceited sonnets.²³ Of course we cannot know with certainty what prompted Wyatt to select particular Petrarchan sonnets for translation and imitation. The motive may well have been artful metaphor, but surely considerations of theme and occasion must have been important, as in the example of Rime 269 (“Rotta e l'alta colonna, e 'l verde lauro”) and Wyatt's sonnet on the fall of Cromwell (“The piller pearisht is whearto I Lent”).²⁴ Here we simply note that the conjunction of the two poets brings together the founding master of a highly artful lyric form and an imitator whose own talent seems not to include the polished confidence of his model. If Wyatt has little of Petrarch's high facility or, indeed, of Sidney's later ambition to compose a rival sequence, what, we may fairly ask, is Wyatt doing with the Petrarchan sonnet? What is found in the process of working with Rime 140? What is lost or changed utterly? Is there a context for this poem that shows it to advantage independently of Petrarch's work?

I shall attempt to answer these questions through a consideration of Wyatt's use of Rime 140. That use reveals a manner of working with Petrarch and then of departing from him. It is important, I believe, to observe this double relation between original and imitation because Wyatt establishes certain effects by his modulations from likeness to difference. His sonnet is a parody of Rime 140 in the special sense of that term marked out by Louis Martz and Rosemond Tuve.²⁵ It is to be read par-odia, by the side of Petrarch's song; and in the process of reading we are to mark the point and manner of the departure. To give one example, we note that Wyatt preserves Petrarch's rhyme scheme until the last two lines. The substitution of a final couplet for Petrarch's closing tercet alerts us to Wyatt's concern to change Petrarch, not copy him, at the point of conclusion. Since both poems are about matters of ending, Wyatt underscores in this way a close correspondence between poetic structure and theme. Yet this relationship is itself a lesson taught by the master. In poetry's kingdom an enlightened lord may well appreciate the homage of independence; history's kingdom is another matter.²⁶ Wyatt uses Rime 140 to raise and test issues of loyalty to differently placed masters and ladies, and his poetic argument invokes finally what Bacon terms the ancient savings.

Wyatt begins his translation by adhering to Petrarch's sonnet structure. This adherence is signalled by a strict imitation of the rhyme scheme (until lines 13-14) and by a like use of the quatrains within the octave to balance “love” (1-4) against “She” (5-8). Variations are kept at the level of phrasing and metrical experimentation, as the iambic pentameter line is tested as an English equivalent to the Italian endecasillabo.²⁷ Wyatt removes from the first line Petrarch's balanced verbs (“vive e regna”). He uses the single verb “harbar” to represent the protected enclosure of thought from which love emerges and to anticipate later enclosures farther inland. He inserts an alliterative adjective “longe” to capture the sense of duration conveyed by Petrarch's two verbs. The result emphasizes love's duration within a protected place but without offering any sense of love's triumphant majesty (“regna”). The lengthy existence of love until the moment of the poem is Wyatt's concern, and not the reversal of its majesty—a possibly awkward topic if the King were part of an actual or notional audience. From these slight and counterbalanced changes, we may conclude that Wyatt wishes to maintain the general structure of this Petrarchan sonnet while advancing less obvious variations on Petrarchan themes. He begins in the role of a minor and subordinate revisionist; he will end by altering considerably Rime 140's share of the Petrarchan vision. If we wish to extract a general principle, it is that translation does not create a copy so much as change an original into something else. Imitation leads to adaptation and finally to a strange originality.²⁸

The second quatrain continues this method of creating a general likeness with specific differences, although allowing the sense of the differences to sharpen. Here Wyatt follows carefully Petrarch's devices of balance and subordination, with some variations arising again in diction and phrasing. For both poets, the two quatrains balance and oppose each other: the first devoted to Prince Love; the second, to the Lady. Both second quatrains dramatize through syntax the subordination of the Prince to his idol and opponent; in each, the Lady governs her suitor just as she governs the quatrain's sentence. Wyatt, however, allows more prominence than Petrarch does to the speaker. Petrarch joins the speaker easily to the figure of love through the pronouns “ne” (5) and “nostro” (8). He also replaces the singular possessive pronoun “mio” (1, 2) with the definite article (3, 6). The effect is to smooth the transition from the speaker's world to the world of the conceit. Petrarch's reader concentrates on the two principal figures of Amor and the Lady. Wyatt follows the plot of Love's advance and capitulation but does not allow the presence of the speaker to dissolve. In contrast to Petrarch's practice, that presence is kept before us in the second quatrain by a continued distinction between the first person (5, 6) and the third person singular pronoun (8). The stage of Wyatt's second quatrain contains beside the Lady both the speaker (“She that me lerneth,” my emphasis) and the figure of Love (“with his hardines,” my emphasis). The effect is an odd sense of sharp contrasts in reference and in attributed emotions, none of them joining easily in the machinery of the conceit. That sense is all the more distinctive because in general Wyatt seems to follow Petrarch carefully. But there is here none of the smooth deftness that can be found in the Petrarchan original or indeed in Wyatt's own songs. Is it possible? A poet who can write smoothly when he chooses has apparently elected to translate smoothness into something rougher, and his aim seems to involve setting his speaker against the personification of his emotion.

Wyatt is of course exploring a poetic form new to the English language, and his attitude is thoughtful rather than lyrical. Although working with a Petrarchan text, he is not Petrarchan in his manner with it. He adopts it to test it, subjecting it to the forms and stresses of another language and inevitably therefore to a different literary sensibility. Perhaps we mistake the roughness of Wyatt's versification if we regard it as a failure of art. It may well be not a vain effort to copy Petrarch, but a deliberate effort to change textures, metaphors, and meanings by translation. A term for Wyatt's practice could come from his public duties—a negotiation is enacted here between English and Italian interests, with each making demands of the other. One example of such different interests may be found in the phrase “my trust, and lustes negligence” (6), for whose last word there is no counterpart in the Italian poem.²⁹ The Petrarchan original—“'l gran desio, l'accesa spene” (6)—balances adjectives and nouns, one phrase and its complement, in a general definition of love that is abstracted from the speaker by the article. In addition, the sonnet is so thoroughly integrated that the adjectives also extend established themes. “Gran” continues the theme of princely greatness set by the verb “regna” (1); “accesa” continues the motif of the blush into the flushed hope that has fueled the Prince's boldness. Amor's behavior follows directly from the nature of the passion: its grandeur, majesty, and energy. Petrarch's language asks us to attend not only to the experience described but also to the rhetorical poise, intricacy, and polish of the description. Poetic artifice holds matter and manner, theme and syntax, psyche and conceit together. It is an impressive unity that Wyatt chooses to face in the negotiations of poetic translation.

Needless to say, his translation embodies a different set of principles. Its rhetoric separates patterns instead of integrating them. Wyatt reverses the position of Petrarch's terms for love (desio, spene) and so implies a different progression of amorous moods (trust, lust). Desire in Petrarch leads to hope; trust or confident expectation in Wyatt leads to mistakes of pleasure. The English terms are all nominal and qualified not by articles but by the first-person singular pronoun; that is, they belong specifically to the speaker and not simply to an abstract and graceful thematic pattern. The double genitive construction—“my trust, and [my] lustes negligence”—does not permit the clear subordination of parallel adjective-noun relationships.³⁰ It compresses and complicates the interplay of speaker (“my”), moods (trust, lust), and consequence (negligence). Instead of the clarity of balanced phrasing, there is an odd linkage of internal rhyme (trust/lust); and after that the striking irregularity of phrasal rhythm created by the trisyllabic “negligence” (with its combination of hard and soft g's) at the end of a line of monosyllables and pronounced enjambment.³¹ Wyatt's nouns, moreover, do not display the thematic integration that marks the art of Petrarch's sonnet. “Negligence,” in particular, appears suddenly in the poem to express the speaker's failure of regard for the nice discretions of a conventional lover. With its suggestion of a liability under law,³² the term reinterprets quatrain one critically, calling the conceit of princely enterprise and intention into question. The word does to the poem, in short, what the trait does to the affair. Rather than a smoothly extended pattern, the entire phrase suggests a distinctive voice in the act of speaking, perhaps carelessly, perhaps honestly. Wyatt's principles involve disruption and reconsideration. He makes this poem by working against the expectations given in his model and by resisting the Petrarchan manner. Wyatt's art is to set his nature against a greater art.

It does not follow, however, that Wyatt is in any programmatic sense anti-Petrarchan.³³ The term would seem to be more useful if reserved to later periods when sonnet conventions are more certainly established and can be qualified or violated with precision. Instead Wyatt is a translator, literally one who carries meanings across from one language to another and then explores original elements in this new linguistic context. We cannot call Wyatt anti-Petrarchan simply because this sonnet emphasizes for a moment the prominence and vernacular unruliness of the speaker's emotions and attitudes. The second quatrain closes as does its original by asserting the lady's complete dominance over love's “bold pretence” (3). “His hardiness” (8)—a near homonym amounting to a pun for Petrarch's “ardir” (8)—is routed by her “displeasure” as the irregularities of line six yield to the alliterative and metrical smoothness of the succeeding line.³⁴ Turning from the lover's carelessness to the lady's rules of conduct, it asserts the Petrarchan ideals of lady worship that no true lover should neglect. She demands that his “trust, and lustes negligence / Be reyned by reason, shame, and reverence” (6-7). The pun of rein/reign returns the motif of royal power to the translation after its exclusion from line one, only now that royal power is one of control rather than love. Wyatt echoes Petrarch's “affrene” (7) to express the Prince's dual responsibilities. As a chivalric warrior, he must manage or rein in careless energies; as a courtier, he must govern (reign) over those same energies with ideals of conduct that belong to Cœur Loyal.³⁵ As negligence gives place to reverence, end rhyme demonstrates Wyatt's appreciation of the bond between form and theme in Petrarch. In the sestet Wyatt will develop that central element of his master's style—the conceit—to suggest not the rejection of Petrarchan art but a particular realization of its use at the English court. Suitably translated, Rime 140 reveals the ancient savings through a “re-metaphoring” of Petrarch's text.

The elaborate conceit remains the most prominent device of Petrarchan art, and Wyatt's sestet extends Petrarch's conceit by adding to it details of place. Amor flees from the Lady's disdain to the safety of the heart, to what had once been the Prince's chief seat or throne (“seggio maggior,” “residence,” 2). His place of flight is left without metaphor because all attention goes to his trembling and weeping. In contrast, Wyatt specifies the place of flight through metaphor and aims at an altogether different psychological mood. That place is “the hertes forrest” (9), and it suggests immediately the realm of a wild and darkly tangled nature.³⁶ The perfect place to hide (the forest) has been transferred by Wyatt from the outside to the inside (the heart). It is the antithesis of the ordered military camp and of all public worlds of bannered ceremonies and “enterprise” (10). The absoluteness of the retreat seems total. The public community of the camp has been yielded. Love must retire not simply to his “residence” (2) or country seat but to the uninhabited forest, as alliteration links the process of fleeing with the place of refuge. The master who once led with banners now hides and will not appear. Secrecy rules again; the affair is over. Such a retreat to woodlands is a topos of medieval epic and romance: the pilgrim Dante finds himself “per una selva oscura”; Chaucer's and Malory's knights are found there; Petrarch himself adopts the names of Silvanus and Silvius.³⁷ And read this way, Wyatt's addition to Petrarch's conceit of the princely lover in flight to his heart merely emphasizes a meaning latent in the original text and its literary traditions. It is to change the master in just his way. Petrarch may seem more interested than Wyatt in the tremors of a defeated sensibility; Wyatt, in turn, may view the loss objectively as the “payne and cry” (10) attending a battlefield defeat. These are only the different nuances of temperament that one might expect to distinguish an Italian poet-scholar-ecclesiastic from an English warrior-courtier-diplomat who was also a poet.³⁸ I find, however, that Wyatt's sonnet can be read in yet another way, one that underscores English concerns and separates the English poem fundamentally from the Italian poem originating it.

Wyatt's heart is a forest because it belongs to the King. The immediate origin of the metaphor may lie in Petrarch's adverb fore (11), but the translated context of meaning for it is the English legal tradition of reserving to the Crown the kingdom's forested regions. The ancient and essentially legal meaning of the term has been summarized by Oliver Rackham:

The mysterious word forest arose in the dark centuries after the fall of Rome, and got into most West European languages, in which it means either 1) a tract of land subjecct to special laws, usually concerned with the preservation of game, or 2) a tract of land covered with trees. … The word Forest was a purely legal term—a tract of land where certain laws operated. … The boundaries were not marked on the ground, and within them was a complete range of land uses including extensive arable and even towns like Colchester.³⁹

Wyatt's “forrest” is a subtle metaphor for a new domain and kind of love, uniting an etymology in Petrarch as well as an English legal term. A modern reader may be inclined to understand this “remetaphoring” in the context of a natural isolation whose romantic traditions reach before and after Wyatt. I suggested such an understanding in the last paragraph, which echoes Thomas Greene's brilliant essay on Wyatt as poet and humanist translator.⁴⁰ In my argument, however, a reader is to understand the re-done image in a different context: to lose the Lady is to enter “a tract of land subject to special laws” and ruled directly by the King. The Lady and the King are, from the point of view of the speaker, antithetical powers, and in fleeing from the disdainful Lady and his own negligence, the speaker flees to another and different kind of authority. That authority, the object of Bacon's caution, presides over terrain that finds no mention in Rime 140. In every sense Wyatt's invention is a Tudor conceit, an enactment in poetic device of the ancient savings, a manner of doing homage in both law and verse.

Wyatt's sonnet offers a farewell to any show of love for the Lady and a pledge of faith to “my maister” (12). The reader must shift the personified figure of “love” from an amatory context, in which princeliness is a metaphor for passionate boldness, to a regal context, in which love reappears as an ethical bond to the master: “What may I do when my maister fereth … ?” (12). The speaker returns as a willing servant, and his courtliness presides over this change, holding the two realms of love and kingship together. If there is any confusion, it is momentary, a re-angling of metaphor, and far less extreme than the compasses, straits, and globes of Donnean metaphor that are now so easily navigated. The sonnet's twelfth line, the first of the final tercet, balances master and servant together and starts a rhetorical question that the concluding sentence will answer.

What may I do when my maister fereth,
          But, in the felde, with him to lyve and dye?
          For goode is the liff, ending faithfully.

(12-14)

Wyatt conspicuously departs from Petrarch, whose speaker fears “il mio signore” (12). Here, in contrast, the emotions that concern the English poem involve a master's fears, distrusts, apprehensions, and the quandary they impose on the speaker. That is, fear, doubt, or uncertainty in the master redouble in the servant whose duty it is to obey. The quandary of uncertain meanings also extends to the reader, largely through the use of newly invented metaphors that shift the contexts of understanding. It becomes difficult to locate the poem's final situation within the original love relationship. These new metaphors of place (forest, field) become dominant yet depart from the Italian sonnet as they suggest kinds of activity beyond the world of romantic love. Put simply, Petrarch remains committed through his master to his love. Laura's name sounds, and will echo permanently, in “l'ora estrema” (13). Wyatt's commitment is to a master of fearful moods. The poet's heart is a royal forest, and his life belongs on the King's field of service. There is no fundamental opposition between forest and field, heart and action. At this great court, no real distinctions separate private and public matters; hearts must be loyal. The King commands all, with no limit but death, as the infinitive and participial forms suggest (“with him to lyve and dye,” “the liff, ending,” 13-14).⁴¹ No lady's name echoes in this conclusion: no Laura, no Anna. Forest and field are used to place the speaker's heart and life definitively, and the sonnet now stands as a courtly pledge, in the very form imported by the poet, of complete and active service. The poetic pledge of faith to the Lady is yielded for a culturally older commitment, the basis of the ancient savings, the feudal bond of vassal and overlord who have always pledged faith in the forest of the heart and on the field of action.

As a translator, Wyatt is least faithful to Petrarch when he turns to the topic of faithfulness.⁴² Petrarch's ending celebrates a love-death whose final sounds echo in mortality the sonnet's beginning in “Amor” (1). This echo and that of Laura's name in line thirteen suggest a sublime circle in which explicit statement passes, despite defeat, into finer and rarer tones of love. The art of poetry permits repetitions within its world that are denied in life; hence the valuing of manner over matter or of art over nature. Surrey saw Petrarch's point exactly and brought his version of Rime 140 to a close upon the initial word, translating the Petrarchan echo into verbal identity: “Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.”⁴³ Wyatt's rougher aim, however, is to break that circle, not to re-affirm its closure. “Forrest” and “felde” mark extensions of Petrarchan language (“fore,” outside; “star,” stay, live, remain, stand), metaphor (Love as a princely figure), and idea (the committed life) into different regions of meaning. Wyatt ventures through and beyond the letter of the Italian text because he wishes to use it to affirm another kind of master, authority, and faith at court. Our concern is not so much a translation as a poet translating. In conception and expression Petrarch's ending carries a high sense of aesthetic finish. Wyatt's, in contrast, carries a simpler sense of ethical resolution about the good life of rugged, faithful service. The shifts of metaphor involved are slight; the styles of experience are altogether different. The English poet adopts a Continental model not to copy or reject it, but to depart from it in the direction of specifically English matters. The issue finally goes beyond the question of fidelity to an Italian text to older and deeper faiths at home.

“The longe love” represents, by means of translation, a return from “foraine realmes.” Such returns were in the nature of a diplomat's business, although Wyatt also duplicated his literal returns in the various poetic forms that he Englished.⁴⁴ An explicit statement of his program for poetic homecomings may be found over a decade later in an epigram of 1539.

Tagus, fare well, that westward with thy stremes
Torns vp the grayns off gold alredy tryd:
With spurr and sayle for I go seke the Tems
Gaynward the sonne, that shewth her welthi pryd
And to the town which Brutus sowght by drems
Like bendyd mone doth lend her lusty syd.
My kyng, my Contry, alone for whom I lyve,
Of myghty love the winges for this me gyve.(45)

As the poet comes home again, he welcomes his return to the Thames and London in terms of both legendary discovery and his own love for King and country. It is, he states, a “myghty love,” the gift of monarch and nation, one that answers their imperial dignity and far outweighs “the grayns off gold alredy tryd” in the celebrated Spanish river. Love's wings will speed his return, quicken his inspiration, and make of him a Tudor version of Brutus and Eros. He is the King's true gold from Spain, his love ripened by the same deity who presides over gold, the sun, and poetry. By 1539, however, Anne was dead three years, and there could be little risk in concluding this epigram with an emblem of love's return to England.

Wyatt's submission to the King was inevitable and no doubt genuine. In awe and fear he could still love. He continued to serve faithfully after 1527, and even after the fearsome imprisonments of 1536 and 1541.⁴⁶ But the submission of 1527—the context, I believe, of “The longe love”—yielded its own suffering, although the “payne and cry” (10) is attributed there to the Prince. The conventional shame of the Petrarchan lover regarding disclosure encompassed new humiliations in the manner of terminating so unequal a courtly triangle. This Lover was abandoned, and yet had to abandon. He had leave to go, and thus the role of leaver assigned to him. It is understandable that against such perplexity his sonnet should try to transmute the relations of Lady, Prince, and Lover and then assert an altogether different system of faith. Wyatt's poetry returns repeatedly to the experience of being forsaken, however, as if there could be no end to perplexity, only repetitions of poems and of the implied questions that close “They fle from me”: “But syns that I so kyndely ame serued, / I would fain knowe what she hath deserued.” We are shown a mind that will not stop; the affair, or affairs, may be long over, but not the faining of knowledge.⁴⁷

In 1532 the metaphor that Wyatt uses to express desertion and loss is the conventional image of love's burning coals “quent” or quenched. It appears in Epigram LIX, which records a visit to Calais in the company of Anne and Henry shortly before their secret marriage. It is a strange return to that English outpost since in the aftermath of 1527 Wyatt had been sent to that “felde” (or more accurately “harbar”) to remove him from the court.⁴⁸

Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent
By see, by land, by water and by wynd;
And now I folow the coles that be quent
From Dovor to Calais against my mynde.
Lo! how desire is boeth sprong and spent!
And he may se that whilome was so blynde;
And all his labor now he laugh to scorne.
Mashed in the breers that erst was all to torne.

It was an established pattern that Wyatts serve the Tudors through suffering, and the elder Thomas Wyatt merely varied the pattern, serving at home and abroad throughout his adult life until dying faithfully indeed in the midst of a royal mission.⁴⁹ Here he regards himself with some detachment, as the epigram shifts from “I” to “he.” In this view of himself, brought on by a return to Calais and by proximity to a lady who has set his wealth and country “in such a rore” (XCVII, 8), he is struck by the ironies of past desire and present vision. The poem's last line introduces another image to represent both his past and present condition: once a lover, now a diplomat and poet but not a lover; once torn by the briars of love, now meshed or tightly woven into the emblematic pattern of the Tudor briar.⁵⁰ The image is appropriately conventional though used inventively, expressing better than the fire and quenched coals the ironic disparities of amorous and courtly service, in which nothing and everything can quickly change. The image contains the poet even as he employs it to complete the epigram and to underscore poetry's value in locating oneself amid the complexities of serving this Tudor prince. Yet all complexities were not over in 1532. Wyatt was assigned his father's prominent role to play in Anne's coronation service (June 1533), and three years later there was the sharpest thorn of all.⁵¹

The bell towre showed me suche syght
That in my hed stekys day and nyght;
          Ther dyd I lerne out of a grate,
Ffor all vauore, glory or myght,
          That yet circa Regna tonat.

(CLXXVI, 16-20).

What is seen requires no mention of the Lady or the Prince. Although the historian might wish for more details, the reader of poetry can only admire the decorum of restraint in simply saying so much and no more. Such decorum is the poet's strength and safety, the necessary mediation between what he has seen and what he can say. There is no need to translate Seneca's choral verse on absolute power: the lesson is fully Englished in the grate that situates exactly the spectacle and the beholder. The swordsman, an expert with the heavy Continental blade, was brought for the occasion from Calais.⁵²

III

That same sense of decorum—precise, subtle, deft yet plain, at once poetic, diplomatic, and political—governs, although at a lesser intensity, the close of “The longe love.” Within its own terms and means, the sonnet resolves tensions between love and politics in the role of the courtier, tensions concerning service that Castiglione, for example, builds into the larger structure of Il Cortegiano's fourth and final book. The principle in each case is respice finem; each work regards the end as an achievement of both closure and goal.⁵³ This is not to claim for Wyatt's resolution more than a sonnet's worth of ending. These tensions troubled Wyatt throughout his career; they brought him close to execution on at least two later occasions (1536 and 1541). But if we are to gauge his sense of the play of power at court, we need to consider carefully “The longe love,” for it studies the literary as well as the political implications of faithfulness. In his conclusion Wyatt establishes a new set of distances and relationships among various texts and ideas. He departs markedly from Rime 140, but through his new conceit of “the hertes forrest” he continues the topic of places from Petrarch's first quatrain. The conceit also embellishes what is plain in the original: “Onde Amor paventoso fugge al core” (9). It is a curious departure, for to this point Wyatt's aim seems to have been close translation (lines one and six excepted) and, if anything, a relative simplification of Petrarchan artifice. Unexpectedly, then, there is a conceit where Petrarch has none. Yet the figure is composed from the rhyme of the Italian sonnet's first tercet; core-fore becomes the heart's forest. Wyatt regards his source most precisely and subtly as he alters it. He seems intent on providing a tighter bond for “rime sparse” (Rime 1, 1), and this conversion of a rhyming pair into a conceit has the authority of language itself in the etymological origin of forest in fore.⁵⁴ For those who know, for those who travel and work between things English and Italian, Wyatt offers a demonstration of the courtier-poet-diplomat as Renaissance humanist skilled in the use of languages—a demonstration of just the sort that most impressed what had become the Tudor-Boleyn court.⁵⁵ It is a particular joining of richness and simplicity, a poetry “graven with Diamondes in letters plain” (VII, 11). And as I have argued above, this alteration signals other laws in addition to those of language and poetics. A flight into the heart's forest returns the speaker's love into himself, takes it off the scene of Petrarchan amours (the heart is a hart), yet in the legal sense of forest carries both heart and hart to the King. The departure from Petrarch, we may suspect, is a decorous and graceful substitute for the departure from the Lady, although such a movement is not the principal point of the final emblem and motto. There the matters of the Lady and love, of the suffering and discipline she has taught the negligent speaker, recede, and attention goes entirely—and with great clarity—to a different kind of place and a different order of faithfulness. We need, however, to recognize in this change the persistence of love. Henry may strike some of us as close to Stalin; he struck some of his contemporaries as the “Pharaoh of England.”⁵⁶ He struck Wyatt in a different fashion, and the poet's final subject is quite simply his own place and service as subject.

That place is the field of action; that faithfulness requires as service a public pledge of the speaker's life. The poem now moves from the ceremony of the conceit to a simpler image. As the Petrarchan paradoxes of a living-dying love are subsumed, the question that the speaker puts to himself is emphatically rhetorical, that is, literally answered in the asking. “What may I do when my maister fereth, / But, in the felde, with him to lyve and dye?” (12-13). Wyatt alters who it is that fears—“Che poss'io far, temendo il mio signore” (12)—to throw into relief the brave and immediate loyalty required by the warrior's code. His master can fear or become apprehensive; he cannot. There is, and can be, no uncertainty over the speaker's proper place. The same cannot be said for Wyatt's critics who have hesitated over these lines, worried by the changing relationship to Petrarch and especially by the contributed image of “in the felde.”

[Wyatt's] addition of ‘in the field’ creates an apparent contradiction because the speaker's master, Love, has already left “the field” of battle (overt affection). Is the speaker hinting at a future return to “the field”? Or is he, despite the phrase, resigning himself, like Petrarch, to an enduring, faithful, but secret love that will last until death?⁵⁷

The response to both questions should be no. There will be no return to overt affection, no resignation to secret love. The final aim is not a likeness to Petrarch and not an offering of covert signs from the past. The image is prospective, not retrospective. Wyatt's departures from, and additions to, Petrarch indicate just that: departures, additions, twistings or skewings of the model in the copy to meet with English circumstances and the speaker's future. In the sestet the poem turns away from the amorous matter of the original to its own courtly concerns but without throwing off entirely the cloak of love since it is not irrelevant to the final issue of faithfulness.

The added images of forest and field, bound more and then less directly to Rime 140, signal the last twist of the poet's argument. The conceit of the heart as forest works with some irony: although it seems to depict a natural isolation (the male deer in his habitat), it does in fact represent a new commitment to ancient areas of royal law (that habitat as the King's domain). To combine the two senses, we might recall Cicero's adage and decide that there the speaker is never less alone than when alone. This understanding of “forrest” allows a transition to the sestet's second image—a more obvious and direct reference to an area also under the King's authority, the field or campaign of battle. Within this context, the image is not so much an antithesis of the “forrest”—open rather than densely filled space—as a complement to it. In legal definition a forest can contain actual, even cultivated, fields; more importantly, when set together, the two terms can indicate all space, everywhere, forest and field alike.⁵⁸ They construct a totality for the speaker, who belongs wholly to his prince in the forest of his heart as well as on the field of his life and death. This second image expresses then the courtier's pledge of a committed life; he will stand with his lord in the field—Wyatt's addition of a scene to Petrarch's “star seco” (12). This is not simply a literary gesture, for it was quite literally by the “felde” that Wyatt made his first dramatic impression on Henry's court: during the 1524-1525 Christmas tournaments at Greenwich, in which the King himself joined the struggles around the Castle of Loyalty.⁵⁹ Whether in forest or field, all ways led to the King; it was the basis of both the ancient savings and this Tudor court. Submission to the King's law in one area was prelude to submission in another—a lesson concerning ends that was taught to many in the decade after 1527.

Wyatt's changes in the sestet repeat the movement outward from hiddenness to openness that appears in his first quatrain and in Petrarch's. This second time, however, the advance belongs to Wyatt's own invention and goes beyond a brief revelation of secret love. It transforms Petrarchan submission into a faithful allegiance that carries the dignity of a stoic heroism.⁶⁰

Wherewithal, vnto the hertes forrest he fleith,
          Leving his entreprise with payne and cry
          And there him hideth and not appereth.
What may I do when my maister fereth,
          But, in the felde, with him to lyve and dye?
          For goode is the liff, ending faithfully.

(9-14)

The aim is courtly: to offer an anatomy of a loyal nature whose excellence inheres in a movement toward and then away from the lady. The important transformation begins in the phrasing and metaphor of “vnto the hertes forrest,” but it rests upon the operation of an earlier pattern of language. In the first quatrain, parallel prepositional phrases refer directly to regions within the speaker and so measure the physical advance of love: “in my thought” (1), “in myn hert” (2), and “into my face” (3). One effect of this syntax, oddly, is to maintain a distinction between the person of the speaker and the metaphorical regions of love (harbor, residence, and camp). Parallelism directs our attention to the parallel process inherent in all analogy. References to the speaker's person are contained within prepositional phrases until the poet turns to the added phrases and images of the sestet. There, within a continued prepositional phrasing, reference to an inner space (the heart) combines with reference to an external space (the forest), and this sudden joining of spaces directs us through a conceit toward an emblematic understanding of the speaker's final affirmation.

The addition of “in the felde” thus constitutes an extension of established phrasing and the topos of places. It also represents a turn to a simpler kind of image than the conceit of the heart's forest. There is no metaphorical crossing of different spaces here; there is only, as in the first quatrain, a reference to one space, although that reference now indicates a world external to the speaker—one to which he must travel, and for which he must travail and perhaps even die. We do not, however, understand this simpler image with an absolute literalness; a style that is literal or literalizing need not generate meanings that are literal.⁶¹ Wyatt offers simplicity as a stylistics of loyalty. The image is invested with qualities of meaning that can be termed emblematic: an easy visibility is linked to certain conventional or received meanings, and both form a personal insignia intended for public display, a poetic escutcheon or heraldic bearing of faith.⁶² The Petrarchan “baner” of love displayed on the face is replaced by a Tudor emblem and motto displayed in the poem. The movement outward from the forested heart to the field of life and death completes a general progression from interior to exterior spaces, a progression that does not leave the speaker's person either abandoned or hidden but committed to a public field of action and judgment. This is the world of the warrior-courtier who acknowledges his prince's claims. As Surrey's elegy does both explicitly and elaborately, Wyatt's sonnet inventories his person and dedicates his purpose. This final twist of the poem toward issues beyond love has its base in a sequence of poetic devices from conceit to emblem and motto, the last two contained as an impresa within the closing couplet of the poet's invention. There, formally and topically, Wyatt separates his work from Petrarch's, marks it with his signature, and gives it to the Tudor court.⁶³

Wyatt's final aim is a coherent and public intelligibility—the clear meaning expressed by the motto in his last line. That line acts as a gloss for the image “in the felde,” revealing at the moment of “ending” the soul of intelligence in the emblem's body.⁶⁴ It aligns an openness or directness of meaning to an opening-out of space in the imagery. This sequence of devices varies a literalizing procedure in the plain style that Rosalie Colie has termed “unmetaphoring.”⁶⁵ Wyatt's added phrases and figures are increasingly literal in manner of reference as the reader proceeds from conceit to image to motto. In his sestet Wyatt adopts (where he need not) the stylistic machinery of the Italian sonnet, but only to establish an English world of creature, scene, and law. The relation to Petrarch is one of indebtedness shading into revisionary independence, a relation that emerges, appropriately, as a function of the sestet and its couplet—the last of course Wyatt's departure from strict Italian form. There is no play in this conclusion with echo, secrecy, and love's “bel fin,” although alliteration does link the contributed terms in the sestet: “forrest,” “felde,” and “faithfully.” The last line is concerned with general reference, clarity, and balance, setting the phrase “the liff, ending” between the judgment on the entire existence (“goode”) and the evaluation of its finish (“faithfully”). This affirmation has little to do with the press and pretense, the camp and banners, of quatrain one. The court world as external spectacle gives way to the centered “liff” of this courtier, warrior, and diplomat. In his own life and expression, in his heart and tongue, distinctions between public and private virtues disappear; this is the poet's “frame of honestye,” the true realization of the “longe love.”⁶⁶ Wyatt's last word has no counterpart in Rime 140. It is an invention and not a translation. In place of Petrarch's ending he has set his own.

Yet in what sense is it his own if it is also the King's? What place does power leave to the person of the poet? Did not Henry want and demand far more than the knee's homage? How can submission to such a prince be construed in any way as an affirmation of one's self? One line of interpretation might be to argue that the Henrician inscription is balanced by the Petrarchan effacement; that controlling Petrarch's text provides a counterweight to the King's rule; that removing one master authorizes the presence of the other. Such an argument grants considerable leveraging power to inventive translation and evades the point that the effacement is undertaken as a part of the submission. A better line of interpretation, I believe, would give credit, rhetorical and substantive, to Wyatt's final word “faithfully.” I have emphasized its final position, but it also calls attention through its adverbial function to a manner of action or performance. The poet—in this case the poet as courtly speaker, warrior, and reformed lover—offers a pledge of faith that fixes the time until death according to a quality of his performance. And it is the manner, the style, of a faithful performance that distinguishes the courtier from his prince even as the pledge binds them together. The King may command obedience; but the courtier still controls the manner of his response. Before we can adequately deconstruct the nature of the powers embedded in the political and social hierarchies of the Tudor court, we need to reconstruct the crafted sense of obligation that brought Thomas Wyatt to serve Henry VIII. Otherwise, this and other Tudor court sonnets will indeed seem like small talk with Stalin. Power is not the only definer of relations, even of those that do involve issues of power. As in the case of Elizabeth Darrell, Wyatt's service for his King was deeply personal, a private matter, a function of an inwardness that could define and shape public expressions of faith.⁶⁷ Wyatt's rhetorical shapings in language extend new dimensions to human commitments—the forests, fields, and faithful endings that are added to Petrarch for an English audience.

This way of concluding, I would argue, represents Wyatt's contribution to English literary history: not the introduction per se of the sonnet but his manner of introducing it as a text to be understood, changed, reformed. His couplet emblem and motto form his own impresa. What is abandoned in Petrarch (“lasciando ogni sua impresa,” Rime 140, 10) is created and maintained here, an undertaking as well as an emblematic device, to complete the poet's return from Italian matters to family traditions of service at the Tudor court.⁶⁸ It is only a mild paradox therefore that this submission to the ancient savings also offers a model to Surrey and others of plain English independence: “A Tonge that served in foraine realmes his king; / … a worthy guyde to brynge / Our Englysshe youth, by travayle unto fame.” Wyatt's own travel for the King was also travail and then literally death.⁶⁹ Yet viewing all of his life poetically, he instructed himself as well as those invited to judge his place and “tyme” and work by his Englishing of artifice and plainness, high conceits and stoic attitudes. Even while sequestered at Allington Castle in the aftermath of the Boleyn executions, he could hold the court in view, satirizing it prudently (in terms of his own inabilities), yet insisting on a distinction between critique and rebellion (CV, 7-13). After the harrowing experience of the Bell Tower, he most shows a courtier's poise as he makes terza rima seem an easy and natural English form, measured and balanced, simple in the sense of plain, unadorned, forthright, direct, whole.⁷⁰ The bloody days of May 1536 broke his heart (CLXXVI, 11), but not his sense of a style, at once plain and aristocratic, that could transform the poet's place.

But here I ame in Kent and Christendome
          Emong the muses where I rede and ryme;
          Where if thou list, my Poynz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my tyme.

(CV, 100-03)

There is more here than a sturdy independence. Wyatt never forgets where he is or what he must regard. The tower grate framed his place of imprisonment as well as the scene of execution. Allington Castle is not so much a refuge from the court as a way of looking at it, a utopian place (as More might employ it) in critique of known and rougher kingdoms. The word judge, even though addressed to his old friend John Poins, could only sound ominously in 1536 from a man just out of prison and still under detention. But Wyatt uses that word, and invites his friend and judge to come from court into Kent and Christendom.⁷¹

After Wyatt's death Surrey celebrated this quality of mind, ethos, and poetry as the “jewell” of a “symple soule” (37, 33), who left a “Witnes of faith that never shalbe deade.”⁷² Perhaps we can return that celebration of faithfulness from the 1540s and the penitential psalms to this particular translation of Petrarch. To do so is to underscore a continuity in the poet's career. The sonnet unfolds in 1527 an argument about courtly service that is at once literary and political. “The longe love” reveals (in Surrey's terms) both the quickness and the plain simplicity of this Tudor poet as suggestions of Matthew 25.21 move beneath the final line. It subtly yet clearly affirms the ancient savings in the pledge to end as his master's good and faithful servant. Throughout a dangerous career, Wyatt's poetic practice was to seek out such places for ethical statement. They were often small places: a refrain, a pointed question, a closing couplet in a sonnet, a forested heart, a field of loyalty, an English county and tercet that sheltered Christendom and the Muses' home. And because the places were small—no sooner reached than finished—the seeking had to be continual, busy, and responsive to context; a series of probings and negotiations, undertaken at home and abroad, with various authors, places, languages, and texts. Surrey's elegy for Wyatt begins by noting “that quicke [he] coulde never rest.” Wyatt sought to compose that restlessness in his work, but what he achieved was more often a matter of poise than of rest. The poise of “The longe love” involves the conversion of a Petrarchan sonnet into a farewell to ladylove and then into a firm pledge of ending faithfully. The Englished sonnet allows the poet to review the resemblances and differences in the two commitments. Both are forms of love, with the first limited by secrecy and time, and the second lasting publicly throughout life.

Wyatt's ending, then, hardly reflects the style of the moment in 1527. It finds its proper context in the duration of the poet's life as in the brevity of the couplet. The importance of that duration for Wyatt is clear. The seeking life constitutes “a mans awne selfe, what he is and wherfor he is.”⁷³ As his son did, we notice the nature of the definition, its inclusion of both quality (“what he is”) and purpose (“wherfor he is”). Such purpose in the sense of self, plain yet grave, invites us to read with special emphasis Wyatt's conclusion to a very different address concerning his life. The date was March 1541; the author's place, the Tower; his audience, the King's Council. They wished to know what he deserved.

I besyke you humbly be my good lordes and lett not my lyf were awaye here, that paradventure myght be better spente in some dayes deede for the kynges service. Our Lorde put in your hartes to do with me as I have deservyd towarde the kinges Maieste.

The King's true faytheful subiecte and seruante and humble orator

T. Wiatt⁷⁴

Wyatt never fashioned a self that he could not sustain. He did not pretend to his son that he was a model husband. He thought hard about what was involved in the games of courtly love, before as well as after 1536. But he could pledge faithful service, and he did so in 1541 as in 1527. He regarded the end because only he could control and shape that regard. The translation of Rime 140 enacts his control; his later career re-affirms the shape. The ancient savings was the courtier's fundamental obligation, but it was also his to observe, to craft, to translate into a better spending.

Notes

1. Cited in J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (1934; rpt. Garden City, N. Y., 1957), p. 350. For advice, I am grateful to David Carlson, Jeremy Adams, and Kenneth Bleeth.

2. See Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patricia Thomson (London, 1974); Burton Fishman, “Recent Studies in Wyatt and Surrey,” English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971), 178-91; and Ellen C. Caldwell, “Recent Studies in Sir Thomas Wyatt (1970-1987),” English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 226-46. For the recent emphases in Renaissance studies, see Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 23-47; Crewe points to issues of interpretive authority and tact raised by Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1982) and by Marguerite Waller, “Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes,” Diacritics, 17 (1987), 2-20 (Crewe, p. 172, n. 12).

3. Quotations of Petrarch are from Il Canzoniere, ed. Dino Provenzal (Milan, 1954). Quotations of Wyatt are from the Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969); cited hereafter as Collected Poems, with individual poems identified by the Muir-Thomson numbering. Wyatt's relation to Petrarch is now a standard critical topic that touches upon issues of style, love, influence, and authority; see the two ELR surveys in n. 2 above. Thomson enlarged the usual context by including the commentaries on Petrarch: Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (Stanford, 1964), pp. 149-208.

4. Quotations of Surrey are from The Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Verse, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (Garden City, N.Y., 1974).

5. Castiglione expands our sense of Urbino from social to geometrical circles: The Book of the Courtier, tr. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), pp. 1-25, 216, 342-43, and 356. On motifs of the social game and the circle, see Thomas M. Greene, The Vulnerable Text (New York, 1986), pp. 46-60. For Castiglione and English definitions of the courtier, see Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, 1978); and David Starkey, “The Court: Castiglione's Ideal and Tudor Reality; Being a Discussion of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Satire addressed to Sir Francis Bryan,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982), 232-39.

6. On the court of Henry VII and political issues in humanist literature, see David Carlson, “Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin's Embassy and Henry VII's Humanists' Response,” Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 279-304; on Wyatt and Henry VIII, see Jonathan Z. Kamholtz, “Thomas Wyatt's Poetry: The Politics of Love,” Criticism, 20 (1978), 349-65; on the court as setting for music, poetry, and the “game of love,” see John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961), pp. 147-229. On the codes and strategies of courtesy, see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege (Berkeley, 1984); especially pp. 104-12 for relations of service and self-deprecation.

7. J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley, 1968); Lacey Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty (Boston, 1971); Jasper Ridley, Henry VIII: The Politics of Tyranny (New York, 1985); and David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (New York, 1986).

8. Scarisbrick, p. 20.

9. Wyatt's correspondence, including letters to Cromwell, Bonner, and Henry VIII, may be found in Kenneth Muir, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963); cited hereafter as Life and Letters.

10. Plutarch's Quyete of Mynde, 1528, tr. Thomas Wyatt, facsim. (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), sigs. Aiil-Aii2. There may have been, in addition, a Christmas deadline for Wyatt's work (pp. vi-vii). H. A. Mason finds translation the linking activity between Wyatt and humanism; see Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959), pp. 178-235.

11. This is a continuing emphasis in Wyatt criticism, although with primary reference to the poetry. In addition to Whigham (n. 6 above), see Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker (Oxford, 1964), esp. pp. 39-53. Recent work by historians has established a social context in which poetry served as one of the linguistic accomplishments by which a court career could be made. David Starkey has sketched the interplay of personalities, talents, and politics in The Reign of Henry VIII; E. W. Ives has provided a thorough study of Anne Boleyn and the program of religious and cultural ideals that she brought to the court: Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 1986). Ives argues that the immediate cause of Anne's arrest in 1536 was overheard mistakes in the language games of courtly love, brought to Cromwell's attention and expanded by him into a coup d'etat against the Bolyn faction (pp. 365-70). For a different view of Anne's fall, see Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 191-233.

12. See the “Table of Dates” under 1527 in Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (1978; rpt. New Haven, 1981), pp. 21-22; cited hereafter as Rebholz. H. A. Mason, Editing Wyatt (Cambridge, 1972), is skeptical about Wyatt's literary acquaintances while engaged diplomatically in Italy (p. 165).

13. Contemporary Catholic writers made much of the Wyatt-Boleyn affair (Life and Letters, pp. 22-23). A problem may lie in judging the actual strength of the affair. It was a courtly game to indulge in love talk concerning intricate rules of service, and Anne may have used such talk to knit her faction together. Alastair Fowler emphasizes the obscurity of feeling and language in Wyatt's courtly poetry in Conceitful Thought (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 1-20. Warnicke sees little or no evidence (except for the arrest in 1536) of a relation between Anne and Wyatt (pp. 64-66).

14. Life and Letters, p. 4. “Who so list to hounte” is generally understood to be “about” the triangle of Wyatt, Anne, and Henry VIII. In my view, what the poem is “about” is constituted more by a sense of courtliness than by a belief in an actual love affair. See Ellen C. Caldwell's summary of arguments in English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 237-38. This poem may well become a test case for various literary approaches: theories of humanist translation, feminist critique, historical or New Historicist study, and the iconography of visual and literary symbols.

15. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (New York, 1954), p. 230.

16. Letter II, in The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir (1949; rpt. Cambridge, Mass., 1950), p. 249; cited hereafter as Collected Poems (Harvard).

17. In The Conceit, K. K. Ruthven surveys the theoretical basis of this figure and catalogues major types (The Critical Idiom, 4 [London, 1969]). Wyatt: The Critical Heritage records, from Warton (1781) to Berdan (1920), a persistent antipathy to sonnet conceits founded upon ideals of naturalness and originality.

18. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), pp. 51-53. There are lucid accounts of Petrarchan imitation in Nicholas Mann, Petrarch (Oxford, 1984), pp. 18-27; and in John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” Diacritics, 5 (1975), 34-40. Donald L. Guss studies Petrarchism and Wyatt in relation to Donne in John Donne, Petrarchist (Detroit, 1966), pp. 11-45.

19. See “Love that doth raine and live within my thought” (ed. Sylvester, p. 185). Setting Surrey's version of Rime 140 against Wyatt's remains instructive, since Surrey attempts to be faithful to Petrarch's language, syntax, and spirit. Wyatt's superiority is argued by Hallett Smith, “The Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 9 (1946), 323-55; an unusual contrast may be found in Crewe, pp. 23-26; 48-78.

20. The late Richard B. Young has emphasized the “fixed relation of lover to lady” in Petrarchan poetry and noted that the dominant Petrarchan forms of idealizing description (the lady's blason) and introspective meditation (the lover's complaint) follow from this fixed relation: English Petrarke: A Study of Sidney's “Astrophel and Stella,” in Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, Milton (New Haven, 1958), pp. 10-12.

21. The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. (New York, 1957), p. 9.

22. I take my sense of the Petrarchan aesthetic from the cited works by Greene, Mann, and Freccero as well as from Marguerite Waller, Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History (Amherst, 1980). See also the remarks on Wyatt's techniques of closure in Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago, 1968), pp. 56-67.

23. Wyatt: The Critical Heritage: Warton (pp. 40-43); Nott (pp. 49-51); Berdan (pp. 129-31, with mention of Warton). Bell (pp. 94-95), Courthope (pp. 96-100), and Foxwell (pp. 115-16) are more tolerant of both Petrarchan conceits and Wyatt's treatment of them. Sergio Baldi finds that Wyatt could not see, much less equal, Petrarch's vision; Sir Thomas Wyatt, tr. F. T. Prince, Writers and Their Work, No. 139 (1961; rpt. London, 1971), pp. 30-35.

24. Wyatt removed the Petrarchan reference to laurel to focus all grief on the loss of support, the death of the patron (in his case thought to be Cromwell). Cromwell is said to have called to Wyatt from the scaffold (Rebholz, pp. 28-29).

25. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954; rev. ed., 1962), pp. 184-93, 259-73. On the etymology and definition of parody, see Rosemond Tuve, “Sacred ‘Parody’ of Love Poetry, and Herbert,” Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), 249-90.

26. On the difficulty of setting a poetics in relation to literary history, see Waller, pp. 3-26. Kamholtz (p. 365) and Greenblatt (pp. 145-50) emphasize the power of the court world to impose limits and bitter meanings on poetry.

27. John Hollander in The Literature of Renaissance England, ed. John Hollander and Frank Kermode (New York, 1973), p. 116. See also John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (London, 1961), pp. 15-29.

28. David Quint studies the Renaissance conflict between tradition and modernity through the topos of the source: Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, 1983). He does not refer to Wyatt, but his discussions offer a context in which translation becomes a model form for accommodating both tradition and innovation.

29. There is no counterpart, in several senses, for “negligence”: no corresponding noun; no word or phrase of equivalent meaning; no emphasis upon any failure of attention. The word is a literal misprision and an anticipation of Wyatt's later neglect of the Petrarchan text. The etymology is pertinent: a negation of choice or reading (nec + legere).

30. Greene reads Wyatt's phrasing differently as two parallel genitive constructions, with the speaker possessing “trust” and “lustes negligence” representing the personified Love's behavior (Light in Troy, p. 253).

31. Rebholz scans the line as iambic pentameter with a trochaic substitution in the third foot (p. 51). A strain still exists between metrical pattern and actual performance, precisely the poem's point about the rules and experience of love.

32. The primary sense involves a “want of attention to what ought to be done or looked after; carelessness with regard to one's duty or business.” OED, s. v. negligence, 1. The addition is irrelevant to Petrarch's conceit, necessary to Wyatt's idea of the court.

33. Wyatt's sensibility is clearly different from that of Petrarch, but he also valued “so aproued an auctour” (Collected Poems, Appendix B, p. 440). H. A. Mason has put it succinctly: “Wyatt used his original as a Mask or Persona, as a means of finding and creating himself” (Humanism and Poetry, p. 185). George Watson makes the relationship depend too much on either accepting or rejecting Petrarch's vision of love: “Petrarch and the English,” Yale Review, 68 (1979), 383-93.

34. Rebholz scans line seven as regular; four of the five accents fall upon syllables that begin with re (p. 51).

35. Scarisbrick, p. 20. Allegorical pageantry invites the participation of all in the generalized figure. The Cœur Loyal is both king and courtiers as one. On the complex symbolism of Tudor court ceremony, ritual, and art, see Sir Roy Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (London, 1967) and his The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977).

36. Greene, Light in Troy, p. 253. The conceit of the heart as a forest contains the familiar pun heart-hart, the latter term referring to the male deer. The effect of both conceit and pun is to naturalize the relation of the male heart to its retreat.

37. Thomson, Background, p. 174. For the motif of retreat and Petrarch's use of the name and role of Silvanus, see Mann, pp. 43-45.

38. In fairness, one should indicate Petrarch's involvement in diplomatic and political matters. See Mann's chapter, “The Active and Contemplative Lives,” in Petrarch, pp. 28-45; also Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago, 1968), pp. 36-37; and Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955; rpt. Baltimore, 1964), pp. 53-54.

39. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, in Archaeology in the Field Series (London, 1976), pp. 152-53. See also Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London, 1983), esp. pp. 192-223. Thomas notes the association of forests with the savage, the primitive, the original and the corresponding notion of development: “The progress of mankind was from the forest to the field” (p. 195).

40. Greene, Light in Troy, p. 253.

41. Greene takes a different view of the ending: “we have at the end another crisis of commitment; the speaker is left out there in the cold, bivouacking with his liege lord, vulnerable to an exposure and a finality that are new” (p. 253). As I argue below, there is a weight, satisfaction, and function even to the last line. “The aphoristic last line, talking about life and faith rather than death and love, makes its feudal fealty against the grain, against the knowledge of cost and moral ambivalence” (Light in Troy, p. 253; my emphasis).

42. Wyatt's practice may seem to work against Petrarch; yet because a subtle relation obtains between the two, it is not useful to invoke a program of “anti-Petrarchanism.” The term has, in fact, all the value of “pre-romantic.” In Poetic Closure, Smith's remarks on Wyatt's deft alteration of refrains suggest a tight integration of theme and form. Her point may be applied to alterations from original to translation (pp. 56-61).

43. Surrey's “Love that doth raine and live within my thought” is regular in its treatment of meter, theme, and original text. Expressing aristocratic control as well as smoothness, regularity allows Surrey to make Petrarch's art explicit without any sacrifice of his own art. The circularity of Love-love is presented, rather, as artful sweetness.

44. Wyatt's diplomatic assignments took him to France, Italy, and Spain between 1526 and 1539 (Rebholz, pp. 20-28). He collected poetic forms and Englished them as literary variations upon the experience of, and return from, foreign states.

45. Collected Poems, XCIV; no specific source for this epigram has been identified.

46. On Wyatt's three imprisonments, see Life and Letters, pp. 25-37; 172-210. The third and most serious arrest occurred in early 1541. On this occasion Wyatt's property was seized in anticipation of a guilty verdict for treason.

47. “They fle from me” has attracted considerable discussion; see the review articles in English Literary Renaissance cited in note 2 above.

48. Collected Poems, LIX; Rebholz's speculation (p. 22). Muir does not make this connection (Life and Letters, pp. 24-25).

49. Wyatt died from a fever contracted while riding to meet the arrival of a Spanish official (Life and Letters, pp. 215-16).

50. The final line is proverbial, reinforcing the generalized, emblematic quality of the conclusion (Collected Poems, p. 311).

51. There has been some uncertainty over the reference of this poem in the Blage MS. Some take it to refer to Wyatt's view of Anne's execution in the Tower courtyard (Collected Poems, p. 415). Others believe that it refers to his view of the men executed on Tower Hill (Life and Letters, p. 32; Ives, p. 403).

52. Ives, p. 401.

53. See Lawrence V. Ryan, “Book Four of Castiglione's Courtier: Climax or Afterthought?” Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), 156-79.

54. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions (1966; rpt. New York, 1967), s.v. forest. The English and the Italian words have their origin in Lat. foris. Wyatt's use of forrest offers the only instance of the word in his poetry. See Eva Catherine Hangen, A Concordance to the Complete Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Chicago, 1941), s.v. forest.

55. See Ives, pp. 57-58, for a summary of Anne's schooling at the French court and the effects of her strong personality on Henry's court after her return to England in 1522.

56. Jasper Ridley, Henry VIII, citing Cardinal Pole, who was the object of an assassination plot directed by Wyatt (p. 325).

57. Rebholz, p. 343.

58. OED, s.v. field, I.1, for combinations of field and forest (or wood) to indicate comprehensive space. The examples given range from 1112 to 1538.

59. Life and Letters, pp. 4-5.

60. To his son, Wyatt urges the study of Seneca and Epictetus (Letter II, Collected Poems [Harvard], p. 250); in reflecting on the bloody days of Anne Boleyn's fall (CLXXVI), he takes his refrain from Seneca's Phaedra (1140); “Stond who so list vpon the Slipper toppe” (CCXL) translates Thyestes, 391-403; “Senec and Plato” call the lover from Love's “lore” in XIII. Robert Hoopes comments on patterns of stoic thought in Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 33-45. Plutarch was not a stoic thinker, but Wyatt's The Quyete of Mynde provides a cluster of relevant themes.

61. There is a valuable discussion of denotation and connotation by Wesley Trimpi in Ben Jonson's Poems: A Study in the Plain Style (Stanford, 1962), pp. viii-ix. See also Douglas Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton, 1967), pp. 87-119, esp. p. 94 and p. 94, n. 10. Peterson argues that Wyatt consistently associates the plain style with anticourtly attitudes (p. 118).

62. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, 1965), s.v. emblem. I use this term tentatively, for emblem literature formally begins in Europe in 1531 with Alciati's work. George Boas has defined, however, the broad context of reception: The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, tr. George Boas, Bollingen Series, No. 23 (New York, 1950), pp. 17-54. Ives's chapter, “Anne Boleyn: Art, Image and Taste,” indicates Anne's interests in public and personal displays of art—visual, musical, literary (pp. 273-301). Wyatt's family coat of arms is displayed in a medallion portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which is reproduced in Life and Letters, p. 172.

63. Heraldic bearings should be seen as a part of the receptive context for emblems; see K. K. Ruthven on heraldic and emblematic conceits (pp. 31-38). Heraldry is also the link to court concerns. Strong points to “the fundamental principle governing all Tudor and Jacobean portraiture. It is concerned with recording and defining in visual terms the position of a sitter in society.” He includes coats of arms in his subsequent list of gems, robes, and armor (The English Icon [London, 1969], p. 29). E. H. Gombrich discusses a related issue of context in his comments on “the philosophy of the Impresa”: “the impresa is more like demonstration than a metaphor. It applies the lesson of a particular observation to a rule of life. Its power lies less in the comparison than in its capacity to be generalized” (Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance [London, 1972; rpt. 1975], p. 163).

64. For the distinction between body and soul in the emblem, see Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London, 1939), I, 108-207. See also the separation of coats of arms from emblems and the three-part division of the emblem or device into body (picture), spirit (invention), and soul (motto) in the quotation from Gaspard de Saulx cited by Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), p. 148, n. 8.

65. For the various applications, see “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, 1970), Index, s.v. unmetaphoring.

66. This phrase is from Wyatt's letter of April 15, 1537 to his son, written from Paris while travelling to his ambassador's post in Spain (Collected Poems [Harvard], p. 245).

67. Despite my admiration for Greenblatt's powerful insights and persuasive skills, I find his commentary richer than his conclusion that Wyatt's courtly self-fashioning appropriates his power of inwardness and suffers in consequence its own exposure (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 156). I find it odd, for different reasons in each scholar's case, that neither Greenblatt nor Waller (Diacritics, 1987) makes any mention of Elizabeth Darrell, Wyatt's mistress and the mother of their illegitimate son Francis Darrell (Life and Letters, p. 211). Inwardly rather than officially sanctioned, their relationship indicates, together with their connections to both Catherine of Aragon and Thomas Cromwell, the densely complicated crossings in the patterns of sexual, political, and religious allegiance at the Tudor court. For what is thought to involve a contrast of Anne and Elizabeth (“Phillis”), see the sonnet “If waker care if sodayne pale Coulour” (XCVII).

68. Wyatt's relation to the English court was complex, for it was bound up with his family and the figure of his father, who had been imprisoned and tortured under Richard III (Life and Letters, p. 1). Wyatt's letter of April 15, 1537 to his son describes his own sense of ethical self-fashioning: “Think and ymagine alwais that you are in presens of some honist man that you know, as Sir Jhon Russel [and] your father-in-law” (Collected Poems [Harvard], p. 245). The letter then describes Sir Henry Wyatt's mediating role between the poet and God and leaves implicit the father's mediating role between the poet and the King after the 1536 imprisonment. See Sir Henry Wyatt, Letters to Henry VIII (May 7, 1536) and Thomas Cromwell (June 14, 1536), Life and Letters, p. 30; pp. 35-36.

69. Surrey's use of “travayle” is especially pointed given the circumstances of Wyatt's death; see n. 49 above.

70. Nott first identified Alamanni's Satire X as Wyatt's source. Muir and Thomson present the changes (Collected Poems, pp. 347-55), and offer CV (with CVI and CVII) as the first English example of terza rima. Greenblatt suggests the irony of a celebration of freedom on lands acquired from the King and by appropriation of monastic properties. But the Allington estate was bought by Wyatt's father in 1492, and the poet was born there in 1503. The properties Greenblatt seems to refer to involved land exchanges with the King just before Wyatt's death, and portions of them were bequeathed to Elizabeth and Francis Darrell, with the consent and help of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 131-32; Life and Letters, pp. 2-3, 211, and 211, n. 2).

71. With Wyatt and Sir Henry Norris (executed as one of Anne's lovers), John Poins participated in the Christmas tournament of 1524-1525. As an old friend, he was the proper mediator to judge Wyatt before the King's visit to Allington Castle in July 1536. Henry used this method of positioning “old friends” on various occasions: for example, Wyatt was named to his father's office in the coronation ceremonies for Anne; Henry Percy, Anne's first lover and later Earl of Northumberland, was named to her jury (Life and Letters, p. 4; Rebholz, p. 24; Ives, pp. 77-80).

72. Puttenham's discussion of Wyatt and Surrey invites us to pair them as courtly poets. In religious matters of course they were in opposed parties, although that does not seem to have lessened Surrey's affection. By invoking Wyatt's penitential psalms, Surrey was claiming, possibly, a Protestant authority for allusions and arguments against royal tyranny and sexual misconduct. See Mason, Humanism and Poetry, pp. 236-54; Greenblatt, pp. 115-28; Crewe, pp. 48-78.

73. Collected Poems (Harvard), p. 249.

74. Life and Letters, p. 184. Muir also prints the speech that Wyatt prepared and may have delivered before the Council; there is no record of an actual trial (pp. 187-209).