SOURCE: Greenblatt, Stephen. “Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt's Poetry.” In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, pp. 115-56. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

[In the following excerpt, Greenblatt analyzes the “intimate relationship between Wyatt's poetry and the forces that shape his identity,” notably politics, religion, and sexuality.]

There is no translation that is not at the same time an interpretation. This conviction, stamped indelibly in the mind by the fact that men went to the stake in the early sixteenth century over the rendering of certain Greek and Latin words into English, lies at the heart of virtually all of Wyatt's translations, never more so than in his version of the penitential psalms—the traditional grouping of psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143—that were, in the climate of the 1530s and '40s, essentially and unavoidably controversial.¹ Rejecting the relatively mild formulations of his major contemporary sources, Wyatt captures the authentic voice of early English Protestantism, its mingled humility and militancy, its desire to submit without intermediary directly to God's will, and above all its inwardness.² Where the Vulgate still clearly speaks at the close of the 51st psalm of a historical Zion and Jerusalem, where John Fisher, the martyred Catholic bishop of Rochester whose devotional work Wyatt had before him, speaks of the “heavenly city of the Church Triumphant,” Wyatt speaks, in words of his own invention, of “Inward Sion, the Sion of the ghost” and of the “heart's Jerusalem.”³ He thus heightens the significance of the psalmist's refusal to offer outward sacrifices, a refusal grounded on the conviction that God “delightest not in no such gloze / Of outward deed as men dream and devise” (498-99). The last clause is also Wyatt's addition and serves to distinguish, in the manner of Tyndale and Luther, between the idolatrous worship of the products of the human imagination and the true inwardness of faith.⁴

My initial purpose in this chapter will be to examine the extent to which the intense inwardness Wyatt voices in the Penitential Psalms is brought into being by the forces sketched in the preceding chapter. Unlike More, Wyatt has no supreme consensus, set apart from royal power and made visible in an enduring institution, that absorbs into itself all individual voices and confers ultimate meaning on human lives. But unlike Tyndale, Wyatt does not give himself over entirely to the Word: theological self-fashioning—the power of the book over identity—cannot be long separated from secular self-fashioning—the power of sexual and political struggles at court. The church in England has become an adjunct of the state, and a discussion of Wyatt's psalms will be drawn irresistibly from the presentation of the self in the court of God to the presentation of the self in the court of Henry VIII, that is, to the court lyrics. With these and the satires, we move decisively away from the religious context that governed inwardness in More and Tyndale. Indeed it is likely that even in the presence of God, Wyatt casts a nervous glance at the king; the two irascible autocrats seem, in any case, to bear a striking resemblance to each other.

We must not, however, pass too quickly to a sense of the immediate occasion, biographical or more broadly historical, of Wyatt's poetry, even in its most intimate moments. Though Wyatt gives it both a personal and markedly Protestant cast, the inwardness of the Penitential Psalms is by no means either his own innovation or the invention of the early sixteenth-century Reformers. It is embedded in the poems themselves, which are among the most influential expressions of soul-sickness in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They speak of stain and cleansing, guilt and redemption; they address a God who “desirest truth in the inward parts” (51:6); they cry out from isolation and persecution and express an intimate longing, fear, and trust. Inwardness, to be sure, is not their only dimension: they express an intense fear of physical assault, unmerited when it comes from malicious enemies, all too justified when it comes from God. But the body's pain is inseparable from the pain of the “heart”: an insupportable dread, a sense of worthlessness and insignificance, a tormenting awareness of having ruptured a personal bond essential to life itself. Likewise, there are expressions of a communal, indeed specifically national character, particularly at the close of psalm 130, but the concerns of the whole society are reached only by way of the individual; the primordial penitential experience takes place at the level of the isolated, suffering soul. This soul may be said, of course, to embody humanity as a whole, but such representative status only heightens the importance of the individual.⁵ The psalms enact not a communal confession of sin, a guilt born by the entire community and purged by a shared ritual of absolution, but an unmistakably personal crisis of consciousness. It is the individual, cut off from his kinsmen and followers, who acknowledges his fault and suffers divine chastisement. And if this chastisement bears eloquent witness to the otherness of God before whom and against whom one has sinned, it is felt at the same time as the lash of conscience, the secret sense of guilt in the innermost reaches of one's being.⁶

Taken together, as they appear to have been for centuries, the penitential psalms seem to express not only powerful states of defilement, sin, and guilt and the complementary longing for cleansing, forgiveness, and redemption but a movement, a psychological and moral pattern, which other men can experience—reenact—in their own lives. The movement may be likened to the course of an illness in which the initial onslaught is followed by a brief remission, then succeeded by progressively graver assaults and remissions until an intense crisis is experienced and passed, whereupon the disease slowly wanes. Each of the psalms thus expresses a version of the whole, but in graded degrees of intensity and elaboration; the movement is at once repetitive and linear. Such considerations have far more than formal, aesthetic importance, for these poems bear a powerful functional significance from a very early date; they constitute, in effect, a dynamic mold, one of the models by which men organize their experience. As the Church's penitential system develops, this pattern becomes institutionalized, prescriptive. Thus in a canon from the monk Regino's Ecclesiastical Discipline (ca. 906), the bishop is instructed to lead the penitents into the church, where “prostrate upon the floor, he shall chant with tears, together with all the clergy, the seven penitential psalms, for their absolution.”⁷ At this point, penance still reflects the wholly public character of the system of forgiveness and reconciliation that characterizes the early Middle Ages; the inwardness of the psalms is not thereby canceled, but it is absorbed into a ritual that marks the entry of the penitent, once and for all, into a formal social category, with rigid obligations and severe disabilities that continue until death. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, this system had been largely replaced by the momentously different penitential practice that we glimpsed in the previous chapter: a system that called for regular, individualized, and “private” confession to a priest. The privacy should not be overemphasized: the confessional box was a mid-sixteenth-century innovation, and, until its widespread use, confession was relatively open and would have been audible (and no doubt interesting) to those waiting their turn to confess. But at least in comparison with the earlier period, the confession of the High Middle Ages is profoundly private in the sense of its intense interest in the inward state of the individual penitent, a state that must be repeatedly and convincingly rendered in discourse, narrated to the priest. The Church's concern for the penitent's willingness to perform overwhelming disciplinary exercises gives way to a concern for the sincerity of the penitent's contrition, which now becomes the central part of the sacrament of penance.⁸

The seven psalms take their place in this new system not only as a ritual practice—part of the penitent's public “satisfaction”—but, more significantly, as a guide to a desired spiritual condition. Accordingly, the psalms' traditional attribution to King David is insisted upon with increasing elaboration of details; David comes to function as a kind of model penitent whom the worshiper can imitate.

The poems' formal characteristics as a group—their fusion of the cyclical and the linear, their passage through anguish and dread to consolation and security—are now seen clearly as a depiction of the penitent's spiritual progress, one that must be repeated on a regular basis. The recitation that in the tenth century marked a decisive, unrepeatable act becomes by the early sixteenth century the daily practice of a pious layman like Thomas More. This is not to say that the psalms have now become a strictly psychological expression, the representation of a particular cast of mind at a moment of crisis. Such a perception of psychological processes is indeed possible, almost inevitable by the late Middle Ages, but even when there is a lengthy discussion of the character of David, as in Fisher's commentary, the psychological is carefully subordinated to the doctrinal. Everywhere in the seven psalms, Fisher sees injunctions of the proper threefold method of doing penance: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The three stages, he comments, may be likened to the erasure of writing: with each step the marks are further effaced until the paper is once again perfectly clear. And the “paper” in question is not simply the mind of the penitent: he may “feel” cleansed after contrition and confession, but there remains in the soul “a certain taxation or duty” that must be satisfied with pain in this life or in purgatory.⁹

Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all attacked this threefold penance, though they disagreed about the extent to which any confession to a minister of God's word was to be allowed. Tyndale, as we have seen, carried this attack to England, asserting that confession was the key to the Church's spy network and hence a mainstay of its corrupt power. But the Protestant assault did not extend to the inwardness fostered by the penitential system or to psychological models like the penitential psalms. On the contrary, contrition becomes for Luther still more the essence of repentance, precisely because the insitutional role in absolution—the power of the keys—has been cast away. The presence of Protestant ideology in Wyatt's version of the penitential psalms, in the lines we have quoted and elsewhere, may be likened (as I have already suggested in another context) to a seizure of power, a coup carried out in the very heart of the individual. At stake, as Luther suggested in his commentary on the 51st psalm, was virtually the whole doctrine of the Reformed faith: the nature of sin, repentance, grace, justification, and worship.¹⁰

Thus the inwardness of these poems can in no way be conceived as Wyatt's private affair, any more than can the controversial writings of More and Tyndale. The intensely personal moment—the withdrawal into the darkness of the self, the anguished acknowledgment of festering guilt, the solitary straining for reconciliation with God—is intertwined with the great public crisis of the period, with religious doctrine and the nature of power.¹¹ The consequence for the penitential psalms as poetry is that now more than ever the text does not respect aesthetic limits, indeed is scarcely even “poetry” in the sense in which we usually use the term: that is, rhythmical language formally marked off from the ordinary, practical functions of discourse. To be sure, the penitential psalms are decisively marked off from the everyday; they are, after all, sacred, but their sacredness only intensifies the insistence upon the interpenetration of text and reader, and by “reader” we must include as the first and most important instance Wyatt himself in his psychological and spiritual particularity. This particularity had always been implicit in the psalms, we have argued, even in the Church's institutional framework: a man “shall not confess another man's trespass,” Fisher comments, “but only his own.”¹² Still, the sacrament of penance directed attention toward the consoling and disciplining power of the Church. With the rejection of the penitential system, as we have already seen in the case of Bainham, the book assumes a still greater compulsion and intimacy. The penitential psalms must be experienced as expressions of the reader's own consciousness: the distance between reader and text is effaced and the poems absorbed into the reader's inner life, which is in turn the legitimate object of both secular and religious power. And if this conception seems to exalt the reader (or the translator), such exaltation is sharply tempered by the fact that here, as with Tyndale's Obedience, the reader is virtually created by the text he absorbs. In Wyatt, as in Tyndale, translation is the supreme expression of this paradoxical relationship, for the translator at once pays homage to the original text and transforms it into the representation of his own voice and culture.¹³

Discussions not only of the penitential psalms but of virtually all of Wyatt's poetry have generally reflected either the belief that Wyatt inherited an inert mass of clichés and, by virtue of his intense individuality, managed at his best to infuse this frozen material with warmth and life, or the belief that his poetry exemplified “the clash between a desperate personal need and the impersonal and ceremonial forms which such needs assumed in the court of Henry VIII.”¹⁴ Such views posit an opposition between the constraining, repressive force of literary and social convention and the vivifying force of personality, emotional need, honesty—an opposition that seems to me a romantic misreading of the early sixteenth century. I would suggest that there is no privileged sphere of individuality in Wyatt, set off from linguistic convention, from social pressure, from the shaping force of religious and political power. Wyatt may complain about the abuses of the court, he may declare his independence from a corrupting sexual or political entanglement, but he always does so from within a context governed by the essential values of domination and submission, the values of a system of power that has an absolute monarch as head of both church and state. For all his impulse to negate, Wyatt cannot fashion himself in opposition to power and the conventions power deploys; on the contrary, those conventions are precisely what constitute Wyatt's self-fashioning. If as a poet Wyatt seems to be set off from his contemporaries, it is not because he managed to burst through imprisoning clichés, but because in this aspect of a cultural competition he proved himself a superior performer. Far from struggling against the supposed anonymity of received forms, Wyatt seems to me to have been almost incapable of both genuine anonymity and detachment from received forms. He could, of course, play with masks—the translations are all a kind of elaborate masking—but the masks are part of the social game in which he is fully implicated as a competing player. They do not permit an authentic detachment.

It is in the light of such a general conception of Wyatt's self-fashioning, I suggest, that we must understand his attempt to “dramatize” the penitential psalms by borrowing from Aretino the “historical” prologues that set the poems in the context of a notorious abuse of power, King David's adultery with Bathsheba and his responsibility for the death of her husband Uriah. The psalms are conceived as dramatic soliloquies, David's anguished response to the prophet Nathan's denunciations, and it would first appear that such a setting would have the opposite effect from the one I have described: that is, the historical framework would seem to distance the poems from both poet and reader by insisting upon the local and particular circumstances of their original composition. But the dramatic setting—which is handled awkwardly and, for the modern reader, lends little but histrionic vulgarity to the entire sequence—seems to have appealed to Wyatt precisely because it embeds the poems firmly in a world of royal power he inhabited. That is, we must conceive the drama not as a performance that takes place behind a proscenium arch that frames and isolates the represented action but as an interlude that is thrust in among the ordinary lives of the beholders.

If, as H. A. Mason suggests, Wyatt wrote the work in 1536, when he was imprisoned and nearly executed in the aftermath of the fall of Anne Boleyn, the invocation of David may glance, slyly and indirectly, at Henry VIII himself. Instead of behaving with self-righteous and murderous indignation, the king should emulate David—the implication would run—and repent his own scandalous abuse of power in the service of his lust. In Wyatt's psalms, wrote Surrey, “Rulers may see in a mirror clear / The bitter fruit of false concupiscence.”¹⁵ The setting, if this reading is accurate, provided Wyatt not only with a mirror to hold up to the king—something akin to the parable Nathan first uses to awaken David's conscience—but with a mask to protect himself against the king's wrath, for the Tudor monarch bore scant resemblance to the king of Israel, and it would have been fatal for a subject to point his finger directly at him and say, “Thou art the man.” As Morus and Hythlodaeus both grasped, anything short of abject flattery had to be put to the autocratic ruler with tactful indirection; the principle was stated memorably by Sir Walter Ralegh when asked why he chose to write about the ancient past rather than his own times: “whosoever in writing a modern History, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.”¹⁶ As if to protect his teeth, Wyatt's mask in the psalms is of double thickness: not only is the moral drawn from the life of the biblical ruler, but the setting is a translation from the Italian. The implied reflection upon Henry VIII has what government spokesmen now call “deniability.”

Quite apart from these considerations of self-preservation, the allusion to the king, if present at all (and the dating of Wyatt's poetry remains uncertain), seems to me subordinated to interests at once more personal and more general. Wyatt's poetic individuality is not something uncovered, disclosed as by the lifting of a veil, but something put on, created by the brilliant assimilation of literary materials. In the case of the psalms, those materials focus particular attention on the interplay of power and desire: by using the Bathsheba story as the context for the entire sequence, the Renaissance in effect sexualizes what in the original is a broader expression of sinfulness and anxiety. The speaker of the psalms—the voice seems unmistakably Wyatt's, the condition his own—is surrounded by enemies who conspire against him, but his worst enemies are the “mermaids” within himself, his senses, who have contrived to “usurp a power in all excess” and who must be forced “by constraint” to “Obey the rule that reason shall express” (175). Under the “tyranny of sin,” the poet has been entrained into “filthiness,” his “entrails infect with fervent sore” (353).¹⁷ Where the Vulgate describes the psalmist's nightly grief as an aspect of that misery which he begs the Lord to heal, Wyatt and his contemporary sources describe it as a kind of prophylactic discipline:

By nightly plaints, instead of pleasures old,
I wash my bed with tears continual,
To dull my sight that it be never bold
To stir my heart again to such a fall.

(148-51)

As a result of this discipline, and with the help of God, the poet can “stop his ears” to the mermaids' songs and block the sensual tempters from reaching his fortified heart. The repentant David, we are told in the prologue to psalm 39, is now “Inflamed with far more hot affect / Of God than he was erst of Bersabe” (317-18).

This transference of “hot affect” from mistress to the Lord is at the center of Wyatt's rendering of the Penitential Psalms, and the force of the transformation of desire is intensified by the fact that God is present not only as merciful friend but as stern judge:

O Lord, I dread, and that I did not dread
I me repent, and evermore desire
Thee, thee to dread.

(83-85)

To love God is to love the smiter, the punisher whose heavy hand was so “increased” upon him both day and night, in Wyatt's elaboration of psalm 32,

                                                            and held my heart in press
With pricking thoughts bereaving me my rest,
That withered is my lustiness away.

(246-48)

The turning of eros from Bathsheba to God, the transformation of desire from “filth” to worship, is effected through submission to domination:

                                                                                I, lo, from mine error
Am plunged up, as horse out of the mire
With stroke of spur: such is thy hand on me,
That in my flesh for terror of thy ire
Is not one point of firm stability,
Nor in my bones there is no steadfastness:
Such is my dread of mutability.

(333-39)

It is not until we reach the phrase “with stroke of spur” that we realize that the peculiar expression “Am plunged up” is a full passive; it captures with uncanny accuracy the paradoxical act of rising beneath and because of immense downward pressure. This ascent through the acceptance of domination from on high is for Wyatt the quintessential penitential experience.¹⁸

Submission to domination is, as we have seen, at the center of Tyndale's Lutheran politics and theology. In Wyatt's psalms we encounter one of the psychological aspects of this ideology: sexuality in its natural, that is sinful, state is aggressive and predatory; in its redeemed state, passive. Sexual aggression—that which motivated David's abuse of power—is transferred entirely to the sphere of transcendent power, where it serves to bring about penitence.

If the penitential experience is marked by a loss of “firm stability,” a sense that the body has no “steadfastness,” the pain of this uncertainty—as the language implies, this impotence—is welcome insofar as it leads to a higher stability and firmness grounded outside the body. The goal, to reverse one of the tenets of phenomenology, is to lose the body as our “point of view on the world, the place where the spirit takes on a certain physical and historical situation.”¹⁹ This centrality of the body, a given of modern consciousness, is seen as unbearable, at once vulnerable to mutability and presumptuously independent: the senses must be checked, the body not permitted to be our central human expression in the world.²⁰ By the time he composed his translations of the psalms, Wyatt had encountered the Inquisition and endured two imprisonments, the latter extremely perilous. In 1536 from his cell in the Tower, he appears to have watched the execution of Anne Boleyn: “The bell-tower showed me such sight / That in my head sticks day and night.”²¹ In the late 1530s, Wyatt wrote to his son of the “thousand dangers and hazards, enmities, hatreds, prisonments, despites, and indignations” he had faced, and his father had endured the same: if “the grace of God that the fear of God always kept with him, had not been, the changes of this troublesome world that he was in had long ago overwhelmed him. This preserved him in prison from the hands of the tyrant [Richard III] that could find in his heart to see him racked, from two years and more prisonment in Scotland, in Irons and Stocks, from the danger of sudden changes and commotions.”²² The son to whom this brief family chronicle was written was beheaded for treason by Queen Mary.

In such a world, an obsession with “steadfastness” and a mistrust of the body are hardly surprising. The psalms at once reproduce the experience of power, by celebrating a crushing disciplinary force, and transfer this experience to a “higher” level, where the spirit is secured from the vulnerability of the body. The victim of both the homage to secular power and its transcendence is the body as the perceiving center of human existence. Repentence entails an assault upon the primacy of perception, an assault signaled by David's withdrawal from the world of light—the world in which his senses are kindled by the vision of “Barsabe the bright”—to the cave “wherein he might him hide / Fleeing the light, as in prison or grave” (61-62). The first psalms are sung in total darkness, relieved midway through the sequence by a mysterious beam of divine light that pierces the cave striking the harp and, by reflection, David's eyes, “Surprised with joy by penance of the heart” (316). This is the light not of bodily but of spiritual perception, a distinction underscored by the fact that David stares “as in a trance” upon the ground and, still more, by the frequent descriptions of David's prone or kneeling position—his humble abandonment of the upright posture that establishes human beings in perceptual opposition to the world of objects.²³ The body itself must be reduced from the presumptuous independence of the perceiver to the status of an object in the world, gazed upon by the creator as by a jailor. Imprisonment (and we should recall that Wyatt probably translated the psalms just after his release from the Tower) becomes not an object of fearful contemplation but a metaphor for the state of grace.

The psalmist thus pleads with God, “Do not from me turn thy merciful face,” and Wyatt adds, revealingly, “Unto my self leaving my government” (543-44). To be left alone, unregarded and self-governing, is far worse than to be punished, for as in Tyndale or, more familiarly, in Donne's Holy Sonnets, identity is achieved in moments of chastisement: “For thou didst lift me up to throw me down, / To teach me how to know myself again” (575-76).²⁴ Self-knowledge—and the second line here is Wyatt's own—is achieved by submitting the body to discipline, a conception that accorded well with Renaissance child-rearing and educational practices. The sequence closes with a clear indication that his prayers have been answered, that identity has been established outside of himself, beyond his own live bodily being: “For thine am I, thy servant aye most bound” (775). The phrase “aye most bound,” the assurance of eternal domination, is Wyatt's addition and responds to his intense “dread of mutability,” his longing for “steadfastness.” At moments the poet conceives of sin as bondage (341-44) and hence penitence as liberation, but his most persistent wish is for a state of perpetual bound servitude to God:

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

(628-31)

The final phrase, again Wyatt's addition, plays on the now archaic sense of “fere” as “companion” as well as the obvious “fear”: a community is finally fashioned out of dread, a congregation locked into the desired domination. To be “stablished”—bounded and unchanging, all avenues of escape blocked off, forever under the gaze of the Lord—is to be saved from the radical instability that is the poet's fears and hence to approach the timelessness of God: “thou thyself the self remainest well / That thou was erst, and shalt thy years extend” (625-26).

The goal of steadfastness or boundedness was, as we have seen, central to the careers of both More and Tyndale; it is for both Catholic and Protestant the response to a crisis in political and spiritual authority. Wyatt's Penitential Psalms offer us an almost formulaic reduction of the historical, psychological, and literary forces that we have repeatedly encountered: power over sexuality produces inwardness. In other words, the inner life expressed in the Penitential Psalms owes its existence to a wrathful God's power over sexuality; before the Lord's anger was stirred up by “filthy life,” David was blind to his own inwardness, an inwardness he is now driven to render in speech. Hence divine power over adulterous sexuality produces penitential inwardness. The imposition of secular power has its place in the production of penitential inwardness as well, particularly if the impetus behind Wyatt's translation was the king's violent wrath against his adulterous wife and her alleged lovers.

Each of the terms of the formula we have extracted from the psalms represents a rich interaction of meanings. David's abuse of his political power—the monopoly of legitimate force that enables him to send Uriah to his death—is the result of the sensual usurpation of reason's power within him. This ursurpation in turn is an aspect of the war between sin and faith in which God is invoked as a merciful ally against the feared enemy, but God is at the same time the threatening, wrathful judge whom men must fear and to whom they must submit. The proper mode of relation to this divine power is directly linked to the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, and hence to the temporal as well as spiritual power of the Church. As even this brief sketch should make clear, not only is the term power itself multivalent but it insistently involves the other multivalent terms sexuality and inwardness. Sexuality is both the sinful desire that must be resisted and the “hot affect” to God, both the rebellious longing to gratify the senses and the passionate, tearful craving for self-abasement and submission. Inwardness is a psychological state (and hence subjective) and a spiritual condition (and hence objective); it bespeaks withdrawal and yet is insistently public, for we may only encounter a discursive inwardness, one dependent not only upon language but upon an audience. Indeed it is precisely this audience, in the figure of God as ultimate reader, who has brought the psalms into being by the pressure of his hand, and so we are returned from inwardness to divine power. The overarching effect of the penitential psalms as poetry (insofar as they succeed at all) is to insist upon the interdependence of categories which, in ordinary discourse, have an illusory distinctness. The poems express a single, unified process which we may describe in religious terms as penitence or in psychological terms as loving submission to domination. And Wyatt attempts to convey this process by fashioning a new poetic technique, introducing terza rima into English and, as important, forging a language sufficiently forceful and subtle to represent the fusion of power, sexuality, and inwardness.

This sense of an intimate relationship between Wyatt's poetry and the forces that shape his identity may be confirmed by examining his other terza rima poems, the satires. Like the psalms, the satires appear to have been written in the wake of a personal crisis, quite possibly the same crisis: in 1536, following a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk and coincident with the arrest of Anne Boleyn and her alleged lovers, Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower, from which, after several anxious weeks, he was released with the command to return home to Allington Castle and learn, under his father's eye, “to address him better.”²⁵ Both sets of poems then may jointly represent his response to this command, a struggle to clear himself of the entanglements that had nearly brought him to the scaffold and to achieve a new mode of “address.” Both invoke the pressure of power; both turn in revulsion from the allurements of lust; both depict retreat from the locus of corruption to safer ground, in the psalms a “dark Cave,” in the satires “Kent and Christendom.” The psalms express, as one critic notes, certain aspects of the secular stoic doctrine of the satires: the longing for steadfastness, “firm stability,” wholeness and integrity. The satires, for their part, have at moments a homiletical fervor that links them to the psalms.²⁶ In both, through the experience of power the poet discovers his true voice.

But if the similarities between the two sets of poems are sufficient to suggest that they both emerged from the same or at least highly similar circumstances, the differences between them are too great to be bridged with a single term, such as “Christian stoicism”; rather, they seem to represent alternative and even competing modes of self-fashioning. We may recall Thomas More in 1516, torn between those versions of himself that he calls Hythlodaeus and Morus; in just such a spirit, Wyatt may have represented to himself in poetry contrasting ways of facing his circumstances and shaping his identity. Thus though both the psalms and the satires self-consciously give voice to a “true” self, stripped of falsification and corruption, we encounter two distinct versions, the former produced by submission, the latter by negation. Where the psalmist longs to be utterly bound by God's will, to accept eternal domination, the satirist discovers himself in the act of saying no. Where the psalmist prays, “Do me to know what way thou wilt I bend” (760), the satirist lists all that he cannot do—“I cannot frame my tongue to feign,” “I cannot crouch nor kneel,” “I cannot with my work complain and moan,” “I cannot speak and look a saint,” and so on for dozens of verses—until he bursts forth in a general cry of negation: “I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be.”²⁷ Of course, though distinct, submission and negation are not necessarily incompatible; we have already seen them yoked in a powerful ideological form in Tyndale's Obedience, a work that may well have influenced Wyatt's inwardness. The attack on the corruptions of the great is carefully qualified by the satirist's denial that he scorns or mocks “The power of them to whom fortune hath lent / Charge over us, of Right, to strike the stroke” (“Mine Own John Poins,” 8-9), while the psalmist's turn to God presupposes something like the satirist's rejection of the court. Yet already in Tyndale, submission and negation pull tensely against each other; in Wyatt's psalms and satires they appear to strain toward opposing expressions.²⁸

Where David pleads with God not to run away, “Unto my self leaving my government,” the speaker of the second satire, “My Mother's Maids,” counsels self-possession:

Then seek no more out of thy self to find
The thing that thou hast sought so long before,
For thou shalt feel it sitting in thy mind.

(97-99)

Where the psalms are solitary expressions of anguish, sinfulness, and faith, the satires are confident, moralizing, and self-justifying conversations with friends. Where the psalms long for an end to the isolated self by means of submission to God's domination, the satires call for retrenchment, renunciation of the longing for power and wealth, acceptance of limitation in the name of freedom and security. The psalms represent an attempt to break away from enveloping corruption by means of a radical reformation of the self, a plunge into the intense emotions of dread, love, and willing servitude. The satires counsel a retreat from anxiety; the individual does not seek to be driven or possessed or crushed but to be steadfast and independent. He grants the right of rulers “To strike the stroke,” but then quickly turns to his own integrity, untouched by any outward force, incapable of compromise, hypocrisy and doubleness. This “self-content,” a value far from the spirit of the psalms, is the key to a mastery over the accidents of existence, the answer to the restlessness, anxiety, and posing of court society. The goal of the satires is not as in More to find the institutional guarantee of certainty nor as in Tyndale to reach unmediated union with the Word; the goal is to take control of one's life by finding within oneself a sustaining center.

The worst pain that the satirist can ask God to visit upon the fools he attacks in “My Mother's Maids” is that “looking backward” they may see the bright figure of virtue and, “whilst they clasp their lusts in arms across,” “fret inward for losing such a loss.” That is, illicit desire is dismissed not, as in the psalms, because it is mortally sinful and arouses the wrath of a jealous God, but because sexual pleasure is inevitably disappointing:

Live in delight even as thy lust would
And thou shalt find when lust doth most thee please
It irketh straight and by itself doth fade.

(“My Mother's Maids,” 81-83)²⁹

This is the closest Wyatt comes in the satires to the Stoic's outright rejection of the body epitomized in Seneca's flat pronouncement: “Refusal to be influenced by one's body assures one's freedom.”³⁰ Accordingly, “My Mother's Maids” comes closest to Seneca's conviction that it is possible to live invulnerable in the midst of viciousness and depravity. Elsewhere Wyatt suggests either that the individual must condemn court corruption and accept the consequences or, alternatively, withdraw to the country simplicity and spareness depicted so delightfully in “Mine Own John Poins”:

This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk
And in foul weather at my book to sit.
In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk
No man doth mark whereso I ride or go;
In lusty leas at liberty I walk.

(80-84)

This simplicity is both a life style and a literary style, a conjunction captured most perfectly perhaps in the deliberately proverbial flatness of “But here I am in Kent and Christendom.” This is spoken in contrast not only to the foreign countries where as diplomat he would have had to practice “Rather than to be, outwardly to seem” (92) but to the London where as courtier he would have had to call the crow a swan and the lion a coward, praise flattery as eloquence and cruelty as justice. “Mine Own John Poins” bitterly assails that divorce between the tongue and the heart which is the constant lament of humanists throughout the sixteenth century. The great enemy is hypocrisy, the ability to feign and play parts:

My Poins, I cannot frame my tongue to feign,
To cloak the truth for praise, without desert,
Of them that list all vice for to retain.

(19-21)

As the long catalog that follows makes clear, most of the vices that the satirist attacks involve what Jürgen Habermas has called “distorted communication”—self-censorship, deceit, false reverence, mystification, inversion—and the strength of the attack lies in its recognition of the essential link between language and power. When speech enters the milieu of the court, it is inevitably perverted; indeed, its perversion is precisely the privilege and the achievement of power which is, as Habermas claims, itself a form of distorted communication.³¹ The satires on court abuses written later in the sixteenth century almost always have recourse to an idealized version of court life, a proper use of power usually located in the figure of the queen and a handful of “perfect” courtiers. It is against this visionary model that particular vices are measured, so that the very attack upon deviations bears witness to the triumph of normative court ideology.³² In Wyatt, by contrast, the essence of power is to prevent a clear grasp of norms of any kind by compelling a systematic perversion of standards:

And he that dieth for hunger of the gold
Call him Alexander, and say that Pan
Passeth Apollo in music manifold,
Praise Sir Thopas for a noble tale
And scorn the story that the knight told.

(“Mine Own John Poins,” 47-51)

What is lost in this topsy-turvy world is not only a grasp of the nature of virtue and truth but an understanding of the self; these, the satire suggests, can only be achieved elsewhere, at a safe distance from power. Wyatt makes his forced retirement seem a noble attempt to purge himself of that cynical role-playing in which he and his poetry had been involved by virtue of participation in the intrigues of court and diplomacy, an attempt to cleanse his speech of its Machiavellian manipulation of appearances. He will discover himself not through the exercise of protean powers of self-transformation, but through a grasp of all that he cannot do, all that his nature will not permit him to learn. And in its clarity and leanness his poetry will be a model of undistorted communication, exemplified by that intimate exchange with a close friend that must have made the form of the verse epistle particularly appealing to him. Wyatt forges for himself a blend of a conversational directness and moral earnestness that enables him to pass gracefully from the lively retelling of a fable—

“Peep,” quoth the other, “Sister, I am here,”
“Peace,” quoth the towny mouse, “why speakest thou so loud?”—

to exalted reflections on its moral:

Alas! my Poins, how men do seek the best
And find the worse, by error as they stray!
And no marvel, when sight is so oppressed
And blind the guide.

(“My Mother's Maids,” 70-73)

The poetic voice here and the values expressed are familiar from the hundreds of similar performances in the centuries that followed; this is the classic voice of what Courthope in 1897 called with perfect precision “an English gentleman conversant with affairs.”³³ Like all such successful models, this voice gradually came to seem inevitable, natural, an object in reality; in Wyatt we may witness one of the crucial moments in its invention. And the purpose it serves is to free the speaker from any implication in the world he attacks; unlike the court lyrics, here he stands safely apart, in firm moral rectitude. Having withdrawn from the court to the country, Wyatt achieves a sense of self-confidence and self-content, of integrity and invulnerability.

Until recently the satires were Wyatt's most admired poems: Warton speaks of “these spirited and manly reflections,” written “with the honest indignation of an independent philosopher, and the freedom and pleasantly of Horace,” Nott of their “force and dignity,” Courthope of their “strength of individual feeling,” and Tillyard of their “air of unaffected self-expression.”³⁴ In their energetic expression of a confident wholeness and independence, they reflected and helped to shape a powerful, enduring sentiment among the English gentry, a sentiment that found its full poetic flowering in the Horatian imitations of the eighteenth century. But it is important to understand how much of the self is left out of this self-presentation, how tightly the nexus of power, sexuality, and inwardness has been reined in.

What is left to express in this “unaffected self-expression”? Inwardness is eloquently praised—

Then seek no more out of thyself to find
The thing that thou hast sought so long before,
For thou shalt feel it sitting in thy mind—

(“My Mother's Maids,” 97-99)

but is defined almost entirely negatively. The satirist claims to have a center in his life from which he speaks with secure assurance, but he pays for this claim in the coldness that lurks beneath the surface energy, the stiffening that seems to preclude the possibility of full emotional life. Sexuality has diminished to nothing: the satirist defines himself by his attack on sexual viciousness in the court and his stoic dismissal of the pursuit of pleasure. Power is denounced as the very essence of corruption: the satirist defines himself by his distance from the pursuit of power and wealth. There is, to be sure, both money and social standing associated with the speaker—hunting and hawking, servants, land on which to walk and ride “at liberty”—but he is not at all implicated in the processes by which this wealth is secured. We may remind ourselves that the estate to which the poet retreats from power is the reward for royal service and that the pleasant acres are swelled with confiscated monastic lands. We may point out the ironic connection between the comfortable means evoked by the phrase “My mother's maids” and the grinding rural poverty so eloquently depicted in the fable of the country mouse and the town mouse; we may observe that the high moral tone of the fable's close counsels an acceptance of wretchedness that is not, after all, the condition of the speaker but of those nameless men and women who support him; we may conclude that the probity and rectitude, the confident individuality, the honest indignation of the speaker feed upon what Raymond Williams eloquently calls the “brief and aching lives of the permanently cheated.”³⁵ But we do so only by standing outside the poems and questioning their fundamental assumptions about the world. To be sure, in “Mine Own John Poins” the poet qualifies his delighted celebration of rural liberty by noting that “a clog doth hang yet at my heel” (86), but the nature of this clog is left unclear and the acknowledgment of its existence is immediately followed by a denial that it constitutes a genuine constraint: “No force for that, for it is ordered so, / That I may leap both hedge and dike full well” (87-88). For the briefest moment we glimpse an unpleasant answer to the question with which the poem has begun—“The cause why that homeward I me draw”: the poet's country freedom is in fact a kind of house arrest. But the thought is dispelled with the image of the gentleman leaping across boundaries, though a lingering reservation survives in “it is ordered so.”

Only in “A Spending Hand,” which may have been written later than the first two satires, is there somewhat more than a perfunctory acknowledgment of the limiting conditions of the rural life and the voice Wyatt has fashioned to praise it. The poem combines the preoccupations of the other satires: it pillories the duplicities of court life—

In word alone to make thy language sweet,
And of the deed yet do not as thou says—

(38-39)

while it exposes the self-deception by which Sir Francis Brian thinks he can successfully combine a career as courtier and diplomat with an “honest name” and a “free tongue.” Yet the celebration of country rectitude that we might have expected is instead both lightly travestied in the speaker's own encomium—“drink good ale so nappy for the nonce, / Feed thyself fat and heap up pound by pound”—and vigorously attacked in Brian's reply: “For swine so groans / In sty and chaw the turds moulded on the ground.” For Wyatt's Brian, the rural retreat is nothing more than bestial sloth, no better than the life of idle monks: “So sacks of dirt be filled up in the cloister.” Against this excremental existence, Brian holds up the ideal of service: “Yet will I serve my prince, my lord and thine.” This is the ideal Wyatt himself inherited from his father, the self-conception of his profession and indeed of his whole social class. This is the principle they repeatedly invoke to explain to others and above all to themselves their difficult, anxious careers, to make moral sense out of apparent moral chaos, to ward off the claims of competing conceptions of service, such as those embraced by More or Tyndale. This is, in one line of monosyllabic verse, the justification of an entire existence.

At the comparable moment in book 1 of Utopia, Hythlodaeus confronts Peter Giles with what service to the prince entails in the real world: the inevitable and progressive corruption of one's own moral position in pandering to the debased will and pleasure of the ruler. Wyatt here mounts a similar attack by pretending to instruct his friend in the duplicitous arts of advancement at court: if you want to succeed, say one thing and do another, pander to the rich, court wealthy old widows, sell your sister or daughter, and so forth.

“We”—the implied intimate audience constituted by the poem, the audience that assumes Brian's place as recipient of the mock advice—do not take the cynical counsel at face value; we know for a certainty that the pose is a “thrifty jest,” a pointed dramatic irony that heightens rather than undermines the speaker's integrity. How we know this is more difficult to say with precision—we assume that Wyatt is not deliberately exposing his own degradation, we assume that such advice, if seriously intended, would not be committed to paper and that the terms of moral capitulation would be softened, we assume from the model of Horace's satire on legacy hunters or from mock encomia that Wyatt is working in a familiar satiric tradition. And the close of the poem supports these assumptions: the corrupt, worldly proverbs are invoked to be rejected. The rejection, however, only leads back to the unsatisfactory state with which the poem began: to trot still up and down and never rest, running day and night from realm to realm, wearing oneself out to no apparent purpose. To be sure, by the poem's end, this choice is given a certain dignity, the dignity of honest poverty and the acceptance of occasional adversity for speaking the truth. Yet this ethos of selfless, loyal service—the ethos of Lear's noble and true-hearted Kent—seems in Wyatt's poem pallid and abstract, an ideal that can be voiced only by guarding it from all contact with lived experience.

To accept the “free tongue” that the poem celebrates in its last lines as anything more than a hopeless fantasy is to forget everything that the preceding lines have implied: that the corruptions listed with such bitter energy are not those of isolated individuals but of a whole system, that they constitute the rules of the game. It is precisely such a forgetting that the poem seems to demand, and this may be only the extremest instance of that ideological obscuring of unpleasant contradictions or qualifications that we have already witnessed in the first two satires. Wyatt and his peers need to view themselves in a favorable light, to fashion their images as independent, courageous, freedom-loving gentlemen who condemn the viciousness of others, the craven “beasts” who cheat and lie and curry favor. Having rejected the praise of rural retreat, “A Spending Hand” has no alternative but to uphold a vague ideal of service to a prince whose court has been vigorously condemned.

But “A Spending Hand” offers at least one indication that Wyatt is quite conscious of the forgetting: the choice of Francis Brian as the contemner of cynical advice and the spokesman for the values of godliness and an honest name. These are the very last things the historical Francis Brian possessed or represented: wit, bravery, and the ability to survive, yes, but not an honest name. Already by 1519 he had earned notoriety by riding, in company that included the king of France himself, “daily disguised through Paris, throwing eggs, stones and other foolish trifles at the people”;³⁶ Brian was evidently the kind of man a king would take along when he felt the urge to amuse himself in this fashion. His was a career of conniving, betrayal, politic marriage, sycophancy, and pandering. Though Wyatt's poem seems quite deliberately to avoid turning its satire against Brian, more than one of the vices it catalogues bear an uncanny resemblance to well-known incidents in Brian's life.³⁷ There is no explicit internal evidence for an ironic reversal, an exposure of his unscrupulous boon companion as a mock honest man (just as the speaker had pretended to be a mock corrupt man), but some such thought must at least have crossed Wyatt's mind. At a minimum, any contemporary reader of the poem would have had to be dimly conscious of the work of forgetting that he had to undertake to make Brian the spokesman for honesty. The effect of this consciousness is to raise a faint but significant uneasiness about the comfortable stance of gentlemanly rectitude, to signal the potential deviousness of this apparently straightforward discourse. Power, with its distorting influence, was supposed to be “out there,” the object of high-minded contempt, but the satirist himself stands on morally uncertain ground—his position may be itself a kind of pose taken in response to the dictates of power. Men like Brian—and possibly Wyatt himself—find it diplomatically useful to assume a rough honesty and incorruptibility, an air of satirical truth-telling. It is as if Wyatt felt compelled to acknowledge the distance between this stance and reality, to deflect this acknowledgment from himself onto a blatant timeserver like Brian, and then to deflect it further by presenting Brian as an honest man. What should be solid and unambiguous—the poetic alternative to the duplicity of the court—threatens to crack apart, and if the reader hastens to repair the cracks, by excluding as “irrelevant” what he knows about Brian, there remains an unsettling awareness of having done so.

But why should Wyatt have risked subverting his own moral authority? The answer seems to lie in the force of his extraordinary intelligence, in the need to give vent in however indirect a form to his perception of his situation. More accurately, the poetry itself constitutes this perception—the Penitential Psalms and the satires are, by virtue of their poetic mode, enactments of Wyatt's condition, functional registers of his relation to the world. The force of Wyatt's poetry consists precisely in its full, painful engagement in the anxieties, bad faith, and betrayals of his career, even as the poetry is written to serve the ends of that career. The point is worth stressing because of the tendency to read back into the Renaissance the modern notion—not wholly adequate even for our own period in which art has far more autonomy—that poetic technique is developed entirely for its own sake out of a disinterested aesthetic concern for form and apart from both personal interests and the general interests of the culture as a whole. No doubt Wyatt was fascinated with literary form and may have been, in Patricia Thomson's phrase, a “born experimenter.”³⁸ “The English language was rough and its verses worthless,” wrote John Leland in a Latin elegy. “Now, learned Wyatt, it has had the benefit of your file.”³⁹ For Puttenham, in the 1580s, Wyatt and Surrey “were the two chieftains, who having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measure and style of the Italian Poesy …, greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar Poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.”⁴⁰ But as Puttenham's whole work makes clear, this manner of “courtly making” is not at all set apart from the dominant social and political concerns of the culture; “while the Arte of English Poesie is ostensibly a treatise on poetry,” a perceptive critic has recently noted, “it is at the same time one of the most significant arts of conduct of the Elizabethan age.”⁴¹ Wyatt's poetry is, in effect, a species of conduct.

To be sure, the court of Henry VIII has been frequently invoked in discussions of Wyatt's poetry, but, more often than not, for the purpose of dismissing any claims the poetry might make to be taken seriously:

Wyatt, like the other court writers, was merely supplying material for social occasions. Consequently, the study of these poems belongs to sociology rather than to literature.

(H. A. Mason)⁴²

The whole scene comes before us. … We are having a little music after supper. In that atmosphere all the confessional or autobiographical tone of the songs falls away.

(C. S. Lewis)⁴³

But is this really what it meant to write from within the court? Entertainments in the court of Henry VIII were perhaps less lighthearted than Lewis's charming account suggests; conversation with the king himself must have been like small talk with Stalin. And Mason's sense of the trivializing force of “social occasion” may likewise be misleading.⁴⁴ Certainly when we consider even the relatively slight lyrics in the Devonshire MS, we find very little verse that is merely “occasional” (in the sense of those lines still turned out by the poet laureate on the occasion of the queen's birthday). On the contrary, however much these poems impress us as entertainments, fashioned to be read or sung in a sophisticated group of courtiers and ladies, they convince us at the same time that the poet has a stake in them, though the precise nature of that stake may be obscure. Indeed it is precisely their blend of playfulness and danger that marks them as the product of the court; we must imagine a game in which idealism and cynicism, aggression and vulnerability, self-revelation and hypocrisy are tensely conjoined. The game seems often childish, the stakes are enormous and, on occasion, fatal: we would do well to reread The Charterhouse of Parma or to recall More's sense that the great and powerful of his time were madmen performing plays on a scaffold.

Wyatt is a master of this game. He rehearses the familiar tropes and stale paradoxes, parades the appropriate proverbs and turns of phrase, assumes the expected poses, and yet convinces us again and again of the reality of his pain and disillusionment. It is as if the daring of the game consisted in freighting fragile artifice with an unexpected weight of passion. And though Wyatt seems to have had this daring in greater measure than his contemporaries, he was by no means alone: the poems only make sense in a society of competing players. The aggression, anxiety, and vulgarity inherent in all such competitions are, on occasion, undisguised, as in the following lyric that cannot be atrributed with certainty to Wyatt but is clearly a product of the world in which his poems were written:

To wet your eye withouten tear,
And in good health to feign disease,
That you thereby mine eye might blear,
Therewith your friends to please;
And though ye think ye need not fear,
Yet so ye cannot me appease;
But as you list, feign, flatter, or gloze,
You shall not win if I do lose.
Prate and paint and spare not,
Ye know I can me wreak;
And if so be ye care not,
Be sure I do not reck:
And though ye swear it were not,
I can both swear and speak;
By god and by the cross,
If I have the mock, ye shall have the loss.(45)

The poem derives its effect from convincing us that the menace is real, that its moments of roughness and irregularity and obscurity are the result of its embeddedness in a specific, highly charged situation. That situation is a tense sexual struggle, and the lines suggest moves and countermoves that express themselves in a kind of intimate shorthand. Thus the rather obscure exchange, “And if so be ye care not, / Be sure I do not reck,” seems to say, “If you are indifferent to my power to wreak revenge on you—because you do not think me capable of it or because you are counting on my restraint and even my own self-interest—you should understand first, that I do not care about your indifference and second, that I am reckless, that is, I do not care, finally, how badly I am hurt in the revelations that will come out so long as you are hurt even more badly.”⁴⁶ The poet does not shrink in the slightest from the full nastiness of this menace: “You shall not win if I do lose.”

C. S. Lewis writes that when he starts to take the voice and implied sexual relationships in such poems seriously, his sympathy deserts his own sex: “I feel how very disagreeable it must be for a woman to have a lover like Wyatt.” Still, Lewis continues, “I know this reaction to be unjust; it comes from using the songs as they were not meant to be used.”⁴⁷ But the notion that these are merely after-dinner entertainments, distanced and generalized to the point of anonymity, does not really lay to rest the perceptions Lewis so acutely voices only to disavow. As with the Penitential Psalms, personal intensity and inwardness, the felt reality of expressed relationships, is not diminished by literary convention but rather created but it.

The conventions of lyric poetry from the nineteenth century to the present lead us to demand as proof of experiential stringency in art a certain self-conscious opposition to the dominant culture and a high degree of particularity; neither was a requirement of the early sixteenth century. On the contrary, the sense of social compulsion is precisely what gives lyrics like “To Wet Your Eye” their force. The fact that such lyrics are called forth by an entire social ambiance, that they are its most familiar and characteristic expressions, does not mean that the expressions are thereby trivialized. Melancholy was fashionable in the late sixteenth century, as was hysteria in the late nineteenth: neither condition was any the less intense or “real” for being the manifestation of a cultural norm, as much “sociosis” as “neurosis.”⁴⁸ So too, in the wake of the dismantling of the cult of the Virgin, in the absence of a fully articulated celebration of married love, in a cultural milieu dominated by a ruthless despot and pervaded by intrigue and envy, it may not surprise us that court entertainments habitually express disillusionment, frustration, menace, hostility to the very women who are courted, and craving for a security that erotic love cannot offer. The frequency of such expressions, their conventionality, is here the virtual assurance of their lived reality. It is only if one is convinced that poetry emanates spontaneously from an inviolable core of subjectivity and has no significant relation to power that one could conclude, with Mason, that the conventionality of the court lyrics is proof that there is in them “not the slightest trace of poetic activity.”⁴⁹ We must grasp instead that in helping to create the subjectivity they express, these poems are the secular equivalent of the Penitential Psalms. Wyatt and the other court poets are as much written by their conventional lyrics as writers of them.

Wyatt's poetic technique, his fasioning of a powerfully expressive idiom, is inseparably linked to his participation in the court. His language is a tool, a weapon, in a dangerous contest, as the poet of “To Wet Your Eye” is intensely aware:

And though ye swear it were not,
I can both swear and speak;
By god and by the cross,
If I have the mock, ye shall have the loss.

The poet's ability to swear and speak more forcefully and persuasively than his mistress is the heart of his power, the power to hurt her more terribly than she can hurt him, and the poem not only affirms this power but attempts to embody it. This accounts for the curious fusion of recklessness and calculation in the final lines: “By god and by the cross” is at once an impulsive exclamation of anger, a solemn oath to strengthen the force of the threat that follows, and a measured display of that ability to swear that he has just affirmed. As such, it is true to its status as a line in a poem: recklessness in poetry is always calculated recklessness. And calculated recklessness, as Machiavelli observed, is one of the essential techniques for sexual and political survival.

It is not only the ambiance of the English court that should be invoked here but the methods and ethos of that other world in which Wyatt and many of his fellow poets were engaged, Renaissance diplomacy. “You shall not win if I do lose” is a time-honored diplomatic maneuver, “perfected” in the nuclear diplomacy of our age, and this sense of sexual relations as diplomacy extends throughout the poem: masking and unmasking, alliances and appeasement, the threat of losing face (to “have the mock”) and the counterthreat of reprisal. To be sure, there is nothing in this poem that had to come from diplomacy, but the overlapping of themes, here and in many poems by Wyatt and his circle, is striking.⁵⁰

In 1527 Wyatt accompanied Sir John Russell's embassy to the papal court of Clement VII, scheming futilely as the imperial troops, virtually beyond the control of their own officers, advanced toward Rome. The twenty-four-year-old Englishman glimpsed a world that still seems, in Ralegh's phrase, to glow and shine like rotten wood, a world of treachery, sophistication, and boundless corruption. It is above all a world in which power seems to be man's supreme product and goal, power directly linked, as always, to wealth, status, and the monopoly of violence, but also thought of as something quite independent, a possession to be wrested from another, an object of intellectual interest, a consummate manifestation of human energy. This energy is conceived in remarkably personal terms; it is the emanation of the emperor, king, prince, or condottiere in his concrete individuality. This is perhaps why the physical presence of the European rulers—the actual body of Henry VIII, Wolsey, Francis I, Charles V—impresses us intensely for the first time during this period. The ruler's social identity seems to be absorbed into his personal being; his power, for all its dependance upon loyal troops, merchant fleets, treasuries, natural resources, seems to breathe forth from his body. This too is perhaps why the punishment of rebels and traitors in the period becomes so much more protractedly and agonizingly brutal. The fairly straightforward executions, if we may so term them, of the Middle Ages become virtuoso performances of torture, as if the physical torment of the traitor had to correspond fully to the incorporation of power in the body of the prince. Finally, this is perhaps why power and sexuality seem so closely intertwined, manifestations of the same energy of the body. Rebels were castrated, their sexual organs burned before their eyes, prior to execution. Conversely, the prince's sexual acts were affairs of state.⁵¹

Power, conceived in these personal and physical terms, is not only the ability to levy taxes or raise an army but the ability to enforce submission, manifested in those signs of secular worship—bowing, kneeling, kissing of rings—that European rulers increasingly insist upon. If these signs always have an air of fiction about them—and indeed in England they become increasingly fantastic until they reach the aesthetic mania of the court of Charles I—so much the better, because, as we have argued, one of the highest achievements of power is to impose fictions upon the world and one of its supreme pleasures is to enforce the acceptance of fictions that are known to be fictions.

As a diplomat for most of his adult life, Wyatt was engaged at once in the assertion of his master's power (and hence the imposition of his fictions) and in the attempt to weaken and resist the competing power of other rulers. The two functions are inseparable, at least in this period, for the Renaissance seems to have conceived of diplomacy as it conceived of trade: it posited a severely limited substance (power or wealth) and hence assumed that the gain of one party is inevitably the loss of the other. “To think of exchange as advantageous to both parties,” Louis Dumont has recently observed, “represented a basic change and signalled the advent of economics.”⁵² The earlier model of exchange, I would argue, permeated the consciousness of Wyatt and the other male poets of his circle, and helped shape not only political but sexual relations, so that a failure in love is like the rupture of a treaty and a consequent loss of power, while even an erotic triumph seems most often to be achieved at the expense of one or the other of the lovers, as well as of a third party. “I love an other,” Wyatt writes in a moment of stark simplicity, “and thus I hate myself.”⁵³ Any expression of need or dependence or longing is thus perceived as a significant defeat; the characteristic male as well as national dream is for an unshakable self-sufficiency that would render all relations with others superfluous: “I am as I am and so will I be.”⁵⁴ But such a hard, indifferent identity—in conflict, after all, with the Protestant conviction of man's utter helplessness—cannot be sustained; even its few expressions are tinged with anxious defiance or calculating regard for those opinions that are supposedly being scorned. The single self, the affirmation of wholeness or stoic apathy or quiet of mind, is a rhetorical construct designed to enhance the speaker's power, allay his fear, disguise his need. The man's singleness is played off against the woman's doubleness—the fear that she embodies a destructive mutability, that she wears a mask, that she must not under any circumstances be trusted, that she inevitably repays love with betrayal. The woman is that which is essentially foreign to the man, yet the man is irresistably drawn into relations with her; hence the need for the diplomat's art.

Diplomacy then, along with courtiership, seems to have influenced Wyatt's conception of the essential function of discourse which he grasped as a shifting, often devious series of strategic maneuvers designed to enhance the power of the speaker, or rather of the party whom the speaker represents, at the expense of the power of some other party. The distinction between the speaker and the power he represents is worth emphasizing, for it is reproduced at the level of court poetry; that is, the poem itself is a kind of agent, sent forth to perform the bidding of its master. The poem is clearly not the direct expression of its author's mind—it is shaped by the complex aesthetic and social rules of literary production and possesses a certain leeway that ordinary speech does not normally possess. But it is governed by its overarching purpose which is to enhance its creator's personal position, to manifest and augment his power. We may note, in this regard, that Renaissance diplomacy is distinguished by its abandonment of the customary medieval phrases about an ambassador's office, phrases that defined the position in terms of the “public good,” the “general welfare,” the “commonwealth of Christendom,” and the “pursuit of peace.” When, in the late fifteenth century, the Venetian Ermolao Barbaro writes of diplomacy, he states quite simply, “The first duty of an ambassador is exactly the same as that of any other servant of a government, that is, to do, say, advise and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state.”⁵⁵ Wyatt's poetry serves a comparable function in relation to his position at court; and even at a distance from the court, in the psalms and satires, it is above all power that shapes his poetic discourse.

A court lyric, to be sure, may be considered apart from its creator and its immediate context: it finds its way into commonplace books, is set to music, and circulated outside the court, is included in anthologies and quoted in handbooks on the art of poetry. And, after all, we know little enough about the precise circumstances of these poems, many of which have come to us without clear attribution, since appearance in print was something courtiers actively avoided. But if we grasp the extent to which Wyatt and others like him were defined by their relation to power, the extent to which they were at once attracted and repelled by Henry VIII and the world he represented, we grasp more readily in their poetry the heightened awareness of techniques of self-presentation and concealment. As ambassador, courtier, and poet, Wyatt seems to have self-consciously cultivated a bluff manner and a taste for homely proverbs, cultivated, that is, a manner that denies its own cunning. We may recall More's comparable diplomatic masquerading—“full of craft and subtlety,” his foreign rivals reported, concealed “by smooth speech and calm expression in the English way.”⁵⁶ As his dispatches to Henry VIII and Cromwell show, Wyatt developed a fine sensitivity to such nuances of feigning, to the deviously indignant denial of deviousness, to plausible lies and passionate insincerity:

And for the other part that they [the emperor's diplomats] be about the clearing of their purposes with France, I suppose the conclusion of that clearing will be but cloudy. And that they would set out some appearance thereof to win time; for I cannot see that it should be for their purpose if they thought that clearing should come to conclusion to tell it me, unless they would have it hindered rather than furthered, for so they take that we would, or else to see if thereby we would make to them any offer with declaring whereof they might recompense the Frenchmen with the like. But in sum, they of the court that dare a little more liberally speak with their friends make here a mock unto the Frenchmen.⁵⁷

This sensitivity to doubleness, this sense of discourse as a calculated series of deceptive moves, this constant apprehension of betrayal and mockery, is familiar to any reader of Wyatt's lyrical expressions of disillusionment in love: the poet either realizes in the bitter aftermath of betrayal that he has been duped or vows, on the basis of his experience, never to be duped again. The relation between this erotic disillusionment and Wyatt's experience of deception in diplomatic service and the court is clearest in a poem like “What 'vaileth Truth”:

What 'vaileth truth? or, by it, to take pain?
To strive by steadfastness, for to attain,
To be just, and true: and flee from doubleness:
Sithens all alike, where ruleth craftiness,
Rewarded is both false, and plain.
Soonest he speedeth, that most can fain;
True meaning heart is had in disdain.
Against deceit and doubleness
          What 'vaileth truth?
Deceived is he by crafty train
That meaneth no guile and doth remain
Within the trap, without redress,
But for to love, lo, such a mistress,
Whose cruelty nothing can refrain,
          What 'vaileth truth?

So completely are the realms of love and power interchangeable that it is not until the last lines that we know that Wyatt is writing about his mistress at all. Indeed the revelation of this interchangeability is the heart of the reader's experience, for we are induced to read the poem as a brooding reflection on career, rule, and reward until the close jars us into connecting the disillusioned perception of power with the disillusioned perception of love.⁵⁸

Even the formal skill involved in the structuring of such a lyric may derive in part from diplomacy, for beyond imparting a sensitivity to doubleness, Wyatt's ambassadorial experience shaped his consciousness of calculated effect, above all through the manipulation of language in the game of power. In 1540, for example, Wyatt was instructed to call the emperor Charles V an “ingrate” for his refusal to hand over a Welshman in his train, Robert Brancetour, whom Henry VIII wanted arrested for treason and brought to England. According to the account Wyatt sent to the king, Charles was (understandably) incensed at the charge:

“For I would ye know I am not Ingrate and if the king your master hath done me a good turn, I have done him as good or better. And I take it so that I can not be toward him Ingrate. The inferior may be Ingrate to the greater, and the term is scant sufferable between like. But peradventure because the language is not your natural tongue ye may mistake the term.”

“Sir,” quod I, “I do not know that I misdo in using the term that I am commanded.”

“Then,” quod he, “I tell it you to th'end your master know it, and ye how to utter his commandment.”

“Nor I see not,” quod I, “sir, under your supportation that that term should infer prejudice to your greatness. And though yourself, sir, excuseth me by the tongue, yet I can not render that term in my tongue into the French tongue by any other term which I know also to descend out of the Latin, and in the original it hath no such relation to lesserness or greaterness of persons. Although I know it be not so meant to charge your majesty in so evil part that you should so be moved thereby.”⁵⁹

Once the word “ingrate” is used, the focus of attention shifts from Brancetour to what Mattingly calls the “chief burden” of the Renaissance diplomat, “maintaining the dignity of his master's crown in the eternal wrangle over precedence.”⁶⁰ And the nuances of language are the heart of this wrangle: Wyatt grasps immediately that the emperor's seemingly gracious allowance of a possible mistake in translation is a slight, a move to regain the initiative. There is, as both emperor and ambassador know, something outlandish about English: “Nobody in the sixteenth century,” writes Mattingly, “except an Englishman was expected to speak English, not even the perfect ambassador.”⁶¹ Wyatt responds with a clever mixture of firmness, pedantry, and qualification, so that, as he tells it at least, he comes close to “winning” this little encounter. But, we should add, Brancetour was not handed over.⁶²

In this anecdote we not only see again the intimate relation in Wyatt's experience between language and power, the subtle engagement of words in the struggle to dominate, but we glimpse too the central place of translation. Once again criticism has treated Wyatt's remarkable translations as a purely literary affair, whereas in fact their very existence almost certainly depends on his ambassadorial experience. I am speaking not simply of Wyatt's intimate acquaintance, through living abroad, with French and Italian culture, but with the context of that acquaintance. His experience, as we have just seen, made Wyatt highly conscious of the potential shifts in meaning as words pass from one language to another, and this sensitivity intersects with an acute awareness of the way conventions of courtesy and friendliness may conceal hostility and aggression, on the one hand, or weakness and anxiety, on the other. The effects of this subtle art of implication are felt most powerfully in Wyatt's brilliant translation of Petrarch's “Una candida cerva”:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more:
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore.
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the Deer: but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain:
And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold though I seem tame.

Wyatt's debt to Petrarch is clear, but so is his deliberate and careful refashioning of the original poem, his transformation of transcendental idealism into exhaustion and bitterness. Petrarch's pictorialism is discarded, as is his loving attention to time, place, and season; the mystical vision becomes the hunt; the focus shifts from the longed-for object in its exquisite landscape to the mind of the poet. Petrarch depicts an experience of illumination and loss; Wyatt an attempt at renunciation; the former is alone with his unattainable beloved, the latter withdraws from a crowd of hunters. Petrarch's sonnet ends with the poet's fall into the water and the disappearance of the hind; Wyatt's with the inscription on the diamond collar, and this collar, emblematic in Petrarch of the beloved's unattainability, her absolute freedom in and for God, seems in Wyatt a sign of her possession by one vastly more powerful than the poet. “Caesar's I am” is the cold assertion that explicates the string of earlier assertions around which the poem is structured: “I know where is an hind,” “I may no more,” “I leave off therefore,” “I put him out of doubt.” The intimation of power spreads backward like a stain through the preceding lines, so that the whole poem comes to be colored by it.

So rooted does “Whoso List” seem in the cynical realities of court intrigue that critics have confidently identified the hind as Anne Boleyn, who is rumored to have been Wyatt's mistress before she became the possession of Caesar, Henry VIII. This identification is plausible—it follows, after all, from the embeddedness of Wyatt's verse in the politics of the court—but stated thus baldly it seems to me to diminish the effect of the poem, an effect that depends on the poet's immense power of implication, a power heightened, as I have argued, by Wyatt's ambassadorial experience. The poem's brilliance is linked precisely with its restraint and suggestiveness.⁶³ There is, in fact, nothing in the poem that is unequivocally about worldly power and appropriation; even the words “Caesar's I am” may refer, as they do in Petrarch, to the motto inscribed on the collars of the emperor's hinds so that they would be left alone and thence, by the conventional symbolic exchange, to the hind's dedication to God. They do not suggest this transcendental meaning, but that they do not is purely by implication. The poem seems suspended between transcendentalism and cynicism, and the decisive movement in one direction or the other is left to the reader.

This reliance on implication may above all else be simply prudence; it would have been suicidal folly to write directly about the loss of Anne Boleyn to Henry. But it results in a richness of resonance that seems more than a mere side effect. The whole poem is caught up in a series of suspensions, or alternately, in passages from one state to another. The poet has not withdrawn from the hunt; rather he is in the act of trying to disengage himself. Thus the poem opens on a note of detachment and superiority belied by the “alas,” as if a carefully plotted show of cool indifference were undermined by an involuntary expression of grief. The poet then places himself among those “that farthest cometh behind,” only to reveal that this knowledge of his position, this consciousness of his own weariness and the emptiness and vanity of the effort, is to no avail: he cannot detach himself and fully renounce the hunt. No sooner does he acknowledge this inability—“Fainting I follow”—than he affirms, in the same line, his renunciation: “I leave off therefore.” There seem to be two separate, indeed opposing intentions held in tense juxtaposition. As if recognizing this impasse, at line 10 the poet writes as if he were beginning the poem over again, this time not to attempt a clear disengagement of himself from the hunt but a clear statement of its hopelessness, its “vanity.” The reader is left with the impression that, despite the poet's attempts at decisiveness, he never quite “leaves off,” that he is incapable of fully drawing his mind from the “deer”: the poem itself bears witness to his continued obsession even as it records the attempt to disengage himself from it.

And it is not only the poet who is suspended or in passage: just at the point that the hind seems most wild, as free and untouchable as the wind, she is revealed by her diamond collar as tame, and just at the point that she seems most tame, she is revealed as most wild. The collar which is the manifest sign of her tameness is at the same time the manifest sign of her wildness. The phrase “wild for to hold” is richly suggestive: at the simplest level, it means “impossible to grasp,” as the proverb of trying to hold the wind in a net had earlier suggested. The hind is unconfined and uncontrollable; she moves freely without restraint, subject only to her own will. But here, as in other poems by Wyatt, we find the proverb invoked only to be complicated and qualified. “Wild” suggests not only elusiveness but the uncanny menace associated with the medieval tradition of the wild man or wild woman: a being who has fallen away from a state of tameness or civilization to the savage condition of animal, a creature dissolute, licentious, and potentially violent, living outside the bounds of human convention, living outside human bonds. This figure is the focus for some of the deepest fears of medieval and Renaissance culture, for wildness exposes the tenuousness and artificiality of society's elaborate codes and challenges the stable order imposed upon sexuality, sustenance, and government. The wild man or woman represents the radically alien being, unassimilated and unknowable.⁶⁴

“Wild” in this sense signals danger and thus crystallizes that transformation of the hunter into the hunted subtly implied in the poet's inability to draw his wearied mind from the deer. The danger lies not only in the hind's own wildness—her irresistible yet unattainable beauty, her otherness—but in the power of “Caesar”: it is, paradoxically, within the power of the ruler to confer wildness. And, by a further paradox, this wildness is a form of protection for the hind; the collar stops the hunt, transforms the hind from prey to pet or possession. The deer seems tame, and this seeming tameness protects her wildness.

This subtle play on the sense of “wild” is the climax of Wyatt's powers of implication; while remaining ambiguous and elusive, it compels a profound reevaluation of all the preceding terms, above all rendering it impossible to take noli me tangere in its original religious context. That context is evoked only to be violated, so that the reader experiences the wrenching transformation of the sacred to the profane which is the essence of Wyatt's treatment of Petrarch. Petrarch's nessun mi tocchi clearly recalls not only Caesar's protected hinds but John 20:15-17, the apparition of Jesus to Mary Magdalene at the sepulcher. “Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” This is the quintessential moment of suspension, of poise between states of being, evoked by Petrarch as the key to his own moment of vision, with its wondrous sense of presence and distance, joy and loss.

In Wyatt, the allusion, made even stronger by the direct quotation of the Vulgate, is bitterly ironic, and the spiraling ironies seem to embrace the whole scholastic theory of the nature of Christ's body as he appeared to Mary and the disciples after his death. According to this theory, Christ's Glorified Body, as it was called, has four qualities, qualities which are at least implicitly present in Petrarch's poem and which seem to be parodied in Wyatt's poem: impassibility, or freedom from suffering, becomes cold indifference; clarity, or glorious beauty, becomes the irresistible lure of the woman; agility, or the ability to pass from place to place with great speed, becomes the lady's maddening elusiveness; and subtlety, or the complete subjection of the body to the soul, becomes the subtlety of the courtesan.

What we have been calling suspension or passage is here revealed as translation. In its subtle restraint and power of implication, “Whoso List” makes part of its meaning the complex process of transformation from one language to another, from one culture to another. The drama of the lyric is the passage from Petrarch's vision of the world to Wyatt's or rather to the vision we ourselves constitute on the basis of the poet's deliberately allusive self-representation. Of course, the effect is diminished if we are unfamiliar with the source, but it is by no means entirely lost, for the reader is in any case implicated in the sonnet's essential activity, the transformation of values. The poet twice addresses the reader as a potential hunter—“Whoso list to hunt,” “Who list her hunt”—both inviting and dissuading him, making him reenact the poet's own drama of involvement and disillusionment. We share the passage from fascination to bitterness, longing to weariness, and we do more than share: we are forced to take responsibility as translators in our own right. It is we, after all, who refuse to take noli me tangere in a religious sense, we who understand Caesar not as God but as an all too human protector, we who hear—as Wyatt's contemporaries may have done—Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII where there is only talk of a hind and her hunters. It is as if a whole mystical visionary ethos gives way before our eyes and under our pressure to a corrupt and dangerous game of power.

This sense of our own implication in the act of translation coincides with the faint but disturbing intimations that the poet himself bears some responsibility for his frustration. The last line, as we have already seen, is a complex reversal of expectations: from the point of view of the hunter it should be the tameness rather than the wildness of the hind that is the disabling surprise. And this reversal subverts the speaker's implied innocence and self-righteousness: the hind was hunted as a wild animal, so it is scarcely surprising that she turns out to be wild. What did the hunter expect? What else could she have been? She is fulfilling not only the laws of kind but the nature of the speaker's own approach, the structure of the relationship. The transformation from idealism to disillusionment was foreordained in the very first line with the mention of the hunt.

But perhaps the transformation has even deeper roots, for if we argue that a radical shift from the sacred to the profane is part of the experience of Wyatt's poem, we may at the same time observe that the connection between them remains deeply felt, and not simply as the relatedness of diametrical opposites. I have already spoken of this connection in regard to the Penitential Psalms with their poetic revelation of the linkage between power, sexuality, and inwardness. This is precisely the nexus of both “Una candida cerva” and “Whoso List To Hunt,” where the poet's inner life in each case is shaped by the relation of Caesar and the object of desire. Petrarch's poem, after all, is as much about frustration and loss as Wyatt's, and if the former does not speak of a hunt, it has its own disturbing image for the pursuit: the miser's search for treasure. There is, I suggest, a sense in which this shared emotional state and the structure of relations that brings it about are more important than the contrasting identifications of Caesar with God and with the king. From this perspective, Petrarch's idealism is not replaced by Wyatt's sense of weariness and emptiness but rather fulfilled by it.⁶⁵

I am not suggesting that the relation between transcendental vision and cynical betrayal was present to Wyatt's consciousness nor that the subtle complicity of the lover in his own failure was fully intended; rather they are intimations at the edges of his finest poems, as if the act of representation itself, in its highest achievements, had its own powers of implication. Few of Wyatt's poems have this resonance, but it seems unmistakably present in moments of the Penitential Psalms, in “Whoso List,” and in his greatest achievement, “They Flee from Me”:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
          With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
          I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
          That now are wild and do not remember
          That sometime they put themself in danger
          To take bread at my hand, and now they range
          Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
          Twenty times better, but once in special,
          In thin array after a pleasant guise
          When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
          And she me caught in her arms long and small,
          Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
          And softly said, Dear heart how like you this?
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
          But all is turned thorough my gentleness
          Into a strange fashion of forsaking,
          And I have leave to go of her goodness,
          And she also to use newfangleness.
          But since that I so kindely am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

In one of the best recent discussions of this poem, Donald Friedman suggests that we consider the speaker a “fully imagined persona” deliberately distanced from Wyatt himself who subjects his creation to a searching “dramatic analysis.” This analysis “reveals a man whose sensibility has been warped by subservience to a code he has just learned is false and impermanent.”⁶⁶ Such an approach enables us to confront the bad faith in the speaker's self-righteous resentment, the ironies that underlie and subvert the claim that “all is turned thorough my gentleness / Into a strange fashion of forsaking.” “Gentleness” has, by this point, been so charged with inner contradiction and aggression that the speaker's simple attempt at irony turns against him: his “gentleness”—the code that governs his sexual betrayal—may indeed have led to what he perceives as betrayal. “I would fain know what she hath deserved.” Excluded from the predominantly male rhetorical culture, “she” has no opportunity to respond, but were she to do so, we might imagine her saying, “Dear heart, what did you expect?”

The speaker's relations with women are charged with that will to power, that dialectic of domination and submission, whose presence we have viewed elsewhere in Wyatt's poetry.⁶⁷ The creatures who now flee from him once put themselves “in danger / To take bread at my hand,” a relationship he remembers with bitter satisfaction. But the image is already more than a simple assertion of successful domination; it conveys a complex interweaving of condescension, menace, and entreaty. The wild creatures are induced to place themselves in submissive postures only if the man suspends all signs of aggression and holds himself perfectly still. The paradox of a power suspended, rendered passive, in order to exist at all is intensified in the second stanza where the bravado of “twenty times better” gives way to the highly particularized recollection of a moment of perfect passivity. Friedman finds this stanza “an anticlimax that reveals the poverty of moral imagination that underlies an elaborate, exalted, and idealizing vision of human conduct”; the scene, he writes, is “a sketch of rapacious appetite, its outlines blurred and made glamorous by ritualized manners and by the compressed meanings of a conventional diction.”⁶⁸ This response is the outcome of the view that the speaker is a persona from whom both poet and audience are wholly detached, but I think it is precisely here that the limitations of this view become evident. For the remembered scene, far from being anticlimactic, seems in the context of both this poem and of early Tudor poetry remarkably intense, almost haunting in its presence. The erotic experience is indeed the object of critical reflection, but from within, from the midst of a powerful engagement. And the criticism is not of “rapacious appetite,” which is little in evidence in either the man or the woman, but of the almost infantile passivity that is the other side of manly domination.

That passivity is tantalizingly ambiguous: in the first stanza, it seems to be disguised aggression; in the second, an ecstatic release from aggression; in the third, a form of victimization. And this progression suggests an emotional pattern that characterizes not only a particular relationship but, as the initial “they” suggests, a whole series of relationships. The pattern is roughly as follows: the man is sexually aggressive; his desire can only be satisfied through the transformation of aggression into passivity; this passivity—at once masked aggression and its negation—invites both embrace and flight; the flight, perceived as a betrayal of his “gentleness,” leads the man to turn his passivity back into aggression against the woman for whose embrace he still longs.

The powerful intensity of “The Flee from Me,” like that of “Whoso List,” derives from the fact that neither audience nor poet is permitted to stand at a comfortable distance from the speaker. It is misleading to conceive of the poem as if it were one of Browning's dramatic monologues, even if such a conception enables us to isolate certain important elements, for this places us at a moral remove where the poem itself insists that we are participants. The experience at the heart of the poem is less a matter of individual character, isolated like a laboratory specimen for our scrutiny, than a matter of shared language, of deep cultural assumptions, of collective mentality. Hence the ambiguity of the speaker's passivity has its roots not in the quirks of a complex personality—there is little individuation of this kind in Wyatt's poetry—but rather in the conflicting cultural codes that fashion male identity in Tudor court lyrics. If, as I have suggested, those lyrics reflect both the religious and secular institutions that dominated their creators' lives, we might note that in the Lutheran context, passivity, understood as submission to nurturing domination, is a transcendent value, while in the context of Henrician diplomacy, passivity, understood as the failure to manifest one's power, is a sign of dangerous vulnerability, recuperable only if the failure is implied to be a mask for a more potent aggression. Now neither the religious nor the diplomatic code directly determines the sexual relations implied by love poetry in the court, but they both affect the way erotic experience will be represented and understood.

The deep disquiet occasioned by “They Flee from Me” emerges then from the contradictions inherent in the code by which the speaker lives and in which we ourselves as readers are implicated (just as Wyatt's first audience would have been implicated); bad faith is not confronted face to face but glimpsed on the periphery, in the hollowness that attaches to words like “gentle, tame, and meek,” in the darkness that hovers about the false phrases of politeness—“I have leave to go of her goodness,” “since that I so kindely am served”—to which the speaker still ironically clings.

As in “Whoso List,” the process portrayed as betrayal turns out to be a fulfillment, but there is no evidence that Wyatt set out to depict the disappointed lover's involvement in his own failure. A subversive awareness intrudes itself into the work of art but is inaccessible to a lover who views himself as a gentleman betrayed by a fickle mistress and asks bitterly what she deserves. From within this dominant perspective, one is aware only of a painful striving toward a perception that remains just beyond the field of vision, an unsettling intimation that the link between male sexuality and power has produced this mingled frustration, anxiety, and contempt. For Wyatt to articulate this perception would be to write a different kind of poem—a psalm or a satire—and in so doing the perception would be utterly changed, for as we have seen, the psalms transfer “hot affect” to an all-powerful God while the satires attempt to withdraw from both power and sexuality.

If Wyatt's best court lyrics make us perceive in a critical form the lived experience of sexual politics at court, they do so in the manner that Balzac's art gives us a critical view of the lived experience of capitalist society: not, that is, because the artist has abandoned his ideology but, paradoxically, because he has clung to it. Balzac and Solzhenitsyn, writes Louis Althusser, “give us a ‘view’ of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us ‘perceive’ … in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held.”⁶⁹ To understand how this internal distance, this gap between discourse and intention, is generated in Wyatt's lyrics, we must return to the conditions of his poetic creation. As courtier and ambassador, Wyatt developed techniques of self-fashioning that he brings to bear on his poetry; these techniques are weapons in a struggle for power and precedence in which sexual relations are fully implicated. The goal, both politically and sexually, is domination and possession (for which Wyatt provides powerful images in the hunt and the diamond collar), but such a goal cannot be openly avowed; instead both diplomats and lovers constantly invoke and half believe in the values of “service,” “gentleness,” and “truth.”

Encountering the same contradictions, Thomas More was drawn to irony and to dreams of self-cancellation or absorption into a transcendent consensus. Wyatt too, under the scourge of royal discipline, expresses the longing for both transcendence and withdrawal, but he lacks More's absolute institution just as he lacks Tyndale's unwavering and consuming adherence to an absolute text. Wyatt is far more purely dependent than either More or Tyndale upon secular power, and it is in relation to this power that his identity is shaped. In the competitive struggle to express himself more powerfully, intensely, and persuasively than anyone else in the court—to win sympathy, command respect, hurt his enemies, in short, to dominate—Wyatt enlists and helps to create the forces of realism, manliness, individuality, and inwardness. These forces are intertwined, and it is in their complex relation that the resonance, the crucial internal distance, of his lyric poetry arises.

Critics have long celebrated Wyatt's “manliness.” The modern anthology's observation of his “manly independence in love” is in a line of such comments stretching back to Surrey's praise of Wyatt as “manhood's shape.”⁷⁰ The qualities that seem to evoke this term are sarcasm, the will to dominate, aggression toward women, concern for liberty and invulnerability and hence resistance to the romantic worship of the lady, a deliberate harshness of accent and phrasing, and—for Surrey at least—a constant and unappeasable restlessness. This last seems to me a particularly fruitful term for the shape of manhood in Wyatt, for it suggests the blend in his works of defiance, assertiveness, energy, inventiveness, dissatisfaction, and passionate incompleteness. These qualities are not, of course, Wyatt's own invention, but it is important to see how little appropriate would “manliness” so understood be as a description of any poet before him or, for that matter, of More or Tyndale. Wyatt appears to have fashioned it as his literary and social identity, in part perhaps as a flattering imitation of Henry VIII. The notion of manliness has, of course, undergone numerous complex transformations since the early sixteenth century, but a certain underlying continuity is suggested by the frequency with which the term continues to be employed in descriptions of Wyatt's poetry. Wyatt's manliness becomes, in its way, as profound and influential a pattern for the future as More's ironic blend of engagement and detachment and Tyndale's passionate identification with the Word.

The principal expressive mode of manliness in Wyatt's discourse is realism, exemplified in the unsentimental weighing of motives in the diplomatic dispatches or the “plain speaking” of such poems as “Madam, Withouten Many Words” and “You Old Mule.” Wyatt presents himself as a man suspicious of aureate diction and the subtle indirections of rhetoric, fond of homey tales and proverbial wisdom. That this stance was identified as Wyatt's and perhaps cultivated by him is suggested by his charge that his enemies, in inventing a speech that they then attributed to him, strewed it with oaths and proverbial expressions to make it sound like his own. These enemies nearly had his head by charging that he had said that he wished the king “cast out of a cart's arse,” that is, hanged like a thief; Wyatt countered that he had merely said he feared the king has been “left out of the cart's arse,” that is, that his interests had been overlooked.⁷¹

Realism as a discursive technique in Wyatt is closely linked with a heightened sense of individuality, dramatized superbly in his poetry by means of innovative metrical techniques.⁷² The verse swells and buckles, the stress suddenly shifts, the translation veers away from its original, to register the pressures of the poet's powerful ego. The natural environment and even the mistress herself play relatively little part; always squarely at the center is the speaker, complaining, threatening, resolving to make an end, recording his doubts and hopes. There is no more insistent expression of the “I” in Tudor literature. This insistence is by no means the equivalent of security; on the contrary, the self manifested so urgently has all of the instability of egotism, at once threatening to swallow up the whole world and terribly vulnerable:

          for suddenly me thought
My heart was torn out of his place.(73)

But of the importance of his identity, Wyatt has no doubt whatever; there is none of the diffidence that colors self-presentation from Chaucer to More.

This faith in the centrality of the self is not simply a sign of egotism but is validated—justified in a quasi-theological sense—by the inwardness that Protestantism held to be one of the signs of truth, the inwardness celebrated in the Penitential Psalms. By achieving this powerful interiority, the court poetry does not appear to be concerned only with historinic self-manifestation but with the revelation of the self in discourse. The audience is not being manipulated but invited to experience the movement of the poet's mind through assurance, doubt, dread, and longing. This painstaking rendering of the inner life seems to surpass any social game, though the poems remain clearly embedded in such a game.

We are now prepared to grasp how the gap between discourse and intention opens up in Wyatt and hence how it is possible for his greatest poems to engage in complex reflections upon the system of values that has generated them. The skillful merger of manliness, realism, individuality, and inwardness succeeds in making Wyatt's poetry, at its best, distinctly more convincing, more deeply moving, than any written not only in his generation but in the preceding century. But his achievement is dialectical: if, through the logic of its development, courtly self-fashioning seizes upon inwardness to heighten its histrionic power, inwardness turns upon self-fashioning and exposes its underlying motives, its origins in aggression, bad faith, self-interest, and frustrated longing. Wyatt's poetry originates in a kind of diplomacy, but the ambassadorial expression is given greater and greater power until it intimates a perception of its own situation that subverts its official purpose. Wyatt's great lyrics are the expression of this dialectic; they give voice to competing modes of self-presentation, one a manipulation of appearances to achieve a desired end, the other a rendering in language, an exposure, of that which is hidden within. The result is the complex response evoked by a poem like “They Flee from Me”: on the one hand, acceptance of the speaker's claim to injured merit, admiration for his mastery of experience, complicity in his “manly” contempt for women's bestial faithlessness; on the other hand, recognition of the speaker's implication in his own betrayal, acknowledgment of the link between the other's imputed bad faith and his own, perception of an interior distance in the ideology so passionately espoused. We sense, in short, a continual conflict between diplomatic self-presentation, struggling to appropriate inwardness, and inwardness struggling to achieve critical independence from self-presentation. Neither triumphs: hence the suspension of Wyatt's court lyrics between impositions of the self on the world and critical exploration of inwardness.

Notes

1. See E. G. Rupp, Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition (Mainly in the Reign of Henry VIII) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 132: “Excerpts from an heretical Primer were condemned by the bishops in 1530 because ‘he puttith in the book of the vii Psalmes, but he leveth owt the whole Litany, by which apperith his erronyous opynyon agenst praying to saints latanie.’ … This agrees with More's statement about Joye's Primer ‘wherein the Seven Psalms be set in without the Litany and the Dirige is left.”’ Rupp notes further that “the first publication to bear Luther's name and authority had been his edition of these Seven Penitential Psalms, and all that we know of this Primer suggests contact with the doctrines of the Reformers.”

2. On Protestantism and Wyatt's version of the psalms, see especially H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 209-21; Robert G. Twombly, “Thomas Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David,” in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 12 (1970), pp. 345-80.

3. Psalm 51, lines 503-5. Wyatt had similarly added the phrase “the heart's forest” to his translation of Petrarch, “The long love that in my thought doth harbor.”

   Line numbers for Wyatt's poetry refer to those given in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969). For a book-length critique of this edition, see H. A. Mason, Editing Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge Quarterly Publications, 1972). I have consulted Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), and Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems, ed. Joost Daalder (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).

4. Both Aretino and Campensis stress at this point that outward deeds are signs of the inner state of contrition (see Collected Poems, Commentary, p. 378); though he elsewhere concurs, Wyatt takes this opportunity to infuse his version with the spirit of Luther's famous Prologue to Romans, as translated by Tyndale: “If the law were fleshly, and but man's doctrine, it might be satisfied, and stilled with outward deeds. But now is the law ghostly, and no man fulfilleth it, except that all that he doth spring of love from the bottom of the heart.” Good works spring naturally from faith, but they may not by themselves be taken as the assurance of anything; everything depends upon the state of the heart which in turn depends upon the will of God. (Cf. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, pp. 215-19.)

5. Apart from the Judeo-Christian West, we should recall, most of the great civilizations of the world have placed overwhelming emphasis not on the isolated member but on the conformity of every element to its role in the society; the dominant ideology of Hinduism, for example, begins from the standpoint of the total hierarchical structure and then moves to the particular, constituent parts. See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 4.

6. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 103-4.

7. In Medieval Handbooks of Penance, trans. and ed. John J. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 315. See Oscar D. Watkins, A History of Penance, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1920), 2:58.

8. See Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 16-27; John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 25 (1975), pp. 21-38.

9. “Treatise Concerning the Fruitful Sayings of David the King and Prophet in the Seven Penitential Psalms,” in The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Early English Text Society, 1876), p. 24.

10. “Est autem multis modis huis Psalmi cognitio tum necessaria tum utilis: Continet enim doctrinam de praecipuis nostrae Religionis capitibus, de Poenitentia, de Peccato, de Gratia, et Justificatione, Item du Cultu quem nos praestare debemus.” Quoted in Mason, Humanism and Poetry, p. 217.

11. The point is worth emphasizing because the hard-won and precious bourgeois myth that the inner life is somehow divorced from the legitimate exercise of power has been read backward into history so that the Spanish Inquisition or the Puritan witch trials have seemed only obscene aberrations. The fourteenth-century legislation that decrees it high treason to “compass or imagine the Death of … the King” does not deem it useful or important to distinguish between “imagine” as a subjective, inner state and “imagine” as the designing of a “real” plot (Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 [London: Stevens & Sons, 1948] 1:7).

12. English Works of John Fisher, p. 33.

13. The personal intensity of the penitential psalms then must not be viewed as something Wyatt somehow tacked on to conventional material; rather, Wyatt's inwardness in these poems is itself largely the product of the total discursive field constituted by other versions of the psalms and by related doctrinal and devotional treatises. If the distinctive voice seems intermittent, the failure is not caused by the dead weight of “impersonal” convention, but by the inadequacies of a poetic technique still in the early stages of development. As his contemporaries understood, Wyatt had virtually to invent for English poetry a language suited to his expressive ends; those ends are “his own” precisely by virtue of the power of the convention.

14. Raymond Southall, Literature and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), p. 22.

15. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, pp. 202-9. Surrey, in Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patricia Thomson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 28.

16. Ralegh, History of the World (London, 1614), p. C4^v. Ralegh wrote of Henry VIII that “if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king” (A4^v).

17. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, p. 216, suggests that the imagery here and at lines 345-48 reflects the horror of those who witnessed the “first deadly onslaughts” of syphilis; if so, the physical revulsion has been absorbed into the depiction of a moral state. It is adulterous sexual desire that is itself the disease, the filth that must be purged by suffering.

18. Cf. Luther on the will: “Thus the human will is … like a beast of burden. If God rides it, it wills and goes where God wills. … If Satan rides it, it wills and goes where Satan wills; nor can it choose to run to either of the two riders or to seek him out, but the riders themselves contend for the possession and control of it” (Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp [London: The Library of Christian Classics, 1969], p. 140). See also Wyatt to his son, “the chiefest and infallible ground [of virtue] is the dread and Reverence of God,” in Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963), pp. 38-39.

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 5.

20. In trying to grasp the origins of this pervasive suspicion of the body, it is tempting to invoke the state of both medical science and personal hygiene in the sixteenth century: men and women endured a daily level of physical discomfort, indeed quite often excruciating pain, that is for us all but unimaginable. Theological objections aside, the phenomenological celebration of the body might well have seemed to most men a slender reed on which to base a conception of human identity. But without dismissing the miseries of ulcers, tumors, gastro-intestinal disorders, and toothaches, I think it likely that the attitude of Wyatt and others in his situation was far more powerfully influenced by cultural forces, above all by their experience of power.

21. “Who List His Wealth and Ease Retain,” line 16.

22. Life and Letters, pp. 39-40.

23. For powerful reflections upon perception and the sense of the body, see Michael Fried, “The Beholder in Courbet: His Early Self-Portraits and Their Place in His Art,” Glyph 4 (1978), pp. 84-129.

24. See Wyatt to his son: “God hath of his goodness chastised me and not cast me clean out of his favor” (Life and Letters, p. 40).

25. Life and Letters, p. 35.

26. Donald Friedman, “The ‘Thing’ in Wyatt's Mind,” Essays in Criticism 16 (1966), p. 377. The satires echo as well the contrast between outward and inward: see, for example, “Mine Own John Poins,” 10-13.

27. “Mine Own John Poins,” 76. One should note that the negation is qualified by the rhetorical insistence on the speaker's inability, on what he cannot do.

28. Thus for Wyatt it is not God but “fortune” that has given rulers the right “to strike the stroke,” while submission in the psalms has no reference to secular authority.

29. As Wyatt's early nineteenth-century editor, George Frederick Nott, observes, these lines are imitated and enlarged from Persius's third Satire (Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, pp. 71-72).

30. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 1969), Letter 65, p. 124. “I am too great,” Seneca writes, “was born to too great a destiny to be my body's slave. So far as I am concerned that body is nothing more or less than a fetter on my freedom. I place it squarely in the path of fortune, letting her expend her onslaught on it, not allowing any blow to get through it to my actual self. For that body is all that is vulnerable about me: within this dwelling so liable to injury there lives a spirit that is free” (123). See Wyatt's sonnet, “Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever,” in which the speaker invokes “Senec and Plato” as his guides in the passage from the bondage of the body to the liberty of the mind. Wyatt urged his son to study Seneca's moral philosophy (Life and Letters, p. 43).

31. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 282.

32. Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 119-40.

33. W. J. Courthope, in Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, p. 104.

34. Ibid., pp. 44, 71, 104, 165. See, too, Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 270: “There is no reason why both his amorous and his satirical poetry should not be enjoyed. But if I were called, as in an examination, to admire one at the expense of the other, I should look askance at the love poetry, as Yeats did at his ‘Stolen Child’: ‘that is not the poetry of insight and knowledge but the poetry of longing and complaint.’ And certainly the satires are Wyatt's greatest achievement in the poetry of insight and knowledge. In the long run courtly wisdom was a richer source of inspiration than courtly love.”

35. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 54.

36. Edward Hall, Chronicle (London: J. Johnson, 1808), p. 597.

37. In 1517 Brian, whom Cromwell nicknamed “vicar of hell,” had married a wealthy widow (as he was to do again later in his career). He furthered the interests of his cousin, Anne Boleyn (cf. Wyatt, “A Spending Hand,” line 63), then upon her fall, hastened to protect his position by working zealously for her conviction.

38. Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background, p. 185.

39. Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, p. 25.

40. Ibid., p. 34.

41. Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, p. 68.

42. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, p. 171. “By a little application,” Mason comments, “we could compose a dictionary of conventional phrases which would show that many of these poems of Wyatt's are simply strung together from these phrases into set forms.” I would argue that conventionality is not in this period the enemy of genuine poetic activity, but one of its essential ingredients.

43. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 230. The influence of the court has been treated more seriously and probingly by Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background, and by Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964).

44. For what bizarre social occasion was Henry VIII himself supplying material when he proudly displayed a “tragedy” he had written on the subject of the adultery and fall of Anne Boleyn? (J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII [London: Penguin, 1968], p. 455). Was this meant to be a grand show of indifference? an aesthetic triumph over the pain and humiliation of betrayal? was it an attempt to make sense of the horrifying turn of events, to impose the coherence and dignity of tragedy upon them? was it a demonstration of prescience and power, a magical assertion that he himself had “written” the whole history? Henry apparently told the bishop of Carlisle, to whom he showed his “tragedy,” that he had long expected the present turn of events. The tragedy has not survived, but the anecdote is haunting: it suggests a far different and more disturbing range of possibilities for the functions of court art than is suggested by after-dinner music.

45. Harrier, Canon, pp. 37-38, thinks it unlikely the poem is by Wyatt. I use the Devonshire manuscript's reading of the final word; the Blage manuscript gives worse.

46. We might note that this accords unpleasantly well with Wyatt's treatment of his wife, whom he publicly denounced for adultery. Obviously, the denunciation heightened the “mock” of being a cuckold, but he evidently did not care about this as much as he cared about his revenge.

47. Lewis, English Literature, p. 229.

48. On “sociosis,” see J. H. van den Berg, The Changing Nature of Man (New York: Norton, 1961).

49. Humanism and Poetry, p. 171.

50. We might take this occasion to remark that the major achievements of all three of the figures we have considered thus far are intimately associated with the Continent, in three quite distinct cultural forms: for More, humanism; for Tyndale, the Reformation; and for Wyatt, courtliness. These cultures overlapped in important respects, but they were far more strikingly at each other's throats. This is most evident in the struggle between More and Tyndale, but they in turn were both set passionately against the world in which Wyatt participated, Europe in what we may call, after Pocock, its quintessentially Machiavellian moment.

51. The nature of the relation between the prince's body and the power of the state is, of course, extremely complex: see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957): “It is evident that the doctrine of theology and canon law, teaching that the Church and Christian society in general, was a ‘corpus mysticum the head of which is Christ’ has been transferred by the jurists from the theological sphere to that of the state the head of which is the king” (pp. 15-16).

    See also Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

52. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 35.

53. “I find no peace and all my war is done,” 11; the poem is a translation of Petrarch, Rime cxxxiv. Wyatt characteristically intensifies the causal relation of love and hate: Petrarch had written, “Et ho in odio me stresso et amo altrui.” One might add that in Wyatt's psalms, when King David turns his love to God, he does so by removing it from Bathsheba and abasing himself. Indeed if Renaissance diplomacy may be usefully invoked in a reading of the love lyrics, it has an equal bearing upon the penitential psalms, which are permeated with the spirit of subtle, devious negotiations with an overpowering, irascible, and dangerous ally.

54. It is doubtful that this poem, which appears in the Blage manuscript, is by Wyatt.

55. Quoted in Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), p. 95. Compare Bernard du Rosier's treatise on diplomacy, written in 1436: “The business of an ambassador is peace. … An ambassador labors for the public good. … An ambassador is sacred because he acts for the general welfare” (quoted in Mattingly, p. 42).

56. Quoted in Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More,” American Scholar 48 (1978/79), p. 28.

57. Life and Letters, p. 157.

58. Tottel, all too typically, wrecks the effect of the poem by entitling it, “Complaint for true love unrequited.”

59. Life and Letters, p. 135.

60. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, p. 217.

61. Ibid., p. 186.

62. Perhaps Charles created the stir about the word simply to avoid talking about Brancetour (though he did so by the end of the conversation). Both Henry VIII and Cromwell chose to interpret the discussion of the word, however, as an assertion of precedence over both the English and French kings; at least they tried to use the emperor's words to sow dissension between him and Francis I (Life and Letters, p. 139).

63. The restraint extends even to the choice of “And” in line 11 instead of “For” as a lead-in to the description of the collar. “For” would have presented the final lines as a clear explanation of the poet's situation; “And” invites the reader to draw his own conclusion.

64. See Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972).

65. Thus Petrarch's “stanchi di mirar, non sazi” is not so much contradicted as confirmed by Wyatt's “The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,” while Petrarch's “libera” becomes Wyatt's “wild.”

66. “The Mind in the Poem: Wyatt's ‘They Flee from Me,”’ Studies in English Literature 7 (1967), p. 4.

67. See also Michael McCanles, “Love and Power in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Modern Language Quarterly 29 (1968), pp. 145-60. My view of Wyatt is close to McCanles's, particularly to his suggestion in a footnote that “it could be shown that the overriding concern of all Wyatt's poetry, including the Satires and the translation of the Psalms, is adjustment to a court and to a society in which the drive to power is dominant” (p. 148, n. 4).

68. Friedman, “The Mind in the Poem,” p. 9.

69. “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 222-23.

70. Surrey, in Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, p. 31.

71. Life and Letters, pp. 198-99. Wyatt remarks, “Because I am wont sometime to rap out an oath in an earnest talk, look how craftily they have put in an oath to the matter to make the matter seem mine.”

72. Mason, Humanism and Poetry, pp. 190-91: “We have a number of poems in Wyatt's own hand and some of these contain Wyatt's second and even third thoughts. These ‘corrections,’ taken by and large, show that, as he worked over them, Wyatt made his lines more ‘rugged,’ ‘difficult,’ and less like Surrey's or the Tottel version.”

    It is tempting, following the lead of Christopher Caudwell, to see Wyatt's poetic technique as a direct outcome of his social position: “This ‘individualism’ of the bourgeois, which is born of the need to dissolve the restrictions of feudal society, causes a tremendous and ceaseless technical advance in production. In the same way it causes in poetry a tremendous and ceaseless advance in technique” (Illusion and Reality [New York: International Publishers, 1937], p. 60). From this perspective, the seizure of Church lands and treasure and the development of new poetic techniques are both manifestations of “primitive accumulation,” the earliest stage of capitalism.

    The difficulties inherent in such an interpretation outweigh the advantages. It takes considerable sleight of hand to present Wyatt as a typical representative of the bourgeoisie, his acquisition of monastic lands does not have a clear relation to his political let alone poetic career, the invocation of capitalism in a description of the 1530s requires an act of faith I personally shrink from. But the Marxist interpretation has the virtue of insisting that Wyatt's life is not rigidly compartmentalized, insisting, as I have argued through this chapter, that poetry and power are deeply intertwined. I believe it is fundamentally correct to link the drive toward technical experimentation and mastery in Wyatt with his manifestation of individuality and this individuality in turn with fundamental historical and economic developments of the period: Henry VIII's ambitions, the accumulation of wealth, the changes in Tudor government that moved England decisively away from feudalism and toward the modern state.

    For an attempt to construct a Marxist reading of Wyatt, see Raymond Southall, Literature and the Rise of Capitalism, chap. 2.

73. “So Unwarely Was Never No Man Caught,” 3-4.