A view halloo, everybody, and welcome back to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where, as you know, rhyme gets its reason.  Today’s episode: Venus, Venison, and Venom: The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt.  Today, we’ll look at a proper Renaissance poet, a bone fide courtier, none of your ambiguous “medieval/ early modern” muckers-about like old John Skelton.  Oh, no!  This is some proper rhyming from the Henrician world.  Today, children, we’re going to meet Sir Thomas Wyatt.  The Elder, bt-dubs.

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So, dear listeners, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder.  Sir Thomas, my dear listeners.  

Born in 1503 to a wealthy family, Sir Thomas Wyatt received a quality education at both St. John's College, Cambridge and the University of Padua in Italy. Entering the court of Henry VIII in the 1520s, he served as an ambassador to France and Spain. One of his official positions was the “Clerk of the King’s Jewels.”  I know I shouldn’t laugh, dear listener, I know I should be better than that.  But I can’t help it.  It makes me giggle like a naughty schoolboy.

But, my sniggering may not be baseless, given that Wyatt was also known as something of a wolf, a playa as the kids say (do they still say that?).  He is reputed to have had romantic affairs with several court ladies, and there is the persistent rumor that Anne Boleyn, who would become Henry VII’s wife and then about 9 inches shorter, was the object of his especial affection.  I’ve no doubt he fancied her – she has the reputation of being quite magnetically charismatic – yet evidence of sexual congress can neither be confirmed nor denied.  But his poems are quite suggestive, and scholars and amateurs have pored over them for confirmation.  Alas, ambiguity persists.  And, to be sure, Wyatt was imprisoned by Henry in 1536, following Anne’s rather precipitous fall from grace, but was eventually restored to favor, only to be flung into chokey once more on a charge of high treason.  He dies soon after his release, perhaps from some infection caught in the cells.

Given the rather topsy-turvy and capricious nature of Henry’s court and its consequences for Sir Thomas, we should not be surprised to find that his poetry, while often bitter, frequently longs for a world of stability and honesty, a life free from the duplicity and doubleness of the court.  But beware, friends, for Wyatt was a creature of that court and we must remember that his verse, even that in the first-person,  presents a carefully curated persona.  The author and the speaker are not necessarily the same fella.

Wyatt’s verse is significant, not only because it’s quite enjoyable, but also because he really establishes some of the major paradigms of English poetry, ones that will endure at least into the 19th century.  He was particularly influenced by Francesco Petrach, the 14th century Italian poet who is sometimes credited with inaugurating what we now call the Italian Renaissance.  But Wyatt found Petrach’s hendecasyllabic (11 syllable) line ill-suited to English poetry, since it is a quantitative line that does not account for English’s accentual patterns.  To remedy this, Wyatt resuscitates the iambic pentameter line Chaucer introduced a century and change before (which had been quite bastardized, incidentally.  It had fallen out of use and older texts using it were misread as a 4-beat riding rhythm – I can’t even imagine how awkward that sounded).  Now despite this resurrection, I should say that Wyatt was not especially concerned about the perfect regularity of his accentual-syllabic style line.  Smoothness was not Wyatt’s jam.  He aimed for a more vibrant, vigorous, and expressive effect.  In any case, however, the iambic pentameter line has become standard for nearly 500 years of English poetry.

Let’s take a look at one of his most famous poems – if you’ve ever sat in a college Brit Lit survey class, you’ve heard this one.  But there’s a reason for its ubiquity – it happens to be very, very good.  It’s written in a stanza form called rhyme royal.  It’s seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABBCC.  To provide some variation in longer narrative poems, you can group that stanza in a couple of ways: as a tercet with two couplets or as a quatrain and a tercet.  Here’s “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;

Therewithall 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 kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

The poem exists in a number of manuscripts, intriguing readers with hints of its potentially autobiographical nature.  For instance, who are the “they” of the opening line: some women? all women? one woman? (then why the plural – could she be royalty?)  Note the tension in the opening line’s construction:  it’s called a Petrachan contrast.  The first half of the line negates or opposes the second half: fleeing v. seeking.  Further, Wyatt ties these opposites together with the assonant long “e” vowels: flee, me, me, seek.

The naked foot of line two is both sensual and innocent, but when tied with the verb “stalking” in his chamber, there’s the suggestion of a hunter, a predator, the foot now seems secretive and its owner metaphorized as an animal. Lines 3 and 4 emphasize the changeability in the “they”: from tame to wild, with a pun on “gentle” as both mild and aristocratic.  Anne?  But the they are fickle and the first stanza’s closing couplet, with another opposition, contrasts their former submission to their current “busy seeking” for something new.  The rhyme of that couplet, range and change, implies both broadness and mutability.

Stanza 2 drives Anne Boleyn fans crazy.  Wyatt thanks dame fortune (she of the ever-turning wheel) that he has had great passions in the past – “twenty times better, but once in special.” Oho!  One lover particularly stands out.  Who is she?  Who could she be?  She certainly seems pretty seductive, slipping off that thin, loose gown.  In fact, she actively stalks, seduces, him.  She “caught” him in her arms – more hunting language.  And questions him, “Dear heart, how like you this?” with those sibilant Ss so redolent of temptation’s serpent.  And there’s a pun in her address to him: “heart” being a metonym for lover, but homonymous “hart” is a male deer, a buck (noisy in the springtime though he may be).  He is prey.  Lots of folks infer that Wyatt must be talking about Anne Boleyn.  While this poem is certainly of the court, it is by no means courtly.  Wyatt leaves those medieval conventions behind.  Here, the illicit love is physically consummated – there’s actual sex – with the woman as the pursuer.  But then, there is abandonment and betrayal.

Usually, in this type of poem, the speaker asserts that all this came to him as a dream (to protect the guilty, presumably), but Wyatt sags off there, too.  Stanza 3 opens with “It was no dream: I lay broad waking.” The line is a syllable short, a curt insistence of the events’ reality.  By the second line, “all is turned,” referring again to Fortune’s Wheel, “through my gentleness.”  Another pun on the dual meanings of gentle – mildness and nobility.  He’s too nice and well-bred for these wild women, especially that one so infatuated with “newfangleness.”  A word we don’t use too much anymore – it means obsessed with new ideas, new experiences.  Not just “a la mode,” but everchanging, never true or stable.  The final couplet drips with sarcasm, wondering what has happened to her, what she has “deserved” for the way she has treated him.  The rhyme at the end is really a restatement: the Latin root of deserve implies one being  entitled to something because of good service. Nice use of the irony, there, Tommy Boy.

But perhaps good Sir Tom’s most significant contribution to the corpus of English writing is his introduction of the sonnet.

The sonnet, English poetry.  English poetry, the sonnet.

The sonnet is among the most durable forms of poetry, having hardly fallen out of fashion in the half-millennium since Wyatt made the introductions.  Now, this is not to say he invented the sonnet – he most certainly did not –  but as a Petrarch fan-boy, he did bring the Italian’s form to the sceptred isle.

For those not in the know, the word sonnet comes from the Italian for “little song” – la sonnetta.  Isn’t that lovely?  Petrarch established it as a compressed lyric: 14 lines of iambic pentameter organized as an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines).  The octave rhymes ABBA ABBA and the sestet either CDC CDC or CDE CDE.  Usually.  In the octave, the poet sets up a situation or poses a problem.  The sestet comments on the situation or resolves the problem.  That shift in tone and intent is called a volta (Italian for turn).  Petrarch’s most famous sonnets are dedicated to a woman called Laura, and he wrote hundreds of them.  Very courtly in their tone and content, the essential Petrarchan convention concerns the poet idealizing the unattainable lady.  Wyatt, in his renderings of Petrarch’s sonnets, adapts not only the form, but he also darkens the tone and mood.  Wyatt’s sonnets typically follow the octave of his mentor, but the sestet is usually broken into a quatrain rhyming CDDC and a couplet EE.  The volta generally stays at line 9.  He discards the Petrarchan view of the beloved as idealized and love as transcendent; for Wyatt, unsurprisingly, love is often the occasion for bitterness.

His most famous sonnet, adapted from Petrarch’s Sonnet 190, is “Whoso List to Hunt”:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, hélas, 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,

Sithens 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.

To clear up a little vocabulary: “list” here is a verb meaning “wishes” or “wants” or “desires.”  A “hind” is a female deer.  

Now let’s look at the situation posed in that octave.  The speaker declares that whoever wishes to go hunting, he knows where there is a deer, but he can’t hunt anymore.  He has been wearied by the vain effort (and vain here is a self-regarding pun: the effort is both futile and motivated by vanity).  Yet he remains obsessed by the thought of the deer, even if capturing her is like trying to catch the wind in a net.

Notice how Wyatt nicely deploys alliteration to sonically link concepts and effects.  The first line with its breathiness: sighing.  Lines 4 and 5, the “f” sound sounds fleeting and fast, breathless.

And that’s a nice concluding complement to a rhythmical subtlety in the opening line.  We say that a sonnet is 14 lines of iambic pentameter, but that doesn’t mean every line has to be rigidly so.  Wyatt begins his sonnet with two trochees – that is, a rhythm opposite to the iamb.  Whereas the iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, the trochee is a stressed followed by an unstressed.  The effect is a sense of driving down.  Sometimes we call the trochee a falling foot because the beat implies a somberness, a weariness, a glumness.  Which works perfectly in the first line: “Whoso list to hunt.”  The accent falls on syllables 1 and 3 and given the bitterness of the poem, that downbeat feels world-weary, defeated.  But syllables 5 on switch the meter iambically – the rising foot.  When he recalls the hind, he perks up a bit.  As I say, it’s subtle, but details like that separate the poets from the poetasters.

So we hear the octave rhymes: hind, more, sore, behind, mind, afore, therefore, wind.  Then we get doubt, vain, plain, about.  Finally, the couplet am and tame.  This is called half-rhyme or slant rhyme, by the way – almost, but not quite perfect, usually used by a poet to indicate some dissonance or awkwardness in the speaker’s thoughts.  

Sidebar: attentive listeners will have noted the slant rhymes in “They Flee from Me”: lines 2 and 4 of each stanza have these off rhymes.  I haven’t sorted out a reason why.  It may be merely a function of the change in pronunciation from Wyatt’s day to our own, but I am unsure.  Answers on the back of a $20 bill.  End sidebar.

The volta narrows the focus of line 1 – the prey, the hind, is now a particular “her.”  And by eliminating the syllable “so” from line 1 in line 9, the stress moves forward: “Whoso” is a trochee.  “Who list” is an iamb.  Wyatt opens the sestet with the accents falling on the verbs: “list” and “hunt.”  Then, he drops a whole boatload of ambiguity and equivocation on us.  The second half of line 9 – “I put him out of doubt” – uses an internal rhyme to draw attention to the end rhyme, and that word, “doubt” is a rather curious property.

Have you ever heard of contranyms?  They’re odd little words that are their own antonyms, their own opposites.  For instance, “clip” means both to fasten and to detach.  “Dust” means to sprinkle something with fine particles or remove the fine particles.  Actually, fine means both adequate and excellent.   Anyway, back in the days of yore (let’s say, for the sake of argument, the 16th century), “doubt” was a contranym, meaning both to be skeptical and to suspect.  So, if you said, “I doubt it will rain,” it could mean that you don’t believe it will rain or, indeed, you do believe it will rain.

Isn’t language a curious thing?

Stick a pin in that for a moment.  Let’s look at the line that follows: “As well as I may spend his time in vain.”  The syntax rather tangles us up.  Does it mean that the prospective hunter (to whom the sonnet is addressed) like Wyatt will waste his time or does it mean that Wyatt is deliberately wasting the hunter’s time by waxing poetic about an unattainable deer?  Then, fling the ambiguous “doubt” on top of that and you really get something of a muddle.  Of course, the main sense is that Wyatt assures him that he will strive in vain (same pun) as well, but the subtext seems much more manipulative and enigmatic.

Which provides a stark contrast to perhaps the poem’s most famous image: the diamond collar round the hind’s neck with the “plain words”: Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am.  The Latin means “Touch me not” and it comes from the Gospel of St. John.  Christ speaks these words to Mary Magdalene upon her discovery of his resurrection.  There is also a legend from Pliny the Elder that, some 300 years after Julius Caesar's death, his deer lived on with that inscription about their necks.  So there is both a sacred and a secular echo to these words.

Now, who could possessive Caesar be in this poem?  If you said Henry 8, give yourself a cookie!  Yes, probably Henry, the head of both the English church and the English state.  Well then, who is the unwinnable hind?  Is the poem simply an elaborate warning against poaching the King’s game?  No, surely, surely  – well, perhaps possibly – the hind is Queen Anne.  If that’s the case, the Greek translation of her collar casts an interesting shadow across the relationship between Wyatt and Anne in “They Flee from Me.”  The Koine Greek of “Noli me tangere” means something like “stop clinging to me.”  Now, isn’t that intriguing?  “Let me go,” she says to the speaker, “stop holding on to me.”  This implies that his longing, his pursuit, is ongoing – like present progressive tense – rather than the warning of a single moment.

You may have noticed that both poems make use of the hunt as a metaphor for sexual conquest and /or frustration.  Here’s a bit of something for all you word nerds: Venus, the goddess of love, venison, deer flesh, and venom all share a common linguistic root: the Proto-Indo-European word “wen,” which means something like “to desire” or “to long for.”  From there, we get the Latin venari, meaning to hunt – if you hunt for something you must want it, right? That meaning of desire also gives the Roman goddess her name.  After William the Conqueror and his descendents established French as England’s prestige language, the word venison came to mean the meat of any animal killed hunting.  Eventually, it specifically meant deer meat.  Lastly, the word that became venom in English developed from the Latin “venenum,” a drink supposed to increase desire – a love potion, basically.  I shall leave it to your own fertile imaginations as to why venom came to mean poison.

Anyway, it’s an intriguing connection that makes the hunt analogy (and Wyatt’s bitter tone about it) all the more rich.  Makes me wonder, too, if, in some sense, Anne Boleyn is Wyatt’s Laura.  She seems to haunt him, and his poetry.  Tantalizingly close, but ever out of reach.  I don’t know that he ever does stop clinging to her.  He wrote a riddle poem called “What word is that which changeth not” and the answer – cunningly – is Anna.  

There is a story, probably apocryphal, that while reading his poetry aloud to Anne while she did needlework, he plucked a ribboned jewel off her as a keepsake. Bit later, Wyatt’s bowling with the king, and they start arguing over a shot. Wyatt claimed the shot but the king demurred: "Wyatt, I tell thee it is mine,”  pointing with the royal finger on which he conspicuously wore Anne's ring. Wyatt, nonplussed, rejoined, "If it may like your majesty to give me leave to measure it, I hope it will be mine." With what did he measure the shot?  With the ribbon from which Anne’s jewel conspicuously hung.

That takes an immense quantity of testicular fortitude. I doubt the bowl's distance was what these two men were really measuring.   As I say, the story is too on-the-nose to be really credible, but it surely gives us a glimpse of the vanity and obsession and, not to put too fine a point on it, sexual possessiveness of the Henrician court.  If Wyatt really did lament the chaotic tangle of intrigue and loyalties of the court, he did little to assuage it.  Seems like he rather deftly rode that wave – with a couple of notable wipeouts, it must be admitted.  And he did so while contributing rather significantly to English literature.  Beyond the pentameter line and the sonnet, Wyatt is the first major poet to speak self-reflectively in English verse.  The poems we looked at today are dramatically first-person, and while the persona may be a construction, the very recognition that first-person interiority is a thing, that one’s personal experiences deserve contemplation and aesthetic rendering is a major development in the Western evolution of the self, the thinking I.

Thanks for listening to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  You’ll hear from me soon!