SIR THOMAS WYATT, HENRY HOWARD EARL OF SURREY
“Great lyrics” in the conventional sense are not to be found in Skelton. We have to look beyond him to someone conventionally greater, a man who belongs entirely to the Renaissance, whose blood has been warmed by the Mediterranean. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) is the first great English lyric poet. “But here I am in Kent and Christendom / Among the Muses where I read and rhyme.”
Almost all of his lyrics are dramatic. The reader plunges in medias res, usually into a complaint against an unregarding or unattainable lady. The poems can be located on a map of passion. They are thrifty, with little but telling detail and a minimum of physical evocation. Like other poems in the song tradition, their imagery is conventional.
Wyatt used over seventy different stanza forms, many of which he invented. At times he taxes himself beyond his technical skills. Critics disagree about his meters, and until the middle of the twentieth century it was fashionable to regularize them by actually changing his words and word order. Are the irregularities poetic flaws, manifestations of peculiar genius, or proof that his language is still in a state of accentual transition? Meter apart, one can’t argue against the rhythm of the best poems, the variations—less numerous than is normally thought—on a metrical norm. They ensure his poetic superiority over Surrey and even Sidney, whose smoothness can be cloying. Violations of metrical decorum answer—or seem to answer—to modulations of emotions.
Sir Thomas involved himself in the king’s affairs (in every sense) more deeply than Skelton did. A courtier, soldier and gentleman, not a priest, he was born at Allington Castle, beside the Medway in Kent, in 1503. His father, devoted to the Tudors, presented his son at court when he was thirteen. He attended St. John’s College, Cambridge. At seventeen he married Lord Cobham’s daughter. She bore him a son and a daughter, then proved unfaithful. Wyatt refused to have her under his roof.
At twenty-three he began actively serving his king. He accompanied an embassy to France, and the next year another to the Pope. Captured by Spanish troops, he managed to escape. In 1528 he became marshal of Calais, a post he held for four years. When he returned to England he held prominent posts in Essex and was chief ewer (in his father’s place) at the coronation of Anne Boleyn.
Legend has it that he was in love with Anne. It’s likely; and that his confession to the king before the marriage on 1 June 1533 saved him his head when she lost hers on 19 May 1536. He was imprisoned in the Tower that year—but as a result of a quarrel with the Duke of Suffolk. It had none of the sinister overtones that Roman Catholic propagandists and romantic critics suggest. Wyatt was soon back in favor. He became sheriff of Kent and in 1537 ambassador to Spain. He returned from Spain in 1539, on his father’s death.
Tagus, farewell, that westward with thy streams
Turns up the grains of gold already tried:
With spur and sail for I go seek the Thames
Gainward the sun that sheweth her wealthy pride
And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams
Like bended moon doth lend her lusty side.
My King, my Country alone for whom I live,
Of mighty love the wings for this me give.
The lines speak honest zeal on the king’s behalf. Wyatt had detractors at home, and a trial at which he was acquitted of charges of treason and immorality. He returned to his post at Calais, later served as MP for Kent, then as vice-admiral of a new fleet under construction. He died suddenly in Sherborne in 1542, of a fever, on his way to accompany a Spanish envoy from Falmouth to London.
Wyatt’s poems were first published in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). Richard Tottel—one of my most distinguished Tudor predecessors, who worked from the Hand and Star in Temple Bar from 1553 until his death in 1594—loved metrical regularity rather too much, and he was the first to regularize Sir Thomas’s meter by altering his language. The poems were thus misprinted from the outset, but—as you expect of a good publisher—with the best intentions: Tottel, and his collaborator the translator and cleric Nicholas Grimald, knew that the poems would not please readers if they were irregular. Wyatt’s work presents serious textual difficulties even now (I have modernized the spelling). What we read today was collected largely by G. F. Nott in 1816 and revised and improved by A. K. Foxwell in 1913, with some later adjustments. Our Wyatt is not the Wyatt that the sixteenth century read.
Some verse forms Wyatt invented, others he imported. From Italy he brought terza rima, ottava rima and the sonnet. Though he was the first great English sonneteer, the sonnets he translated and composed had little effect on his smooth-mannered successors, who went to the fountainhead in Petrarch rather than to Wyatt’s efforts. He failed to domesticate terza rima, which he used with mixed effects in his three satires. They tend toward blank verse, with enjambements so frequent that the rhymes appear accidental rather than elements of form, except in a few passages. One is the opening of the first satire, on court life:
Mine own John Poins, since ye delight to know
The cause why that homeward I me draw,
And flee the press of courts whereso they go,
Rather than to live thrall, under the awe
Of lordly looks, wrapped within my cloak,
To will and lust learning to set a lawe...
The theme is familiar from Skelton, but the added note of personal seriousness in line six is an important development. The tone is intimate, not public, the image “wrapped within my cloak” quick, vivid, part of the subject, not decorative.
If Wyatt sometimes failed to acclimatize his imported forms, he did add to the resources of our poetry. His immediate legacy to his successors was “poulter’s measure,” an alexandrine followed by a rhyming fourteener. C. S. Lewis finds it hard to forgive him this invention, though Surrey, Turberville, Gascoigne, Golding and others used it with a kind of authority.
Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, are bracketed together as fathers of English Petrarchanism. Richard Puttenham saw them as “the two chief lanterns of light to all others that have since employed their pens upon English poesy: their conceits were lofty, their styles stately, their conveyance clear, their terms proper, their metre sweet and well-proportioned, in all imitating very naturally and studiously their master Francis Petrarcha.” This is more true of Surrey than Wyatt, whom Puttenham read in Tottel’s polished text. Certainly Wyatt’s imitations of Petrarch are neither studious nor merely Petrarchan.
The introduction of Petrarch into England was not an unalloyed good. He taught two lessons, one of form and one of subject. The formal lesson provided dangers for native syntax and diction, requiring adjustments and mannerisms against the grain of the language. The thematic lesson imperiled lesser talents. Petrarchan love conventions recast courtly conventions in a new age, and their chief novelty for English poets depended on their disregarding elements latent in the native tradition. Petrarch required not so much translation as transposition into English. This Wyatt did. Those who followed were less successful.
Wyatt found the refined, spiritual love of Petrarch uncongenial—even incredible. He was a man of flesh and fiery blood and his best poems are decidedly un-Platonic, arising out of carnal passion. He avoids the aureate style that later Petrarchans developed. In Petrarch’s sonnets the octave normally establishes a specific occasion—a thing perceived, an emotion felt. The sestet generalizes from that occasion. Wyatt saw Petrarch’s skill in structuring an idea, a structuring more allusive and concise than the mechanical procedure of allegory, but not unrelated to it. His own poems structure emotions: the generalizations that emerge relate to physical passion and hardly seek to transcend it. He is forthright, clear in outline, colloquial, undecorated. Shakespeare was able to use Wyatt’s poems familiarly in, for example, Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Surrey and Sidney bring orthodox Petrarchism to England; in Wyatt the energy of an old tradition, mediated through imported models, remains alive.
The best illustration of Wyatt’s freedom with Petrarch is his imitation of “Una candida cerva” (Canzoniere, poem 190), which he renders in “Whoso list to hunt.” In Petrarch’s sonnet the speaker sees a doe and follows her, coveting her as a miser covets gold. Around her neck he notices a diamond and topaz collar that says “Nessun mi tocchi.” She is Caesar’s. He follows half a day and falls exhausted. She disappears. Wyatt takes the poem and rearranges the halves of the sestet. “Nessun mi tocchi” he translates with superb blasphemy into Christ’s words, “Noli me tangere.” He does away with the miser image and from the outset presents the lover as a tired hunter. He heightens the hunting image—not in Petrarch at all—with the words “Yet may I by no means my wearied mind / Draw from the deer,” suggesting an arrow (a Cupid’s arrow, too) that has hit its mark without slaying it. Wyatt imparts dramatic unity, with a fitting climax in the last three lines. The poem lacks Petrarch’s intellectual clarity, but it has been transmuted into Wyatt’s manly, less reflective idiom. The doe may be Anne Boleyn.
Most of his poems develop a single theme. Statements of feeling are tight-lipped and masculine, not overstated or ironized. He uses rhetorical devices with restraint: means of expression, not ends in themselves. An older native tradition survives in him, despite Petrarch, and it helps to explain his prosody. He combines meter with the older accentual verse. Unless we read him with a metronomic ear, we must expect to hear at times a regular iambic pentameter line followed by a line from the accentual tradition, with a marked caesura and probably two strong stresses (and perhaps a secondary stress) in each half line. His best-known poem, with verbs and adjectives suggesting animal passion, reflects this:
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 themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand...
It includes the most prosodically contested of Wyatt’s lines, “But all is turned thorough my gentleness / Into a strange fashion of forsaking,” which Tottel amended for regularity, as he did the first passage. It is futile to force Wyatt to scan, as, for example, by voicing the e in “strange.” The two accented syllables, followed by two unaccented, “stránge fáshion of,” force a brief pause and then an acceleration not substantiated by syntax or meter, an irregularity with dramatic aural rightness if we listen with both ears.
The persona of the unhappy lover, like a glum Hilliard miniature, becomes repetitive and tiresome. He has little to celebrate. Occasionally he risks a female voice, but the effect is not striking. The poems vary greatly in quality, from the twenty or so masterpieces, among the best lyrics in English, to conventional works in which wordplay, so cherished by sixteenth-century poets, displaces thought and experience, or where a poem develops by accretion rather than progression.
Much ill is spoken of Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms. One critic declares that the real penance is to read them at all. Yet they are among the first and certainly among the better of the modern metrical versions. A comparison between Wyatt’s uneven efforts and those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or Archbishop Parker, proves that, though they do not crown his achievement, they do him no discredit. He is the first of a type—the noblest type—of poet in English literature: a man of action, servant of his king, his God and of his Muse, like Surrey, Ralegh, Sidney, Fulke Greville, Lovelace and others. Surrey defines the type in his elegies to Wyatt. They fall short of Wyatt’s achievement but have the merit of sincerity.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, having outshone Wyatt until this century, has now been eclipsed. He is still a magnificent poet, a great inventor, not least of a modern English Virgil and of blank verse.
I call to mind the navy great
That the Greeks brought to Troyè town,
And how the boisterous winds did beat
Their ships, and rent their sails adown,
Till Agamemnon’s daughter’s blood
Appeased the gods that them withstood.
His virtues tell against him: prosodic skill, formal competence. He contributes more to the development of poetry in his century than Wyatt does. He develops the unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse), his sonnets are influential, while Wyatt’s are only admired. He is a thoroughgoing Petrarchan. He may be essentially a stepping stone from Wyatt to Sidney, but that’s a worthy fate.
He was born in Kenninghall Palace, Norfolk, in 1517. From the outset he had advantages. His father was the third Duke of Norfolk. The learned, widely traveled tutor John Clerke took his education in hand and made him an exemplary linguist. He mastered Latin, Italian, French and Spanish. As a boy he was close to the young Duke of Richmond, illegitimate son of Henry VIII, and stayed with him at Windsor. He recalled this happy period later in life, after Richmond’s death and during his detention in the castle,
Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour,
The large green courts, where we were wont to hove,
With eyes cast up unto the maiden’s tower,
And easy sighs such as folk draw in love...
He recalls the ladies, the dances, the tales, games, tournaments and confidences:
The secret thoughts imparted with such trust,
The wanton talk, the divers change of play;
The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,
Wherewith we past the winter night away...
In a sonnet he remembers those years with unusual physical particularity, more like Gascoigne than conventional Surrey in its realization: “When Windsor walls sustain’d my wearied arm, / My hand my chin, to ease my restless head.”
In 1532 he married the Earl of Oxford’s daughter, enhancing his position. He progressed as courtier and warrior, fighting on land and at sea. In 1545 he was given command of Boulogne, but the next year he was arrested and charged with high treason: conspiring against the succession of Edward VI. Henry resented the popularity of his knight—a man ostentatious and ambitious, though not for the Crown. He was a blood relation of Catherine Howard, and this too the king held against him. In January 1547 Surrey was beheaded at the Tower.
He passed into legend on a slightly lower plain than Sidney was to do. Thomas Nashe fictionalized him, exaggerating his qualities, in The Unfortunate Traveller. One speech Nashe attributes to Surrey is certainly in character: “Upon a time I was determined to travel, the fame of Italy, and an especial affection I had unto poetry my second mistress”—the first being Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the Geraldine of the sonnets, who had doubtful Italian origins—“for which it was so famous, had wholy ravished me unto it.” Geraldine was to Surrey what Laura was to Petrarch, an incarnate Muse, a pretext for poems, an ideal. Warton calls her “a mistress perhaps as beautiful as Laura,” and describes Surrey’s achievement in Petrarchan terms: “At least with Petrarch’s passion if not his taste, Surrey led a way to great improvements in English poetry, by a happy imitation of Petrarch and other Italian poets.” He was more imitative, even in love, than Wyatt, and most of his poems concentrate on love’s anxieties. He returned from his first journey to Italy, Warton tells us, “the most elegant traveller, the most polite lover, the most learned nobleman, and the most accomplished gentleman, of his age.” He would have seemed a bit out of place at Hampton Court. Excess of accomplishment contributed to his undoing. It was rumored that he had designs to wed Princess Mary.
A not altogether native grace characterizes his lyrics. There is little of the suggestive awkwardness of Wyatt but instead an acquired facility. The poems please rather than move us. Warton approved: “Surrey, for justness of thought, correctness of style, and purity of expression, may justly be pronounced the first English classical poet. He unquestionably is the first polite writer of love-verses in our language.” Correct, pure, classical, polite: also, a little dull. The poems can have a metronomic regularity, though the syntax is extended and complex. From Wyatt he learned poulter’s measure (couplets consisting of a twelve-syllable iambic line alternating with a fourteen-syllable iambic line) and could write well in it:
I know to seek the track of my desirèd foe,
And fear to find that I do seek. But chiefly this I know:
That lovers must transform into the thing beloved,
And live (alas, who could believe?) with sprite from life removed.
Poulter’s measure is best used for serious statements or for burlesque. It can undermine the tone of a sober poem: “And when I felt the air so pleasant round about, / Lord, to myself how glad I was that I had gotten out!” The lighter tone mars with human warmth an otherwise chilly poem. His best-known poem in poulter’s measure, “In winter’s just return,” succeeds despite rather than because of the verse form he has chosen.
Surrey developed what came to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet and—most important—the blank verse of his translations of Books Two and Four of Virgil’s Aeneid. Grudging respect has been paid this work, yet it is subtly conceived and executed with exemplary plainness, a verse direct and transparent, displaying its matter rather than its manner. Roger Ascham approved his attempt to write without what Warton called the “gothic ornament” of rhyme. It was part of a humanist strategy. In the hands of Surrey’s successors, it proved to be much more. A passage from his version of Book Two illustrates the virtues of his form. The Greek fleet withdraws behind Tenedos.
Though rhyme has gone, the sound structure within each line, and between consecutive lines, is tight; assonance and alliteration, inner rhyme and half-rhyme, keep the verse taut. It lacks the verve of Gavin Douglas’s translation, but it is direct and faithful to the original. It moves at a pace at once dignified and speakable. Surrey attempts to approximate Virgil’s means as well as his meaning, and in this he reveals himself to be the first English poet thoroughly in the humanist tradition promoted in England by scholars such as Roger Ascham and Sir John Cheke. By following rather than dragging Virgil into English, Surrey extends English verse technique. Douglas, who was after the meat of his original, served it up according to a medieval recipe.
Forty of Surrey’s poems appeared, alongside Wyatt’s, in Tottel’s Miscellany—their first publication. A decade had passed since his death, but his reputation was still fresh. He was the only poet singled out by name on Tottel’s title page. It is hard to summon up much enthusiasm for the lyrics. “The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings” recalls Langland in phrase and alliteration, and in the not entirely conventional particularity of its images:
But in a poem with preponderantly end-stopped lines and only two rhymes, the effect is of accretion, not progression, a common vice in Surrey: his poems draw on conventional tropes but do not integrate them into statement. “Brittle beauty” and even “Set me whereas the sun,” each poem in its way memorable, are assortments of image and allusion, not coherent structures.
“Alas, so all things now do hold their peace,” “When raging love,” “O happy dancer,” “Laid in my quiet bed,” “Epitaph on Thomas Clere” and “Sardanapalus” possess as poems some of the virtues of his blank verse, but in rhymed forms, where thought and image develop together. They are among the best poems of the time. Those that record personal experience are often the most memorable. And Surrey can be memorable. Thomas Hardy echoed lines of Surrey’s, such as “Now he comes, will he come? alas, no, no,” and who can deny that the poet who wrote “I Look into My Glass” did not have deep in memory Surrey’s lines, “Thus thoughtful as I lay, I saw my wither’d skin, / How it doth show my dinted jaws, the flesh was worn so thin”?
Surrey’s debt to Wyatt is occasionally apparent in style and image. “Wrapt in my careless cloak” recalls Wyatt’s first satire; a poem with an extended chess conceit has a Wyatt-like lightness of touch; there are poems of mere wordplay, too; and verses spoken by women. But Surrey’s four elegies for Wyatt bear witness to the fact that the older poet was for him an inspiration rather than a model. Surrey was more ambitious and sophisticated than Wyatt, and though a fine poet, a lesser one.