Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt

King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on a deer hunt; Image via Wikipedia

The more I read about Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt, the more I love it!

I’m a fan of the Anne Boleyn story anyway. I enjoy almost anything about her, and knowing that this poem is supposedly about her makes it especially enticing! Whoso List to Hunt is an adaptation of Petrarch’s Rime 190, but it is much, much different.

In Petrarch’s Rime 190, the speaker sees a beautiful deer and pursues her. The poem ends with the narrator falling in the stream and the doe being gone when he comes back up. He also notes that she’s wearing topaz and diamonds.

In Wyatt’s version, his “doe” (or supposedly, Anne Boleyn) is dressed with diamonds only, a point addressed in this analysis in the Guardian. Topaz represents chastity. This doe has entertained suitors, it sounds like, and has maybe even entertained the speaker before, and therefore she is not worthy of the topaz.

But she’s not entertaining suitors anymore. She is owned, as this analysis points out, by the owner of the land. Women are property, don’t forget, and once the lord of the land, King Henry VIII, claimed his prize, no one else was allowed (or would dare) to touch her.

The point of the speaker’s chase is moot, he says, using this line: “Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.” Pursuing her may be his desire, but it will get him nowhere.

The final couplet is “‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.” In other words, Don’t touch me. I belong to King Henry. And even though you think I am but a meek doe, I am entirely too much of an animal for you to handle.

Anne Boleyn’s fire is captivating to me; her determination to get the throne was unstoppable, and she was undeterred by her critics. It’s good to be favored by the most powerful man in the country, but when he changes his mind and the dictator-king becomes paranoid, falls in love with his mistresses and blames his one-time love for not producing a son, it’s horrendous. And he disposed of her the way we today would ditch spoiled leftovers. Her ambition cost Boleyn her life.

Whoso List to Hunt is about a time before Boleyn experienced real nastiness, when she was just becoming out of reach for other men and was the apple of the king’s eye. Boleyn’s story was tragic; she wasn’t innocent, of course, but she was chewed up and spit out. She produced England’s greatest queen, and yet she did not get to see her progeny succeed. She is one of the reasons I adore British royalty, history and literature. So thank you, Sir Thomas Wyatt, for this lovelorn reminder of Boleyn’s beauty and vulnerability.

 

Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Madam, Withouten Many Words

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Here’s my synopsis of this poem:

Lady, I love you. Are we gonna hook up or what?

Classy. Of course, Sir Thomas Wyatt‘s version of Madam, Withouten Many Words is much more beautiful. His poem was inspired by the Italian poet Dragonetto Bonifacio’s Madonna Non So Dir Tante Parole. My understanding is that Bonifacio’s poem was the source, and that Wyatt’s version was not a direct translation.

This analysis of the poem delves into the meaning of some of the words (“oons” being one that it obsolete today but could have meant something like “sometime” or “once and for all”), and this one speculates that this poem might have been about Anne Boleyn — “choose me or King Henry!” I don’t think that’s the case for two reasons: I think I would have found more speculation online about that and I think it would have been written as an original rather than as a poem similar to that of the Italian poet. But I love the Boleyn story, so I enjoy going along with that, even though I don’t believe it’s the case!

How would you respond if you were the lady? The poem isn’t that romantic. It sounds a little more … er, horny … than romantic. Or maybe, read another way, the man is tired of being strung along. (We women do that to men sometimes, and they could potentially be blameless for this sort of put-up-or-shut-up request.) But some brilliant writer has already thought of all this and wrote the following response. (You can also read Bonifacio’s version at the same link.) Clever!

 

Sir Thomas Wyatt’s My Galley

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Sir Thomas Wyatt‘s My Galley is translated from Petrarch‘s poem 189 from Rime. It is a ship struggling during a terrible storm at sea, a metaphor for depression — a mind struggling to right itself. The imagery is incredible, and it’s a beautifully written sonnet. Rhyme scheme is ABBA ACCA DEED FF.

One analysis I read (linked below) said this poem was about a man who had rejected God, and this battery at sea was the consequence (because, of course, God controls the sea and the weather). It also said the author was contemplating suicide as the only way out of this misery.

The word choices are violent and emotional:

• sharp seas
• mine enemy
• steereth with cruelness
• rain of tears
• cloud of dark disdain
• despairing of the port

One line (“every oar a thought in readiness”) is beautiful to me because of the way the analysis below described it: That the author was trying to think his way out of this turmoil, like oars trying to right the ship, and yet he could not. Anyone who has ever been depressed or experienced hopelessness knows that trying to get oneself out of it using logical thought is useless.

The end of the poem indicates that the author doesn’t even remember why he’s experiencing this trauma, and also that he has no guide (like the stars) for getting him to safety.

You can read the poem and a good analysis of it here.

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I have had more thoughts on this poem since I published this post a few hours ago. A God that would beat a nonbeliever to death or near-death using the ocean as a weapon would be an angry, unforgiving and vengeful God. Is that what the English in the 16th century thought of God? Or was that just for poetic effect? Or was it an overreaction of fear on the author’s part of what would happen if he did reject God? I am curious about this and really don’t know where to look to find out what religious people thought back then. Was God a controlling and malicious God or a loving and understanding one? Please comment if you have an answer or theory.

 

Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Farewell, Love

Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder‘s sonnet, Farewell, Love, expresses what many of us have felt at one time or another. The long and short of it is: Love, you’re too stressful, and I’m done with you!

The Norton Anthology editors point out that Wyatt’s sonnets are usually “doleful,” and this is a perfect example. (We’ll get to his perkier ballets or dance-songs in future posts.) In Farewell, Love, he rejects love “forever.” Look at his beautiful language that makes love sound as physically painful as it feels to him emotionally:

• “Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more”
• “Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore”
• “And thereon spend thy many brittle darts.”

I enjoyed the following statement:

Senec and Plato call me from thy lore,

To perfect wealthy my wit for to endeavor.

In other words, the world’s best philosophers agree that love is not the means to a healthy and balanced life.

One analysis I read said the last line “Me lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb” was a reference to chivalry and the expectation that he can’t consummate his passion. That is, he’s no longer interested in chasing dead ends.

You can read the entire poem here, or you can listen to it read here:

 

Wyatt and Surrey’s translation of Petrarch’s Rime 140

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Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, both translated the same poem, sonnet 140 from Petrarch‘s Rime.

Both Wyatt and Surrey had terrifically interesting lives and were very wrapped up with British royalty. Wyatt was rumored to have had an affair with Anne Boleyn before her marriage to King Henry VIII, and he was imprisoned twice by the tyrant for alleged treason. His connections got him out both times. Henry supposedly planned to marry Wyatt’s wife (she would have been Wife #6) even though Wyatt was still married to her. (That guy could get away with ANYthing!)

Surrey was actually executed by Henry’s order. Oh, if only Surrey’s execution-by-decapitation date had been set for 10 days later, no telling what masterpieces he might have created. The young man (only 29 or 30) was sentenced to a beheading by King Henry VIII, who died Jan. 28, 1547, nine days after Surrey’s execution. Surrey’s father’s execution date was scheduled for Jan. 29, 1547; he outlived Henry VIII and therefore was blessed with a stay of execution.

Back to the poetry translation: It takes much more educated minds than mine to dissect the differences between Wyatt’s and Surrey’s versions. This article explains that Wyatt’s verse was much rougher and more forced than Surrey’s smooth rhyme. Wyatt also veered from Petrarch’s rhyme scheme. However, Wyatt and Surrey are known as “Fathers of the English Sonnet.” According to Wikipedia, Wyatt introduced the sonnet into English and Surrey gave the English the rhyming meter and the division into quatrains that now characterizes Shakespearean sonnets.

In Surrey’s translation, love seems to me to be the poet’s ruler. Listen to these words he chooses:

• Love, that doth reign
• within my captive breast
• clad in the arms
• he fought

And in Wyatt’s, it seems that love is more the poet’s guest:

• love that in my thought doth harbor
• keep his residence
• campeth

Another difference is that Wyatt maintains the question at the end, as Petrarch asked it. Wyatt’s version is:

What may I do, when my master feareth,

But in the field with him to live and die?

Surrey removes the question posed by Petrarch and instead declared:

For my lord’s guilt thus faultless bide I pain,

Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove

This link provides both translations side by side, along with Petrarch’s original and with a literal translation of Petrarch’s original. What do you see as the differences?

 

A post about excuses … lots of ‘why nots’

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I’m going to be dead honest for a moment. I love this blog. That is, I love the concept of it. The doing of it is difficult for me.

I love British literature. I was in the library yesterday yearning to read all the books before me (Life in Medieval England, The Complete History of Great Britain, Kings and Queens, etc.) and realizing I don’t have enough time in my life to read them all. Why, why, why, don’t I have enough time? I don’t have kids. I don’t have a job that’s so demanding that I don’t have time for myself. But what I do have is a ton of interests. I love to do volunteer work. I love to watch TV. I love to go out to eat. I love keeping in touch with people, which means time on the phone, on e-mail and on Facebook. I love to cook. So paring it down to read what I want in British lit doesn’t come easily.

But the point of this blog was to make me sit down and do it. Read it, absorb it and write about it. I do read it and I tend to absorb it. My stopping point comes with the writing about it. I feel paralyzed by fear that I didn’t read enough or read it thoroughly or understand it properly, and I can’t possibly put something out there that makes me look stupid, right? Except the fact that I post once every 2 to 3 months and yet continue the facade of “Day 19″ accomplishes that mission all on its own….

It is one of the things that will make me die unhappy, that is, having not absorbed a satisfactory amount of British lit before my day is up. I can’t let myself die feeling lost without having this simple feat accomplished. Because I have so many other things I want to do — after this, I want to go after the anthology of American literature, plus there’s a million other books out there I want to attack.

So I will take comfort in the fact that I don’t have enough readers to judge my lack of British history knowledge or my shallow understanding of literary theory. I will post, by God, whether it’s good or not, and relish in my plan of making British literature as much a part of my life as I truly want it to be.

Do you hear that, Sir Thomas Wyatt? You’re next!

Editor’s note: This post was written on my original blog one year ago. I have not posted since then. This is another of my failures. I have had tons of drama the past year that I have allowed to become an excuse for not writing. I’m trying to stop this continuing failure and get back into my book! Any encouragement is welcome; apparently, I don’t do well trying to take on such a monumental task in a vacuum.

 

John Skelton

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Poetry is difficult for me. I like it, but if I miss the point, I really miss the point. And without the other context around it, like you’d have with a short story or novel, I find myself often — yes — missing the point.

John Skelton is the poet I was to read for this entry. I’m pretty sure I missed the point on all his poems. But he was quite an interesting guy. He tutored King Henry VIII when the king was a young boy, he served as clergy for a time, and he was known as a practical joker. He goaded Cardinal Wolsey with his satiric attacks on the clergy and government, leading Wolsey to imprison Skelton a time or two.

His poems imitated medieval satire and his “open satires” were written in short rhymed lines. The Skeltonic lines would have two to five beats, ending in rhyme, and going on until Skelton himself ran out of good rhyming words to keep moving forward with.

Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale was the first of his I read. It looks like it would probably be pretty funny if I understood it. It is partly spoken by a clerk and partly sung by Margery and a bass. The Norton intro to it even says it has an ironic ending. The best I can figure is that Margery is fussing at this man for most of the poem and then tells him to wed her. Not sure I got that right.

To Mistress Margaret Hussey is an ode to the lady in the title, who is both gentle and strong. She’s patient and kind and happy. It looks to me like this poem employs the Skeltonic line mentioned earlier: The rhyme scheme is basically AAABBBCCCDD throughout.

Lullay, Lullay, Like a Child is a lullaby parody. At first it’s very sweet, with baby in mom’s lap, but by the end, it sounds like she’s rocking to sleep an intoxicated, snoring man. The rhyme scheme is ABABBCCDD.

Colin Clout is a much longer poem that takes shots at Cardinal Wolsey. The book includes only an excerpt.  In the excerpt is Skelton’s commentary on his style of poetry:

For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten
If ye take well therewith
It hath in it some pith.

 

The History of King Richard III

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I read this excerpt from Sir Thomas More‘s The History of King Richard III right after I read Utopia. I planned to blog about it, but I felt so uneducated about the excerpt to blog intelligently about it. I looked up Jane Shore, Edward IV’s mistress, and didn’t find much. And I didn’t get anything from the excerpt. So I decided to come back to it.

It turns out that in the end of the excerpt, More explains why you won’t find much in history on Jane Shore: “…some shall think this woman too slight a thing to be written of and set among the remembrances of great matters, … Her doings were not much less, albeit they be much less remembered, because they were not so evil.” OK, More, you win. I’m interested now!

I re-read it today and feel like I have a clearer sense of it. I’m sure I don’t “get” it, but I got more out of it this time. With the Norton Anthology proclaiming The History of King Richard III as “the first ‘history’ in English that has any claim to be English literature,” I don’t know why the editors chose this excerpt that seems to have very little to do with Richard.

However, it does show Richard III’s cruelty in his treatment of Jane Shore because she was a mistress of his enemy. The excerpt shows her fall from grace. According to the text, she once was the following, under Edward IV’s reign:

• worshipfully friended
• honestly brought up
• very well married
• proper
• fair
• delighted men not so much in her beauty as in her pleasant behavior
• proper wit
• merry in company
• ready and quick of answer
• neither mute nor full of babble

But now, under Richard III, after he “spoiled her of all that ever she had … and sent her body to prison,” More described her thusly:

• old
• lean
• withered and dried up
• nothing left but rivelled skin and hard bone
• beggarly condition, unfriended and worn out of acquaintance

The text says Jane Shore was still alive when More composed The History and that he “holds her forth as a remarkable example of the caprices of fortune.” In fact, her rise and fall reminds me much of that of Anne Boleyn, once so desired by the king to the point that he would cast aside his wife, his daughter, his standing with the people as well as with the church to have her, and yet later she was so despised by him that he’s feasting and merry-making with other ladies while Boleyn’s head is being chopped off in front of the people. My, the mighty how they fall…

One beautiful line in this excerpt: “For men use if they have an evil turn to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn, we write it in dust.”

 

Utopia

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Oh, what a wonderful day it is! As promised, I finished Utopia — well, the excerpt of Utopia that appears in the Norton Anthology — and I thoroughly enjoyed it! It wasn’t what I expected at all.

First, a disclaimer: I know very little about Plato’s Republic, which heavily influenced More’s Utopia, so for people who do know Republic well, please forgive my ignorance on how the two are linked. With that said, I would like to take up the Republic one day, and if I do, I’ll be sure to post here my thoughts about the two books.

OK, onto my thoughts: in Book 1, Giles and More are telling Hythloday that he owes it to his country to enter into the service of a king because his knowledge would be so useful to the public. Hythloday, on the other hand, sees his knowledge not as something that should hold him captive to a king or a society but rather as something that he should enjoy for himself. Besides, he said, no king would listen to him because kings think they know everything and would rather have a room full of yes-men than one person who challenges him.

It may be a stretch, but it reminded me of Jeremy Bentham‘s utilitarianism, a philosophy I understood to mean “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” However, although the Wikipedia entry says this, it goes on to talk about happiness vs. pain, rather than the individual making choices for himself rather than for society. Do you owe society your body of knowledge? According to Giles and More, yes. No matter how much it frustrates them, though, Hythloday sticks to his guns and rejects the idea that intelligence or worldliness binds one to the service of others.

In Book 2, so many themes from my MBA classes popped up:

• bottom-up management The new king comes into town putting his own soldiers on the same jobs as he put the natives on. It’s not true bottom-up in the sense that the king listens to the paeans, but by getting his own men down on the level with the others, it increases buy-in to his mission, creating higher employee satisfaction.
• management of efficiencies The king divided the work among so many hands that work was finished quickly, filling his competitors (other countries) with envy.
• hierarchy organization In Utopia, town magistrates preside over phylarchs which preside over households. Each household has a master and a mistress, who are in charge of about 40 farm workers and two slaves. “Experienced citizens” represent their cities like the House and Senate does in the United States politically, or in a corporate sense, more like departments, committees or a board of directors, and they choose a prince to serve a life term.
• stock valuation The Utopians have excellent control over their economy because no metal or gem is valued more than what they truly deserve. Rarity does not make silver and gold precious, contend the Utopians; instead, these metals are “vain and unprofitable … used to punish slaves, shame wrongdoers, or pacify infants.” Rather, iron is valuable because men need it for useful things.
• corporate culture Once dignitaries from another country learned that Utopia’s culture was to scorn gold and finery, they accepted this custom and adapted for the time they were visiting.
• risk assessment Whereas people in other cultures may believe that their betrothed will be as beautiful or handsome underneath their clothes as they are clothed, Utopians exercise risk assessment upon engagement. Premarital sex is severely penalized, but to encourage happier marriages from the get-go, the Utopians arrange a look-see before the wedding. Bride and groom get to see the goods before they commit, lessening the chance of wedding night misery — and possibly a doomed marriage. It’s what they call being “legally protected from deception beforehand.”
• human resources If employees have few consequences for bad behavior at work, many would steal money, commit fraud or ignore the work on their desk. The same goes for the Utopians, except they leave this concept to the afterlife. For this reason, atheism is despised, and public responsibility is withheld from atheists. The Utopians believe that without heaven as a temptation, people will break rules and act selfishly.
• capitalism This is a strange concept to bring up in such a socialist work, but I contend that the Utopians’ treatment of religion is very capitalist. Every person is allowed to have different views, and everyone can proselytize (advertise) for his or her chosen religion as long as it’s done “quietly, modestly, rationally, and without bitterness toward others.” The thought was that “the true one will sooner or later prevail by its own natural strength.” In other words, the strongest will convert the most followers (customers) and beat its competition.
• social responsibility Utopians stay very busy dedicating themselves to charity, whether from nursing, fixing roads, cleaning, building or transporting. “They work for private citizens as well as for the public.”

I realize the irony of choosing corporate terms to describe concepts in Utopia, a commonwealth made up of no private business where no man owns anything, worries about making a living or fears poverty. So why can places not become this Utopia? And why, I was asking myself as I was reading it, would I like it or dislike it if we changed to this moneyless economy and communal living? More nailed it: Pride. I’m afraid I would succumb to the same failings as many others would, which is measuring oneself in comparison to what others have or lack.

What an interesting world! I aspire to one day read the full Utopia alongside Plato’s Republic and enjoy them together.

 

Sir Thomas More

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I have hit a roadblock, and that roadblock is Sir Thomas More.

More is such a complex and admirable man that I feel that I am destined to do him a disservice with my lack of knowledge about him in my tiny little blog post. I’ve been working on reading the excerpt from Utopiathat appears in the Norton Anthology. It’s not long and it’s not hard to read. But I know that once I finish reading it, I have to make a blog entry about it, and I’m anxious about how little of his story I’ll be able to tell because I don’t know enough about him.I recently watched the episode of The Tudors in which More was beheaded. So many people were being beheaded back then, and all of them are difficult to think about. But More was such an educated and focused individual, and it appears that King Henry felt enormous guilt over the execution — what a shame it was for them and for the world.

So, Sir Thomas More, I will remove your roadblock status. I will post about you, Sir, and I will do it soon. I apologize in advance for any disservice I may do you. Thank you for being such a strong and interesting figure!