Peripeteia

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt, from The Art of Poetry, Volume 4.

Fear and loathing in the Tudor court
Main things Thomas Wyatt is known for now: very important contributions to English poetry, esp. introducing the sonnet form to England. Main things Thomas Wyatt was known for during his life: being an ambassador for Henry VIII / petitioning the Pope re. annulling Henry’s first marriage / getting imprisoned a minimum of twice / having a [rumoured] affair with Anne Boleyn and then watching her get her head cut off. The poetry too, but not so much. No one printed a word of his poems until fifteen years after he died, when Richard Tottel printed 97 of them in the runaway success, ‘Songes and Sonnettes’, a.k.a., ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’. So in the absence of any royalty cheques, with poems circulating exclusively around small networks of readers in letters or manuscripts, Wyatt made his living as a professional politician, a courtier, an attendant on the King whose demands he fulfilled, we can infer from the poems, with a mixture of loyalty and resentment.

For the court of Henry VIII was not a cheerful, open place, but a place of secrecy, betrayal, scheming and fear. Free expression was generally only encouraged in so far as it coincided with the opinions of the King, and the opinions of the King were liable to change quickly and without warning [see: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard]. Wyatt was twice sent to the Tower on dubious charges of treason, and saw several friends go the same way as Anne [viz. beheading], and this heavy atmosphere of suspicion and duplicity informed not only the way he conducted himself at court, but also his poetry. Wyatt’s verses, as such, are complex weavings of personal revelation and poetic concealment, unspeakable confessions masked in metrics, and none seem more dangerous than Whoso List to Hunt.

The poem is a reworking of Rime 190, Una candida cerva, by the Italian sonnet-master Petrarch, who was a Renaissance poet, one of the founders of Humanism, and who formed the basis for modern Italian literature, along with Boccaccio and Dante. The Petrarchan sonnet, which bears his name, is a strict poetic form of 14 lines, divided into an octave [eight lines] and a sestet [six]. In Petrarch’s Rime 190, a white and golden-horned doe appears to the speaker at the confluence of two rivers, inspiring him to ‘leave every task’ and follow it, just as the twelve apostles did with Jesus. It is one of many translations of Petrarch’s sonnets which Wyatt composed, but, as is the case with most of them, and especially with Whoso List to Hunt, ‘translation’ is less the word than ‘transformation’, since his poems differ so dramatically [in language and tone and even narrative] from Petrarch’s originals. The dominant feeling of Whoso List…, for example, is less the ecstatic wonder of Rime 190 than bitter defeat: Wyatt’s speaker has long pursued the ‘hind’ and, though ‘wearied’ of ‘mind’ and body, ‘Fainting’ as he follows, finds that he is still one ‘of them that farthest cometh behind’. It has been a waste of time and energy, a ‘vain travail’, and, resigning the chase, he solicits any who may ‘list to hunt’ to do so, for he has the strength ‘no more’.

The sonnet’s first eight lines, its octet, bear almost no resemblance to those of Una candida cerva, but the connection between the poems becomes more obvious in the sestet, the final six, where Wyatt adopts Petrarch’s unmistakable symbol of the collar, ‘graven with diamonds’, around the deer’s ‘fair neck’. But even here Wyatt conspires to deviate from his model: though the legend on both collars begins, ‘Do not touch me’ [with Wyatt’s in the Latin, ‘Noli me tangere’], T.W. scraps Petrarch’s ‘It has pleased my Caesar to make me free’ in favour of the far more sinister ‘for Caesar’s I am’. It’s the possessive and threatening tone of these words + the knowledge of Henry VIII’s sexual acquisitiveness and jealousy + the fact that hunting was such a common metaphor for courtly courtship + Wyatt’s rumoured romantic affection for Anne Boleyn that has led many to conclude that Whoso List to Hunt is a cloaked confession of the poet’s frustrated attempts to woo the object of the King’s affection [or, at least, lust]. For Henry was England’s ‘Caesar’. And any woman to whom he laid claim was no longer, to extend the hunting metaphor, fair game.

Femme fatale
Those metaphors of hunting for a courtier’s pursuit of a woman inevitably ascribe some pretty menacing and vicious connotations to the courtship. The women are, of course, dehumanised – sub-humanised – expected to ‘flee’ [as Wyatt’s hind does] to make the matter interesting, but then willingly to submit once caught. The undertaking is more about acquisition than love, and the victim is therefore, as in hunting, ideally attractive so as to make more worthy a prize. But the metaphor ends at the moment of the ‘capture’: clearly the pursuer won’t kill the pursued; the conquest will instead be sexual. And at various points in the poem, Wyatt seems to endorse this imagery of carnal conquest, making some fairly subtle but still savage references to the pursued woman’s sexual integrity [or lack of it] in an attempt, perhaps, to ease his own frustration.

The very first line, for example – ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’ – suggests a], in the use of ‘Whoso’ or ‘Whoever’, that the woman will welcome pretty much any pursuer, and b], in ‘I know where is an hind’, that this is quite unlike Petrarch’s sacred doe which vanishes as suddenly as it appears; this woman is easy to find and readily available. Then, further on, Wyatt keeps Petrarch’s ‘diamonds’ around the deer’s ‘fair neck’ but discards the topaz, which may seem insignificant, except that topaz was the stone of chastity. And then there’s the clause, ‘Who list her hunt’, which begins the sestet, the sonnet’s second part, providing a near-echo of the poem’s first words in a demonstration of the sonnet form’s capacity to contain both harmony and disjunction. But it is an uneasy clause, more urgent without the extra syllable of ‘Whoso list to hunt’, oddly configured in a Latinate syntax which positions the main verb, ‘hunt’, after the object, ‘her’. And there’s a suspicion that this unusual syntax is intended to invite the interpretation that ‘hunt’isn’t just the main verb, but also a pun on the vagina-synonym with which it rhymes, the oldest and most Anglo-Saxon obscenity of them all, the word which English poets from Chaucer onwards have loved to conceal in puns and wordplay.

And yet, despite the camouflaged vulgarity and the undeniable sexual aggression of the chosen conceit, there are many indications that the speaker relates to the plight of the deer – of, by implication, Anne Boleyn. The harassed ‘hind’ and his ‘wearied mind’ are allied by the rhyme scheme. The ‘vain travail’ of the pursuit is recognised, perhaps, as vain in the sense of ‘vanity’, as opposed to just ‘in vain’. The ‘Fainting’ as he follows may signify a loss of conviction in the validity of the hunt, rather than merely losing strength. There is even the suggestion that the speaker identifies with the deer to the point of beginning to become her, and not just because the rime riche of ‘hind’ and ‘behind’ suggests that the pun on ‘be hind’ might not be an accident. He says, for example, ‘Yet may I by no means my wearied mind / Draw from the deer’, as if his consciousness and the fleeing doe have become inseparable, as if he is unable to distinguish his ‘mind’ – which can also mean ‘sentiments’ or ‘opinions’ or ‘experiences’ – from hers. And the apparent obstacle of their different genders is diminished by the fact that it was the white stags [the male deer, rather than the does] which wore the collars inscribed, ‘Noli me tangere quia Caesaris sum’ [‘Do not touch me for I am Caesar’s’], in 3rd Century Italy, and provided the inspiration for the image.