Practical Criticism: Class 1

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Sir Thomas Wyatt

The poem is by Sir Thomas Wyatt (?1503-42), who was a courtier in the reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt was for a large part of his career an embassador for the king. He participated actively in several of the sumptuous 'disguisings' put on at the court of Henry VIII, in which the King and courtiers dressed themselves in fine clothes and rich masks to perform impromptu plays or dances. The phrase 'after a pleasant guise' might take on a firmer association with performances in the light of this information. Wyatt was imprisoned when Henry VIII accused Anne Boleyn of adultery in 1536, and was suspected of being one of Anne's lovers. This has led to some enthusiastically 'historical' readings of the poem in which the unnamed woman in the central stanza is taken to be Anne Boleyn. What might be wrong with reading the poem in this way?

There are some ways in which a knowledge of the historical context of the poem can clarify some of the features which we found mystifying, however. Wyatt was an ambassador; he was also someone who had been imprisoned on suspicion of an affair with the king's mistress. He also lived through Henry VIII's extension of the treason act in 1535 to include verbal treason. Although we do not know exactly when the poem was composed, all of these pressures may make the poem's reluctance to specify exactly who or what it is about a little more explicable. Wyatt knew how to watch his words. He also had to compete and survive in the extremely competitive and chiefly male world of the Henrician court. His final question in this poem ('I would fain know what she hath deserved) might almost be addressed to a small group of friends who might be expected to know who exactly he was talking about. His readers are invited to join a closed and potentially aggressive circle.

Wyatt's own biographical circumstances are only one form of historical information which we could bring to bear on the poem. How does the poem stand in relation to wider currents in literary history?

Wyatt is chiefly remembered as one of the first English poets to translate Petrarch's sonnets into English. He also read and imitated Seneca and Horace. On the strength of these interests he is often regarded as one of the first writers in the English Renaissance. To see him, however, as a forward looking imitator of classical models is not entirely accurate. He was also an admirer of Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1345-1400). Verbal echoes of Chaucer's work are found throughout Wyatt's poems: we find them here in 'newfangleness', used in the specifically Chaucerian sense of 'fickle'. The impression left by the critical discussion of the poem was that terms such as 'kindly' and 'gentleness' no longer had meaning for the speaker because of his abandonment by the lady. This personal and emotional reading might not be the whole story: Wyatt himself in this poem may be attempting to look back to and revive some of the central moral terms from an earlier period. He may find that they simply do not quite have the same meaning any more. The speaker's apparent problem with those abstract nouns may not just be personal; it may have something to do with the historical moment of the poem's composition.

The poem exists in Wyatt's own manuscript of his verse, and it is worth considering the ways in which you respond to it differently if you read an unmodernised version of it.

The unmodernised version might make us wonder about the emphasis which our critical reading of the poem placed on its metrical irregularities. The unmodernised version reads 'kyndely', for example. In the language of Chaucer the medial 'e' would have been pronounced. By the early sixteenth century this was no longer the norm, but on occasions it does appear that poets were not quite sure whether final and medial 'e' should be pronounced or not. How might this make us reconsider the 'emotionally expressive effect' by which the speaker twists the pronunciation of the word 'unkindly' in the same way that the woman distorts its sense? Is this metrical oddity actually the product of the poet's uncertainties about the ways English was pronounced? Or does Wyatt make expressive use of uncertainties in the pronunciation of his language?

The first printed edition of this poem, which appeared after Wyatt's death, shows clear signs that its printer and editor Richard Tottel in 1557 felt that Wyatt's metre needed to be smoothed. Tottel changes line 2 to read 'With naked fote stalkyng within my chamber': he clearly felt awkward with the pause that seems so dramatic when one first reads it. He also adds a syllable to line 4 ('that do not once remember') in order to make clear that a feminine rhyme brings with it an eleven syllable line. His alterations show that English pronunciation and general expectations about metrical regularity were changing extremely fast in the early sixteenth century: his printed version appeared only fifteen years after Wyatt's death. It is very likely that those changes were occurring during Wyatt's life, leaving him unsure about pronunciation and accent. However, if we respond to his uncertainties by reading them as emotionally expressive are we necessarily doing anything wrong? Why should historical information be given more weight than critical insights?

There is of course no need to see these as either/or options. The features of the poem which seemed most enigmatic are not fully explained by thinking about Wyatt's historical circumstances, although that information might give us a clearer sense of why he might want to be quite so unspecific about the precise circumstances of the encounter represented in the poem. Information about the history of English poetry or the history of the language does not necessarily invalidate our critical findings. Rather they add an additional aspect to them: something very strange is happening to the word 'kindly' in this poem. That may have to do with the speaker's dramatic position, the poet's historical position, or a mixture of the two. Poems are neither just words on a page (or a screen), nor are they just reducible to historical circumstances.

In order to help you think about some of these questions you might want to compare the unmodernised version with the modernised version. You can also compare the unmodernised version with Tottel's version, which was 'modernised' to suit an audience in 1557.

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Further Reading

A university crest by an item indicates that it is written by a member or former member of the Faculty:

• Sir Thomas Wyatt: the complete poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978)
• Burrow, Colin, 'The Experience of Exclusion: Literature and Politics in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII', in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999)
• Heale, E., Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London and New York, 1998)
• Spearing, A. C., Medieval to Renaissance in English poetry (Cambridge, 1985)
• Stevens, John, Music and poetry in the early Tudor court (London, 1959; rep. Cambridge, 1979)

©Colin Burrow 1999