Sir Wyatt’s Satirical Voice Essay, Research Paper

During the 16th Century, English poetry was dominated and institutionalised by the Court. Because it ‘excited an intensity that indicates a rare concentration of power and cultural dominance,’ the Court was primarily responsible for the popularity of the poets who emerged from it. Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of a multitude of the so-called ‘Court poets’ of this time period, not only changed the way his society saw poetry through his adaptations of the Petrarchan Sonnet, but also obscurely attempted to recreate the culture norm through his influence. Though much of his poems are merely translations of Petrarch’s, these, in addition to his other poetry, are satirical by at least a cultural approach.

Thomas Wyatt was born at Allington Castle in Kent, in 1503 and had made his first Court appearance by the age of thirteen as a Sewer Extraordinary to King Henry VIII. By 1525 he served the King in several various duties. Wyatt was rumoured to have been a lover of Anne Boleyn, wife to King Henry VIII, and possibly imprisoned for the affair. He witnessed her execution on May 19, 1536.

Another important thing to realise while studying Wyatt, in so far as poetry analysis is concerned, is the time period in which he wrote. Although the exact date for the beginning of the Renaissance is unknown, Wyatt was surely part of that movement. The term Renaissance denotes a transition between the medieval and modern world which individualised the sixteenth century and helped to enlarge the mind of man ‘with a sense of old freedoms regained and of new regions to be explored.’ Wyatt and one of his contemporaries, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, pioneered a literary movement in which ‘their task was, not to carry on the tradition of English verse, for that had been virtually lost, but to create a new one.’ During an official trip to Italy in 1527, Wyatt became acquainted with the work of the Italian love poets. Later, his translations of Petrarch introduced the sonnet into England, which is what he is most commonly known for.

Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s poems, mainly idealisations of unobtainable women and considered to be biographical, were unusual in the Court at the time. Court poetry, because used only for special occasions and entertainment, allowed little or no room for a poet’s personal emotions. Most of Wyatt’s poetry ‘is conventionally elegant, clear, impersonal, speaking with the voice of the collective, directed at his audience rather than to his own experiences.’ Wyatt’s unique translations reveal his own emotions in a limited, but accepted way. The sonnet, because of its small size and strict form, allows little room for vagueness and forces its writer to avoid obscurity; ‘the sonnet itself is such a model space- a stanza, a small room, like those no doubt of study or closet in which it would be written or read.’ Wyatt employed the sonnet as a corrective for vague thought and loose expression that nearly all Court poetry typified.

Because of Wyatt’s position in his culture, obedience of the laws in Courtly love was expected of him. Wyatt argues against this restraint of his passion in the sonnets ‘Farewell, Love, and all thy laws for ever’ and ‘I abide and abide and better abide.’ In ‘Farewell Love’ the speaker dismisses the ‘baited hooks’ and ‘sharp repulse’ of love and its laws, or, as a present day reader would assume, the laws of Courtly love in particular, being as this is all Wyatt had known in his life time. Courtly love is a type of game where the chivalric gentleman is never rewarded by the woman he lusts after, his desires are never satisfied. Like the speaker of the poem who ‘lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb’ Wyatt wanted the laws of Courtly love to ‘claim no more authority.’

In another of his sonnets, ‘I abide and abide,’ Wyatt reveals his envy of a common, non-courtier man. The speaker of the poem, who claims to ‘abide and abide and tarry the hide,’ shows his frustration at ‘Nother obtaining nor [being] yet denied.’ Rather than continue in this fashion of constantly remaining in between the grounds of being reward by his love or being turned away by her, the speaker admits from the point of view of a courtier, ‘much were it better for to be plain.’

These two poems, as well as a third entitled ‘Complaint for true love unrequited’ are what have been labelled today in the Dictionary of Literary-Rhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance as complaint poems. Complaint poems were often aimed in the sixteenth century at correcting the problem of which the poem’s speaker complains; ‘in some of these poems the complaint merges with satire to urge correction of man’s foolish and vicious behaviour.’ Wyatt’s ‘complaint’ poems show an attempt to change the laws of Courtly love and to employ the Renaissance philosophy of ‘old freedoms regained,’ thereby classifying them as satirical.

In addition to criticising Courtly love, Wyatt mocks the relationship of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in his sonnet ‘Whoso Lists to hunt.’ In the poem, Wyatt compares the fantasy of courtly love with hunters chasing after a hind. The hunters symbolise the courtiers while Anne Boleyn is the hunted hind. The poem contains the bloody imagery that can be associated with a hunt; the speaker does not ‘Draw from the deer’ his wearied mind. This imagery accompanied with the inscription on the collar around the deer’s neck, ‘for Caesar’s I am,’ shows the disintegration of the institution of the Court. Henry VIII, who was well known for his hunting ability, had brought blood and gore into the practice of chivalric love, through the beheading of Anne Boleyn, making it more than a simple amusement.

In his poem ‘They Flee From Me,’ Wyatt’s satiric voice can be identified through his clever use of contradictions. The story in the poem contrasts the past with the present; ‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,’ and also serves as a superficial indication of the poem’s deeper set of contradictions. In the first stanza of the poem the speaker depicts a time when he dominated women, but in the following stanza he immediately refutes this dominance with one particular instance of his own submission ‘When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,/ And she me caught.’ The women in the first stanza, though they are submissive to the speaker, are only drawn to his passivity, the stillness of the hand ‘That sometime they put themselves in danger/ To take bread at.’ The passivity’s purpose changes in each stanza; ‘in the first stanza, it seems to be disguised aggression; in the second, an ecstatic release from aggression; in the third, a form of victimization.’ Because Court poetry put little emphasis on the individual and his experiences, the speaker in this poem is more likely a symbol of a collected group, ‘hence, the ambiguity of the speaker’s passivity has its roots not in the quirks of a complex personality but rather in the conflicting cultural codes that fashion male identity in Tudor court lyrics.’ The passivity introduces yet another contradiction between religious and diplomatic expectations. Passivity, in the Lutheran context, is a transcendent quality, but is a sign of weakness and ‘the failure to manifest one’s power’ in the context of Henrician diplomacy. Neither God nor the King, during the Tudor period, could determine man’s identity according to Wyatt, who, through this poem, criticised a society that believed otherwise.

With Wyatt’s negative view of the court, in which he had such an active role, established one can argue for an even deeper form of satire found in his style. An admiration for the work and style of Petrarch seems at least a necessary trait for Wyatt, but an interpretation of his translations in conjunction with his other poems reveals a possible alternative. Several of the ideas expressed in Wyatt’s poetry contradict those of Petrarch’s. Where Petrarch idealises love Wyatt implies its tyrannical traits by calling it authoritative and a spender of ‘many brittle darts.’ He uses Petrarch’s romantic vernacular, but only in the aid of vulgar description. Later on during the Renaissance, the Petrarchan style became hackneyed and

vulnerable to parody. Some poets turned away from a ‘honey-tongued’ tone, elaborate Petrarchan conceits, and an idealisation of the beloved. Their love poems not only mocked the imagery of the traditional Petrarch vocabulary but also deflated the attributes of the lady and ennobling effects of love.

Wyatt, like these later poets though more discreet, displays at least an unconscious mockery of Petrarch’s ideals, perhaps because of their similarity to the ideals of courtly love. ‘Whoso list to hunt’ is another example of Wyatt and Petrarch’s contradictions. The poem ‘is transformed from Petrarch’s original to a more meditative ironic poem, full of self-pity, bitterness, and disenchantment.’

Wyatt’s satires, although they almost speak for themselves, require at least a touch in this analysis. They were most likely written, after he was released from prison and put under his father’s jurisdiction, as a response to the command of the Court. Wyatt had no hope of over-throwing the extreme power of the Court through his poetry, but he does take the liberty of giving moral advice through his use of sarcasm. In his third satire, to Sir Francis Brian, Wyatt says to ‘Use virtue as it goeth nowadays/ In word alone to make thy language sweet,/ And of the deed yet do not as thou says.’ Nowhere in his satires, however, does a command for abandoning the structure of the Court emerge.

All of the satire found in Wyatt’s poetry addresses the one seemingly overwhelming problem of the Court’s influence and restraint on an individual’s morals and emotions. According to Stephen Greenblatt in an essay on culture, the more severe punishments which are used against those who do not behave in a socially acceptable way, such as imprisonment (in Wyatt’s case), are not nearly as effective as ‘seemingly innocuous responses: a condescending smile, laughter poised between the genial and the sarcastic, a small dose of indulgent pity laced with contempt, cool silence.’ In literary works, Greenblatt connects these responses with the effect that blame has in enforcing cultural boundaries through the use of satire; as I have shown, Wyatt uses poetry, although obscurely because of the jeopardy it imposed on his freedom, as his own method of social control.