THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Wyatt’s love-poetry suggests an equally intimate acquaintance with the whims and moods of those who possess
and manipulate power, though here the power dealt with is both political and erotic. It is essentially a courtly poetry;
it assumes an acquaintance with codes of manners and formal approaches, withdrawals and responses; it reads signs
and interprets codes; it indulges in elaborate displays of both loyalty and affliction and it plays lyrical surfaces against
insecure and often perplexed subtexts. Throughout, the poet casts himself in the role of the unfulfilled Petrarchan
lover, albeit one who tends to view his mistresses as fickle rather than as chastely detached and one who cultivates an
air of melancholic self pity. Much of the finest verse has a directness and an immediacy of address. Wyatt poses direct
questions (‘And wylt thow leve me thus?’, ‘Ys yt possyble | That hye debate, | So sharpe, so sore, and off suche rate |
Shuld end so sone and was begone so late? | Is it possible?’, ‘What shulde I saye | Sinns [since] faithe is dede | And
truthe awaye | From you ys fled?’) and he throws down challenges or issues for debate (‘Unstable dreme according to
the place | Be stedfast ons [once]: or els at leist be true’, ‘Wythe servyng styll | This have I wonne, | Ffor my good wyll
| To be undonne’). He is the self conscious poet singing the role of the defeated lover in ‘My lute, awake!’ but in
‘They fle from me’ and ‘Who so list to hunt’ he is the courtly male stalker, wooer, and pursuer of female animals,
both tame and wild. The domesticated animals that once took bread from the narrator’s hand in ‘They fle from me’
desert him when his fortune shifts and ‘all is torned thorough my gentilnes | Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking’.
In what was probably his own first appearance in print in 1542, Surrey, Wyatt’s junior by fourteen years, paid
posthumous tribute to a poet whose innovations were ‘wrought to turne to Britaines gayne’. Wyatt had possessed a
head ‘where wisdom misteries did frame’ and a hand ‘that taught what might be sayd in ryme’. If Surrey’s poem
makes only oblique reference to Wyatt’s ‘witnesse of faith’ - his interlinked paraphrases of the seven Penitential
Psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143) - it does so as part of an explicitly Christian epitaph in which piety
counts for more than courtship. Surrey had, however, clearly been deeply impressed by the novelty and shapeliness of
the older poet’s borrowings from the Italian and by his recasting of the form of lyrical, amorous verse in English. His
own sonnets, which were much admired as pioneer expressions of neo-classical propriety by critics from the sixteenth
to the eighteenth century, have an assured regularity which smoothes out Wyatt’s occasional metrical awkwardness.
They also have a certain glibness which suggests a poet writing to a formula rather than evolving a personal mode of
expression. Surrey is at his most expressive when he allows a persona to particularize emotion. His stanzaic poem on
the Windsor where he was imprisoned in 1537 (‘So crewell prison’), for example, looks back on the lost
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joys of adolescent friendship, on entertainments, hunts, and tournaments (‘On fominge horse with swordes and
friendly hertes’), without any need for the traditional moral resort to a reflection on the whims of Fate. The complaint
of a grieving wife in ‘O happy dames’ is also transformed from a public plea for sympathy into a precise evocation of
an acute and restless private passion:
When other lovers in armes acrosse
Rejoyce their chief delight,
Drowned in teares to mourne my losse
I stand the bitter night
In my window, where I may see
Before the windes how the cloudes flee.
Lo, what a mariner love hath made me!
Where Wyatt adapted Petrarch and Petrarchanism to English sounds and into English metres, a good deal of Surrey’s
verse tends to look back beyond Petrarch to the Latin culture which had informed the development of Tuscan poetry.
His debt to Latin verse is most evident in his attempts to echo the syntax and the rhetoric of Virgil in his translations
of Books II and IV of the Aeneid. An admiration for the sonority of Virgil’s poetry was scarcely a new discovery in
European humanist circles; the desire to explore a vernacular equivalent to Virgil’s formal eloquence was, however,
part of a general campaign to reform modern European verse according to Latinate principles. Surrey had before him
the pioneer translation of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas who had rendered Virgil’s hexameters into lively heroic
couplets (or, as he patriotically preferred to call it, ‘Scottish metre’). Though Surrey was prepared to lift words,
phrases, and even whole lines from Douglas, he made a significant move to unrhymed verse. His choice of an
unrhymed pentameter of more or less ten syllables, rather than an approximation to Latin hexameter, had a lasting
effect on English poetry.