1. 1
The Meaning of Form in Early English Renaissance Poetry1
Dr S. Mngadi (B 723, English Department, University of Johannesburg)
Consultation Hours: Monday; Tuesday; Thursday: 10h30 – 12h30; Friday: 10h00 – 12h00(or by
appointment)
NB: I have covered some of the poems in the selection provided, in view of the
exam. The poetry of Walter Ralegh, Queen Elizabeth 1 and Philip Sidney is thus
excluded from the discussion as it will not feature in the exam.
Introduction
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet, 1.5. 195-
196).
Seen in the wider context of the English Renaissance, Hamlet’s words above about “*t+he time” being
“out of joint” have far-reaching implications than the specific context of the play Hamlet in which he
utters them, i.e. the early 1600s (early 17th
century) when the play first appeared. In fact, already in the
early 1500s (early 16th
century), with the appearance of Thomas Wyatt’s English translations of the
poetry of the 14th
century Italian poet Francesca Petrarca (Petrarch), the sense thatEnglish literature was
breaking with the morality literature popular in England in the late 1400s (late 15th
century), and
entering a new era, could be discerned in the troubled tone and imagery of Wyatt’s poems.For instance,
if one leaves aside the formal similarities, reading Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, one is
immediately struck by the difference in their preoccupations: whereas Petrarch’s sonnets were
addressed to Laura, the real woman that Petrarch loved,Wyatt’s poems are addressed to a generic (or
non-specific) “love,” or “she,” ora “hind” (female deer/dear), or “her.” Moreover, the woman in Wyatt’s
poems serves a metaphorical purpose rather than the real one that Laura served in Petrarch’s poems.
One could even say that the real addressee of Wyatt’s poems is not a woman at all but, instead, the
male speaker’s sense of his times as “out of joint” (but metaphorically characterised as the difficult
woman of the chivalric romancesof Petrarch’s time). It is in this sense that I say Hamlet’s words above
resonate with the character of the Renaissance as a whole, from the early 1500s, through the 1600s, to
the end of the Renaissance in the first half of the 1700s.
1
This poetry spans the period between 1500 and 1599. It includes poetry written before (pre-Elizabethan) and
during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth 1 (Elizabethan poetry).

2. 2
Wyatt’s poems, then, begin a period of transition of English literature from the literature of the
Middle Ages (or medieval literature) to the early modern literature (or Renaissance literature). It is a
generally accepted fact that times of transition – of change – are anxious times for those living through
them. When old certainties and habits of thought begin to come under the pressureof new and
fundamental questions about the very nature of thought and being, as it happened in the late
1400s(late 15th
century) when scientific discoveries began to threaten the authority of the Catholic
church and the feudal state, various areas of human endeavour begin to dramatise multiple reactions to
the pressing questions of the day.As one of the areas of human endeavour, literatureplayed its part in
the transition as witness to, and agent for, the search for answersto the meaning/s of change.What is
now called English Renaissance literature, poetry and drama in particular, was at the centre of this
search: what readers of Shakespeare’sHamletremember most about Hamlet, for instance, are his
struggles to find answers and to give form to his troubled(Elizabethan) times2
than what he actually
does. In this sense, in the play his words and the complex shape that they give to his times constitute
his actions upon his time and space, often more so than his physical actions do.One could say this is true
of the pre-Elizabethan poetry of Wyatt and the early Elizabethan poetry of Edmund Spenser and Sir
Philip Sidney, for instance.
The following discussion of English Renaissance poetry substantiates thebroad historical and
conceptual framework that I outline above.Like Cristina Malcolmson, I conceive of the Renaissance in
England not so much as the rebirth of classical consciousness,3
as the term Renaissance has traditionally
been employed,4
as the time of“the production of early modern and modern versions of selfhood, or
what is termed ‘subjectivity’” (Malcolmson 2; my emphasis).Thus, while in my discussion I pay close
attention to the forms of the poems that I consider, such as the Petrarchan sonnet form, I do so in order
to examine the social and cultural uses to which Renaissance poets put these forms. Indeed, as I note
above, times of social upheaval and change engender new forms, even if at times some of the new
formsare revisions of old ones, as in the case of the sonnet.
2
Even though Shakespeare disguises this fact by setting the play in Denmark.
3
That is, of England’s belated consciousness of its European heritage. As I note in my introductory remarks,
Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch do not so much mark his return to the chivalric or courtly love tradition in which
Petrarch produced his poetry as borrowing the Petrarchan sonnet form for a different purpose.
4
This sense of conceiving of the renaissance, as Cristina Malcolmson informs us, was “heralded by Burckhardt in
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860” (1).

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The function of form in Renaissance poetry
Literary historians have written widely on the historical and political context of English Renaissance
poetry and this discussion draws on some of their work. However, my focus will be on the ways in
which the poems encodespecific aspects of this literary-cultural history.
Early English Renaissance poetry owes its character, but not necessarily its substance, to the courtly
lovedoctrine (or the doctrine of chivalry) of Western Europe of the Middle Ages.M.H. Abrams defines
courtly love as
A doctrine of love, together with an elaborate code governing the relations between aristocratic
lovers, which was widely represented in the lyric poems and chivalric romances of western
Europe during the Middle Ages. [. . .] In the conventional doctrine, love between the sexes,
with its erotic and physical aspects spiritualized, is regarded as the noblest passion this side of
heaven. The courtly lover idealizes and idolizes his beloved, and subjects himself to her every
whim. [. . .] The lover suffers agonies of body and spirit as he is put to the test by his imperious
sweetheart, but remains devoted to her, manifesting his honor by his unswerving fidelity and his
adherence to a rigorous code of behavior, both in knightly battles and in the complex
ceremonies of courtly speech and conduct. (48-49)
There is no doubt that, at the very least, one finds the outlines of the courtly love doctrine of the Middle
Agesin the poetry of early Renaissance England: there is, for instance, a male speaker addressing a
difficult woman. Yet one could say the similarities end there: the man in the early Renaissance poems
does not “idealize and idolize”(Abrams 48) the woman; in fact, often he scorns her. Moreover, as I note
in my introduction, the woman serves a metaphorical purpose in the early Renaissance poems that I
shall examine: she is more of a poetic device for illustrating a point than a real woman. The points
illustrated in early Renaissance poems often have little to do with love as such, or the relationship
between lovers, but rather concern abstract concepts such as social change (in Wyatt’s poems), or the
defence of poetry (in Spenser’s poems), or virtue and constancy (in Sidney’s poems). In this sense, the
‘woman’ functions as the opponent or opposing force against which the male speaker-lover asserts his
particular view on a specific subject or issue. Thomas Wyatt’s poems, for instance, deal with the issue of
social change but do so by means of the metaphor of the courtly love doctrine: in his poems, we
encounter male speakerswho no longer have faith in the usefulness, in their changing times, of the
chivalric tradition that calls for what Abrams above calls “unswerving fidelity to a rigorous code of

4. 4
behavior” (49). The imagery of Wyatt’s poems is of the futile hunt (“Whoso List to Hunt”), or of the male
speaker sailing rough seas with a cruel woman steering the ship (“My Galley”), or of women who were
once “gentle tame andmeek” but “now are wild . . ./ Busily seeking with continual change” (“They Flee
from Me”). In Spenser’s sonnets, which were heavily influenced by Philip Sidney’s essay, “An Apology
for Poetry,” the male speaker is a poet testing his wits against an unappreciative woman (who, in the
poems, is given the identity of nature). In Sidney’s poems, the man, who values the qualities of virtue
and constancy, searches in vain to find them in the women of his times.5
It must be evident, then, that
while the addresser and addressee in these poems remain a man and a woman respectively, as in the
chivalric romances of the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance period the content and, to a large extent, the
form of their address had changed.With this in mind, let me turn to the discussion of a selection of
Renaissance poems.
Thomas Wyatt
Thomas Wyatt’s poems, written between 1503 and 1542, before Queen Elizabeth 1’s ascension to the
throne of England, are a good place to start. This is mainly becausetheyregister a more pronounced
sense of transition, that is, of the individual’s social and psychological dislocation, than the
laterElizabethan court lyrics of Spenser and Sidney do.6
It could be that, writing at the onset of England’s
cultural renaissance, that is,in the absence of a literary tradition commensurate with his changing times,
and during the turbulent reign of King Henry VIII, before the stabilising nationalist political influence of
Queen Elizabeth 1, Wyattwould have felt his situation somewhat more precarious than Spenser and
Sidney did their own. As a courtier in the court of King Henry VIII, and a sometime ambassador for the
king, Wyatt’s poetry displays the influence of some of his experiences within the court of Henry VIII and
during his ambassadorial travels to places such as Italy, France and Spain. His borrowing from the Italian
(or Petrarchan) sonnet, which he would have discovered on his travels, is one example of this influence.
Wyatt was also a richly educated man who would have taken a keen interest in the cultural renaissance
of Italy and France, which had already taken place long before England had its own cultural renaissance.
5
However, of the three poets that I discuss here, Sidney is the closest to the courtly love tradition, in terms of both
the manner of his poems’ address and their subject matter. His strong aristocratic links to the court of Queen
Elizabeth 1 were an important factor in his artistic choices.
6
In her recent biography of Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (2012), Susan Brigden states that,
“before the Elizabethan prodigies *i.e. Sidney and Spenser+ there had been Wyatt and Surrey, the morning stars of
the Renaissance in England” (5). Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was Wyatt’s dear friend who translated Petrarch’s
Rime 140, as “Love, That Doth Reign and Live within My Thought,” which Wyatt had translated as “The Long Love,
That in My Thought Doth Harbor.”

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Further, as regards the influence of his travels on his poetry, which would have been by sea, Wyatt’s
poetry is saturated with nautical metaphors: for instance, the imagery of the male speaker sailing rough
seas in a war ship (the galley) steered by a cruel mistress (“My Galley”), or the imagery of the speaker as
an invaded harbour and of the woman (the long love) as the invading country “spreading his banner”
(“The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor,” Ln. 4). The turbulent reign of King Henry VIII saw
Wyatttwice thrown in jail (the Tower) by Henry VIII on suspicion of treason. There was also a rumour
that he had an adulterous affair with the king’s wife, Anne Boleyn, whom some critics say is the woman
who, in “Whoso List to Hunt,” says “Noli me tangere [do not touch me+, for Caesar’s I am” (Ln. 13),
“Caesar” being thought to have been a reference to Henry VIII. This background must give one a better
sense of the subtext of Wyatt’s poetry; that is, that while on the surface (i.e. in their formal appearance)
his poems may appear to be unimaginative copies of the courtly love doctrine of the Middle Ages (in
particular the Petrarchan expression of this doctrine), on closer examination they are poems of and
about his uncertain times. This is a very important point to consider as the basis for the discussion of
Wyatt’s poetry.
What, then, was the content of England’s cultural renaissance that marked England’s transition from
medievalism to early modernity and which Wyatt’s poetry captured, albeit in a form that seemed ill
suited to his times?Here “seemed” is the keyword, for, as I note above, Wyatt’s poems may have
seemed archaic in style but in their subject matter they spoke of an England entering a period of social
and cultural crisis, where older forms and their subject matter, such as the morality literature of the last
decades of the 1400s,7
were becoming increasingly irrelevant to a changing European social, political
and cultural milieu.8
Wyatt’s poems track this crisis mainly in the conceit of the futile hunt or, more
generally, in their underlying sense of an English world that is losing its old certainties and clear goals –
in a nutshell, a world in constant change. One could say that, through this conceit of the futile hunt,
what Wyatt posits in his poems is the view that futility itself (or meaninglessness) is the new meaning or
goal that Renaissance man must, to some degree, inevitably embrace.9
The Petrarchan sonnet form, with
7
Here plays such as The Castle of Perseverance or the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight come to mind as
examples of the morality literature that flourished in England in the 1400s. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may
have come from a French Arthurian romance.
8
As I note above, the far-reaching changes in Europe – the challenge to the Catholic Church by Martin Luther in his
reformist 95 theses, for instance; the Copernican revolution in science (astrology); and the rise of humanism
against feudalism in the literature of the Italian and French renaissance – meant that it was a matter of time before
England would be swept up in these changes.
9
Here I use the term futility in the modern sense to refer to the condition of the modern human subject later
captured in the 20
th
century by works such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for instance. The renaissance is

6. 6
its two parts – the octave expressing the speaker’s frustration and the sestet in which the speaker
attempts a resolution – seems to have been a perfect form for Wyatt (and for Elizabethan poets after
him, albeit with modifications) with which to frame this crisis. To this end, let us examine his sonnet,
“Whoso List to Hunt,” more closely:
Whoso List10
to Hunt
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, ˚ female deer
But as for me, alas, I may no more:
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore.
I am of them that farthest cometh behind;
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain:
And, graven in diamonds, in letters plain
There is written her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere,11
for Caesar's I am;
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
E. MS. (from the Edgerton Manuscript)
On the surface, the poem is a typical courtly love poem: a male hunter-lover has been pursuing “an
hind” (female deer; deer puns with dear: beloved). And, as in the courtly love lyrics of Middle Ages
Avignon (in southern France), of which Petrarch’s sonnets are a part, the beloved woman is unavailable,
already married to a powerful man (the “Caesar” mentioned in line 13). In the poem, while the male
hunter-lover has not given up the pursuit of the beloved woman, he has no doubt that the hunt is buta
often referred to as the period in which this type of dislocated human subjectivity emerged from the feudal subject
of the Middle Ages.
10
Whoever likes.
11
“Touch me not (Latin). The phrase (in Italian in Petrarch) has roots in both Petrarch’s sonnet Rime 190 – Wyatt’s
main source – and in the Bible (see especially the Catholic Bible, the Vulgate: John 20: 17 and Matthew 22: 21).
Renaissance commentators on Petrarch maintained that the deer in Caesar’s royal forest wore collars bearing a
similar inscription, to prevent anyone from hunting the animals. The allusion raises questions about Wyatt’s
relation to King Henry VIII (“Caesar,” line 13). Wyatt was accused during his lifetime of having been the lover of
Anne Boleyn, who became Henry VIII’s second wife and a major cause of his break with the Catholic Church”
(Ferguson, Margaret et al, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fifth Edition, 2005: 127).

7. 7
futile exercise, and so shares with those men “whoso list to hunt” (who still want to join the hunt)his
experience, i.e.that his hunt has not borne any fruit. Moreover, “The vain travail hath wearied *him+
sore” (Ln. 3), which means that the futile trial, or his futile chase of the woman, has exhausted him. The
octave (first eight lines) ends with a powerful metaphorforthe futility of his efforts: he says, “in a net I
seek to hold the wind” (Ln. 8).In the last six lines (sestet) the male hunter-lover attempts to arrive at a
resolution, which is to “put him *whoso list to hunt+ out of doubt” (Ln. 9), because he *whoso list to
hunt+ may “spend his time in vain” (Ln. 10), as the hunter-lover has spent his, pursuing an unavailable
woman.The tone of the poem compliments its message: for instance, the words “alas” (Ln. 2), “wearied”
(Ln. 3), and “Fainting I follow” (Ln. 7) carry the emotional content of the futile act, which emotional
content threatens to spill over the lines of the tightly-structured sonnet form itself, so to speak.
Yet beneath the surface something else is underway in this sonnet. Indeed, it is when one (i) situates
Wyatt’s poem in his time; (ii) examines the poetic stance of Wyatt’s poem’s speaker; (iii) attends to the
diction or vocabulary of the speaker’s case; and (iv) takes note of the tone or attitude of the speaker
towards the woman, that certain anomalies appear between the courtly love lyric, the Petrarchan lyric
included, and Wyatt’s own.
In Wyatt’s poem there is none of the devotional content of the Middle Ages courtly love
lyric.Whereas in Petrarch’s lyrics for Laura, collected in the Rime disperse, Laura features as“Non . . .
mortale” (Ln. 9), meaning “not . . . a mortal thing,” or “uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole” (Ln. 12), meaning
“a celestial spirit, a living sun,” in Wyatt’s poem the woman is decidedly human and the speaker’s
attitude towards her is reproachful. However, let us consider one of Petrarch’s sonnets for Laura, parts
of which I have just cited, to illustrate this point further:
Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi
che ‘n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea,
e ‘l vago lume oltra misura ardea
di quei begli occhi ch’or ne son sὶ scarsi;
e ‘l viso di pietosi color’ farsi,
non so se vero o falso, mi parea:
i’ che l’ ésca amorosa al petto avea,
qual meraviglia se di sùbito arsi?

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Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale,
ma d’angelica forma, et le parole
sonavan altro, che pur voce humana:
uno spirto celeste, un vivo sole
fu quel ch’i’ vidi; et se non fosse or tale,
piagha per allentar d’arco non sana.
[Her golden hair was loosed to the breeze
which turned it in a thousand sweet knots,
and the lovely light burned without measure in her eyes
which are now stingy of it;
and it seemed to me
her face took the colour of pity:
I, who had the tinder of love in my breast,
what wonder is it if I suddenly caught fire?
Her walk was not of a mortal thing,
but of some angelic form, and her words
sounded different from merely human voice:
a celestial spirit, a living sun
was what I saw, and if she were not such now,
a wound is not healed by the loosening of the bow.]
In this sonnet, Petrarch’s estimation of Laura is in inverse proportion to his estimation of himself: his
poetic effort is entirely devoted to his beloved Laura, as the plant to the sun (the latter known
asheliotropism12
). By contrast, in Wyatt’s Petrarchan sonnets there is none of this heliotropic(or one
could say, devotional) substance; instead, the male speaker is the point of reference, while the ‘woman’
12
The term heliotropism refers to the unidirectional growth of the plant towards the sun. As the metaphorical sun
in Petrarch’s sonnets, Laura occupies an elevated position in the direction of which the poet-lover, Petrarch, aims
his devotional lyrics.

9. 9
(who is referred to generally as ‘the love’)inhabits a metaphorical plane at the opposite, rather than the
upper, end. Let us consider, for instance, Wyatt’s “The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor.”
The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor13
The long˚ love, that in my thought doth harbour,˚ enduring/lodge
And in mine heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretence,
And therein campeth, spreading his banner.14
She that me learneth˚ to love and suffer, teaches
And wills that my trust and lust’s negligence
Be reined15
by reason, shame and reverence,
With his hardiness˚ taketh displeasure.boldness
Wherewithal, unto the heart's16
forest he fleeth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry;
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do when my master feareth
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life, ending faithfully.
E. MS.(Edgerton Manuscript)
On a basic level, the poem dramatises the conflict between (i) love as passion/sensuality and (ii) love as
subject to the moderating influence of reason17
and then attempts to resolve this conflict. It is a typical
Petrarchan sonnet: the first eight lines (octave) introduce this conflict: as a sensual (or bodily) state, love
resides “in mine heart . . . / Into my face presseth with bold pretense” (Ln. 2-3). As a state of mind,
however, sensual love must “Be reined by reason, shame and reverence/ With his hardiness . . .” (Ln. 7).
Sensuality is given a male identity, “he,” “his” and “him” (Ln. 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 & 13),and reason a female
one (in line 5 it is “She that me learneth *i.e. teaches me+ to love and suffer”). In line 8, sensuality
“taketh displeasure” at reason’s reprimand, “Wherewithal, unto the heart’s forest he fleeth” (Ln. 9) and
“hideth” (Ln. 11), “Leaving his enterprise *i.e. his desire+ with pain and cry” (Ln. 10). The last six lines
(sestet), then, present sensuality resolving to follow his “master [i.e. desire]” (Ln. 12) who has fled “unto
the heart’s forest” (Ln. 9), and there “with him to live and die” (Ln. 13). It would seem from the
13
Translated from Petrarch, Rime 140. Cf. The translation by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, “Love, That Doth Reign
and Live within My Thought.”
14
Raising the flag, i.e. taking up a position for battle and, figuratively, blushing.
15
Checked; with a probable pun on reigned.
16
With a pun on heart and hart (as deer).
17
This is understandable, given that the renaissance increasingly came to be known as the Age of Reason, as
opposed to the Age before it, i.e. the age of passions or of the body.

10. 10
rhetorical question in line 13 that the male lover sees his decision to follow his desire as logical: “For
good is the life, ending faithfully” (Ln. 14). This resolution, needless to say, is the reversal of the
Petrarchan resolution: in Petrarch the male lover remains “unswerving” in his “honor” and “fidelity”
towards Laura, who, like the mistress of reason in Wyatt’s poem, is the symbol of chastity (Abrams 49).
Yet this basic level of the poem’s meaning clearly serves an allegorical purpose, the poem’s deeper
meaning lying elsewhere in the radical transformation of the social and cultural milieu of England
herself, a transformation Wyatt was caught in. George Puttenham, the Elizabethan theorist of poetry,
said of Wyatt and his friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, they were “the most excellent makers of their
time” (74; my emphasis). This characterisation of Wyatt as the maker of his time, obviously through his
poetry, takes our reading of his poetry in a historicist direction. That is, it enjoins us to read past the
Petrarchan façade of his poems, and the façade of the courtly love tradition, and to discern in his
poemsthe contours of a poetic voice that properly belongs to early (pre-Elizabethan) 16th
century
England, rather than to 14th
century Provence in which Petrarch wrote (and in which the courtly love
doctrine flourished).The question, then, is: what might it mean, in the practical sense of interpreting his
poems, to say that Wyatt was the maker of his time? This question has been partly answered above;
however, let us look closer at the larger issues that Wyatt’s poems poeticise, and here elements such as
imagery, tone, diction, and the allegorical (and metaphorical)significance of his subject matter will be
crucial.
A quick scan of Wyatt’s poems, “The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor,” “Whoso List to
Hunt” and “My Galley,” reveals a recurring cluster of images, terms (diction) and attitudes (tone).For
instance, in all three poems, the dominant image is of a beleaguered speaker operating with means (or
tools) ill-suited for his times, but nevertheless halted by his “trusty fearfulness” (“My Galley,” Ln. 8) of
the tools of reason from ever embracing them entirely. Here reason, in the form of the “she” in “The
Long Love” or “[t]he stars *the lady’s eyes+” in line 12 of “My Galley,” leaves “his enterprise *desire+ with
pain and cry” (“The Long Love,” Ln. 10) or leads him “to this pain” (“My Galley,” Ln. 12). Reason, in other
words, is an unreliable “consort *companion+” (“My Galley,” Ln. 13) in these times of change. Or, to put
it differently, reason is like the unrequited love of the courtly love doctrine, but transposed onto
renaissance England, the Age of Reason.What we have in “The Long Love,” then, is not a conflict arising
from two conflicting sense of love in the literal sense. Rather, it isa conflict between historical periods
(or times) and faculties (or ways of thinking), that is, between vanishing medievalism (which could be

11. 11
called the age of the senses/body) and the emerging renaissance (the age of reason/mind18
). Living in
the turbulent times of change, Wyatt captures the full scale of the uncertaintyof transition in the
metaphor of a “galley charged with forgetfulness” (literally a war ship, but metaphorically a lovelorn
man whom love has caused him to forget himself) passing through “sharp seas in winter nights”/’Tween
rock and rock” (Ln. 1-3). This is the type of metaphorical love which, in “The Long Love,” “harbor*s+” in
his “thought” (Ln. 1) and “campeth” (Ln. 4)in his body and which reason cannot quite dislodge. In
“Whoso List to Hunt” we have the image of the speaker’s despair captured in the metaphor of his “vain”
(Ln. 3) pursuit of an unavailable “hind” (female deer/dear). Perhaps the most powerful pointer to the
poem’s metaphorical status as a poem about the onset of modernity, aside from the recurring images of
the speaker’s futile attempts at halting time’s elusive progress, is the last line in which the woman says
she is “wild to hold, though I seem tame” (Ln. 14). Given that in Petrarch’s sonnets Laura is the very
symbol of constancy, there is enough ground to argue that, by contrast, the woman in “Whoso List to
Hunt” is the symbol of modernity’s elusive and constantly shifting character.
Aside from the imagery of flight from reason (in “The Long Love”), the futile hunt (in “Whoso List to
Hunt”) and of sailing rough seas without reason as guide (in “My Galley, reason is “*d+rowned . . . that
should me consort”),these poems are also marked by a recurring tone of weariness and despair. This
tone arises from the same conditions as the imagery: in “The Long Love” the speaker feels himself
trapped between two ways of being and thinking; in “Whoso List to Hunt” he finds himself pursuing not
the Petrarchan beloved but the metaphorical mistress of modernity who is “wild for to hold, though
*she+ seemtame” (Ln. 14); and in “My Galley” he feels his being – his fortitude – slipping away from
himlike a ship tossed about violently and strandedat sea far from “the port” (Ln. 14). This tone and the
terms in which it is given voice in the speaker’s “sigh” of despair (“The Galley”), in his “alas”(“Whoso List
to Hunt”) and “pain and cry” (in “The Long Love”), captures quite powerfully the gravity of the speakers’
sense of their unsettling times. One could say the same thing about the poems’ diction (the vocabulary
with which Wyatt characterises the speakers’ restless world). There is, for instance, the “long love” and
“reason” in perpetual conflict in “The Long Love”; the “net” that cannot “hold the wind” in “Whoso List
to Hunt”; and the unreachable “port” in “My Galley,” all of which frame the speakers’ experiences of
living in the vanishing medieval historical moment without the wherewithal to make the transition to
the new, i.e. renaissance, period to which they must now adaptwithout a trustworthy “consort [or
companion]” (“My Galley,” Ln. 13). The oxymoron in “My Galley”, i.e. “trusty fearfulness” (Ln. 8),
18
The 16
th
century French philosopher Renè Descartes captured the shift from medievalism to the renaissance in
his famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am.”

12. 12
captures quite well the perils of transition: the speaker must trust what he fears, i.e. reason, to take him
across what Hamlet calls “the sea of troubles” (or the transitional moment).
It is clear from the discussion of Wyatt’s poems that, while on the surface they appear every bit the
courtly love poems of the 14th
century, beneath the surface lies a more profound reflection by Wyatt on
his own times. George Puttenham’s verdict that Wyatt and his friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were
“the most excellent makers of their time” (74) doubtless finds credible support in the three poems that I
have considered.
Edmund Spenser
Perhaps the most profound influence on Spenser’s poetry, particularly his sonnets, was Philip Sidney’s
famous essay, “An Apology for Poetry,” which is still regarded as “a classic statement of Renaissance
literary theory” (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism2005: 324). Spenser and Sidney were
contemporaries and both served at the court of Queen Elizabeth 1 (the daughter of Henry VIII) as
courtiers. Their poetry is characterised by a pronounced sense of classical consciousness that marked
England’s conscious effort to stake her claim on the renaissance of Italy and France,as part of
Europe,while asserting her own cultural identity.19
Indeed, Sidney’s ideas in his essay date back to the
work of the 14th
century Italian classical scholar and writer, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), who wrote
his own defence of poetry in Book 14 of his Genealogy of the Gentile Gods. Boccaccio said of poetry:
This poetry, which ignorant triflers cast aside, is a sort of fervid and exquisite invention, with
fervid expression, in speech or writing, of that which the mind has invented. It proceeds from
the bosom of God, and few, I find, are the souls in whom this gift is born; indeed so wonderful a
gift it is that true poets have always been the rarest of men. This fervour of poesy is sublime in
its effects: it impels the soul to a longing for utterance; it brings forth strange and unheard-of
creations of the mind; it arranges these meditations in a fixed order, adorns the whole
composition with unusual interweaving of words and thoughts; and thus it veils truth in a fair
and fitting garment of fiction. (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism2005: 258)
Now consider Sidney’s defence of poetry in “An Apology for Poetry”:
19
There are notable references to Italian renaissance writers such as Homer and Dante in their poetry, including
references to Greek mythology and pantheon of gods (Cupid, Eros, the Muses, etc.).

13. 13
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [to nature], lifted up with the vigor of
his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than
nature bringeth forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes,
Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not
enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his
own wit. (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 2005: 330).
Boccaccio (and Sidney later) was reacting to the Greek philosopher Plato’s accusation of poets as liars
and inventors, as opposed to philosophers and naturalists whom Plato placed above poets as seekers of
truth.Thus in their defences of poetry Boccaccio and Sidney argue that inventiveness is, in fact, the
poet’s strength rather than a weakness.
Now, this preoccupation with the power of poetry to remake nature in its image, which is a
preoccupation with poetry’s autonomy from imitative disciplines such as natural philosophy (or even
moral philosophy),is the substance of Spenser’s poetry. In his two sonnets that I discuss here, namely,
“Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay” (Sonnet 54) and “One day I wrote her nameupon the strand”
(Sonnet 75), this preoccupation is dramatised, literally, in the form of the speakers’ encounters with
what one might call Platonic figures (in the form of women) who disdain of their art.However, let us
lookat the poems.
Sonnet 75
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washèd it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,˚ attempt
A mortall thing so to immortalize,
For I myselve shall lyke to this decay,
And eek my name bee wypèd out lykewize.
Not so (quod I), let baser things devize
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the hevens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas Death shall all the world subdew,
Out love shall live, and later life renew.

14. 14
On the surface, the conflict in Spenser’s Sonnet 75 takes the formof contrasting views about the extent
to which words can serve to immortalise (or preserve) identity beyond its physical demise. The male
lover believes that with enough persistence and a belief in the higher virtues of humanity, writing can
withstand (or win against) what “baser things devize” (Ln. 9). On the other hand, the woman who is the
object of his poetic effort is adamant that he is misguided to think that writing (or his “vaine assay”) can
“A mortall thing . . . immortalize” (Ln. 6).The conflict is resolved by the male lover’s insistence that while
death “shall all the world subdew” (Ln. 13), their “love shall live, and later life renew” (Ln. 14). Thus,
contrary to the view expressed in later Renaissance poetry, particularly of the Jacobean period
(Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” for instance), that death lays waste all traces of human culture, this
male lover is of the view that writing or art (“My verse” *Ln. 11]), as symbolic culture, transcends the
physical world over which death rules with absolute finality.
However, there is another level on which one can read this ‘exchange’. After all, it is not just an
abstract philosophical debate about whether culture or nature determines the meaning and worth of
human identity. In fact, it is not even a debate at all but, rather, a dramatic monologue in which the
male lover constructs an imaginary female adversary – theproverbial straw man – for the purpose of
asserting the idea that poetry is autonomous of nature’s force. In short, what the poem posits is
Sidney’s idea of the poet “freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit” (something that will also
be evident in Sonnet 54) and “disdaining to be tied to any . . . subjection *to nature+” (330). For
instance, the dramatic monologue is set on the seashore (“the strand” *Ln. 1]) and the writing of the
beloved’s name on the sand, which the waves wash away, serves to heighten the stakes in the contest
between nature (also figured as woman) and poetry (figured as male). The to and fro movement of the
waves is counteracted by the lover’s repeated act of writing her name: “Agayne I wrote it with a second
hand” (Ln. 3). As nature, the woman mimics both the character and behaviour of the sand: like the sand
which cannot preserve her name, she is mutable (“For I my selve shall lyke to this decay” [Ln. 7]), and as
the sand is subject to the sea’s corrosive effects, she too, or in this case her name, will “bee wiped out
likewise” (Ln. 8), or nature will claim back its own, i.e. dust-to-dust.The male lover must thus find a point
at which he could sink an anchor; and, needless to say, his verse provides such a point. Crucially,
however, is that his verse serves not only to anchor him but also to “eternize” the beloved woman’s
“vertues” (Ln. 12). This act of symbolic preservation, which the speaker explicitly calls poetry or “verse”
(Ln.11), rivals and triumphs over nature, not by imitating it but, rather, by inventing its own ‘nature’.

15. 15
Sonnet 54
Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay,
My love lyke the Spectàtor ydly sits
Beholding me that all the pageants˚ play,roles
Disguysing diversly my troubled wits.
Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits,
And mask20
in myrth lyke to a Comedy:
Soone after when my joy to sorrow flits,
I waile and make my woes a Tragedy.
Yet she beholding me with constant eye,
Delights not in my merth nor rues˚ my smart:˚ pities / hurt
But when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry
She laughes, and hardens evermore her hart.˚ heart
What then can move her? if nor merth nor mone,˚ moan
She is no woman, but a senceless stone.
Sonnet 54 (“Of this worlds Theatre”) tackles the same question of the autonomy of art/poetry, that is,
its ability to invent a world of its own. In the poem, the world “in which we stay” is itself a “Theatre” (Ln.
1) and we are actors in it. Our worth – as it were, the significance of our being – depends on our “wits”
(Ln. 4), rather on some pre-determined formula or truth: in short, we remake our worlds as we remake
ourselves. This is the basic message of the poem and it appeals to the same idea of poetry posited by
Boccaccio and Sidney. Yet, as we have seen in Sonnet 75, Spenser is not satisfied to have the matter rest
on this supposition: what has come to be known as the Spenserian sonnet is the type that uses dialogue
(or an interlocutor) to dramatise its thesis.In Sonnet 54 the speaker makes his case by means of the
theatre metaphor, i.e. the metaphor of a stage performance, which brings up the issue of the
performative dimension of existence (i.e. of the manner in which our existence is governed by our
actions upon our world). On the stage the male speaker performs different acts for a spectator (the
“she”)who “ydly sits/Beholding *him+ that all the pageants play” (Ln. 2-3). The crisis in the poem comes
about quite early: there is already a hint in the second line, in the word “ydly *idly+” (Ln. 2), that the
poem will develop along the path of tension between two contradictory understandings of the world.
The male performer posits the view that the world is a stage and that we are all actors/performers in it –
a well-known English renaissance idea – to which the female spectator reacts with passive disinterest,
which the words “ydly sits” (Ln. 2), “constant eye” (Ln. 9), “*w+hat then can move her” (Ln. 13) and “She
is . . . a senceless stone” (Ln. 14) succinctly capture. The use of “senceless stone” also locates the “she”
20
Cover (or mask) his emotions; also, act in a masque, a short, allegorical drama.

16. 16
in the world of nature, as the woman of Sonnet 75 is also the voice of nature. However, in her passive
disinterest can be discerned the disapproving stance of a “harden*ed+ . . . hart *heart+” (Ln. 12): “when I
laugh she mocks, and when I cry/She laughs” (Ln. 11-12). Confronted with the intransigence of the
spectator’s demeanour, then, the actor makes one final move: he likens her to a Platonic figure whom
Boccaccio would have called and “ignorant trifler” (330).
It is evident that both of Spenser’s sonnets develop an argument, using the facility of the
dramatic,that poetry transforms our perception of the world. It is a thought that one can substantiate by
considering both the comments of Boccaccio and Sidney and their obvious influence on the
preoccupation of Spenserian sonnet.
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh Ed. Florida: Harcourt, 1999.
Ferguson, M., et al (eds.). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Fifth Ed. New York: Norton, 2005.
Malcolmson, C. Renaissance Poetry. London & New York: Longman, 1998.
Puttenham, G. The Arte of English Poesy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1911.
Shakespeare, W. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.