Elizabeth's Dress is Listening

            On Monday morning I memorized the chorus and the second verse of “Tennisman” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            For lunch I had kettle chips and salsa with cream cheese. 

            At around 10:30 I logged on for my British Literature lecture. This lecture was about lyric poetry and analyzing poetic language, meter and sound. 

            For most of the rest of this course England is a Protestant country. 

            Henry VIII was succeeded by Edward VI but he died at 15. His daughter Mary I became Queen for five years, but she was Catholic and had 280 Protestants burned at the stake, earning her the nickname of “Bloody Mary”. She probably died of ovarian cancer and then Elizabeth I became queen.

            Elizabeth renewed her father’s break with Rome but in a sense the metaphorical ghost of Bloody Mary became the backdrop of religious tensions in England. 

            Diane Morgan wrote that Henry VIII was the “kingiest king who ever kinged”. His reign was about opulence, but he was inconsistent, autocratic and self-serving. He was brutal to his six wives and considered a tyrant by the people of his era. It was a volatile, bloody period with sharp shifts in factional power. This was the backdrop for the poets Wyatt and Surrey who blended poetry with politics. 

            Henry VIII was also a poet and a songwriter. He is credited with the authorship of several songs, including “Green Groweth the Holly”. 

            Because many of Henry’s actions were motivated by his desire for a male heir the English reformation is considered to be an erotic period. Henry was so smitten by Anne Boleyn that in 1526 he went to a joust with his armour bearing the imagery of a tortured lover. On his chest was a picture of a heart in a vice shooting flames, accompanied by the words, “I dare not declare.” His suffering can’t be expressed and yet he declares it. This kind of erotic intensity over the pressure of disclosure was critical to the sonnet. 

            A lyric poem is a short description of intense emotion in the first person. They are more interior than the usual story. In Italian “sonnet” means “little sound”. Petrarch was not the inventor of the form but he was the king of the Italian sonnet who wrote a long sequence of scattered rhymes. 

            The Petrarchan sonnet has fourteen lines of interlocking rhymes. The first eight lines or octave rhymes always in “abba abba”, while the final six lines or sestet is usually “cdd ece” but this scheme is more flexible and could have three rhymes or two rhymes. The key is in the thematic break or volta between the octave and the sestet. It signals a turn to a different content

            The English loved Petrarchan sonnets and used them to express the struggle to articulate intense erotic desire. 

            Wyatt’s adaptation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 134 juxtaposes the absence of war and peace; burning and freezing; in an unlocked prison from which there is no escape; he can’t live or die. He is torn by opposing paradoxical emotions with a disturbing sense of bodily experience alienated from the self. The poem is claustrophobic in its structures of antithesis. The first three lines begin with “f” sounds “I find”, “I fear”, “I fly”. 

            The size of a sonnet makes it a compression chamber to force a magnitude of emotions into a small space. The constraints of the rules turn it into a pressure cooker for the compression of diamonds. It invites an exploration of interiority that is hard to pin down. The sonnet depicts a process by which feelings and the self are discovered. 

            Thomas Wyatt lived from 1503 to 1542. He was a diplomat and discovered Petrarch while on a mission to Italy. He began to translate his work but translation is a creative process and Wyatt takes liberties with Petrarch’s poems. His poems depart from Petrarch’s and express alternative views.

            Petrarch’s Rima 190 begins: "A white doe to frolic on the grass / Appeared and on her head were golden horns."  The deer is off limits because it is protected by Caesar, the speaker stumbles and the deer vanishes. 

            Wyatt’s version begins: "Whoso wants to hunt, I know where there’s a hind /  But as for me alas I may no more / The vain travail has wearied me so sore  / I am of them that farthest come behind."    Structurally Wyatt frames the theme differently than Petrarch. He relates to the imagined reader some instruction in where to hunt. He advises from the viewpoint of failure. Petrarch first sights the deer and then fails in the hunt, while Wyatt begins having already failed. I know where she is, but I can’t catch her. Petrarch is linear while Wyatt is jagged. But “as she flees afore, fainting I follow.” Wyatt’s speaker pursues the dear deer while at the same time knowing he has already failed. He cannot help himself. 

            The “f” sounds of “as she flees afore, fainting I follow” create a panting sound to simulate the exhaustion of pursuit. 

            Both the octave and the sestet begin with “who”. The message is that the hunt is impossibly vain and guaranteed to fail. Wyatt’s sestet has a couplet at the end in “ee” rhyme bringing a second change of direction but not in the speaker’s voice. Petrarch put this other voice at the volta where he says, “Let no one touch me. It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.” But Wyatt’s version is more about ownership, “No one may touch me, for Caesar’s I am.” It echoes Christ’s order to Mary Magdalene when she sees him alive after the crucifixion. Wyatt’s deer is wild to hold although she seems tame. This could either be interpreted as her being “too wild to hold” or “wild to hold”. The speaker concludes that it is not his fault that he cannot have her but that of political forces. 

            This poem might be autobiographical with Caesar representing Henry VIII. Wyatt was rumoured to have fucked Anne Boleyn but there is no evidence. Henry’s court was flooded with anxiety over all of the executions and so honesty was a liability. Sonnets provided a secret means of expression for private thoughts. The relation between the poet and the speaker is often hard to pin down. Maybe a speaker is a character in a fictional story. Wyatt’s poem plays with one voice but ends in another. But whose voice is speaking at the end? The words are written on a sign around the deer’s neck and so this might be an imperial decree co-opting the deer’s voice. But then again the speaker might be blaming his plight on the government to ease the pain of his own failure. 

            We are shown the image of a draft of Wyatt’s “What Rage is This?” There are different coloured inks reworking lines, words are crossed out and replaced. 

            Wyatt is famous for his sonnets but also for longer poems. We looked at his ballad, “They flee from me”. 

            “Stanza” means “stopping place” or “room”. The stanzas serve to progressively organize his thoughts. 

            In the first stanza he imagines past loves in erotic hunts from which they ran. The language is ambiguous and the lovers are spoken of as if they are animals. He is jaded and bitter and inter-threads the past with the present. 

            The second stanza tracks the movement of his thoughts to the past. She says to him :”Dear heart, how like you this” and so there is a pun on the fact that a “hart” is a male deer. She has hunted and caught him. 

            The third stanza declares that it was all true. The voice is increasingly bitter and sarcastic. When he says, “But since that I so kindly am served” he means the opposite. And in the end with, “I would fain know what she hath deserved” he wants revenge. Wyatt is the poet laureate of ugly emotions. 

            The last stanza is “ababbcc”. In meter each pattern is a foot. The feet stalking in his chamber may be the metrical feet of the poem and the room in the poem may be the room of the poem. This may be meant as a farewell to love or to love poetry. “Danger” doesn’t quite rhyme with “remember”. The poem is about the changeability in power or love. 

            In “Who list his wealth and ease retain” Wyatt adapts Seneca’s Phaedra for the first two stanzas. The greatest disasters effect those who have the most to lose. What mighty disasters toss the mighty. Jove attacks powerful men and ignores the common people. The Latin refrain at the end of each stanza translates as, “Around thrones he thunders.” In politics there is always danger of downfall. “Who would his wealth and ease retain / himself let him unknown remain.” Stay far away from heaven. 

            The third stanza is in the first person and it is tempting to read it as autobiographical since he was in prison when he wrote it. Anne Boleyn failed to give Henry a male child and so was arrested and placed in the Tower of London. Wyatt was in the Bell tower and could see Anne’s execution from his cell window. He saw “such sight that in my head sticks day and night.” 

            There is a shifting context and he might put words “around thrones he thunders” in new meaning for each stanza. In the fourth stanza the thunderer may be Henry. The Latin may act as a secret code to conceal this. In the fifth stanza, “Bear low, therefore give god the stern.” Let god steer. He may be expressing a hope for god to intervene and to bring about Henry’s downfall. Wyatt lived for six more years and then died of fever. 

            Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey was a poetic follower of Wyatt, fourteen years younger. In Petrarch’s Rima 310 the octave is about natural beauty while the sestet speaks of sadness from the beloved. Surrey’s version experiments with a change of direction at the last minute as if he was playing chicken with the sonnet. The poem is about the change of season and in the end he puns with “my sorrow springs”. In the sestet the alliteration is in pairs with couplings such as “fish float”, “swift swallow”, and “busy bee” as if it were some kind of poetic Noah’s ark. The message is that coupling causes sorrow. 

            With the rhyme scheme “ababcdcdefefgg” Surrey created what later became known as the Shakespearian sonnet. 

            “Th’assyrians’ King” is based on Sardonopoulis, who was infamous for his indulgent court. The poem is a portrait in contempt of lust in politics and may be about Henry. Anne Boleyn and another of Henry’s wives were Surrey’s cousins. The poem may be wishing Henry dead. 

            Wyatt was not in print in his lifetime but selections of his work were collected in a manuscript by his sister and then circulated. 

            The early 16th Century was a time of self-assessment in England. In 1532 the first works of Chaucer were printed. It was the first time a publication featured an author. Surrey wrote on Wyatt in 1542. He did not use a sonnet but rather a blason, which describes various body parts of the subject, each with a corresponding virtue. “A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme / that robbed Chaucer the glory of his wit.” He is saying that Wyatt was better than Chaucer. This is the first time an author was canonized in print and it’s also ironic because Wyatt was not in print at the time of his death.

            In 1557 Richard Tuttel compiled an anthology featuring poems by Wyatt, Surrey and others.

            In 1589 George Puttenham wrote The Art of English Poesy. In the first age were Chaucer and Gower and in the second age Wyatt and Surrey. 

            Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me” has lines with five iambic feet. An iamb is a metrical foot with one unstressed and one stressed syllable. If there are five of these it means the line is in iambic pentameter. 

            The second line of this poem is not so regular. The final stanza is irregular but Tuttel regularized it for his book, which restarted the popularity of the sonnet in England. 

            Petrarch had a sonnet sequence but Wyatt and Surrey did not. The first English sonnet sequence was by Anne Locke. 

            How different were Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Barnfeld and Shakespeare from Wyatt and Surrey? 

            After Bloody Mary, when Elizabeth I became queen she pursued a religious settlement with the Act of Supremacy in 1558. The British monarch was no longer for the Church of England the equivalent to the Catholic pope. She became the supreme governor of the church. Her rein was officially over a Protestant country but she was trying to calm down internal conflicts. 

            Richard Mulcaster wrote in The Queen’s Majesty's Passage that the monarchy is a performance. In one of the portraits of Elizabeth she is wearing a gown covered with images of eyes and ears. Perhaps this was to convey omniscience but also surveillance. 

            Elizabeth never married and so came to be known as “The Virgin Queen”. Her motto translates as "Always the same". 

            The pope released his Catholic subjects in England from allegiance to Elizabeth. England sided with the Protestant Dutch against Catholic Spain. In 1588 the Spanish tried to invade England and on August 9 of that years she rode to the coast in armour and gave a famous speech to encourage the troops. 

            Elizabeth’s mother Ann Boleyn stressed the importance of education and her daughter benefited from Humanism in receiving a classical education as did the daughters of Thomas More. Elizabeth was fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian and French and she continued into her old age translating the works of Horus, Plutarch, Boethius and Tacitas. 

            Elizabeth’s speeches were masterpieces. She wrote “The Doubt of Future Foes” about the threat of Mary Queen of Scots and her followers. John Harrington got hold of a copy and distributed it but Elizabeth was said to disapprove of being caught writing poetry. But some speculate that she deliberately leaked the poem in order to convey its message. In the poem she expressed doubt, apprehension and dread of the danger of her enemies. The poem turns later to a declaration that “this should not happen”. Her enemies are clouded. The poem builds with references to nature: tide, clouds, grafted root and develops from vegetation to declaring that Mary shall “reap no harvest”. To raise rebellion in England is futile. The poem answers the question, “Who gets to control nature?” and declares that Mary is an unsuccessful gardener while Elizabeth will eliminate the weeds. She uses the internal rhyme of “top of hope” and assonance in “root of rue”. “For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb / which should not be if reason ruled and wisdom weave the web.” The root of the word “text” is texere, which means “to weave” as in “the words of the poem were woven wisely.”

            As usual, transcribing my handwritten lecture notes took up my day and evening until dinner. 

            I had a potato, gravy, and the wing and spine of a chicken for dinner while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story a passenger in sunglasses travelling under the name of Chu Luon uses tear gas and a gas mask to highjack a passenger plane that is also carrying a large shipment of platinum. He safely lands the plane himself on an abandoned US airstrip in Burma. The platinum is transferred to a light plane waiting on the strip. In Hong Kong the same man passes through customs showing a picture of a Chinese man on his passport but unrealistically he is not asked to remove his sunglasses. Interpol finds that the same method of highjacking has been used twice before but with different Chinese names on the passports. Duval says that if he fails to successfully land a passenger plane on one of those tiny jungle strips it will be mass murder and so he has to be stopped. Duval flies to Hong Kong. Duval concludes that the highjacker must be connected with the Hong Kong airport to have known about the platinum shipment. The Hong Kong airport police inspector appoints his airport staff officer Bill Grant to check on all Chinese employees of the airport. We learn when the Caucasian Bill Grant goes home to his wife Jane that Bill is the “Chinese” highjacker and Jane is his accomplice. Bill goes to a hotel in his Chu Luon disguise and shows his passport to ask for a ticket to Manila. The clerk notifies Interpol and when they arrive they are told Luon went into the washroom. Inside they find Bill Grant washing his face. He says someone came in but he didn’t look at him. They conclude Luon must have gone out through the window. Later Luon’s coat is found in the harbour with a bullet hole in it, along with several passports and $50,000 in the shoulder pads. Duval notices that the bullet hole is in the part of the jacket that would have been buttoned underneath and concludes that Luon faked his own death. Duval observes that no witnesses have seen Luon without sunglasses. They conclude that he could be a European and so they begin to investigate all employees. When Bill Grant learns of this he tells Jane to book two flights to Tokyo while he goes home to get their money and passports. Looking through the staff records it is discovered that Grant is a former RAF pilot trained in Canada and he speaks Chinese. Grant goes home and only takes his own passport because he’s decided to ditch Jane. Duval goes to the airport and find Jane but realize Grant decided to take a boat to Macao instead. Duval misses the boat but confidently tells the inspector that Grant will be caught in three and a half hours in Macao because it’s Portuguese territory and Portugal is a member of Interpol. 

            Jane was played by Jan Holden, who played in many theatrical comedies, appeared in several British television series in the 1950s and a few films in the 60s such as “The Stranglers of Bombay”; “Work is a 4-Letter Word” and "The Best House in London".