Synopsis
Graven with Diamonds "First published in the United Kingdom in 2011 by Short Books"--T.p. verso. Full description
Extrait
Prologue
Time that is intolerant1
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
W.H. Auden wrote these verses to commemorate the events of January 1939, the month that W.B. Yeats departed life and Auden, England and her coming wars. He later took them out on grounds of tact; but he left in the famous parting shot that liberated poets from their political responsibilities. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’ he wrote; meaning, it is not the business of poets to be right, or brave, or just, or useful. What poets should do, is write well.
These words, and the ones above, kept recurring all the time I was making this book about Sir Thomas Wyatt. It was partly because there are just comparisons to be made between Auden and Wyatt. The pair of them are the lyric poets who bookend the period of England’s political greatness; both are poets of unreciprocated feeling, of frenetic inertia, and of fear. But I think the main reason why these particular lines kept coming back to me was that Wyatt’s posthumous career refutes them on every count.
It isn’t hard to refute Auden’s claims for language. Anyone surveying the literary scene of half a millennium or so ago will of course find the intervening prospect strewn with the husks of writers whose gifts have not, in fact, survived, contrary to the expectation of their peers: the 14th-century lyricist ‘Richard’, for instance, the undisputed literary star of the baronial hall:
Richard, root of reason right,2
In poetry and rune and rhyme,
Of gentle maidens you can write
The finest verses of our time!
As gentle-tempered as a knight,
A scholar versed in mysteries,
In every house his fame is bright
No longer. Now no one knows who ‘Richard’ was, or which of the surviving lyrics he wrote, if any. Time has never had a soft spot for language. In our own reading lifetimes especially, it has turned on language as if with the dedicated aim of proving Auden wrong. Writing styles that seemed to us supple and exact only 20, 30 years ago begin to coarsen and sag; they even develop the very same look of faintly shameful grotesquerie that human beauty assumes in decay. No need for names; we can all think of examples closer to home than a semi-obscure courtier poet like Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder. But the case of Wyatt has a special relevance. For time has forgiven him on both of Auden’s counts – that is, for being dead, and for being frail – despite an almost universal consensus that he can’t write. Down the centuries whenever his name is spoken, there has been someone to say that language, far from living in him eternally, was dead in him to begin with. Even his first promoter, the Earl of Surrey, thought his work ‘unparfited’ (unperfected). By Shakespeare’s time he was politely acknowledged as a pioneer3 but commonly held as a joke; his badness was rediscovered in the 18th century and again in the 19th when his first proper editor, George Nott, found him an unoriginal thinker, clumsy translator and a harsh versifier. Few disagreed, but by the middle of the twentieth century he had somehow, in defiance of this, become established in the English literature canon and a fixture on the university syllabus; while continuing to disappoint those scholars who elected to study him. ‘Can we doubt,’ asked his editor, H.A. Mason, in 1959, ‘that if we had all the songs sung at court between Chaucer and Wyatt we should be able to shew that every word and phrase used by Wyatt was a commonplace? ... There is not the slightest trace of poetic activity.’4 Likewise, C.S. Lewis defended him with the barely discernible commendation: ‘When he is bad he is flat or even null. And when he is good he is hardly one of the irresistible poets.’ Thirty years later, when I was an undergraduate, some eminent professors thought him too bad to teach.
And yet, he has triumphed. Behind Wyatt’s reluctant champions other voices emerged to admire the ‘plainness’ of his style. Poets in particular got his point. Historicist critics meanwhile, looking at the past from the end of their terrible century, began to realise that Wyatt, like Mandelstam or Akhmatova, was a poet writing under tyranny, who might yield insights into life under the Tudor Stalin. And so he has survived in the universities – where extensive new editions of Wyatt’s diplomatic letters, his political, religious and secular poetry are now in preparation – and out of them, where his love lyrics continue to be read, collected, anthologised, quoted and printed in new selections. He has survived, as C.S. Lewis says ‘in the only sense that really matters: his works are used as their author meant them to be used’. And here is the really crucial word for any discussion of Wyatt and his works: used. Wyatt intended his poems for use. Five hundred years later we still use them. Though it is not approved for serious readers to seek their own experience in literature, self-recognition is what most people want out of love poetry; in Wyatt they find it directly. When we read for the first time such lines as
The stars be hid that led me to this pain,
or
They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
or
I am of them that farthest cometh behind5
we are conscious of a thrill of acquisition. Here is something we can use.
All lyric poetry aims at the impersonal expression of some intense experience, but few achieve it so purely as Wyatt. There is a difference in intention, for example, between two simple lover’s ‘plaints’ separated by 100 years:
Go, lovely rose –
Tell her that wastes her time and me
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
[Edmund Waller]
and:
To wish and want and not obtain
To seek and sue ease of my pain
Since all I ever do is vain
What may it avail me.6
[Thomas Wyatt]
Neither of them got the girl. But if we take the Waller, we have to imagine we are him, with his girl and his rose and his framework of 17th-century manners. While we can appreciate the sentiment, we are obliged to take it within its context. No such impediments prevent the Wyatt from delivering its shot of self-recognition: he hands us a howl of frustration to use on anyone we like. It’s the difference between a book token and a ten-pound note.
This, as we shall see, is the strength of Wyatt’s lyrics; but it is one of the problems with him as a biographical subject. Another is the availability of source material, which is very scarce until 1536 and then comparatively abundant in the years of his diplomatic work. There is nothing remarkable about this: diplomats sent letters, courtiers didn’t. Henry VIII’s court, where Thomas Wyatt spent most of life, was not a place of paper transactions. Business was done lip to ear and face to face. Petitioners, waiting for days to place a word with the right person, delivered their message by mouth. The most important man at court, Sir Henry Norris, died without leaving a single letter. The exception to this paperless existence is the lyric poetry of the inner court, much of it written by Sir Thomas Wyatt. It’s almost all that remains of the private life of the court.
For all of these reasons, the present book is not intended as a life of Thomas Wyatt but as a life of his lyric poetry. Unlike most books on his love lyrics, it is not concerned with how he wrote – his metrics – or what he wrote – the complex canon of his verse. This is a book about the uses of Wyatt’s love poetry: why he wrote. He wrote at a time when poetry made things happen. Not just Wyatt’s poetry – though that too – but all the poetry, ancient and modern, which the early Tudor court admired, wherein the attitudes and activities which are the central concern of this book were distilled and which, for the sake of concision, I will sometimes call ‘poetry’. At Henry’s court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his poems were the hub and centre of this; and if we run the story of Wyatt’s life and times behind his lyrics, they – these apparently slight, unaddressed, undated, unadorned songs – will show us that they had more uses than we might imagine. Not all of their uses are evident to us now. Some of them would have been hidden even to Wyatt, at the outset. When Wyatt began to write poems he could not have guessed into what strange service they would be pressed by the changing times. To see their changing purpose is the purpose of this book.
Chapter One
The story of Thomas Wyatt begins, appropriately enough, at a place which is not what it seems: the battlefield of Bosworth Field, where the rebel Henry Tudor challenged the last Plantagenet king, Richard III. Recent scholarship has discovered that this battle was neither what we thought it was, nor where: Richard and Henry’s captains fought with bullets at a place a mile or more away from the site where tourists come to dream of plumed and lancéd warriors at its newly redundant visitor centre.
But for Richard, the outcome was the same: he ended the day as a corpse, strapped, like a sack, over the back of a horse, ‘nought being left about him so much as would cover his privy member’. He had feared as much. He had lately lost his son and heir, and along with him the certainty of God’s support for his kingship. The night before the battle he was visited with premonitions of doom.
Henry Tudor, his upstart adversary, had spent the eve of the battle in a more resourceful frame of mind. He had done something then to demonstrate the peculiar genius for creative self-legitimising that would come to characterise his line. Though only an earl with a scant trickle of royal blood in him, he sent a letter signing himself ‘the King’, thus pre-dating the start of his reign to the day before his insurrection. By this simple manoeuvre, he transformed treason to sovereign loyalty. It meant that the next day, King Richard’s general, Sir William Stanley, could change sides in the middle of the battle with no loss of allegiance to a crown that was on Richard’s head at the time. It meant that the Duke of Norfolk, loyal to Richard, could be attainted for treason, with his titles and lands removed; and his family, the Howards, plunged into ignominy until the Tudor or his heirs saw fit to restore them.
Good luck for the Stanleys, bad luck for the Howards, neither of whom felt any particular personal loyalty to the individual they had backed. After decades of civil war during which they had had to rally behind a succession of insecure and transient monarchs, they had learned that loyalty was a transferable asset and what mattered was not the incumbent but the legitimacy of monarchy itself. Norfolk’s son, Thomas Howard, spoke for many change-sickened subjects when he explained his family’s position to the new king, Henry VII: ‘[Richard] was my crowned king, and if the parliamentary authority of England set the crown on a stock, I will fight for that stock. As I fought then for him, I will fight for you.’
There were among this crowd of waverers some who had taken another view, and one of them was a Kentish gentleman of dim northern origins, called Henry Wyatt. This Wyatt, so the family chronicle tells us, supported Henry Tudor during bad times. Under the Yorkist king Edward IV and his brother, Richard III, there had been an active policy of bringing the civil wars to an end by killing any Lancastrian with a claim to the throne. Young Henry Tudor’s title, though notoriously weak, was not beneath that kind of notice. He fled to France with his uncle and a small band of fellow exiles, leaving his English supporters behind to do what they thought best in the circumstances. Henry Wyatt, who must have been a person of some substance even then, was noticed, arrested and put in prison by Richard III.
King Richard tried to talk him round: ‘Wyatt, why art thou such a fool? Thou servest for moonshine in the water. Thy master is a beggarly fugitive. Forsake him and become mine. I can reward thee, and swear unto thee I will.’ ‘Sir,’ was Wyatt’s answer, ‘If I had first chosen you for my master, thus faithful would I have been to you, if you should have needed it; but the Earl [of Richmond, Henry Tudor], poor and unhappy though he be, is my master, and no discouragement or allurement shall ever drive or draw me from him.’1
This passage appears in some Wyatt family papers compiled by a descendant, partly published in the 19th century by the antiquarian John Bruce, and sharing a tendency to emphasise devotion and blamelessness as typical Wyatt characteristics. The earliest anecdote concerns Sir Henry, harshly imprisoned for his fidelity, as we have seen, and only saved from starving because a passing cat took pity on him and agreed to supply him with pigeons. This is rather hard to believe, even for stout admirers of cats, and casts the shadow of doubt upon the other dramatic assertion in the story, that Sir Henry’s captors tortured him with a horse-barnacle. A barnacle was a farrier’s tool, a hinged implement a bit like a sharply serrated nutcracker, used to subdue horses. An open barnacle would be positioned where the horses’ muzzle is soft and loose, then pinched shut and twisted. It would be used in much the same way on a man. It sounds unlikely, but there are a number of reasons to believe it true.
First of all, the Wyatts made a virtue of this ordeal, alluding to it wherever possible as a symbol of their pioneering loyalty to the Tudors. Henry Wyatt commissioned some ‘carpets’ – that is, tapestries, for public display – ‘in which the figure of the barnacles is eminently conspicuous’ says Bruce, adding that the tapestries were still in the family possession in 1735. His son Thomas added a commemorative barnacle to his coat of arms in early 1537: a sensitive moment, as we shall see. And there is another reason. Holbein’s portrait of Wyatt, now in the Louvre, shows him with a curiously weak, almost lifeless musculature in the lower half of his face. The cheeks hang from his bones like cloths from a rail, most unlike the firmly modelled cheeks and l...
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