The New English Poetry

The reign of Henry VIII was not a period of unbroken internal peace. Nevertheless, when the wars of the Roses were over and a feeling of security had been induced by the establishment of a strong dynasty, a social and intellectual life became possible in England which the troubles of the reigns of Henry VIII and his two successors were sufficient to check but not to destroy. More important still, England, having more or less settled her internal troubles by a judicious application of the balancing system, became a power to be reckoned with in European politics. This brought her into touch with the kingdoms of the continent, and so, for the first time in a more than incidental way, submitted her intellectual life to the influences of the renaissance. The inspiration of the new poetry was almost entirely foreign. It was upon French, and, especially, upon Italian, models that the courtiers of Henry VIII founded the poems which now began to be written in large numbers. The extent to which the practice of versifying prevailed cannot now be gauged; but modern investigation shows it to have been very wide. To make poems was one of the recognised accomplishments of the knight as conceived in the last phase of chivalry; and it is not, perhaps, too much to say that every educated man made poems, which, if approved, were copied out by his friends and circulated in manuscript, or included in song-books. It was not, however, till 1557 that some few were, for the first time, put into print by Richard Tottel, in the volume, Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, commonly known as Tottel’s Miscellany.

The pioneer was Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was joined in the leadership by Henry Howard, known as earl of Surrey. A sketch of their lives, especially of that of the former, may be of interest as helping to show the extent to which England was brought into touch with European influences. Thomas Wyatt was born in or about 1503, and was educated at Cambridge, possibly, also, at Oxford. In 1511, his father was joint constable with Sir Thomas Boleyn of Norwich Castle, and, as a boy, he made the acquaintance of a lady—Sir Thomas’s daughter Anne—with whose name report was to link his own very closely. In 1525, after holding certain offices about the person of the king, Thomas Wyatt accompanied Sir Thomas Cheney on a diplomatic mission to France. In 1526–7, he was sent with Sir John Russell, the English ambassador, to the papal court; and visited Venice, Ferrara, Bologna and Florence. On his return, he was captured by the imperial forces under the constable of Bourbon, but escaped. In 1537, he went as ambassador to the emperor, and remained abroad, mainly in Spain, till 1539; in the April of that year he was recalled, in consequence of the intrigues of his fellow-ambassador, Bonner. At the end of the same year he was despatched to Flanders to see the emperor and followed him to Paris, returning in 1540. He retired to his house at Allington, in Kent, and employed his leisure in writing his satires and his paraphrase of the penitential psalms. In 1542, we find him knight of the shire for Kent; and, in the summer of that year, hastening in ill health on a mission to conduct the imperial ambassador to London, he caught a fever, and died on the road, at Sherborne, on 11 October. One other episode of his life remains to be mentioned. He was commonly regarded as, in youth, the lover of Anne Boleyn; and it was reported that, when the king wished to make that lady his wife, Wyatt informed him of his previous relations with her. Whatever the truth of an obscure matter, Wyatt was chief ewer at the coronation of Henry’s second queen in 1533; and, though we find him committed to the Tower in May, 1536, the period of her downfall, it was probably only as a witness. One of his sonnets, Whoso list to hunt, has clear reference to Anne Boleyn, ending, as it does, with the line: “ Noli me tangere; for Caesar’s I am”; for, though it is imitated from Romanello or Petrarch (157, Una candida cerva), it may yet be of personal application. His confinement in May, 1536, was, undoubtedly, one of the facts in his life which induced him to regard May as his unlucky month. It will be seen that Wyatt frequently travelled abroad, and that he spent a period of some months in Italy. And it was from Italy that he drew the ideas and the form by means of which English poetry was rejuvenated. The changes which English versification passed through in the period between Chaucer and the Elizabethans are described elsewhere. Neither the principles of rhythm and accent, it would seem, not even the grammar of Chaucer were fully understood by his followers, Lydgate, Occleve and Hawes. In place of Chaucer’s care in arranging the stress and pause of his line, here is chaotic carelessness; and the diction is redundant, feeble and awkward. Meanwhile, the articulate final - e, of which Chaucer made cunning use, had been dropping out of common speech, and the accent on the final syllable of words derived from the French, such as favour, virtue, travail, had begun to move back to the first syllable, with the result of producing still further prosodical confusion and irregularity. It was the mission of Wyatt and his junior contemporary, Surrey, to substitute order for confusion, especially by means of the Italian influence which they brought to bear on English poetry, an influence afterwards united by Spenser with the classical influence.

Wyatt’s chief instrument was the sonnet, a form which he was the first English writer to use. Of all forms, the sonnet is that in which it is most difficult to be obscure, turgid, or irregular. Its small size and precise structure force on the writer compression, point and intensity, for a feeble sonnet proclaims itself feeble at a glance. No better corrective could have been found for vague thought, loose expression and irregular metre; and the introduction of the sonnet stands as the head and front of Wyatt’s benefaction to English poetry. His model—in thought, and, up to a certain point, in form—was the sonnet of Petrarch, of whom he was a close student. Wyatt’s sonnets number about thirty: ten of them are translations of Petrarch, and two others show a debt to the same author. But either he did not apprehend, or he deliberately decided not to imitate, the strict Petrarchian form; and the great majority of the English sonneteers before Milton followed his example. The main difference is this: that, whereas the sextet of the strict Petrarchian sonnet never ends with a couplet, the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Elizabethan sonnets in general, nearly always do. The effect produced, that of a forcible ending, is opposed to the strict principles of the sonnet, which should rise to its fullest height at the conclusion of the octave, to sink to rest gradually in the sextet. But the final couplet has been used so freely and to such noble ends by English writers that objection is out of place. Wyatt was possibly induced to adopt this form partly by the existence of the favourite Chaucerian rime royal stanza of seven lines, riming ababbcc. Of Wyatt’s sonnets, two or three (e.g. Was never file; Some fowles there be; How oft have I) do actually, by their sense, fall into two divisions of seven lines; but it is plain that this was not the principle on which he constructed his sonnets. For the most part, the separation of octave and sextet is clearly marked, and the rimes of the former are arranged in Petrarchian fashion, abbaabba, with occasional variations, of which abbaacca is a not uncommon form. He was a pioneer, and perfection was not to be expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward. Perhaps the best way of illustrating his merits and his shortcomings is to quote one of his sonnets in full; and it will be convenient for the purpose to take his version of a sonnet of Petrarch which was also translated by Surrey, in order to compare later the advance made by the younger writer.

The longe love, that in my thought I harber, And in my hart doth kepe his residence, Into my face preaseth with bold pretence, And there campeth, displaying his banner. She that me learns to love, and to suffer, And willes that my trust, and lustes negligence Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence, With his hardinesse, takes displeasure. Wherwith love to the hartes forest he fleeth, Leavyng his enterprise with paine and crye, And there him hideth and not appeareth. What may I do? when my maister feareth, But in the field with him to live and dye, For good is the life, endyng faithfully.

The author of this sonnet clearly has much to learn. The scanning of harber, banner, suffer, campeth, preaseth, forest as iambics is comprehensible; but, in line 6, we have to choose between a heavy stress on the unimportant word my, or an articulated final -e in lustes; while, in line 8, we can hardly escape hardìnesse, and must have either takës again, or displè-a-sùre (a possibility which receives some very doubtful support from line 8 of the sonnet, Love, Fortune, and my minde, in the almost certainly corrupt version in the first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany). In lines 11 and 12, we find the curious fact that appeareth is rimed with feareth, not on the double rime but on the last syllable only; while the last line throws a heavy emphasis on the. The author, in fact, seems to have mastered the necessity of having ten syllables in a decasyllabic line, but to be very uncertain still in questions of accent and rhythm. Some of the lines irresistibly suggest a man counting the syllables on his fingers, as, indeed, the reader is often compelled to do on a first acquaintance; on the other hand, we find a beautiful line like the tenth, which proves the author however unskilled as yet, to be a poet. The use of the caesura is feeble and often pointless, and the total impression is that of a man struggling with difficulties too great for him. But it is fair to remember two things: first, that pronunciation was then in a state of flux (in one of his satires we find Wyatt scanning honour as an iambic and as a trochee in the same line); secondly, that he made great advance in technique, and that some of the ruggedness of his work (not including this sonnet), as it appears in the first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany, is due to a faulty text, partly corrected in the second edition. Nott, who published the original MS. in 1816, discovered that Wyatt had occasionally marked the caesura with his own hand, and sometimes indicated the mode of disposing of a redundant syllable. There are sonnets (e.g., Unstable dream) which run perfectly smoothly—to say no more—showing that mastery came with practice, and that errors were not due to want of correct aim and comprehension.

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