Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jeff Dolven on Sir Thomas Wyatt ("They Flee from Me")
2.8k Plays1 year ago
"Dear heart, how like you this?" There's really nothing better than that, is there? I talked to Jeff Dolven about Sir Thomas Wyatt's gorgeous poem "They Flee from Me." It's one of the hottest poems I know, and after talking to Jeff I know it much better.
Jeff Dolven is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. He is the author of three books of criticism, including, most recently, Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation (Chicago, 2018), and two books of poetry: Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings, 2022).
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get updates on the podcast.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction with Cameron Javidizadeh and Jeff Dolvin
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Cameron Javidizadeh, and it's my real pleasure today to have Jeff Dolvin on the podcast. I'll tell you lots more about Jeff in just a moment. He has kindly agreed.
00:00:18
Speaker
It's funny, we had a funny little email correspondence about this. At some point, Jeff accused me of having twisted his arm, which I don't think I did. He has kindly agreed, per my suggestion, I suppose, to talk about Sir Thomas Wyatt, a great English Renaissance poet and his, perhaps one of his most, no, perhaps about it, and one of his most well-known poems, a poem called They Flea From Me.
00:00:44
Speaker
Actually, maybe we could talk about the title or what I take to be the title, which, as I understand it, is a sort of convention kind of post hoc strategy for referring to the poem rather than a title in the modern sense. Anyway, the poem is called, They Flea From Me, Sir Thomas Wyatt. As ever, there will be a link to the text of the poem provided in the episode notes.
00:01:11
Speaker
So those of you who might like to look at the text as we talk about it, we'll be able to find it there.
Jeff Dolvin's Literary Journey and Influences
00:01:18
Speaker
It's been a couple of weeks.
00:01:20
Speaker
since we've had a new episode, and I'm really excited to be diving back in right now with Jeff. Jeff Dolvin is a professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where he teaches courses in poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance. And he's the author of three books of criticism,
00:01:44
Speaker
His first book was called Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance, and that was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. He has also more recently written a book called Senses of Style, Poetry Before Interpretation. That book was also published by Chicago, this one in 2018.
00:02:06
Speaker
And Senses of Style is a fascinating book about which I'll have more to say in a moment. But I can say just quickly now that it's a book that is in large part about today's poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt. It's also in large part about the poet who is the subject of the very first episode of Close Readings, Frank O'Hara.
00:02:28
Speaker
And it's about O'Hara's, among other things, it's about O'Hara's admiration for Wyatt and the continued life that Wyatt had in O'Hara's poetry. So I think after this conversation, many of you will want to, if you haven't already read it, rush out and order a copy of Senses of Style. I'll make a link to that book available as well.
00:02:55
Speaker
Jeff also, there's a third book of criticism, which he describes on his website as admittedly hasty. It's a book called Take Care. It was published by Cabinet in 2017. And it is a book that was written under certain preset constraints.
00:03:18
Speaker
Among them, most notably, was that it was a book that he wrote in 24 hours. I think I've got that right. Fascinating experiment. That is the opposite of my method. It takes me approximately 24 years to write a book.
00:03:35
Speaker
Okay, Jeff is also a poet.
Experimental Styles and Personal Experiences
00:03:38
Speaker
He's one of the guests on this podcast series for whom both things are true, scholar and poet. Jeff has two books of poetry, one called Speculative Music, which was published by Sarabande in 2013, and then most recently
00:03:55
Speaker
a book of poetry called A New English Grammar, which may not sound like the title of a book of poetry, but I can assure you is, and it's a fascinating title with an asterisk at the beginning of its words. Maybe, Jeff, you can tell us about what that's meant to signify. That book was published by Dispersed Holdings in 2022.
00:04:20
Speaker
So, but back to Senses of Style for a moment. I was fascinated by this book in part because I love a book that takes an experimental approach to, I mean, in particular, a book of academic literary criticism that takes a kind of experimental approach to its own form. And this surely is such a book. The book is a collection of remarks in Jeff's sort of self-effacing description of the
00:04:48
Speaker
Well, you might call them paragraphs, but some of them seem a bit longer than that.
Interconnections between Frank O'Hara and Thomas Wyatt
00:04:53
Speaker
Some quite a bit shorter, some are just a single sentence. A book of some 400 remarks that take as their occasion, there's this beautiful story Jeff tells in the acknowledgments to that book in which he says as a boy, he was, I think, in the car listening
00:05:11
Speaker
to the radio with his father, and he correctly guessed that the symphony, I think, or the piece of music that he was listening to at the moment, that the composer of that music was Brahms. And his father said to him, right, now what makes you say so?
00:05:30
Speaker
Jeff says, well, that question stayed with me for many years. And that's a question whose answer, I think, is something like the word style. But of course, what that word means is a very hard thing to say. It's a hard thing to, it's a sort of slippery subject for a book. And Jeff does a beautiful job at sort of circling
00:05:52
Speaker
patiently, curiously, imaginatively, that subject. And it's clear that he is a scholar who is also a poet.
00:06:01
Speaker
you know, who is able to make the kinds of leaps of imagination that we're accustomed to or expect from our poets, but maybe don't necessarily expect as readily from our critics. So I really admire this criticism, this book of criticism that Jeff has written. Style is a way, he tells us at some point. And then
00:06:25
Speaker
There's this moment which I just wanna quote because it's from early in the book and I think it's sort of exemplary of the sensitivity of the readings at work here. And it sort of does bring us full circle, brings together Wyatt and the poet with whom the series began, Frank O'Hara. Remember I talked to Brian Glavy about O'Hara's great poem, Having a Coke with You. Jeff describes in the,
00:06:53
Speaker
in the early pages of this book, how it came to be that O'Hara became a reader of Sir Thomas Wyatt. And he quotes briefly from one of Wyatt's translations of the poet Petrarch, a poem called, in Wyatt's translation, my galley charged with forgetfulness, which ends this way. So this is, remember Wyatt translating Petrarch, the stars be hid that led me to this pain,
00:07:23
Speaker
Drowned is the reason that should me comfort, and I remain despairing of the poor. I'm now skipping ahead slightly. After this, Jeff tells us about how O'Hara read Wyatt and College at Harvard. The chapter ends this way.
00:07:41
Speaker
by reference to a poem which I gather many of you know, a poem of Franco Harris called, To the Harbormaster. But in case you don't, Jeff usefully quotes its final lines here. The end, now this is Jeff Doulton, the end of To the Harbormaster plays a variation on the final suspension of my galley. Quote,
00:08:02
Speaker
I trust the sanity of my vessel, and if it sinks, it may well be an answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you." Now back to Jeff.
Influential Academic Experiences and Anecdotes
00:08:15
Speaker
This not quite reaching you is O'Hara's version of remaining despairing of the port. The eternal voices of the waves postpone the final union and the poem ends in refusing an ending.
00:08:27
Speaker
It refuses its you as well, who was Larry Rivers, friend and more of O'Hara's, in 1954, but also, half-remembered, Petrarch's Laura, the famous love object of Petrarch's sonnets.
00:08:46
Speaker
Now, Jeff, again, it does, however, choose Wyatt. It chooses him not as an object, but as a model. If not love, then likeness. Well, I just I just love the the the beautiful distinctions and the care that are drawn there and the care with which Jeff draws them. And and this reminds me and this is the last thing I'll say by way of introduction. I know I've gone on for a minute how I first heard of Jeff Delvin.
00:09:18
Speaker
We share the same undergraduate institution, and I'm now convinced that, or I know, I have been suspected for many years and now have had it confirmed, that we have the same freshman literature teacher, a man named Howard Stern, who was a professor of German poetry, though neither Jeff nor I took him in the context of his area of specialization. Howard Stern, back when we knew him,
00:09:46
Speaker
certainly when I had him as a student, had to make a joke at the beginning of every semester saying, oh, I'm not that Howard Stern. Maybe the shock jock on radio. Maybe that name has faded somewhat from public consciousness to the same joke isn't necessary. Anyway, I already was very interested in the poet Elizabeth Bishop, and I was writing about a poem of hers, not for Howard, actually, for another class, but I was bugging Howard about it. I wanted him to read my writing.
00:10:15
Speaker
a poem of hers called Squatter's Children, which in the course of the conversation, Howard told me, oh, I had a student, I think this is what he said, you know, fogs of memory and whatnot. I had a student named Jeff Doulvin who once noticed that the form of this poem, Squatter's Children, is borrowed by Bishop from Wordsworth and his poem, The Solitary Reaper.
00:10:44
Speaker
which is, you know, you can look up the two poems and you'll see that that's exactly right. And it's a bit of an unusual form. There is a short third line in all these stanzas. The poems rhyme in the same way. They're the same number of lines. And even in fact, if you think about it a bit, the poems concern themselves with some of the same kinds of issues.
00:11:10
Speaker
Anyway, a couple of things stood out to me in that moment. One is it unlocked for me a way to think about poems across time, to think about certain ways that poems can find continued life in each other. This is what reminds me of the O'Hara and Wyatt interplay that Jeff describes in Senses of Style. It also made such an impression on me that here I had
00:11:40
Speaker
this very sort of esteemed faculty member in my eyes at the time, and still, who had listened to his student and kept with him something that the student had noticed, and then passed it along to another student years later.
00:12:00
Speaker
And then over the years, of course, I became aware of Jeff Dolvin, not just through classroom rumor, but in print and in all the other ways. And now it's just such a delight to finally be sitting and talking to each other and to get to share
00:12:17
Speaker
our own thinking about poetry with this podcast's audience. So I want to thank Howard Stern for telling me about Jeff Dolan years ago, and I want to thank Jeff Dolan for appearing on the podcast
Sir Thomas Wyatt's Life and Roles
00:12:31
Speaker
today. Jeff, how are you doing? I'm well, Kamran, and that's such a generous introduction. I love that story and that reminiscence, which in fact, remember that moment very clearly, not for the suggestion that I made about Wordsworth, although I'm proud of myself now for having made it.
00:12:47
Speaker
But Howard brought me that poem. I hadn't read it, Squatter's Children, and his attraction to it was one line. I think the woman in question, the squatter, is digging in the dirt. In that poem, there's a gathering storm, and she holds a mattock with a broken haft. Mattock with a broken haft. And I guess a mattock is
00:13:14
Speaker
I certainly looked it up at the time. I think it's something like a ho. But his love of it was the sound of that. He liked the way that sound. And the sort of thingy sound of it, the magic with a broken half. Who needs Heidegger when you've got that line? That's right. And so I remember that very clearly. And he was a very important teacher, I guess, for both of us, one of a couple. And maybe we'll canvas more of that.
00:13:40
Speaker
territory as we go. But another thing I remember about Howard is that, I don't know if he was still doing this when he were there, but Friday afternoons, he would get together whoever ever wanted for this moderately cheerful hour. He didn't like to call it a happy hour. He thought that was over promising.
00:13:55
Speaker
Exactly. But that was just a great scene of literary conversation with wine and cheese, much better wine and much better cheese than any of us knew to appreciate. And a mix of his colleagues, but also students, students at various levels of advancement and so on. So there was something very kind of democratic about it.
00:14:22
Speaker
That's really right. And it gave me a glimpse of what felt like the possibility of a kind of intellectual sociability with literature. And that's a very nice thing about being here together with you, this podcast. We were saying before coming on the air that it's sort of double sense of close reading, both playing attention to the text, but also close in conversation with
00:14:50
Speaker
with each other. And I think that's such an important dimension of literary experience and what has always sort of brought me to it and kept me in it that I can talk about it with people who care about it or can be convinced to care about it.
00:15:10
Speaker
I think this podcast is now something of an archive of those occasions and I don't know if other people are using it this way but I've started to point students to it who ask, you know, so what is this close reading thing? You know, the poem is only six lines long. How am I supposed to write a five page paper about that?
00:15:29
Speaker
And, you know, I've always had bits and pieces of writing by other people that I've been able to point to, say, take a look at this or take a look at that. But this is a really wonderful sort of new element of that archive. So I've enjoyed it usually and I've been putting it to work and I bet other people have been too. Well, thank you for saying so, Jeff.
00:15:53
Speaker
Yeah, close readings in both of those senses. And maybe your work reminds me of this conversation, what you said about Howard. All of that also reminds me close also in the sense of close to our own lives and our own experiences, which is maybe antithetical to what the new critics intended with the various reading strategies that tend to get grouped under that name.
00:16:24
Speaker
But maybe not. I don't know. So, well, with that in mind, you know, we're here today to talk about Thomas Wyatt and talk about a particular poem of his. But I like not to take for granted that our listeners come into these conversations with any real set of preconceptions about who it is they're going to listen to. And given the fact that
00:16:46
Speaker
at least in terms of this podcast run, we're moving further back in time than we generally do. And so maybe some kinds of historical contextualizing would be useful. I wonder if I can invite you just to begin the conversation, Jeff, by telling us something about Sir Thomas Wyatt, about where he fits into your sense of literary history, the history of poetry,
00:17:14
Speaker
He's often referred to as a court poet. Maybe you could tell us something about what it means to be a court, or what it meant to be a court poet. How seriously, in other words, should we take the sir at the beginning? That goes with Thomas Wyatt. Petrarch, you know, I've already mentioned is a poet who's important to Wyatt. Maybe you could tell us something about that too. And then finally, just invite you to say something
00:17:40
Speaker
Also weave it in however you like, but more personally about how it was that you came to be a reader of
00:17:47
Speaker
English Renaissance poetry in general, Sir Thomas Wyatt in particular, any or all of that that you think would be useful as a way of setting up a conversation about this poem, I'd be really grateful to hear. Sure. Well, it really is useful to know something about Wyatt's life, not least because we're a long time before anything in England, like a professional poet.
00:18:11
Speaker
the idea that that would be the center of your identity and certainly the way you earned your bread or keep. That's a good ways in the future and Thomas Wyatt had a quite extraordinary life within which the poems take a very interesting
00:18:27
Speaker
place. And so just to sketch it briefly, he was born in 1502, and he's the son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who was a member of Henry VII's privy council. So quite close counselor of first of the Tudor monarchs, who
00:18:46
Speaker
was an extremely pragmatic, capable administrator king as they went at the time. There was a sense that Henry VII was a good governor of England and a prudent man, and Henry Wyatt was an extremely important member of his inner circle, very much in that vein, known as a good and solid
00:19:12
Speaker
counselor, someone who'd survived great trouble under Richard III, had been imprisoned, and came to serve Henry VII very well. He continues to serve the monarchy under Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, whom we already realize doesn't quite meet those descriptions of the bureaucrat that I was offering. More well-known. More well-known, and for all the wrong reasons.
00:19:43
Speaker
And Wyatt, because of the advantage of his father's position, kind of works his way sort of up through the ranks at court. So he's among the various sort of aristocrats and gentlemen who are in service.
00:20:00
Speaker
to Henry from very early in his reign. And quite unlike his father, Thomas becomes a diplomat from early on in his service in court. He's going out on foreign missions various places. So he has an early diplomatic mission to France.
00:20:20
Speaker
I think around 1527, he is sent down to the Papal Court in Italy for elaborate negotiations that have to do with whether or not Henry is going to stay married, to Catherine of Aragon, whether the Pope will give permission for this,
00:20:38
Speaker
on the way back. He's captured by forces of the Holy Roman Empire and ransomed, ransomed back. And he just, he goes on to have a really quite extraordinary diplomatic career. He's also at another moment an ambassador to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, does some very touchy negotiating with him.
00:20:57
Speaker
why it's a big man. He was probably over six feet, as people describe him. Sounds like his talk was pretty profane. And everybody who interacted with him in all of these foreign courts clearly enjoyed this sort of bluff, charismatic Englishman as he kind of traveled around making deals
00:21:18
Speaker
for his king. So there are many ways in which Wyatt was clearly indispensable to Henry in a lot of sort of very complicated foreign negotiations. And just to zoom back for a moment, this is a time when kind of seismic change is happening to England in part because of the sort of complicated erotic politics of Henry's own court. He's married to the Spanish queen, Catherine of Aragon,
00:21:48
Speaker
She's not giving him an heir. He falls in love with Anne Boleyn and wants to arrange for a divorce from Catherine in order that he can marry Anne. And the Pope won't give it to him for reasons both doctrinal and political.
00:22:04
Speaker
And this is among the kind of precipitating causes of what we call the English Reformation, the break on the part of the English state with the Catholic church and the turn towards Protestantism, towards reform religion and towards a church of England on reformed lines. So Sir Wyatt is in court across this change and he's a really important diplomat working for Henry.
00:22:30
Speaker
And so far, you know, I've given you a portrait of somebody who has, you know, a brilliant career up and up and up and up, but that's not strictly speaking accurate because
Wyatt's Interwoven Poetry and Political Career
00:22:43
Speaker
to be in Henry's course,
00:22:46
Speaker
which is this sort of intimate, not to say claustrophobic circumstance in which sort of friendship, love, fidelity, infidelity, politics are all kind of mixed together, kind of a tangle of family and eros and power that's quite alien to those of us who think of politics as being done in big white buildings.
00:23:13
Speaker
This is very intimate stuff. So Wyatt is sort of in there in that mix, kind of variously entangled with various of the personalities. He's pretty close to the Bolins. And when there is no male heir from Anne Bolin, Henry starts to sour on her and look for ways to get rid of her. And in 1536,
00:23:43
Speaker
I think six men are imprisoned for adultery within. A musician, a guy named Marcus Meaton, some other aristocrats, gentlemen, and Thomas Wyatt. Five of those men are executed. One of them walks away. We don't know exactly why, but Wyatt survives to fight again. More of the embassies that I was describing, more of the infighting,
00:24:13
Speaker
Stephen Greenblatt memorably describes sitting down at Henry's table as being dining with Stalin. That's quite apt. That is never knowing whether you're in or out or up or down. Wyatt serves well, but ends up going back to the tower in 1540, 1541, I think. He's imprisoned again. Looks like he's going to be executed. And then
00:24:41
Speaker
Once again, he's freed and back in service to his king. And it's on an embassy, hastening to a southern port to receive a Spanish ambassador, that he dies of a fever in harness for Henry and a year before Henry himself dies.
00:25:01
Speaker
So that's the guy we're talking about here. That's the poet. He was plenty busy with state business. Yeah. Well, sounds incredibly busy, and yet you haven't mentioned poetry yet. So where amidst all of this is he, I mean, how does poetry fit into the life of someone
00:25:22
Speaker
like Wyatt, let alone Wyatt himself. What's your understanding of that? Well, also, a little unusually for someone in his position has a kind of humanist education. So he spends some years at Cambridge University. He clearly reads Latin poets. His father encourages him in this. So not every aristocrat at this moment in English history
00:25:49
Speaker
or learns to read Latin by any means, Wyatt had this background of that kind of poetry. And he's in a court environment where there is an increasing kind of back and forth of courtly lyrics, of poems often sort of imagined as sung to music or actually sung to music, which are sort of passed back and forth and read aloud of an evening and sort of
00:26:15
Speaker
part of a traffic among courtiers in some ways the social equivalent of an especially handsome outfit or a special gift at fencing or court tennis or something like that. It's a
00:26:30
Speaker
It's a cultured accomplishment that gets you a certain credit within that little world. And Wyatt is clearly very good at this and writes a bunch of short poems of various kinds. We'll talk a little bit about the form of They Flea for Me. But I mentioned earlier his wide experience on the continent. He's traveling all over the place as an ambassador.
00:27:00
Speaker
He wasn't only spending his time waiting for an audience pope. He clearly talked to writers. He had conversation with people in those courts and he read poems, read poems in Italian, read poems in French. He read Petrarch, the great humanist Italian lyricist.
00:27:22
Speaker
and he brought those poems back to England. So why it is, we think, the first person to translate Petrarch into English and some of his best poems are poems that are adaptations or imitations of the Italian. Not, they flee from me, but
00:27:41
Speaker
Uselist Hunt is a translation, free translation of Petrarch and so on. And so am I right in thinking that Wyatt is then sort of instrumental in introducing the sonnet into the English tradition? That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. It gets picked up by his admirer, the slightly younger Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. And Howard is son of the Duke of Norfolk and someone very well positioned
00:28:07
Speaker
in the court with a kind of aristocracy of birth quite beyond what Wyatt has. And it's Howard's taking up of the sonnet and Howard's prestige, Surrey's prestige. We usually bomb Surrey. That kind of accounts for a lot of the subsequent transmission of the sonnet as a form, but Wyatt's the guy who introduces it. That's right.
00:28:35
Speaker
Okay, so that's fascinating. So the picture I have in mind is a poet not publishing in anything like the ordinary sense that we understand obviously. These poems are sort of circulating within a very small and elite social world. And clearly he has, I don't know, I'm not at all
00:29:03
Speaker
a specialist in the period, obviously, but one gets the sense that the talent, he's a kind, I don't know, I feel this way about some poets, Jeff, more than others, even great poets. He seems to me a poet from like from whose fingertips are like dripping talent. Like he's, you know, he turns a beautiful phrase. I don't know how else to put it. And it's sort of surprising often. And so I don't know where that comes from.
00:29:32
Speaker
And of course, it's one of the great mysteries of life. I mean, you've given an account in which it clearly, in part, comes from a reading of things in other languages and of a certain kind of opportunity, perhaps freedom from other kinds of material concerns.
00:29:51
Speaker
But beyond that, maybe it's hard to say. Yeah. And I think you asked when did he write or where did he write. He sort of wrote everywhere.
Thematic Exploration of Wyatt's Poetry
00:30:04
Speaker
We have poems where he describes himself as in exile from the court in Canton and sort of writing a bitter satire.
00:30:13
Speaker
there is one manuscript which we may have occasion to talk about, which is actually partly in his hand. And scholars have looked at the inks that are used in that manuscript and discerned that some of them are clearly from Spain. So he worked on it at home. He worked on it on embassy all around Europe. So this was an activity
00:30:37
Speaker
that he had to sort of braid with his very, very busy political life. I suppose if you're an ambassador and you get sent to France or Spain, there's a lot of downtime on those trips, right? There's a lot of time on the road, you know, if you can keep your pens steady. Right. And it's also, it's clearly a way for him to express to himself
00:31:04
Speaker
and to the intimates with whom he shared these poems, some of the discomfiture, some of the agonies, outrages of court life. It is also a dissident mode for him, a mode of protest, if private protest, and that too, I think, is something that comes out and they flee from me. Was Henry VIII reading these poems?
00:31:32
Speaker
That's a good question, I'm sure. Some of them, some of them not. We speak in this period of the stigma of print, which is to say nothing does more honor to a poet in our moment than to have a book with a press and so on and so forth.
00:31:52
Speaker
for a aristocrat of this period, why would you want a book printed so it could be spread among people who don't matter to life at court? And so these are all poems that we have to imagine as being sort of passed from hand to hand, loosely for copied out by people in their commonplace books. Little sum is dot. Now, this poem in particular
00:32:20
Speaker
seems to take on from its own particular angle, one of lyric poetry's great subjects, which is erotic love. Is that typical for Wyatt? And are poems not just in this era signaling a kind of social
00:32:46
Speaker
prestige, but also means of seduction. Do you have a sense of that too, Jeff?
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's just a wonderfully rich and complicated question. They are erotic poems in a Petrarchan vein, so they sort of imagine that intense relationship to one half real, half imaginary person. Yeah.
00:33:19
Speaker
But Wyatt's poems, as I think we'll see with this one, they're always interested in other audiences in onlookers and the sort of challenge of maintaining erotic privacy within a court where all sorts of bonds could be advantageous one day and deadly the next.
00:33:40
Speaker
So fair to say then, Jeff, that even if this poem, which I'll invite you to read for our listeners in just a moment, even if this poem seems, well, I don't know, a naive listener might think, well, he seems to be talking about a particular woman.
00:34:02
Speaker
and a particular sort of experience he had with a particular woman. And presumably, given the kind of image you've given us of the social world within which these poems circulate, if that's even the right word to use, get handed from hand to hand, that woman may have been among the readers of the poem
00:34:25
Speaker
It's not as though this is like a love letter which posterity has somehow saved and now published. That is why it had some deep awareness that his audience was a complex thing. Even if it wasn't the public in the way we think of it, it wasn't simply one other person. These were poems that had
00:34:50
Speaker
sort of a nuanced view of who would be reading them and with what impressions they'd be forming. Have I described that well? Very well, I think. And in some ways, they're all really questions for the poem itself because of the adjustments of audience and moments when it's speaking in different directions on a different scales that fluctuates so much.
00:35:18
Speaker
Well, let's hear it. I mean, I'm eager now to hear it. This is a poem that I really love, and I'm just so delighted to have the privilege to get to talk with a real expert like you about it. But first, we ought to read it. And I also know that, or because you've told me, and I think I've seen this here and there,
00:35:40
Speaker
that there are changes, maybe some significance, some relatively trivial having to do with standardizations of spelling and that kind of thing. Different versions of the poem that one can find. You have a preferred one for the purposes of this conversation, at least. Is it worth, you know, for the general listener right now, is there anything we ought to know about that before we listen to the version that you've chosen for today's conversation?
00:36:08
Speaker
It may be interesting as we go to talk a little bit about what happens when the poem does get published. Great. It's probably written in the early 30s, 1530s or late 20s. It's very hard to date Wyatt's poems exactly. Right.
Analysis of 'They Flee From Me'
00:36:25
Speaker
And so if he was born in 1502, then he is likewise either in his late 20s or early 30s. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, exactly.
00:36:34
Speaker
And he's, the text that we'll be working with is from a manuscript that has his hand all over it. He had an amanuensis writing his poems, but there are annotations, lines in his hand. So we have a good authority that this is the poem as to why I wanted it.
00:36:58
Speaker
But interesting things happen to it wherever it travels. And those may be worth talking about, especially when it first gets printed about 20, 25 years later. And now it's traveled here. That's right. That's right. Read it for us if you would, Jeff. OK, here we go. They flee from me that sometime did me seek with naked foot stalking in my chamber.
00:37:27
Speaker
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, that now are wild, and do not remember that sometime they put themself in danger to take bread at my hand. And now they range, busily seeking, with a continual change. Thank'd be fortune it hath been otherwise twenty times better, but once in special,
00:37:55
Speaker
in thin array after a pleasant guise, when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, and she me caught in her arms, long and small, therewithal sweetly did me kiss, and softly said, dear heart, how like you this. It was no dream, I lay broad waking, but all is turneth through my gentleness,
00:38:25
Speaker
into a strange fashion of forsaking. And I have leave to go of her goodness, and she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.
00:38:48
Speaker
So that's Jeff Dolvin reading Sir Thomas Wyatt's They Flea From Me. Jeff is a beautiful reading of the poem. Thank you. For people who aren't looking at the text, you know, I find it useful sometimes just to stand back from it for a moment and say what we see on the page. I see
00:39:09
Speaker
three stanzas here. Is there anything interesting, noteworthy to you about the way this poem is sort of organized at that scale, sort of at the scale of the whole?
00:39:19
Speaker
Yeah, three stanzas, seven lines each, rhymed A-B-A-B-B-C-C. And that's a form that gets called rhyme royale. Won't have that name for a while yet. But it's Chaucer. That is, where did Wyatt get this? Well, he got his sonnet from Italy, from Petrarch. He gets this form from Geoffrey Chaucer.
00:39:45
Speaker
the English poet, the well of English undefiled as he gets later called. And so that's a real statement that this is a homegrown poem. Elsewhere he imitates Seneca, but this poem is to do with England and has roots in England. And there's other truss around it as we'll see. Good. Okay.
00:40:12
Speaker
All right, so maybe as we have occasion to move through the poem, we'll want to say something about the three stanzas might suggest a kind of
00:40:25
Speaker
dramatic progression of argument or of narrative or something like that. I generally speaking like to begin with the beginning and oh, and I noted it way back at the beginning of this episode in introducing the topic for today that the poem gets referred to as they flee from me. Is that its title? I mean, does it make sense to talk about a title here or not in the
00:40:51
Speaker
I don't know. Is that even an interesting question? No. Really, it's handle, in a sense, the handle by which we grab it. If you look at it in the Edgerton manuscript, it just begins at its beginning. Just to sort of open a parenthesis there, the whole history or the printing of this poem is part of the history of titles. Because when it does get printed,
00:41:20
Speaker
it gets a title. The title being the lover showeth how he is forsaken of such as he sometime enjoyed, which somehow has not become the handle that we grab. And maybe we can, I'll say maybe a little bit more later on about titles and the history of titles, but this one just jumps in.
00:41:40
Speaker
Good. And so in any case, the reason I brought it up in this moment was to say that first line has always stood out to me so sort of prominently. It sort of has a whole kind of world in it. It's clever in its way. And I just want to invite you to say something to us about
00:42:01
Speaker
the kind of structure that you're detecting or the drama that you're feeling, the tone or something like that of that first line, they flee from me that sometime did me seek. Yeah, yeah. Well, as you kind of prophecy, there is an architecture to this thing, maybe a sort of large juxtaposition of scenes or even sort of narrative moments.
00:42:31
Speaker
But in some ways, for me, the basic experience of the poem is being subjected to its tone, which fluctuates so much as it goes.
00:42:46
Speaker
Uh, so they flee from me. It's a pretty confident utterance. Um, you know, that's a position of power to say, uh, you know, when I come, they go, they flee from her. Right. Suggest that the eye who's saying that is, is, um, a predator or a dangerous. That's right. Yeah. And then, you know, we're just four syllables in that sometime did me seek.
00:43:14
Speaker
So wait a minute, they flee from you now that used to seek you. Well, possibly that's still a posture of power. That is, they used to feel confident sort of coming to me, but now they know better.
00:43:30
Speaker
But already we have just a little shiver of, they flee from me now, but once they used to come around more often or more willingly. I guess it's not clear at that point that the first line is about an erotic kind of situation at all. I mean, maybe it's suggested and it emerges strongly as the poem goes on, but at that point it could be
00:43:57
Speaker
about anything really, I guess. Yeah. And trying to discern sort of the ratios in any given line or any given moment of politics and eros is sort of one of the kind of endlessly provocative bafflements of
00:44:14
Speaker
of Wyatt. And one of the things that I think he needs to speak to in a sense about his life, we don't know that Thomas Wyatt had an affair with Anne Boleyn, but we know he was sent to the tower for it. Right. And then not killed. And then not killed, right? Then let out again to be of service again. Sure.
00:44:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, there's something about the, I don't know, would it be the right thing to call it a chiastic structure that that first line has? Like flee, me, me, seek, you know, that takes you through the mirror, through the looking glass as it were. Yeah.
00:45:00
Speaker
Yeah. And also, that does open up a question that I've found myself rereading the poem, thinking about and wondering if we might get anywhere with it. But the relationship between this poem as a kind of verbal artifact, something with form that you can sort of appreciate as a kind of accomplishment sort of along the way, on the path to the ideal of a poem as a monument in some sense.
00:45:30
Speaker
on the one hand. On the other hand, as a succession of speech acts or just as a person talking with all of the contingency and fragility and in real-timeness of that,
00:45:48
Speaker
And so that, you know, talking about tone, I'm leaning on the real-timeness. So they flee from me that sometimes did me seek. But in pointing out the chiasmus, you're saying, ah, but look, you know, it's got this kind of symmetrical structure that seems almost independent of that sort of wavering authority. Yeah, that's interesting.
00:46:11
Speaker
I mean, maybe it's worth just glossing for people who are unfamiliar with, because I think that the use of some time is sort of anachronistic or archaic, right? So that doesn't mean like sometimes as in every now and then it means used to, right? Yeah, that's right. Good to point that out because it's not like it's still going on, happens sometimes and sometimes not.
00:46:41
Speaker
sometime in the sense of my sometime friend, my former friend. And it has, even in the period, that sort of slightly arch distancing in it. But sometime, didn't he say it once? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good. I'm interested in the way time
00:47:03
Speaker
is experienced in this poem, and that first line gives us a kind of before and after, or rather after and before structure. I don't think this is in the published letters. I know that the poet James Merrill, you'll find this amusing, Jeff.
00:47:30
Speaker
I read a letter of his once in which he said that he tried his hand at a modern version of this poem, but never got past the first line. He rendered the first line as, they turned me down that once did call me up.
00:47:46
Speaker
I didn't know that. That's great. There's nothing in they turn me down that is powerful sounding and which is maybe part of what makes it funny. It's sort of pathetic from the beginning. And this isn't that, right? So now maybe we're in a position to talk a bit more broadly about the first stanza and feel free to bring in any lines or moments that you like. But the situation in the stanza, the kind of governing metaphor that's never
00:48:16
Speaker
spelled out explicitly, but that seems to be the kind of, you know, embedded imagery of the stanza is of animals, of a kind of hunted and or a kind of scene of hunting or something. So, you know,
00:48:41
Speaker
How conventional is that? I mean, I know you say this isn't, at least formally speaking, this is a kind of a at-home poem. This is a form inherited from Chaucer. This isn't Wyatt doing Petrarch in the sense that we talked about earlier.
00:49:01
Speaker
But the conceit of that first stanza in which it seems like the lover is an animal who is either tamed and amenable to sex or whatever else, or wild and can't be, I don't know how to, how should we think about that? The sort of dramatic situation or the,
00:49:29
Speaker
rhetorical kind of situation of the first stanza, Jeff.
00:49:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's interesting that that sort of figure of the animals is quite prominent, really governing in that first stance. And then it goes away. It's not going to come back. So it feels a little bit like a strategy of mastery that he's trying out. There once were these women who came to me.
00:50:04
Speaker
and with naked foot stalking in my chamber. So those are their feet who are naked, right? I think so, yeah. So there's what feels like a really charged erotic game of predator and prey there where perhaps the roles can flip because they're the ones who are doing the stalking.
00:50:24
Speaker
Interesting. So we've kind of opened up this even slightly kind of kinky space of erotic freedom, experiment, pleasure. Play, yeah. Play. And you can feel the voice sort of
00:50:51
Speaker
lamping down on that at moments and trying to sort of make that relationship with the animal one of hunter to hunted or of, you know, somehow tender to tended, something like that. I have seen them gentle tame and meek. I've seen them defer, I've seen them
00:51:21
Speaker
And then, and those are, who knows what animals those are exactly, but possibly deer. And there's another famous Wyatt poem, Whose a List Hunt I Know Where Isn't Hind, a deer that sort of develops that relationship.
00:51:40
Speaker
But it's something else to know about animals that they too are political. Deer belong to the king. That poem is to hunt and touch me not for Caesar's I am and wild for to hold though I seem tame.
00:52:00
Speaker
That is, I the deer may be beguiling, but watch it, because I belong to someone else. I belong to the king. And so some of that energy is here too, as these animals, these women defer, but then assert themselves, or simply rebel, that now are wild and do not remember.
00:52:30
Speaker
that sometime, there's that word again, sometime they put themselves in danger to take bread at my hand. They used to come to me, they were attracted to me or my power was charismatic and magnetic, who knows what it was, but it was good for me, the speaker of the poem.
00:52:56
Speaker
And amenable for them. And amenable for them. And they may well have gotten something out of it, although I wasn't at the time thinking of their strategic interests. I was thinking of my own. The person who feeds a deer from their hand is not
00:53:17
Speaker
nourishing the deer, really. But they're sort of luring, I don't know, creating a kind of experience of intimacy. It's complicated because what it's not is quite. I mean, the threat of violence seems there, but it's always withheld. It's not really, the violence isn't in the poem, it's sort of,
00:53:46
Speaker
outside of the poem as something whose knowledge is provisionally suspended or something.
00:53:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's lovely that sense that this is not feeding the animals. It's a species of play and a reminder of where your bread is buttered, I guess. To take bread at my hand.
00:54:23
Speaker
And that word danger is, I think we can take it in really the fullest modern sense. It also has a little bit of an erotic
00:54:36
Speaker
valence to it in the period. The idea of love danger is a sort of trussarian phrase. It's the erotic peril that you put yourself in when you have an affair at court and when love and the various sort of lines of authority get mixed up and tangled with each other.
00:54:57
Speaker
And it was worth it for them to put themselves in danger to come to me to be with me But but again that that sometimes sometime they put themselves in danger to take bread at my hand and and now they range it's great word, you know busily seeking with a continual change there's a lot of
00:55:22
Speaker
power in that idea of ranging. Now they're free, they go where they want and they go widely. There's something really... Yeah, so go on, please. Oh, well, just that... Again, it feels like that's another moment of that sort of subtle tonal modulation where he says, and now they range, which is really from imagining our speaker and why it is sort of the same
00:55:47
Speaker
the same person, sort of why the ambassador always being told to go here and told to go there by Henry. That there's a lot of, it seems to me, kind of respect and admiration and envy, something like that in range
00:56:02
Speaker
And then he clamps right down on that, busily seeking with a continual change, which sounds slightly contemptuous as though, you know, what I really want to say about them is, you know, they've become fashion victims. Now they're just sort of trivially chasing the next thing. So busily sounds pejorative in that sense.
00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah, and we haven't even begun to talk about rhythm yet, but you can hear... Wow, that was going to be my question for you. The rhythm of that line really changes, yeah. Yeah. Sort of all front-loaded feet, it seems like, yeah. Visually seeking with a... Yeah, it seems sort of fussy fast and trivial. To take bread at my hand and now they range is a pretty measured
00:56:48
Speaker
line, all those mono-syllables, and then it becomes kind of jittery and nervous. And maybe this is a moment just to say a little bit about the rhythm of these lines because this is in some ways what first drew me to Wyatt was
00:57:11
Speaker
the mystery of how to read him aloud and how this poetry is supposed to sound.
00:57:19
Speaker
you could read that first line. They flee from me that sometimes did me seek and say, aha, I am now embarked upon a poem in iambic pentameter. That's what it sounds like to me. And another of the teachers that we have in common, and we were talking about this just a little bit before the show, John Hollander, a wonderful poet and critic and
00:57:47
Speaker
theorist of meter. And he has a concept that I... And scholar of the Renaissance. And scholar of the Renaissance, that's right. That's right. He speaks of the poem's capacity to make what he calls a metrical contract with the reader, which is... It's first lines, a poem will establish a set of expectations. It's like, okay, I'm a poem in iambic pentameter.
00:58:16
Speaker
And so now you can continue to read me that way, that is, you know, your reading voice can kind of steer the lines towards those rhythms, those five I ams. Da-pom, da-pom, da-pom, da-pom, da-pom, where I am is that unstressed, stressed combination, da-pom. You can read me that way, and also at moments when I break that contract, when the rhythm changes,
00:58:43
Speaker
You can ask questions about that. It will sound like a departure. It will sound like a departure and you may want to ask, what's going on? Why does it depart there? Does it have motives for breaking its contract?
00:58:59
Speaker
Having said all that, Wyatt is really writing at a moment before iambic pentameter gets consolidated as a normative line in English verse.
00:59:17
Speaker
So, there are people writing in lines of ten stanzas. Chaucer writes a lot of what we would call iambic pentameter, but for complicated reasons having to do especially with whether or not the E is pronounced at the end of a word, things like that. It's hard for the 16th century to hear Chaucer that way.
00:59:40
Speaker
So we're blundering around a little bit in relation to a line that's going to crystallize pretty shortly as a rhythmic norm. So we're wrong-footed a bit by that opening. They flee from me that sometimes did me seek with naked foot.
01:00:04
Speaker
stalking in my chamber. That still feels like more or less five beats. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek is another line that's plausibly iambic. It just doesn't have that unstressed first syllable.
01:00:18
Speaker
But it gets weirder and weirder. And by the time we get to busily seeking with a continual change, then if there was a contract, then it's being sort of flagrantly broken. Well, I feel tempted to make what can often seem like the reductive and too obvious move, which is to say that
01:00:41
Speaker
to read the rhythm sort of mimetically in some way and to say that the sort of authority of that first line is partly communicated by the regularity of the rhythm and that when things become destabilized in some way, we hear it happening too that now are wild and do not remember doesn't
01:01:08
Speaker
you don't hear the kind of the oscillation as regularly in a line like that. And I had flagged and meant to ask you about busily seeking with a continual change, which sounds like it's just from a different kind of poem altogether.
01:01:32
Speaker
I think you're really right to read it that way, mimetically or expressively. And I mentioned Suri earlier, who a little bit later is going to translate two books of the Aeneid into blank verse. He's really the first English writer of blank verse, of unrhymed iambic pentameter.
01:01:58
Speaker
And those lines are very regular. And it's clear that he's making a proposal that a heroic line in English should sound like this. And that is enormously influential. And it leads to 20 or 30 years of quite conservative
01:02:25
Speaker
rhythm in English poetry, where the rhythm and the meter are very close to one another. So the distinction I'm making there is between, on the one hand, the kind of disposition of stress in a line or in any sentence, the sort of way in which the beats fall.
01:02:47
Speaker
and meter as the formal expectation for how those beats are going to be organized. So we often think of a difference between the meter, the expectation, and the actual rhythm of the line.
01:03:02
Speaker
And there's some very broad sense in which poetry, post-Wyatt and pre-Dunn, there's a collaborative project of proving that English can be as metrically regular a language as any other, including French, including Latin.
01:03:24
Speaker
And so, you have poets like George Gascoigne or Suri or others who really just write like a metronome. There are very few metrical variations. And it's only, you know, Philip Sidney and others start to
01:03:39
Speaker
start to break that contract again for kind of polemical or expressive purposes. But Wyatt is really writing before that contract. So he can use the iambic pentameter line, but when he's using it, it's not exactly because it's the norm and everything else is a departure from it.
01:03:59
Speaker
It's just one of his rhetorical resources. So it's like when he wants to sound stately, a line like that or poised, a line like that as a resource for him. But when his speaker gets agitated or as I think at the end of this stanza is sort of trying to get a grip on his own admiration for these rangy women and redescribe their transgressions as kind of
01:04:30
Speaker
trivial fashionability. Well, you can do that with all those little unstressed syllables jumping around in the line. Yeah. And they're seeking, you know, without an object even, or without a stated one. They're just sort of, you know, wandering away. Yeah. I mean, he's not saying, you know, that they've left me for these other men. Yeah. I mean, it's perhaps implied. Yeah.
01:04:57
Speaker
Right. But it's not as though they've made a choice between constancies. There was a former sort of proper attention to him and then the other is just arbitrary contingent.
01:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's like there are satellites that have lost their planet or something. That's a good figure. And in moving into the second stanza, it seems to me there's a kind of reassertion of the sort of authority or strength with which the poem began. I mean, it's almost comical. Thanks be fortunate, it had been otherwise 20 times better. It just sounds to me like an adolescent kind of
01:05:38
Speaker
Oh, I've had lots of girlfriends, you know.
01:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, pure braggadocio, I think. And there's a kind of bluff, pagan, thank be fortune. It's not thank God, it's thank be fortune that has been otherwise. More than 20 times, that is, I haven't got enough fingers and toes to number all the women who came to me in that first mode that I recall. Oh, sorry. Is that what the better means after 20 times more than 20? It doesn't mean it was better in our sense 20 times.
01:06:11
Speaker
than it is. I would read it as more than 20 times. I lost count. Yeah, sure. I get it. That's not an actual number. That's a gesture towards plentitude or something. Yeah.
01:06:31
Speaker
But so then there's a really interesting play for me that I want to ask you about in that second stanza, which, you know, if it went on in that mode that we've just been describing as the first line and a half of the second stanza, thank be fortunate, but it has been otherwise 20 times better, it would for me not sap that I am, I guess, not be as memorable as it turns out to be, because then there's this kind of like,
01:07:00
Speaker
rapid transition from this sort of collective, habitual experience of the past with a kind of particular memory, this sort of singling out of a particular moment,
01:07:21
Speaker
And so, I don't know, I want to just ask you, Jeff, to talk about how you read, but once in special and, you know, what is the relation, in other words, between the particular example cited and this kind of atmosphere of
01:07:39
Speaker
power and plentitude that had seemed like braggadocia, to use your word, just a moment earlier. How do those sort of puzzle pieces fit together in your reading of that second stanza? Yeah, it's such a wonderful and surprising moment. And it's maybe a good point to come back to the question that you asked early on about.
01:08:08
Speaker
Who's the audience of this poem? Who's listening to it? And I think there are three possibilities for that. One is that Wyatt is talking to himself. And I'm going to keep speaking as though Wyatt were the speaker of the poem. And in some poems, I think that's an extremely arguable, potentially problematic claim. But here, I think it works pretty well.
01:08:36
Speaker
Wyatt talking to himself. Wyatt talking to a peer or maybe to a slightly younger man with similar ambitions and aspirations. And then finally, the possibility that he might be talking to or might be heard by this woman.
01:09:02
Speaker
And I think the poem, yeah, I think it's just so mobile among those possibilities. But presumably, just to pause you there, there would be different demands or expectations given those three roads that you've just sketched out for us, were he to go down one or the other, or at least presumably there would be. Yeah. Maybe in some interesting way there wouldn't be. I don't know.
01:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think very much so. And if I had to give an answer in a sense to the question, I'd say that this is a poem that is, as it would have been in Curtier's circles, addressed to appear. But
01:09:50
Speaker
But it is a voice that is only intermittently able to remember that that's the situation that it's in. That is, I'm trying to tell you a story about court life. I'm trying to explain to you how things were great for me once. They're not so great now, but that doesn't matter. I'm still the man.
01:10:21
Speaker
And at the same time, I'm listening to myself speak and reacting to myself speak. And as I do that, I intermittently lose a little bit of a grip on my project of persuading you, persuading you how authoritative I am. And then there are also moments where
01:10:43
Speaker
this woman is so much in my mind that I forget you and I forget myself and it's this, oh, I'm speaking to her. And I'm trying so hard to manage the situation. If I were a sort of poet in perfect control, which is to say a much inferior poet, if I were a poet in perfect control, then I would be steadily engaged in a sort of project of self advertisement.
01:11:12
Speaker
But the memories that I'm working with are so charged that I lose that. And I think this is a moment like that. Thanks be fortunate. It has been otherwise 20 times better. I'm saying that to you.
01:11:27
Speaker
But once in special is a memory that comes upon me with a force that actually distracts me, diverts me from that project of self-assertion. And now I'm there. I'm in that moment. And what I see is not who I'm talking to.
01:11:49
Speaker
I see her in thin array after a pleasant guise. She's sort of dressed in something, maybe diaphanous. And it's fashionable after a pleasant guise. And you can again hear him just trying to in thin array after a pleasant guise.
01:12:09
Speaker
work himself back into that posture of you know slightly satirical these women and their fashions that was the spot that he took in the end of the first stanza in thin array after a pleasant guise a little dismissively but he can't hold on to that when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall that's just magic that's
01:12:33
Speaker
That's all pretense slipping away, possibly even for both of them, and slipping away just by force of gravity.
01:12:43
Speaker
And whatever posture of predator and prey was present in the first stanza gets reversed here, right? Yeah. And she caught me in her arms. Yeah. Yeah. And whether that's... I mean, the gown falls, but now it's like he's falling and she catches him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Is it predation or is it a rescue? Is he, you know, but he, you know, catch me and she does.
01:13:07
Speaker
her arms long and small. That's so plain and so lovely. Small means slender in there, I think. Yeah. And that sound comes back in therewithal, the all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Therewithal sweetly did me kiss and softly said, dear heart, how I like you this.
01:13:34
Speaker
It's so good, Jeff. It's so good. It's so immediate. It's so painful. It seems so accurate in the sense that he's remembering what happened. I'm quoting her directly. I'm not ever expecting it, even though I know it's coming. It's like her words are now
01:14:02
Speaker
in the poem, not just in the poem, but sort of in this sort of place of privilege in the poem, coming at the end of the stanza, at the end of the line. Yeah. You know, I taught for a year at Brandeis. It's a very happy year. And one of my colleagues there was Billy Flesh, William Flesh. And he said something about close reading.
01:14:27
Speaker
that's always stayed to me and I stayed with me. I use it from time to time with students who are trying to figure out, you know, what kind of attention are we talking about? He says, imagine you're breaking up with someone and the person you're breaking up with says one sentence and then walks out the door and all you're left with is that sentence.
01:14:49
Speaker
How much would you think about, have you thought about that sentence? And all that it could possibly mean, every word, every comma, every gesture, every tone in it, as best you can remember. That's close reading.
01:15:05
Speaker
And this little fragment feels like that. I mean, he heard it. But what does it mean? It's what he has now. I like you this. So what I hear, I was, my ears perked up earlier when we were talking about the first stance and you said, well, the animal stuff doesn't come back. And I thought, well, doesn't it? Is there a pun in deer heart? I mean,
01:15:30
Speaker
In other words, for people who don't know, a heart is like a male deer. Have I got that right? And of course, the word deer is itself a homonym. How clever can we be there? Is she sort of...
01:15:51
Speaker
I guess we can't resolve these questions, but is there the possibility that she is sort of playfully, in that moment, reversing the metaphor? Yeah, I love that. And particularly, as you said, picking up on caught on that reversal just a little bit earlier. And does our speaker want to hear that, in a sense? He probably remembers it every way.
01:16:19
Speaker
But it could be the most generous, dear heart, how like you this, an open question, a real question. But it could also be, what do you think of this? How do you like this?
01:16:35
Speaker
an assertion of authority on her part, which is a little bit more in line with what you're hearing with the sort of return and reversal of the figure of the deer and the hunter and the deer. Yeah. I love how the this
01:16:59
Speaker
rhymes on the kiss, you know, but it's also pointing back to it. It's like, you know, presumably. Yes, and I love what you just said about how it's insofar as the sort of evidence of the poem is telling us that
01:17:19
Speaker
He's making this argument, and then I love the way you described how this sort of particular memory makes him lose his train of thought, as it were, and he gets swept along by it. Presumably, it is the kind of memory which he is replaying every way, and it's at once a tender moment and a kind of
01:17:38
Speaker
vulnerable moment for him, right? And a moment of the sort of loss of power. Now something's being done to him. Yeah. Yeah. It's just beautiful. And then sort of into the third stanza, it was no dream.
01:18:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And the way that line splits down the middle, there's so much
01:18:14
Speaker
therewithal sweetly did me kiss and softly said, dear heart, how like you this. There's a kind of momentum in that, which is just like this could go on forever. And then it was no dream. I lay broad, waking. Now he's shaking himself. Did this happen? It did happen.
01:18:37
Speaker
I was there and I was awake and I'm awake now, perhaps sleepless thinking about it or have been sleepless thinking about it. So, let me assure you. And again, this is the sort of moment when maybe he's talking more to himself
01:18:58
Speaker
has forgotten a little bit that he's trying to talk to somebody else and persuade them. Because his point to you, I keep making you the courtier here, but his point to you is I don't care about these women, they're all effectively interchangeable. I've had 20 of them. I've had 20 of them, exactly. And so when I say it was no dream, I lay broad waking, I'm trying to get myself back
01:19:25
Speaker
back to that spot, but I'm still privileging this one moment that I can't forget. And that's the conversation with myself is about her. To you, I'm trying to say one of many, but I'm confronting never again.
01:19:46
Speaker
never again. And that's a deep fear of this poem, erotically and politically both, perhaps never again. Do you think that the memory is so kind of vivid and powerful for him that it's as though in the kind of time of enunciation of those lines,
01:20:09
Speaker
it's as though he's addressing her. I mean, it's funny, I actually had to remind myself, like, oh, there's no second person in this poem, is there? It's all in the third person, because it sort of feels at that moment like it's in the second person, you know, like, you know, like he's speaking to her. But that the kind of movement from the second sense into the third, and that I was no dream, I lay broad waking, period.
01:20:40
Speaker
It's just as surely as she entered into his presence while he was speaking those lines, it's now as though she's vanished.
01:20:53
Speaker
And he's back alone, right? And now back sort of addressing the dumb man that he was talking to before or to himself, you know? Yeah, I think that's right. That's a real Petrarchan inheritance, these kind of broken visions. You see it and then it's gone and you can't recover it.
01:21:17
Speaker
It also feels very romantic to me. I don't mean just, I mean like, Fled is that, you know, gone to that dream, you know, do I sleep or wake, you know, that sort of moment and the, anyway. I realize I'm getting my history done. Fled is that music, right? Yeah, Fled is that music.
01:21:38
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's right. And I think that these resonances sort of across literary history are such real things that if you have the same kind of physical string starting across the same lute,
01:22:02
Speaker
It will vibrate when you read Nightingale and it will vibrate when you read for me different as their situations are. And I think I mean I just as I'm reading it now there may be some way in which.
01:22:21
Speaker
Wyatt speaking to you, Curtier, and speaking to himself, they come together a little bit, and maybe there's a little bit in the wake of her disappearance, a little bit more of a sense of solidarity that it becomes a little... He's now trying to figure out what just happened, and he's trying it out on whoever is listening. But all this turn it through my gentleness,
01:22:49
Speaker
because I was so gentle and so disarmed, always turned it through my gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaking, into a weird kind of leaving. She left me, I think, but it was in a strange way. And there's that word, fashion, when we hear, again, just the hint of his
01:23:18
Speaker
management of the situation by dismissing it as kind of fashionable variety. But a strange fashion of forsaking, even if there's a hint of that dismissive fashion, that's not really what he's doing now. And I have leave to go of her goodness and she also to use newfangleness. Those are difficult lines. But I think it means something like
01:23:49
Speaker
How is it that I wanted to stay but ended up leaving because she gave me permission to? Right. So I have leave to go. Leave means, at least in the first sense, a kind of permission. I am permitted to go.
01:24:09
Speaker
because of her goodness. I'm sort of filling in and taking all the poetry out of the line. But it's not just our modern years, Jeff, but presumably it would have been just as true, if not more, for Wyatt's readers that leave to go is a kind of paradoxical play on words, too. Or there's something
01:24:37
Speaker
In other words, I guess what I'm trying to, let me ask it as a question. Is the confusion, the difficulty I have, and it sounds like maybe you were sort of reassuring me as normal to have at this moment in the poem, is it an artifact of our historical distance from this moment, or is it somehow there in the original in a way that you as an expert in the period can tell us about, reassures that is there?
01:25:06
Speaker
That's a great question. I've not put that question to it because it feels like you have leave to go, so sort of idiomatic enough. But I'm second guessing myself now. It does feel as though it
01:25:25
Speaker
It puts additional pressure on this question of what it means to leave. Who's leaving whom? Oh, yeah. You know what it makes me think of? Because you said it earlier. It's like the line about imagine someone breaks up with you and gives you one line. In the way you could say in the wake of a breakup, oh, yeah, no, it was mutual.
01:25:48
Speaker
or whatever, right? As a kind of space saving. It's not you. It's me. And it was so good. And we've got that crazy preposition, leave to go of her goodness. What does that mean? That's a real Wyatt, these sort of impressionistic prepositions which seem to serve all sorts of possible connective agendas without stipulating any of them.
01:26:14
Speaker
In fact, if you take out the word leave, it's, and I have to go. It's not have as possession, it's have as like compulsion.
01:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that definitely shadows it. But she managed, partly this is a courtier, someone as why it was, expert in the arts of courtly negotiation and the delicate power plays that are part of life in the orbit of Henry VIII.
01:26:46
Speaker
saying, how did she do that? That was good. Among the tonalities here is something like professional admiration. It's like, hats off. And it seems like that the expectation or the code by which such games are played is that there won't be too much protesting at the time of departure. It's like,
01:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, and he would have, he perhaps he should have, or he should have asserted an authority that perhaps he had, except that she so managed that it was her pure generosity that allowed him to leave.
01:27:33
Speaker
that allowed him to do the thing that he least wanted to do. And she also to use newfangleness. So that's a strange. Yeah. Yeah. And again, you know, this fluctuating tone, that's a Trusser word. So we're sort of back. Which one is the newfangleness? Newfangleness. Yeah. How was it that I, I allowed her
01:27:56
Speaker
I released her to participate in this newfangled world of courtly performance and change. And a little bit of, again, that incredibly labile self-questioning, self-doubting voice, having just said, I have leave to go for goodness in bewilderment and admiration.
01:28:20
Speaker
sort of recovering itself enough to say, and she also to use new fangleness. That's all it was. Is the plain sense of that line, so if I have leave to go, so I'm permitted to go, her goodness has permitted me to go, and her goodness has also permitted her to use her new fangleness,
01:28:45
Speaker
I think it's, and I have leave to go of her goodness, and she has leave from me, although I hardly knew I was granting it, to use newfangalists as to behave after this new fashion, where whatever was between us means nothing the next morning.
01:29:04
Speaker
which is at tonally a very different kind of description of the same phenomenon or state of affairs that was previously described as busily seeking with continual change, right? I mean, that's sort of the same thing, right? She's always just sort of... Yeah, right. And he's trying to, you know,
01:29:22
Speaker
find that kind of self-centering satirical voice again. And so, well, with that in mind, not that we've exhausted by any means all the lines that preceded, but the concluding couplet of the poem, but since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.
01:29:50
Speaker
I guess I'm offering a reading in my emphasis of particular words there. But I think tonally the word kindly is hard to make. Well, a lot depends on how you take the tone of the deployment of that word. So I want you to walk us through some of the possibilities that you encounter just as a reader of those last two lines.
01:30:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. But since that I so kindly am served, well, I think a modern reader first here is kind in relation to gentle tame and meek. And there, is it admiringly or ironically, she manages so well she treated me so kindly even though she was jettisoning me.
01:30:45
Speaker
Since she treated me so well, what does she deserve?
01:30:53
Speaker
there's another sense of kindly there as well, a little bit sort of more active in the period when YA is writing, but since that I am served in kind. So since... You did to me the kind of thing I did to her or would have done or something? Yeah. Perhaps I was
01:31:13
Speaker
I've been busily seeking with a continual change myself 20 times better. Sounds like it. Yeah. So, yeah. So, a little bit of, huh, you know, since that turnaround is arguably fair play, then what has she deserved? So, that sense that kindly as in kind and here, you know, we began by talking about
01:31:40
Speaker
animals and various forms of power relation in relation to gender in the court. And this feels like the moment when he sort of has to confront her as both beloved and an equal adversary or even his better. Because she has won this. If it was a contest, then she's won it.
01:32:11
Speaker
Right. So those positions of hunter and prey are human and animal
01:32:18
Speaker
are not in the kind of world of this poem, roles or sort of permanent positions to which, say, men and women are affixed, but instead they're kinds of roles that they provisionally occupy with respect to each other, and the roles can be flipped, as we've seen.
01:32:42
Speaker
Yeah, and to discover in Wyatt's imagination this kind of contingency in relation to love and in relation to the roles that men and women play in this court in relation to power is still so shocking.
01:33:08
Speaker
And that, I think, opens up in that final line. I would fain know what she hath deserved. And tonally, you can give that, you know, so what should I have done to her? She deserves, you know, I, you know, there was a blow, I didn't land. But I don't think that's the dominant
01:33:36
Speaker
tonality. And even though in that word deserved, there's language of service that's sort of politically rich for the period and so on. I think there are moments in poems that are good poems where you can feel them trying to push away, you know,
01:34:01
Speaker
everything but their own questions, everything but their own language or their own urgencies. What did she deserve?
01:34:17
Speaker
What did she deserve now at this moment? What did she ever deserve? Looking back across all of my life as the speaker of this poem, how did I treat women? What did they deserve? What do they deserve? What do I deserve? There must be some better account of how we treat each other.
01:34:43
Speaker
than the sort of world of courtly game that I've been negotiating my relation to throughout this poem. As though the poem at the end springs for a moment free of the world that it's been trapped in and sort of tries to ask, you know, what do we owe each other? And then it's done.
01:35:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And then it's done. And actually, that's lovely, Jeff. It's the question that's been loosely forming in my head as you've been talking about those lines. And as I think back to the second stanza, I mean, we
01:35:26
Speaker
we sort of foregrounded as a possibility that the tripartite stanzaic structuring of this poem might imply a kind of shape of an argument or of narrative or something like that. And I'm just imagining a kind of alternate version of this poem in which
01:35:49
Speaker
that rather than it being one, two, three, it's more like one, three, two. What if the poem sort of ended with the memory of the kind of intimate encounter
01:36:03
Speaker
as its kind of lasting note. That would be a different kind of poem. So, I mean, I offer that as a kind of hypothetical alternate version for you to consider by way of sort of clarifying what the fact that it's this way and not that way promotes as a kind of
01:36:31
Speaker
larger scale, you know, I keep coming back to the word argument, argument that the poem is making or kind of a set of investments that it might have, you know, it's, it's, does that make sense as a question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if it ended with that second stanza, I think,
01:37:01
Speaker
The remembered experience of that encounter would be an almost visionary rebuke to the various kinds of rhetorical maneuverings elsewhere in the poem. If that were the final note, I think it would be something like,
01:37:19
Speaker
For all this, there was that moment. And you could kind of imagine perhaps the speaker of the poem sort of carrying that away with him as a talisman against the bewilderments of his own practical situation.
01:37:39
Speaker
That's sort of like how the poem is lodged in my mind. It's that second stanza that stands out to me. But I'm seeing that that's a kind of willfulness reading or something. Yeah. And one that I think is so, you know, there are sort of currents in the poem that drive that way for sure. That is, you know, if only it had ended, you know, maybe even forget that third stanza altogether. Right.
01:38:06
Speaker
But the third stanza is like, okay, so what is it like to live with this memory now that you no longer have it? Do you learn anything from it? Are you changed by it? In a way, it's like the first stanza has the whole narrative in it. I used to have success and now I've been deserted.
01:38:33
Speaker
then the second stanza gives us a particular example. The third stanza returns us to that narrative of the first, but has been informed by our kind of carrying with us the memory of the particular beauty of the encounter. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.
01:38:59
Speaker
since that I so kindly am served. I mean, I guess part of my question too is like, how bitter is the articulation of that line? You know, is it sarcastic in other words, you know? Yeah.
01:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think the potential for sarcasm is there, and I want to see the line as lifting out of that, perhaps even as it speaks, and sort of finding the radical question with which it ends as a radical question, rather than kind of, how am I going to get revenge for this? Rather, how should we live?
01:39:41
Speaker
How should we live? That's the radical question you're hearing at the end. I think so. How should we live and how should we treat each other? How should we love? How should we love Hannah?
Reflections on 'They Flee From Me' and Interpretations
01:39:51
Speaker
What do we deserve?
01:39:52
Speaker
Good. Well, Jeff Doldin, this has been a thrilling conversation. I'm glad I twisted your arm. It really required no twisting. That was the joke of it. I said, fine, we don't have to do why. I think Jeff was worried that his reading of why it was too well formed and maybe it would be better to do something about which is
01:40:14
Speaker
opinions were less committed. And I said, sure, that's fine. But, you know, whatever. It's fine either way. He said, OK, fine, let's do it. It's tempting. And now, you know, it's easy to see why it's just such a it's such a beautiful poem. And and and maybe with that in mind, I can ask you to to read it for us so we can hear it in its entirety one more time.
01:40:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'll do that. And then I'll follow that, if I may, by reading the last stanza, not as why it has it in his manuscript, but as it gets printed in Totl's Miscellany, which is the sort of first place that it appeared in print in 1557. And that
01:40:57
Speaker
you'll hear, that's an edited version of the poem where it has been rewritten to be in iambic pentameter. So it against the incredibly excruciating expressive quality of the rhythms in the poem we've been looking at. The version entitles miscellany, which is the version that everybody reads for a long, long time.
01:41:21
Speaker
is written to conform with this new strict English prosody. Do you want to give us, I mean, you do it your way, but do you want to at least consider the possibility of giving us that other version first and then ending with the rereading of the poem? Or how would you rather do it? It's true. Maybe Wyatt should have the last word. Yeah.
01:41:42
Speaker
No, I think I do it your way. Yeah. Let me because it's the thing about the revised version is that one does one thing that's really. But then, yeah. OK, so you'll have to tell us what that one. Yeah, I will. I turn it over to you, Jeff. OK.
01:41:56
Speaker
And I'll just say that this is, you know, one of the things you never ever do is like by, oh, I don't know, John Gilgood, supposing you could get a recording of John Gilgood reading the Shakespeare solids or something. These great English actors, it tends to be very blustery.
01:42:17
Speaker
But this would be an interesting poem to get Ian McKellen to read, or an interesting poem to get Judi Dench to read, or some of these sort of elaborately expressive royal Shakespeare traditions, because it's just so... Next week on Close Readings. That's right. That's right. But I set myself up. I'm just going to read it. Here it is.
01:42:44
Speaker
They flee from me that sometime did me seek, with naked foot stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle tame and meek at now are wild, and do not remember that sometime they put themselves in danger to take bread at my hand. And now they range, busily seeking with a continual change.
01:43:09
Speaker
like to be fortune, it hath been otherwise, twenty times better, but once in special, in thin array, after a pleasant guise, when her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, and she me caught in her arms long and small, therewithal sweetly did me kiss and softly said, dear heart, how like you this?
01:43:34
Speaker
It was no dream. I lay broad waking. But all is turned through my gentleness into a strange fashion of forsaking. And I have leave to go of her goodness, and she also to use new fangleness. But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she hath deserved.
01:44:05
Speaker
And so here's what Richard Toddle does with it. It was no dream for I lay broad wide waking. You can hear how he's da da da da da da da da da. But all is turned now through my gentleness. I'll read it a little into a bitter fashion of forsaking. You can hear his rhythms. And I have leave to go of her goodness and she also to use newfangleness. Here's what's interesting.
01:44:31
Speaker
But since that I unkindly so am served, how like you this, what hath she now deserved? And that I think is pretty interesting to reach up earlier in the poem and pull down her words.
01:44:47
Speaker
And I would fain know is sort of perfectly good in Wyatt's version. But I think Tatl is onto something. And to imagine that speaker still haunted by those words, sort of replaying them. Her voice is perhaps coming back in, speaking through him, or he can only sort of speak that echo. But I think it's actually a pretty delicate
01:45:15
Speaker
Emendation does more than just make the meter work. Yeah, yeah. If the implication in the quotation in Wyatt's original, let's call it original version, was that she is playfully directing, if not his words, then his sort of posture back at him.
01:45:41
Speaker
You know, there's a kind of implied earlier version in which he catches her, you know. Now she's catching him, how like you this, how like you this, you know. This version which you've just read us, the Z-Mendation, is sort of turning that mirror around one more time. Yeah.
01:46:04
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I hear what you're saying. To my ear, it's also sort of like, I don't know, gilding the lily or something like that, or taking out some of what I like as the undecidability of the kind of tone or posture of those last lines. I think I'm with you. I think I'm with you. But this is what people heard of Wyatt, whereas many of the changes in Tuttle are pretty junky. Yeah, there's something to it.
01:46:33
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, good. Well, that's yeah, I mean, that's interesting too, because now I want to say something about how well, you know, it's as though he had tamed the poem or something, you know, he did. Right. And it was too gentle, you know, it allowed it allowed itself to be caught.
01:46:50
Speaker
But no longer.
Conclusion and Future Prospects
01:46:53
Speaker
This has just been, yeah, like I said, Jeff, a thrilling conversation and thank you for giving us the time and the attention and the intelligence that you always bring to poems. It's a real treat for me, a real honor.
01:47:09
Speaker
And I know that our listeners will share that feeling. So thank you listeners for spending the time with us and stay tuned. There will be more episodes of Close Readings to come soon. Be well, everyone. Thank you so much, Cameron.