I’ll begin this investigation of lyric relations of mastery and bondage with the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42). Wyatt’s poetic writing includes versions of the Psalms and Boethius, humanist satire and epigrams, rondeaux and ballades, and the Petrarchan sonnets for which he is now best known. In his amorous lyrics, Wyatt represents the tensions between victims and perpetrators of erotic and political violence as oscillations between motion and fixity, human and animal figures, formal constraint and prosodic looseness, particular and inscrutable selves. Wyatt conjures spaces of minor autonomy, at home, at court, in the forest, or even in a prison cell, where the lyric subject can enjoy the freedoms of fantasy and appeal to like minds for relief from his enslavement by wrong desires. Figuring his affections as servitude, Wyatt moves fluidly between positions of domination and subordination. The speakers in his poems are free and ensnared, master and servant, hunter and prey. Their fluidity is an expression of social privilege, and depends on others who are silenced or ventriloquised: the woman, the slave and the animal.

Wyatt is often perceived to be an originator of the English Renaissance, a writer whose poems produce the effect of inwardness in rebound from eroticised oppression or oppressive eros.Footnote ¹ To Wyatt is attributed the invention of literary interiority in proximity to political power. This chapter will contest some of these attributions. However, given that Wyatt’s poetry is frequently situated at the threshold of the modern lyric, it can tell us something about what the modern lyric subject is supposed to be: intimate, solitary, corroded by the sovereign who penetrates its fantasies, sadistic or masochistic, mournful for lost freedoms, split by desire; but also autonomous, creative, ironic, mobile, improvisatory, opportunistic. Wyatt had repeated, personal experience of captivity. Imprisoned three times, held in Italy by imperial forces, examined by the Inquisition, rusticated to his estate in Kent, Wyatt also saw his friends executed and members of his household threatened or arrested. His poems constantly represent the lover as a prisoner or slave, petitioning the beloved to give him his freedom. This posture of the lover as the servus amoris is a conventional one, and we will encounter it again later. But Wyatt reinforces the similitude between amorous service and bondage through form: the ‘bridle’ of the refrain, the circular rondeau, stanzaic structures and rhymes that keep the speaker in an enclosed space of diminishing returns. Caught in formal, amorous and political traps, the speaker can sometimes appear like a hunted animal, turning endlessly in search of an exit, or torn to pieces by desire and the cruelty of the mistress. This violent scattering recalls the myth of Orpheus, among whose powers was the ability to tame the wild beasts with his music. Wyatt has a much more ambivalent relationship to animals, which he sometimes dominates as a hunter, and sometimes becomes, as the prey to a mistress or his own desires. Those relations, and their implications for thinking about the early history of lyric whiteness, will come into focus with a reading of his most famous sonnet.

The Speaking Animal

In this poem, one of Wyatt’s most famous, we encounter the first of the half-human animals that will appear throughout this book: the elusive hind, a female deer. She is owned, and wild; was once captured long enough to be fitted with a collar, but never held for long. She is also the site of an enunciation, an epigram inscribed on what we will remember as a collar but the poem only describes as ‘written her faier neck rounde abowte’. This enunciation is in the first person, though as she is an animal the speech cannot be her own. It splits being (‘I ame’) from appearance (‘I seme’). This split seems to be the cunning self-description of a fickle creature, but is a projection of the multiplex writer of this inscription – Wyatt as Caesar as Henry VIII or someone else entirely. (The agate stone of Wyatt’s signet ring was carved in the likeness of Julius Caesar.) When the poet, or the king, makes his object say ‘I am’, who is really speaking?

This inscription is immensely daring: ‘for Caesar’s I am’ recalls Christ’s injunction to render to Caesar’s what is Caesar’s (Matthew 22:21), and Noli me tangere (do not touch me) is what he said to Mary Magdalene in the graveyard, after he was resurrected but not yet risen to his Father (John 20:17). Collapsed in one deer is both Christ and coin. It is proof of Christ’s submission (tamed) and evasion (wild) of Caesar’s dominion. The poem affirms sovereignty over things: Caesar’s proprietary identification of the body of this feminised other masks her name under the brand of his own.

This dominion also draws out the speaker. He is vitiated: fainting, following, feeble, falling, an akratic subject who – as I will argue in Chapter 2 – is represented by Plato as a slave of desire. He offers knowledge – ‘I know where is an hind’ – and withdraws it (her location is unspecified). The speaker’s previous contact with the animal asserts his success as a tracker; but now he falls behind. And yet, for all his behindness, he finds his own freedom in the forest, where he can imagine this poem. There, his wild ‘mynde’ can no more be ‘drawe[n] from the Diere’, his poetic conceit and the compulsion to hunt her, than the deer can be drawn into the open. The hind remains wild; the speaker remains feeble; this is how they might resist Caesar. In Caesar’s absence, hind and speaker can engage in an erotic coupling, or a solidarity based on mutual recognition of their bondage, with only the reader as witness. This promise is hinted at by the poem, but not enacted, in part because it shows us a desirable animal who speaks to us and whose human femininity therefore appears but remains just beyond reach, across the gap that preserves desire.

This poem lends itself to antithetical readings of Wyatt as the laureate of courtly dissimulation or free speech, of flattery or candour, of active service or Stoic retirement, of the internalisation of tyranny or the lyric discovery of autonomy.Footnote ³ Feminist critics cite it as demonstrating how the early modern women is fetishised as a ‘nonhuman, nonself who, at least potentially, can belong to someone’.Footnote ⁴ Jonathan Crewe does not see the hind as victimised; instead, he asserts that the hind ‘constitutes herself in the rigorously subject-forming relation of bondage’ (my emphasis), making herself ‘doubly invulnerable to possession’ by dwelling in the forest of ‘non-self-identity’.Footnote ⁵ This is a reading of the poem as proto-feminist: a female subject coming to both identity and voice within the liminal space of non-identity, the forest of the lyric imagination.

All of these critics perceive the poem as the performance of a profoundly ambivalent male subject in heteroerotic relation to a feminised body, which is owned. No critic, as far as I know, has called this creature a slave. This is not to say that Wyatt, or Petrarch before him, was deliberately referring to historical slavery, ancient or modern. But then, it is not Wyatt’s intentions that I am tracing, but how this figure appears to us, in a poem that has circulated for centuries as a formative moment in the history of white lyric. Slavery and servitude were persistent tropes in early modern love poetry. Shortly after Wyatt's death, slavery was instituted as a remedy for poverty in England. From 1547 until its repeal in 1549, the Vagrancy Act (1 Edw. VI c. 3) condemned those who were found loitering and refusing work for more than three days to slavery; their master could ‘cawse the saide Slave to worke by beating [or] cheyninge’ the enslaved person’s neck and legs, and lease, sell or bequeath them like ‘movable goodes or Catelles’. England did not become involved in slave trading until the 1550s; in 1553, the first English expeditions to Guinea were mounted, and John Lok captured several Africans on his voyage in 1554.Footnote ⁶ However, from the 1440s, the Portuguese had brought African captives back to Iberian peninsula: ‘by 1500 about a tenth of the population of Lisbon and Seville were African slaves’.Footnote ⁷ Roland Greene has itemised some of the many instances of Petrarchan tropes in the texts of colonial conquest, and notes that the Petrarchan sonnet that Wyatt is reworking here was imitated in Oviedo’s Quinquagenas (1526), which compares a ‘collar of gold’ found in Asturias in 1496 to the mineral wealth and gold mines of Hispaniola.Footnote ⁸ He also locates the language of stalking by naked-footed hunters that Wyatt uses in ‘They flee …’ in contemporary descriptions of Native Americans.Footnote ⁹

There is also a long tradition, well known to Wyatt, in which enslaved and free men, or animals and humans, serve as allegories for the body’s necessary subjection to the soul. In the Politics, Aristotle famously describes the ‘natural slave’ as comparable to a ‘wild beast’:

Here again is an image of the man created in opposition to the ‘wild beast’, forming a hierarchy in which the slave is a middle term that can be found between human and animal, soul and body. As Orlando Patterson puts it, ‘the slave, as a socially dead person, existed in a permanent state of transition: socially dead, yet physically alive; an instrument, yet a vocal one; a two-legged beast, yet with a mind and soul; a physically separate being, yet no more than a living surrogate of the master’.Footnote ¹⁰ The hierarchy naturalises slavery rather than basing it in conquest, violence or law. But as Quentin Skinner notes, under Roman law slaves (like children) were ‘not, sui iuris, within their own jurisdiction or right’; their ‘lack of freedom derives from the fact that they are “subject to the jurisdiction of someone else” and are consequently “within the power” of another person’. Even when acting according to their own will, that will was not free, because ‘they remain at all times in potestate domini, within the power of their masters’.Footnote ¹¹ The slave was defined by Varro as a ‘speaking instrument’, instrumentum vocale (R.R.1.17.1), and by Aristotle (Politics 1253b) as ‘an animate piece of property’, where property is ‘a tool to live with’.Footnote ¹²

However, the censored speech of the enslaved person was perceived as creating the opportunity for the development of private internal thoughts not knowable to the master – and thus the source of an anxiety that resonates with the Henrician court.Footnote ¹³ Steven Connor argues that the marks of the owners on the enslaved bodies of the ancient world (or later the United States) are ‘uneasy’: ‘To make the one marked bear their [the owner’s] own sign, to show forth as literally as possible their own character, is at once to reduce them to the condition of a sign, and to degrade their sign to the condition of a body’.Footnote ¹⁴ Caesar’s inscription on the hind makes her into a sign of his power; but for all its opulent hardness, it also vanishes into the living materiality, the pelt of the deer: there is no collar here, just language that disappears into the body that bears it. The body of the enslaved person articulates the absolute tyranny of the state by becoming identical with its proclamations; but it also remains the inexorable, elusive, living creature who absorbs that language into itself, and turns it and tears it apart.

In the Labyrinth

Wyatt’s poetry is positioned between medieval England and modern Europe, between the earliness of prosodic irregularity and the lateness of excessive control, between a proliferation that opens up to the future and an attrition that dislodges the past. His poems draw on the language of feudal relations of service and the localities of Anglo-Saxon, Chaucerian and Kentish diction; but they are also forged in the context of humanist letters, Italian lyric poetry and early modern European imperial conflict and exile.Footnote ¹⁵ They look back to values such as ‘trouth’ (truth and troth), but from the vantage of a modernising society in which those values had been ‘degraded’ by suspicion.Footnote ¹⁶ Brian Cummings finds him caught in ‘a very Tudor bind’, ‘between revelation and concealment, between freedom and bondage’.Footnote ¹⁷ In these readings, the most dramatically bound subject in Wyatt’s poems is the lyric ‘I’. But as I’ve begun to argue, the resources of that lyric ‘I’ to emancipate itself from its constraints also depend on the suppression of other real captives.

Reading Wyatt as a modern, critics tend to present the self – a secret, bland and disintegrating ‘I’ – in his poems as a space of retreat, reconstructed in chambers and forests and lyric poems. Anne Ferry finds him at the English beginning of what she calls lyric poetry’s ‘inward turn’, the literary construction of the ‘subjectivity effect’ through spatial withdrawals into enclosed spaces such as bedchambers or cells, where the subject can resist the intrusions of state power.Footnote ¹⁸ Peter Sacks alleges that ‘Wyatt pens love into its chambers’, formally and ‘spatially matching the temporal construction of inwardness’.Footnote ¹⁹ Michael McCanles describes him as ‘an inmate of that most impregnable of prisons, that which he creates for himself in the desire to achieve the absolute freedom of his fantasy world’.Footnote ²⁰

But there are several problems with the narrative of Wyatt’s inauguration of the solitary modern lyric, battling and internalising power through his fictions of private lyric spaces. The first lies in the modes in which Wyatt’s poems circulated and were recomposed in manuscript, turned and returned by many hands. Many of Wyatt’s poems are compiled in the Devonshire manuscript, where they can be read alongside amorous poems by Thomas Howard and Margaret Douglas, who were both imprisoned in the Tower.Footnote ²¹ Scholarship has emphasised the social and collaborative nature of this manuscript anthology, which (like the historical actuality of the prison) belies the isolation often imputed to Wyatt’s poetic speakers.Footnote ²²

Second, Renaissance prisons were also social spaces, with porous boundaries, makeshift architecture and highly contingent relations between the inmates and their jailers. Groups lodged together, often along with family members and servants who could come and go freely. Lower-class prisoners were destitute, starving, beaten and exposed to rampant disease in terribly unhygienic conditions. They were tortured by having to wear iron fetters, chains and blocks day and night, to prevent their escape or punish those who had attempted to run. (Such chains were cheaper than reconstructing walls.) But Wyatt’s conditions in the Tower reflected his status as a gentleman; he could enjoy his own sparsely furnished rooms, writing materials, visitors and decent food.

Along with the prison, the court is seen by many critics as the most significant spatial enclosure in shaping Wyatt’s lyrics. Both were places of punitive discipline. Wyatt’s friend and the addressee of several of his poems, Sir Francis Bryan, complains in his Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier (1548):

Despite its dangers and resemblance to a prison, Bryan insists that court is preferable to a life of rustic otium; separation from power’s risks and ‘brackishe joyes’ (Wyatt’s phrase) means separation from its benefits. But he lamented: ‘that worst is there is no libertie to depart hence. The yoke of the court is hard, the bondes faste tyed and the plough so tedious’ (sig. L1^v).

Bryan’s translation goes on to use another metaphor that also appealed to Wyatt. Entering the court, ‘I did cast my selfe into this perilous labyrinthe (which is to say a prison full of all snares)’ (sig. N6^r). The courtier is lost in the labyrinth, a prison not merely by nature of its impasses but also because of the dangerous traps in which it catches its prey. The labyrinth had a powerful hold on Wyatt. He complains that:

Paradoxically imprisoned by freedom or constrained by the ‘liberties’ that sit outside the jurisdiction of the city, hopeful and hopeless, he is lost (in the Petrarchan contraries) as in a maze. On his way back from Venice in 1527, while waiting for a change of horses and musing on the ‘want of success of the King’s affairs’ in the papal curia, Wyatt sketched an impresa on the wall of his chamber, depicting ‘a maze, and in it a minotaur with a triple crown on his head, both as it were falling, and a bottom [ball] of thread with certain gives [shackles] and broken chains there lying by’, along with a line from the 123rd Psalm (Vulgate numbering; 124:7 in AV): Laqueus contritus est et nos liberati sumus (‘the snare is broken, and we are delivered’). There is some debate about the meaning of this image – an anti-papal sentiment, a representation of the diplomatic maze, a recognition of the threat posed by the Emperor’s German troops who were intent on sacking Rome?Footnote ²⁴ But it also demonstrates Wyatt’s preoccupation with chains and shackles, materialisations of bondage to which I’ll return throughout this chapter.

Court was a labyrinth, and a prison wherein the courtier finds himself ‘fettred with cheines of gold’ (‘In court so serue decked with freshe aray’, 253). The social bondage of the court was also materially displayed. In 1514, Nicolo di Favri, attached to the Venetian Embassy in England, described Henry VIII’s courtiers as wearing ‘such massive gold chains that some might have served for fetters on a felon’s ankles, and sufficed for his safe custody, so heavy were they, and of such an immense value’. This fashion was restrained by a 1515 sumptuary act, which decreed that ‘no man under the degree of a knight were any cheyne of gold or gilte or colour [collar] of Gold or any gold about his neck’.Footnote ²⁵ The term ‘knight of the collar’ was used for the convict, the executed felon and the knight. The collar was a badge of courtly service, and of slavery; of status, and its precarity. It seems that the gold chains worn by the ambassadors and bondsmen in Thomas More’s Utopia were not entirely fictional.

Bondage loomed over the Wyatt family in more direct ways. His father was imprisoned during the reign of Richard III for his loyalty to Henry Tudor and was racked for two years, ‘in irons and stoks’, as Wyatt described it. Wyatt complained to his son that his own folly had brought him ‘into a thousand dangers and hazardes, enmyties, hatreds, prisonments, despites and indignations’.Footnote ²⁶ He was taken hostage by mutinous imperial troops outside Bologna in 1527 and held for a large ransom. He was imprisoned in the Fleet in May 1534 following an affray in which one of the sergeants of London was killed. Again, in May 1536 he was swept up in the fall of Anne Boleyn and imprisoned in the Tower, then held for several weeks after Anne’s execution.

Several of Wyatt’s poems dwell on the presence of a ‘thing’, an alien internal object that buries itself in the subject and cannot be dislodged or even directly addressed. The most famous of these ‘things’ was the sight, widely surmised to be the execution of Anne Boleyn and others, which Wyatt claimed to have watched from the Bell Tower:

Wyatt never specifies what this ‘sight’ was. Colin Burrow notes that, in contrast to Wyatt’s indirection about the sight ‘that in my hed stekys’, very specific signifiers could at the time be seen on the bridges of London: traitors’ heads on stakes.Footnote ²⁷ Something like power also intrudes on the speaker, gets metaphorically inside his head. This ‘thing’ – a splinter of memory, or desire, or imagination – lodges in the mind, interrupting his autonomy. In another love lyric, he complains that:

What is this wavering thing in the heart and mind? Though indeterminate, it sticks: and the speaker refuses to accept that he can’t reason it away. The internalisation of power as something that remains recognisably other but cannot be overcome is one of the poetic themes that fit Wyatt’s work for modernity.

After Anne’s execution, Wyatt was released to his estates in Kent with a warning from the king ‘to adres hym better’.Footnote ²⁸ It was during this period that he wrote ‘Myne owne John Poynz’ (88), a verse epistle modelled on a satire by the Florentine republican and exile Luigi Alamanni. Wyatt represents his rustication as voluntary: ‘homeward I me drawe’, fleeing the court where others ‘lyve thrall’, terrorised by their lord. He can at last enjoy the autonomy of his estate, recreate himself far from the court’s passions and duplicity.

The poem celebrates creative freedom within a property bounded by the land of others, or by common land. The intellectual freedom of otium, to ‘read and rhyme’ far from the business of the metropolis, is an ancient theme, and one that would also inform prison architecture from the eighteenth century onwards. But in Wyatt’s satire it is multiply ambivalent: first, because his poem dwells obsessively on the court, even through apophasis; second, because as Stephen Greenblatt notes, this estate – purchased by his father from Henry VII, and ‘swelled with confiscated monastic lands’ – is held through the generosity of the crown; and third, because his freedom is defined by physical constraint.Footnote ²⁹

And this constraint turns the speaker into an animal. ‘Lusty lees’ (or leas) refers primarily to a lush meadow, but ‘lees’ was also a spelling of leash, a thong or line by which hounds or coursing-dogs were held. This double meaning is also present in the passage from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde that Wyatt is imitating here. Criseyde – contending with herself about whether she ought to love Troilus – describes herself as ‘Right yong, and stonde unteyd in lusty lese’ (Book I, l. 752). The bridle is a key image in Troilus, where it is a Platonic metaphor for reason’s guidance of the blind human passions; but Diomede also literally leads Criseyde away with a bridle.Footnote ³⁰ In Wyatt’s epistle, the speaker is simultaneously the exemplary gentleman landowner, free in his domain, and the fettered property of another; both the hunter and an animal, which can ‘lepe’ the hedges that bound his estate despite the ‘clogg’ that hangs at his heel.

The clog, a wooden block or log used to hobble animals (and people), is Wyatt’s addition to Alamanni’s satire.Footnote ³¹ Patricia Thomson notes an epigram recorded in a manuscript that includes the name of Wyatt and Poyns:

‘One who is an ass, and would well be a deer, will realise the truth on leaping the ditch.’Footnote ³² The transgression of a boundary can lead to a more modest self-perception. It can also bring the power that maintains those boundaries into the open. Thomson hears the name Anne in ‘asne’, but the words for deer – cervus/cerf – also echo the Latin for servus (slave), and serf; the servus amoris will be a key figure for thinking through the sadistic and masochistic experience of love in Ovid and Christopher Marlowe later in this book.

Wyatt was restored to royal favour from this latest fall astonishingly quickly, and resumed his ambassadorial work in 1537 with some reluctance. At the court of Charles V in Spain, he was scrutinised by the Inquisition, and members of his household held by them. Back in England his mistress Elizabeth Darrell was embroiled in the arrest of the Marquis of Exeter, and gave testimony that Wyatt had plotted to assassinate Cardinal Reginald Pole. Wyatt was recalled, to his great relief, though he was also reputedly present on the scaffold when his protector Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1540. He was in danger again: among Cromwell’s papers were found documents alleging that Wyatt had conspired with Pole. A letter from Wyatt’s enemy, the Bishop of London Edmund Bonner, quoted Wyatt making indelicate (and potentially treasonous) remarks about wishing the king would be cast out of the cart’s arse. Bonner was intent on incriminating the poet, but his testimony reveals that Wyatt could not forgive and forget his incarceration. Wyatt:

His imprisonment stuck in his stomach, or his mind. As a result of Bonner’s testimony, Wyatt was arrested for a third time and taken in a most undignified way to the Tower of London, ‘so bound and handcuffed that everyone could only suppose ill, for it is the custom in this country to take them to prison unbound, being well assured that they could not escape’.Footnote ³⁴ His house at Allington was searched and his plate and other goods were taken for the king.

Wyatt’s descriptions of prison stress its privations, and the distinction between the suffering body and the unfettered mind that has been a central trope of prison writing since Boethius. (Wyatt himself translated Boethius, who also exerted an influence on his poetry through Chaucer.)Footnote ³⁵ One poem seems to have been written in captivity:

The prisoner in Wyatt’s poem is famished but self-sustaining: he eats his sighs and drinks his tears. He is isolated from the outside world but retains his social connections (Wyatt addresses his friend Sir Francis Bryan). He can also displace the clinking of fetters with the ‘music’ of his own poetic feet. This moment leaves a scar, a sign of the reputational and physical injury caused by incarceration. The poem’s continuous present represents this wound as simultaneously healed and unhealed, liable to be reopened each time the poem is read. The scar/poem as a site of a perpetually reopening wound can also be understood as an example of dehiscence in the Lacanian sense. Jacques Lacan uses this botanical and medical term to describe a ‘vital dehiscence constitutive of man’: the subject is split in the mirror stage, his desire for the object of the other’s desire awakens, giving rise to aggressive competition, ‘from which develops the triad of other people, ego, and object’.Footnote ³⁶ The scar that marks the sealing of the subject within the symbolic, and his vulnerability to rupture, will recur throughout this book.

Muir dates this poem to 1541, on the basis that the final couplet is echoed in the speech Wyatt was then preparing for his defence following the fall of Cromwell.Footnote ³⁷ In that statement, Wyatt affirmed his fidelity to the king, calling attention to his onerous ambassadorial service. He refers to the Treasons Act of 1534, which defined treason as to ‘maliciously wish, will or desire by words or writing, or by craft imagine, invent, practise, or attempt any bodily harm’ to the king. Wyatt, who did not have to prove the innocence merely of his action or words, but also his imagination, declares that he had never offended against the King ‘in dede, worde, wrytinge or wysshe’; nor had he done anything secretly against his master: ‘as God iudge me I am clere of thought’.Footnote ³⁸ Nothing was stuck in his mind that might threaten his master.

Wyatt also focuses his defence on the specificity of language. When everything hangs on the interpretation of a word as the evidence of a private intention, all that’s required is for one’s enemy to make an emendation: ‘yt is a smale thynge in alteringe of one syllable ether with penne or worde that may mayke in the conceavinge of the truthe myche matter or error. For in thys thynge “I fere,” or “I truste,” semethe but one smale sylbable chaynged, and yet yt makethe a great dyfferaunce’.Footnote ³⁹ As Seth Lerer points out, this steadfastness is ironic given the instability of Wyatt’s corpus and the regularising interventions of his editor Richard Tottel.Footnote ⁴⁰ A word can be turned from truth to lie, and torn from its context, with the change of a syllable: similarly, in More’s Utopia,

There is only a syllable’s difference between being a servant, and subservient; between service and slavery. Wyatt’s defence, or perhaps his service or the entreaties of Katherine Howard, were sufficient to ensure his release; officially he was said to have confessed. Nonetheless, the accusations reveal the lingering force of imprisonment on Wyatt’s table talk, and his capacity for indiscretion.

The Knot of Service

Wyatt’s tumultuous diplomatic career exposed him to domination by his own and foreign monarchs, but it also gave him opportunities to manifest the exculpatory power of eloquence. The work of an ambassador, called an ‘orator’ in this period, was to present both his master’s wishes and himself through rhetorical performances. Cromwell instructed him:

His job is not only to speak, but to attend to the effects of his speech: to observe, in the attempt to draw out the secrets held within the body of a king. Wyatt was often forced by delays in communication to improvise and invent in his own person a simulacrum of the royal will. Symbolising and exercising power without possessing it, the ambassador had to speak for the monarch persuasively, but not lose himself in the performance. This splitting and doubling mirrors the many torn subjects we will find in Wyatt’s poems, and recalls the hind who speaks for Caesar through the poet (or vice versa).

Wyatt prolongs a courtly tradition that portrays love and sex as ‘my seruice and my hiere’ (32), depicting political and amorous service as enslavement. As Patricia Thomson has argued, by this point in history ‘the master-servant link had, in fact, lost most of its feudal strength. At most, the master represented an intermediate loyalty between servant and state.’Footnote ⁴³ Wyatt’s feudal role-playing can read like a defensive recursion to archaic models of service and protection in response to intrusive Tudor politics.Footnote ⁴⁴ But the eroticisation of political service is also a way of placing the master or mistress under an obligation. In many of Wyatt’s poems, the lyric subject enters voluntarily into submission, contracting a reciprocal relation with the master or mistress through the gift of his heart. I offer my ‘hart and servys’ to you; ‘take yt to yow jentylly’ and ‘Reward your servant liberally’ (193), he asks. Marcel Mauss analysed gift-giving as establishing relationships of reciprocity.Footnote ⁴⁵ Wyatt repeatedly reminds the master or mistress of their obligations to the servant: ‘And syns so muche I do desire / To be your owne assuryddly, / Ffor all my servys and my hyer / Reward your servant liberally’ (99); ‘Then sins that I have neuer swarfde, / Let not my paines be ondeseruid’ (32): my pains are undeserved if I, the servant, am not served. The subjection of the speaker to the master or mistress in these poems involves not the total surrender of his rights, but an opportunity to articulate them. Unlike an actually enslaved person, a ‘speaking instrument’ whose voice must only articulate the wishes of his master, Wyatt’s subject speaks for himself, performing enslavement as dissent. He makes demands; he is bitter; he expresses pain. The poem documents his irrepressible voice, even in conditions of abjection.

Wyatt’s slave of love frequently protests that he cannot exercise his own free will; he must move and suffer according to the arbitrary desires of his master or mistress. In ‘Myne olde dere En’mye, my forward master’ (5), the speaker is ruled by a ‘wicked traytour’, the ‘obstinate will’ to love, which ‘robbeth my libertie with displeasure’ (6). He tries to flee, but love chases him ‘Thorough desert wodes and sherp high mountaignes, / Thoroughe frowarde people and straite pressions’ (7). In response, the master ridicules the speaker, who still ‘stryveth with the bit, / Which may ruell him and do him pleasure and pain’ (p. 9). Submitting to the ‘bit’ and allowing the master to ride him wherever it pleases will save him the unnecessary pain of choosing to serve his own will. That Wyatt resented being ridden thus by his masters is apparent in his defence of his embassy in 1541:

Wyatt has had to move under compulsion, ‘trotting’ like a beast determined to offer his ‘beste service’. Surrey memorialised this constant motion in his epitaph: ‘Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest’.

The constraints experienced by Wyatt’s lyric subject are mirrored by the poems’ forms, rhymes and refrains. The word ‘refrain’ comes from the Latin refrēnāre, to bridle (or leash); it is at once the repetition that prompts certain dance moves, and the restriction that holds back the poem’s progress, in that each stanzaic development circles back to its first premise, even as that premise is modified by its context. Some of Wyatt’s refrains reflect the inescapability of love – like ‘thys paynfull fytt’, a fit of diseased love and of song, a seizure and a poetic division, which ‘Hath last to longe’ but seemingly can never come to an end (‘The knott that furst my hart dyd strayn’, 184). Wyatt also plays with the rondeau, accentuating its formal entrapments with virtuosic if rather fruitless repetitions: ‘Yet though thy chayne hath me enwrapt / Spite of thy hap, hap hath well hapt’, goes one particularly relentless one (‘In faith I wot not well what to say’, 19).Footnote ⁴⁷ In ‘Lo, what it is to love!’ (66), the circular rhyme scheme enacts the speaker’s entrapment in the intrigues of love:

This poem of amorous suffering is answered by another that refutes its ‘slaunder’ of love point by point, prompting a third reply that moderates between the two, affirming ‘Trouth’ and exposing the earlier speaker as a literary artificer: ‘how you fayne / Pleasure for payne’, fabricating devices of ‘Suche fire and suche hete’ as ‘Did never make ye swete’ – sweet or sweat (69). But rather than resembling anything like the stages of the dialectic, these poems – the refrains within them, and the multiplication of their responses – seem to defy development, staggering around in arid stasis.

Alongside these formal devices, Wyatt illustrates his erotic and political servitude by repeated references to chains, traps, ‘bayted hookes’, snares, bridles, knots, binds, bands and collars:

This ‘knot’ translates Petrarch’s ‘caro nodo’. It is a device that binds, in the sense both of constraining and joining together. It rhymes with the suggestive ‘not’ that provides the final word for each line in the strambotto ‘A lady gave me a gift which she had not’, and which stands in for the female genital naught.Footnote ⁴⁸ It also suggests a bridle that restrains, or a halter by which the speaker might hang himself, slipping out of service and out of life.

Several of Wyatt’s poems suggest that the only escape from the knot of bondage is self-destruction. ‘Yf right can have no remedie’, if there is no ‘lawe or libretye’ that can withstand the vagaries of fortune, then only death offers a release from the vicissitudes of love (‘To make an ende of all this strif’, 233–4). This is a Stoic argument: that freedom is guaranteed by the possibility of suicide. My ‘hand in haste’ can release me from suffering, and its ‘dedelye stroke’ will lose the bonds that ‘bounde my liberte’ (234). Read in Hegelian terms, the lover as slave and the lady as master are engaged in a struggle to the death.Footnote ⁴⁹ He is ‘abiecte’ (98), but she seems unaffected by their relation. His fear of and proximity to death, combined with the discipline of his service to the lady, produce a recognition in the lover of his determinate being; but she remains fixed in a state of shallow defiance. The poem is the thing he works on, through which he comes to know himself. The mistress’s desire for this thing – the poem – is mediated through her erotic bondsman; but she makes nothing of her own, and so is barred from self-recognition. Because she lacks both the discipline of servitude and the object to work on, this cold and superficial beloved can never achieve the kind of self-knowledge Wyatt exemplifies here:

Whether I am bound or free, I alone know who I truly am.

Wyatt claims that ‘I am’ constant, in the present and future; you ‘know no more then afore ye knew’ when you first met me. But that inscrutability also leaves the ‘I’ in this poem as a vacant mean: not rejoicing, not complaining, not mirthful or sad, just an assertion of bare subjectivity. This figure is at the heart of Wyatt’s poetry, and it has led critics including John Kerrigan to attribute the anonymity of Wyatt’s speakers to a ‘profound distrust of the world beyond the self’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Cathy Shrank observes, Wyatt repeatedly turns Petrarchan poems in the third-person to first-person narratives, while also stripping out some of the identifying features of Petrarch’s poems which provide specific and named contexts for the poems, in order to ‘maintain a layer of protective opacity’.Footnote ⁵¹ It is this subjectivity without personality that may fit Wyatt out so neatly as a modern: his poetry reveals the process by which the subject comes to know himself through his encounters with loss and oppression; the lyric form allows that privileged, white male aristocratic subject to retain its autonomy through a kind of resistant indirectness that appeals to readers beneath the censorious gaze of the sovereign.

This is an explanation of the kind of ‘self’ that Wyatt fashions in these poems: plastic, inscrutable, but persistent. But I would also argue that a feature of Wyatt’s modernity is the way the lady is instrumentalised in his poems. The servant comes to self-knowledge and frees himself from dependence on the mistress not only through his work on the lyric object, but because he originally possesses the social power and autonomy that she lacks. In other words, Wyatt’s erotic lyrics mimic and invert a relation of political dominance, pretending to the condition of servitude and relishing the continuity of mastery. The lover emerges in his particularity through suffering, but the lady remains vague and unspecific. She is an occasion for performance that the poet makes his own. His specificity is manufactured at the cost of hers. We know little about him, but nothing about her except her effects.

While Wyatt as ambassador was called upon to speak for the king, the king could speak very well for himself. This is a crucial distinction with the lady in these poems. The hierarchy in their erotic or lyric relation inverts the actual social relation (patriarchy). Like the slave or the animal, the lady’s voice and volition are suppressed; when she does speak, her question – ‘how like you this?’ – is a reflection of the wishes and pleasures of the male subject. Maria Menocal has traced the troubadour lyric and the courtly love paradigm back to the songs of enslaved Arabic women, taken to Provence from Arab al-Andalus by Guillaume de Montreuil. Her account is a reminder that the suppression of the female or enslaved voice in lyric history is not total.Footnote ⁵² But if lyric is one of the means by which a resistant, politicised subject is invented for modernity, then the erasure of these voices as an original and constitutive feature of lyric contributes to their exclusion from political recognition as subjects.

Turned and Torn

The gift of the heart in Wyatt’s poems of erotic and political service is an emblem of the violent division of the self into parts in the erotic encounter that we might call jouissance. In ‘Alas the greiff, and dedly wofull smert’ (3), the speaker addresses the self as a composite of parts – service, pain, a pitiful heart, a faithful mind – and instructs them all to ‘Retourn, Alas, sethens thou art not regarded’. The gifts of love are ‘presented’ and ‘repented’, given and called back. This fort-da movement contrasts with the changeful beloved, who is able freely and ‘vnconstantly to raunge’ (4). Finally the speaker resolves that ‘Though pece mele in peces though I be torne’, I shall never let anything ‘again make me retorne’ (6). The poem’s repetitions – piecemeal pieces, turn and return, rhyme – suggest an entrapment that will not yield to this resolution. But the fragmented pieces are gathered into the coherence of a poem, that turns, and resists being torn apart.

Wyatt’s poems are obsessed with tourning, that which is torn and turned, in the circle of Fortune’s wheel or the whirling of desire. The speakers are encircled by enemies (Circumdederunt me inimici mei), dwelling in a court around which thunder circles: circa Regna tonat. They are tossed and turned and torn. Like Orpheus scattered by the Thracian women, the speaker finds himself torn ‘pece mele in peces’; suddenly, ‘My hart was torne owte of hys place’ (‘So vnwarely was never no man cawght’, 202). In another poem, the lover ‘Within my bons to rankle is assind’; he resents his bonds, which ‘rankle’ like physical shackles. Here, the torn place is a wound, in which a weapon turns: ‘In diepe wid wound the dedly strok doth torne / To curid skarre that neuer shall retorne’ (‘What rage is this? what furor of what kynd?’, 83). Jeff Dolven describes Wyatt’s style as ‘self-sabotaging’, betraying through its ‘unanchored pronouns’ and ‘fragmentation of his speakers into a mix of anatomical and grammatical parts’ an anxiety that ‘rhetoric cannot hold him together’.Footnote ⁵³ Love splits the subject into pieces. Poetry mobilises this fragmentary subject within the labyrinthine spaces of its formal enclosures, turning the torn self to a trope.

Reading Wyatt this way claims him for modernity. However, returning Wyatt to his medieval context would mean reversing the modern association between lyric speakers, individuality and desire. Robert Meyer-Lee describes the voice of Ricardian lyric as ‘typically … anonymous’, an assumed male or female plaintive voice emptied of particularity whose anonymity signified a ‘striving toward the disclosure of a homo interior that is individuated but undifferentiated, an imago Dei that is the same for all human beings’. In that context, it is sin that particularises, jeopardising our ‘essential divine samenes’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Desire vitiates the subject rather than creating worlds. The particularity of Wyatt’s speakers does seem to confirm Meyer-Lee’s proposition: they are most specific when they are enfeebled by love, or driven to sadistic fantasies of revenge. The beloved is less particular and identifiable, perhaps because she is more powerful, less injured.

Attending to the frequency of the word ‘torn’ in Wyatt also offers a different perspective on that famous line: ‘But all is torned thorough my gentilnes’ (27). Here Wyatt courts the paradox of how tenderness and timidity might be turned back and torn apart. This tearing can be done by the turning of a word; all words can be turned, otherwise what’s the point of that riddle, still puzzling the historians: ‘what wourde is that that chaungeth not, / Though it be tourned and made in twain?’ (36). The ‘answer’ is often imagined to be ‘Anne, sir’, or ‘An, na’ – no, nay. But rather than a particular woman, the poem might lead us towards an inscrutable ‘I’: a word that is the same coming and going. I am as I am and so will I be, however hard I am turned. But the symmetry of the ‘I’ should not distract us from the riddle’s stipulation that to be turned is also to be torn in two. The tearing and turning memorialised in Wyatt’s poems are products of repetition – indeed, the poems are themselves that repetition, formally, and thematically, reopening their wounds with each recitation. And the tropes of turning and tearing brought together in the early modern ‘torn’ are allied metaphorically to verse-making, literally a form of turning back; the turning wheel of Fortune; lathe work; and trickery.Footnote ⁵⁵

Orpheus may have tamed the wild beasts with his song; but he was paid for his service by being torn apart. The violent sparagmos of Wyatt’s speakers also infects the images of women who are always ‘turning’ with the vicissitudes of love: for ‘womens love is but a blast / And torneth like the wynde’ (‘A! Robyn’, 41). Trying to catch this turning wind, the heart which ‘change[s] or torne[s] as wether and wynd’ (‘Ys yt possyble’, 195), will leave you with only a torn net. Erasmus explains in his Adagia that the proverb ‘in a net to hold the wind’ is ‘used of people who toil in vain, or who chase foolishly after things they have no hope of catching, or who snatch in a futile way after futility’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Behind that adage is Ecclesiastes 1:14: all is vanity, and a chasing after wind. The net also recalls Wyatt’s translation of Plutarch’s The Quyete of Mynde, where those who strive for power are criticised for foolishness and compared to those who get ‘angry with fortune’, and ‘with vayn indevour / hunt an hart with a dragge net / and nat that they attempt to do those impossibilytes by their owne madnesse and folysshnesse’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The net in which we seek to hold the wind is a figure for fugitivity, like the fruitless chase after the hind.

Wyatt describes the fool who follows his desire as fated to awake one day ‘Mashed in the breers that erst was all to torne’, both stuck and ripped to pieces, ‘boeth sprong and spent’: a sprung trap, an animal sprung from its cover, spent or wasted, like money, bodily energy and semen (‘Some tyme I fled the fyre that me brent’, 44). An animal caught in a trap might also tear itself apart, trying to escape. Wyatt’s poems are filled with such imagery, which draws on hunting and animal husbandry to portray love as pursuit, evasion and wounding. The cruelty of these images is filtered for modern readers not just through a cognisance of the suffering of animals bonded to us, as Donna Haraway would say, in significant otherness; but of the many times since Wyatt wrote that human beings have been hunted and torn apart by dogs and traps.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Wild to Temper

Wyatt often compares success or failure in seduction to the methods used to tame wild animals. With other animals, men ‘some way, some tyme, may so contrive / By mens the wild to temper and tame’; even the lion shows some mercy to those ‘that sueth mekenes’ (‘Processe of tyme worketh such wounder’, 61). But the beloved is like a ‘fiers Tigre’, who gets less subdued ‘the lenger I pray’. She is an animal who can prey on others, but who won’t submit to his management – no matter how much I ‘pray’ to or on her. Sometimes the speaker himself is the prey, trapped by the beloved: ‘Tanglid I was yn loves snare’, like a ‘birde tanglid yn lyme’; but ‘ha ha ha’, ‘I am nowe at libretye’, having escaped with ‘no hurte’ (227–8). Or the lover is a beast of burden, or a domesticated animal like the ‘hounde that hath his keper lost’ (‘For want of will, in wo I playne’, 246), or a hawk starved into submission: ‘Refrain I must; what is the cause? / Sure as they say: so hawkes be taught’ (‘Suche happe as I ame happed in’, 27). Wyatt’s animal imagery is not only a way of representing the violence of unrequited love; it also explores the themes of liberty and constancy, embodied by animals whose wild instincts are forced to submit to serve their human masters.

In many of these poems, the tamer is singular, the animal part of a herd, just as Wyatt frames many of his poems as the expressions of individual desire addressed to a collective of readers. A poem on ‘Luckes [Lux], my faire falcon’, possibly written from Allington in 1540 after Cromwell’s execution but before his own arrest, contrasts Wyatt’s faithful hawks with friends who abandoned him in his adversity:

The falcons are proclaimed true ‘friends’, but they are trained through deprivation and controlled by traces. Their fidelity is sworn on their ‘bells’, insignia of their constraint and mechanism for their recovery if they did attempt to ‘forsake’ the speaker. In this way, the poem epitomises the fragile relatedness with which so many of Wyatt’s poems of hunting seem to culminate. As Catherine Bates has argued, Wyatt’s representation of the falcon who neither abandons his keeper nor tears him to pieces is an emblem of the ‘courtesy’ of man and beast, a relation not of coercion but of fleeting cooperation and mutual service.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet Wyatt’s poetry is populated by many fierce animals who show no tolerance for their masters and threaten to tear them apart.

To create the wild and the domestic as categories is to decide what can be bound and what cannot. But Wyatt’s poems, many of which take place in the hinterlands of managed forest that are neither completely wild nor tamed, often symbolise the irruption of the other’s true self as the return of an animal to its ‘kind’. This trope is also familiar from white supremacist discourses around the ‘civilising’ process and the tendency of Indigenous people to ‘revert’ to their savage natures: the plasticity, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson puts it, of ‘black(ened) flesh’.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is a trope that can be found in the Consolatio of Boethius, which Wyatt and Chaucer both translated. In Chaucer’s version, caged animals, bird and lion, may seem subdued; the Punic lion bound in ‘fair[e] cheines’ can be taught to take meat from her keeper’s hands. But if once she tastes blood, then ‘Hir corage / of tyme passeþ þat haþ ben ydel and rested. repaireþ / aȝein’. She remembers her nature, ‘and slaken hir nekkes from hir cheins vnbounden’, tears her keepers to pieces and escapes to the woods. Likewise, the bird who is captured and ‘inclosed in a streit cage’: however carefully she is fed, once she sees the ‘agreable shadewes of þe wodes’ she will be consumed by longing for freedom in the woodland. So all things seek again their proper course. Human or animal nature ‘chaungeþ nat from hys propre kynde’.Footnote ⁶¹

In Boethius’ argument, these captive animals symbolise a constant universe in which each thing returns to its providentially assigned nature. But they also militate against notions of moral pedagogy. The animal, like Aristotle’s natural slave, cannot learn; it is a prisoner of its nature. To be ‘kyndely’ served, in the language of ‘They flee from me’, is thus to be treated no better or worse than according to what we would describe as the animal’s natural instinct. The ‘kindness’ of the human and animal species is opposed to the ‘gentileness’ of a politic humanity, rooted in the gens, the tribe. Taming wild creatures is traditionally men’s work; and the suspicion that these creatures are only pretending to be tame but will revert to their true nature at the earliest opportunity, feeds into misogynist discourse around women’s inclinations to infidelity and betrayal. As Othello says, comparing his wife to a hawk:

As Sean Benson has argued, early modern comparisons between wife-taming and animal-training drew on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which compared a woman to a horse that needs to be broken. But the hawk metaphor was perhaps more attractive to Wyatt because trainable hawks are usually female and are gendered as such in falconry manuals.Footnote ⁶³ In these examples, Wyatt plays on his masculine prerogative to hunt and hawk and tame. But that prerogative also extends to the ease with which he switches identification between hunter and hunted.

These complex relations between human and animal life, wildness and tameness, predator and prey, culminate in Wyatt’s best-known poem:

Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson note that the opening expression follows a poem by Charles d’Orléans, another poet writing poems from prison about being imprisoned by love: ‘They flee fro me they dar not onys abide’.Footnote ⁶⁴ But what is it that ‘With naked fote’ are ‘stalking in my chambre’ in Wyatt’s poem? Former lovers, but what else? The poem’s dreamlike looseness should be a preservative against excessively strict allegorical interpretation. Nonetheless, critics have seized on its scant particulars, attempting to penetrate its gauzy ethos of power and desire. There is much debate even about what ‘kind’ of animal they are. Most critics think of ‘them’ as deer – making her gentle naming of the speaker as ‘dere hert’ (deer hart) a kind of punning recognition of a shared animality. Ann Berthoff, surely too pragmatically, argues that ‘they’ are birds, because it’s hard to get deer inside a chamber;Footnote ⁶⁵ as Thomas Greene observes, stalking can denote the bird’s stiff steps, or the hunter’s stealthy approach.Footnote ⁶⁶ Richard Leighton Greene cites a fifteenth-century carol that clearly attributes to women the submissive ability to ‘take bred a manus hand’, to argue that no animals whatever are invoked in the poem: that it is simply an erotic image of a human woman.Footnote ⁶⁷

Wyatt’s poem does not fix the animals as a particular kind; the poem is, after all, about their powers to wander and transform. At first, ‘they’ are tamed (taking bread at my hand); now they run away, returning to their wild nature; but they are also stalking him, turning him to the prey who is confined to a bedchamber (infidelity as the ability to range, constancy as being fixed in place). The poem shifts from a species characteristic (‘they’) to a particular instance (‘ons in special’), before finally isolating the subject (‘I lay broad waking’). ‘They’ become a singular ‘she’ who surrenders voluntarily to a momentary captivity in the lover’s chamber: he can be hunter again, separating out the vulnerable individual from the herd. Whereas it is usually the poet who writes him or herself into a prison of form in order to enjoy his or her creative liberties, in this case it is the object of desire who undertakes that temporary captivity. She preserves some of her original wildness, and brings it into the chamber like the cold scent of the forest. In her embrace, the speaker becomes the ‘dear heart’ or hart. Once he was tracked and ‘caught’, now ‘All is torned’: turned and torn, by my gentleness, and her strangeness, tameness and wildness tumbling in memorial circles. Her turning contrasts with the stasis he must maintain in order for her to approach. But the poem’s turning, the turning of tropes, allows him to range, seeking out a continual change that is not trapped in a circular form.

They stalk not with weapons or nets, but with a ‘naked foot’. In Ovid’s elegies, as we’ll see, the naked foot is a sign of erotic intimacy. The singular ‘foot’ separates the animal from the herd (‘ons in special’), and signals that we are moving from a general principle to a particular case; it evokes the unshoed hoof (another way the poem’s animal references dissolve: deer are never shod), as well as a quietness and stealth that characterises the poem itself. But it is also an unfettered foot, free of the ‘clog’ that might keep it from clearing the dike and escaping, and ready to run.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that ‘The Other is on principle inapprehensible; he flees me when I seek him and possesses me when I flee him.’Footnote ⁶⁸ This is the paradox of courtly love, rendered as an existential condition of all relations. Desire entails motion towards an object that can never end, unless desire itself comes to an end. Augustine argued, in Hannah Arendt’s paraphrase, that love is ‘a kind of motion, and all motion is toward something’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is not the motion of the trotting ambassador; it is closer to the ranging of the faithless object or free master, whose constant motion away from me draws me after: ‘Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde / Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore / Faynting I folowe.’ And after all, perhaps it’s better that way. To seize the object of desire threatens its loss, and occasions fewer poems. Anne Carson suggests as much: eros exists ‘because certain boundaries do … the boundary of flesh and self between you and me’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The boundary turns space into desire. The boundary – the dike or fence around the landowner’s property which the hobbled animal or enslaved person cannot leap without trapping or impaling itself – also turns space into property. In the gap between self and other, wild and tame, the motion towards the other – which is love and in which lyric can be written – is possible.

The vivid intimacy of desire that ends without ever ending is preserved in this poem, which also ends without ever ending. The poem is a space that can be endlessly revisited, so that its different kinds of ending can be experienced anew. How does the poem end? By inviting readers to make a judicial decision. The poem enacts his penalty for loving too well – the endless re-turn to the memory of pleasure that has disappeared. Maybe he gets what he deserves. But what does she deserve, now that she has released him from serving? This rhetorical question is similar to the ending of ‘Like as the byrde in the cage enclosed’ (243). That poem describes a choice: ‘Twixte deth and prison’, liberty ‘By losse off liefe’ or life deprived of liberty. Like the bird that escapes its cage only to find ‘the hawke without’, the speaker has an artificial liberty to choose the brief pain of death, or a long life of ‘thraldome and doloure’ in captivity. Wyatt invites the reader to act as jury to the speaker’s case, and concludes by soliciting ‘Your aduise, yowe louers, wyche shalbe best’ (244)? Neither ‘Like as the byrde’ nor ‘They flee’ include a reply. The question is not answered by the imagined audience of readers, perhaps because what she deserves is obvious; or because it isn’t. The reader can either share in the speaker’s sense of injustice and participate in a collective work of imagining her punishment, or (as I do) repeatedly return to the poem’s scene of gentleness turned to forsaking to ask that question again. If this feels like stalling, it is very different from the failure to progress that I kicked against in my discussion of Wyatt’s refrains.

Like the hind, Wyatt was bound to speak Caesar’s words. But he preserved a distinction: I am as I am and so will I be, no matter how tame I may seem. His poems hold in balance artful symmetries of power and weakness, flight and containment, wildness and tameness, sovereign and poetic inscription, and so provoke remarkably ambivalent readings. He complained that he was forced to trot up and down like a beast in service to the king. Retreating, inwardly or outwardly, to chambers or country estates, the heart’s forest or the anonymity of a pained lyric ‘I’, does not obliviate the conditions of political dominance for which Wyatt was employed to speak. Rather, the poems recall that tense and tender moment in which the animal approaches, seeming tame but ready to break into wildness at the slightest trigger, as a way of dwelling with the complexities of submission and autonomy, civility and desire.

Wyatt’s service to his mistresses is never far from his obligations to his king, but neither is she just a decoy; we can hear in her resistance to his love the whispers of resistance to patriarchal domination. His poems articulate the subjection of the self by constructing another, a mistress, animal or a slave, who cannot speak for herself. She is free insofar as she can no longer be touched, wild only when he attempts to hold her: it is that effort to touch that elicits who ‘I am’, rather than who ‘I seem’ to be. But there is another way of reading this injunction, Noli me tangere: as the most catastrophic of the prison’s prohibitions, that turns the prisoner into an object not to be touched, an animal to be handled at the end of a chain. As one incarcerated person wrote to the legal theorist Colin Dayan, ‘If they only touch you when you’re at the end of a chain, then they can’t see you as anything but a dog. Now I can’t see my face in the mirror. I’ve lost my skin. I can’t feel my mind.’Footnote ⁷¹