Whoso List to Hunt - Sir Thomas Wyatt

Henry VIII
Catherine
of Aragon
Anne
Boleyn
Jane
Seymour
Ann of
Cleves
Catherine
Howard
Catherine
Parr

Birth
Henry VIII Anne Boleyn
Elizabeth Tudor
September 7, 1533. Greenwich
Palace

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542)
Born in Kent, England, Sir Thomas Wyatt was an
ambassador to France and Italy for King Henry VIII.
Wyatt’s travels abroad exposed him to different forms
of poetry, which he adapted for the English language —
most notably, the sonnet. Rumored to be Anne
Boleyn’s lover, he spent a month in the Tower of
London until Boleyn’s execution for adultery. Many
consider his poem “Whoso List to Hunt” to be about
Boleyn.
https://www.theanneboleynfiles.com/17-may-1536-five-
executions-on-tower-hill/

Wyatt introduced the sonnet, a fourteen-line
poem with a fixed format and rhyme scheme, to
England. Despite not publishing his poetry, Wyatt
would have made his poems readily available to
others. During the Elizabethan period, poets
passed their work around in aristocratic circles, in
what has been described as a sort of game of
one-upmanship: each poet's work inspired his
readers to create something comparable or
better.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 11 October 1542) was a 16th-
century English lyrical poet credited with introducing the
sonnet into English. He was born at Allington Castle, near
Maidstone in Kent – though his family was originally
from Yorkshire. His father, Henry Wyatt, had been one of
Henry VII's Privy Councillors, and remained a trusted
adviser when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. In
his turn, Thomas Wyatt followed his father to court after
his education at St John's College, Cambridge.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG7AkKeYw-4

Wyatt had very serious intentions in versification when he
turned from Court poetry to introduce the sonnet, and to
establish a ten-syllable line.
He was a scholar, and undertook the work carefully; he
chose Petrarch as his master, but needed at the same time
an English model.
A STUDY OF SIR THOMAS WYATT'S POEMS
A. K. FOXWELL, M.A. (LoND.), 1911. 37
https://www.arcjournals.org/pdfs/ijsell/v2-i8/6.pdf
His thoughts must have turned to Chaucer, as
the great national poet, to help him with the
versification.
1340-1400

Sonnet
• A poem of fourteen lines.
• It slowly moves away from the Courtly Love
poetry tradition.
• Renaissance sonnets often dealt with love
from afar.
Studio C – Love from afar

Sonnet
It’s a Lyric poem, written in a
single stanza that usually
consists of fourteen lines of
iambic pentameter.

If the Renaissance sonnet responded to
the courtier’s need to proclaim an
identity in a patronage system in which
women were influential, and adapted
Neoplatonic and Petrarchan ideas to do
so, it also responded to an ideal of style,
likewise promoted by Cardinal Bembo,
which may have arrived in Britain too
late to affect Sir Thomas Wyatt, but
certainly influenced his successors in the
sonnet.

Wyatt chose the Petrarchan sonnet as his
inspiration. The Petrarchan sonnet is a fourteen-
line poem in which the first eight lines, the
octave, present a problem, which is resolved by
the final six lines, the sestet. Wyatt altered the
Petrarchan formula, ending the sestet with two
lines, a couplet, that rhyme. As such, he set a
precedent for later poets, many of whom further
altered the sonnet formula. Also, in focusing on
a hunting allegory in ‘Whoso List to Hunt’,
Wyatt demonstrated that sonnets could explore
more than unrequited love, on which Petrarch
had focused.
Petrarch, Father of the Sonnet

Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
Rime sparse 190
Una candida cerva sopra l’erba
verde m’apparve con duo corna d’oro,
fra due riviere all’ombra d’un alloro,
levando ’l sole a la stagione acerba.
Era sua vista si dolce superba
ch’ i’ lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro,
come l’avaro che ’n cercar tesoro
con diletto l’affanno disacerba.
“Nessun mi tocchi,” al bel collo d’intorno
scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi.
“Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.”
Et era ’l sol già vòlto al mezzo giorno,
Gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi,
Quand‘ io caddi ne l’acqua et ella sparve.

“Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” (Sir Thomas Wyatt)
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, A
But as for me, alas, I may no more. B
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, B
I am of them that farthest cometh behind. A
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind A
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore B
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, B
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. A
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, C
As well as I may spend his time in vain. D
And graven with diamonds in letters plain D
There is written, her fair neck round about: C
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, E
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. E

A Quem Quiser Caçar
A quem quiser caçar, sei onde há uma corça,
Quanto a mim, infelizmente, já não sou mais capaz.
A vã labuta deixou-me extenuado e dorido,
Sou um dos que, a distância, seguem atrás.
Ainda posso, por via incerta de minha exausta mente,
Atrair a cerva, mas como ela foge antes
A desfalecer prossigo. E desse modo desisto,
Já que com uma rede busco segurar o vento.
De quem quiser caçar eu afasto qualquer dúvida.
Assim como eu, poderás passar teu tempo em vão.
E lavrado com diamantes em letras claras,
Está escrito à volta de teu belo colo:
“Noli me tangere, pois eu sou de César,
E indômita para apanhar, embora pareça dócil”.
(1557)
Notas:
(*) Expressão de origem francesa que denota pesar.
(**) Expressão latina que significa “Não me toques”.
Referência:
WYATT, Sir Thomas. Whoso list to Hunt. In: O’NEILL, Michael
(Ed.). English poetry. 1st ed. Cambridge, EM: Cambridge
University Press, 2010. p. 119.
https://blogdocastorp.blogspot.com/2017/03
/sir-thomas-wyatt-quem-quiser-cacar.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfNiaHforg&feat
ure=share

Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” which is
often described as a translation of Petrarch’s
Canzoniere 190, depicts a speaker informing his
friends (or anyone within earshot) that he knows
where to find a deer if they are interested in hunting
it. He declares that he has exhausted himself in
pursuit of this game, and suspects that any efforts to
subdue it will be futile, especially because the deer
wears a necklace identifying her as the property of
Caesar, and indicating that she is wild, even though
she seems tame.

The poem is more an adaptation than a
translation of the sonnet, as a metaphor for the
poet’s pursuit of an idealized object of amorous
desire. But whereas the metaphor of the hunt is
diminished in Petrarch’s poem (the speaker
contemplates the deer more than he actually hunts
her), Wyatt’s changes considerably amplify the
tensions inherent in the traditional Petrarchan
theme of the unapproachable object of desire. The
speaker reflects not only a genuine desire for the
deer, but a bewilderment at the difficulty involved
in attaining it, and a cynicism about the idea of the
hunt altogether.

In the first lines, Wyatt describes his love and that he
suffers because of it. In line 9, he even warns the men
who could also fall in love with Anne that this love will
be ‘in vain’ because she is the ‘property’ of a rich man
(there are not only letters around her neck which tell
everyone that she is spoken for another man; the message
is ‘graven with Diamonds’. Furthermore, Wyatt expresses
the high position of Anne`s ‘man’ by calling him ‘Cesar’
- and if you know the background story and look up who
Sir Thomas Wyatt actually was, you will quickly find out
that Henry VIII is meant.) It becomes easier to
comprehend the whole poem when you are aware of the
parts of it and vice-versa – the hermeneutic circle.

The arduousness of the vain travail makes him so
‘sore’ (3), and leaves him with a ‘wearied mind’ (5),
and ‘fainting’ (7). The cluster of words related to work
amplify Petrarch’s lavoro (6), which he is actually
leaving behind so he can follow the deer and they also
balance the ways in which pursuit is both physically
and mentally demanding. The meaning of the word
‘sore’ includes not only the sense of sore muscles, but
also mental suffering . . . grief. ‘Fainting’ also suggests
not only physical exhaustion, but emotional
exhaustion, or the swoon of a romantic lover such as
Chaucer’s Troilus (the OED indicates that this would
have been the primary meaning in Tudor England).

Wyatt also transforms Petrarch’s virtuous and chaste deer into
a more ethically ambiguous creature. Whereas Petrarch’s
speaker contemplates a ‘white doe’, Wyatt’s speaker
contemplates only a hind. In Petrarch’s Italian white is
candida, a word that has strong connotations of purity and
innocence, as in one of the more archaic meanings of the
English cognate ‘candid’. The sign around the doe’s neck is
encrusted only with diamonds (suggesting eternal beauty, but
also steadfastness and coldness), not topazes (a common
symbol for chastity in Renaissance art) as in Petrarch.
Retrieved from <https://omardesign.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/whoso-list-to-hunt/>. 10, Aug.
2015.

The deer is not viewed as an object of virtue, but
simply as an unattainable object of desire. Because
the deer is not idealized, and because she is probably
not chaste, the tension between the speaker and the
object of desire is increased: he cannot have her, but
not because of her virtue. It is, instead, Caesar that
stands in his way. Caesar is probably not God, as in
Petrarch’s version, but a king in the temporal world.
Perhaps Henry VIII, if the common belief that the
doe represents Anne Boleyn, with whom Wyatt is
supposed to have had an affair, is correct.

Regardless of the poem’s historical background,
Wyatt’s failure to idealize the doe results in a
cynicism about the realities of court life: The
lover is not contending with God for the doe, but
with his fellow courtiers, and with his king, and
this results in a more immediate, and more
physically dangerous set of consequences for the
speaker. Although Caesar is an obstacle to the
speaker’s pursuit of the doe, the doe presents
dangers of her own. The extent to which the
warning spelled out at the end of the poem
comes from Caesar or from the doe is unclear:
‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am / And wild
for to hold, though I seem tame’ (13-14).

A great amount of weight rests on the penultimate
word: ‘seem’. Is she wild, or tame, or both? The
problem is not only that the speaker cannot have
her, but that he cannot know what her own desires
are. As a courtier, leaving the court, and leaving
the pursuit is perhaps not an option. He must
remain, and continue to engage in activities that
he is beginning to view not only as futile and
unsatisfying, but dangerous.

Wyatt thus makes the poem more
physical and more introspective at the
same time. He has combined the reality
of the courtly hunt with the inner
struggles of courtly love in a way that
exposes the realities and dangers
involved in both.

Whoso List to Hunt - Sir Thomas Wyatt

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