Today’s Poem: Whoso List to Hunt

Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am . . .

Richard II’s heraldic white deer, c. 1394 (Wikimedia Commons)

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(In the early months of Poems Ancient and Modern, we presented to our relatively small initial audience several poems that seem worth reviving for the larger number of readers the newsletter has now. And so, over the past few weeks, we have revisited a few of those poems from our archive — now including Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt.”)

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Whoso List to Hunt

by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, 
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.                                  ◦ hélas = alas
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, 
I am of them that farthest cometh behind. 
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind 
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore 
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, 
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. 
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, 
As well as I may spend his time in vain. 
And graven with diamonds in letters plain 
There is written, her fair neck round about: 
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,                                   ◦ “Touch me not”
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
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The twentieth century loved Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542). Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore, John Berryman: Poets and critics were ecstatic about his work, which seemed to them new and fresh.

Of course, that was because previous centuries had not much cared for Wyatt’s verse: drab, it seemed to them, and a sidetrack that turned away from richer poetry that came before and denser verse that would come after. Wyatt was always mentioned as a key figure in the creation of the English sonnet but not much otherwise noticed.

And so, when he came to be celebrated in the twentieth century, part of the reason was that his verse was little known. These days, after almost a century of being proclaimed an underappreciated master, Wyatt no longer has the frisson of the fresh revelation or even of being underappreciated. When everybody anthologizes the man’s work — “They Flee from Me,” “I Find No Peace,” “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse” — the hipness of liking Wyatt has been used up.

Which means that Wyatt alone now remains, to stand or fall on his own poetic merits. A courtier and diplomat under Henry VIII, he began his importation of the sonnet form into English by following Petrarch (1304–1374). But a work such as Today’s Poem, “Whoso List to Hunt,” one of the first sonnets written in English, is not so much a translation as an adaptation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 190, “Una candida cerva.”

Playing with a claim in Pliny’s Natural History (8.119) that Alexander had put collars on long-lived deer, Petrarch offers an image of a royal doe: Nessun mi tocchi — al bel collo d’intorno / scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi — : / libera farmi al mio Cesare parve: “‘Do not touch me,’ in diamonds and topaz, / Was written round about her lovely neck: / ‘it pleased my Lord to set me free.’” (On deer as medieval and Renaissance symbols, see the interesting note by Melinda Reidinger in a post in her In the Groves of Symbols newsletter.)

Petrarch addressing the ranks of man, by Fra Pietro da Pavia, c. 1400 (Wikimedia Commons)

When Wyatt takes up the theme — in a poem possibly about Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, with whom Wyatt had possibly had an affair — the English poet makes explicit the metaphor of lovely woman as lovely deer. And he makes the sexuality more explicit as well, dropping such signs of royalty as topaz and emphasizing the danger she holds. Where Petrarch’s figure is gazed upon, Wyatt’s is pursued, the deer as the object of a hunt — a change from the conventions of courtly love poetry. And where Petrarch has the biblical command “Touch me not” in his poem’s Italian, Wyatt interrupts his English to put it Latin, Noli me tangere, to tighten the reference to Jesus’ command to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, by Francesco Bartolozzi, 1793 (Wikimedia Commons)

Formed of three quatrains with a concluding couplet, rhymed abba abba cddc ee, Wyatt moves English verse from the Petrarchan sonnet’s rhyme scheme to what will come to be called the Shakespearian sonnet. And he tells of a woman dangerous to pursue — a wild deer who only seems tamed in the king’s collar.

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