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1. The Face of the Sonnet

Wyatt and Some Early Features of the Tradition

PETER SACKS

IN JOHN ASHBERY'S “GRAND GALOP” the speaker listens back across more than four hundred years to what he goes on to call “that still-moist garden where the tooting originates.”^[1]

	It drifts away in fragments.
	And one is left sitting in the yard
	To try to write poetry
	Using what Wyatt and Surrey left around,
	Took up and put down again
	Like so much gorgeous raw material.[2]

Green sounds? Herbage of pre-Elizabethan songs and sonnets drifting through late-twentieth-century New York? And who is this ever-later, still-prospective poet? Ashbery's impersonal pronoun conjures one whose language, if one succeeds, will not be one's “own” but rather that used by Wyatt and Surrey. Nor do the displacements stop there, despite the word originates. Poetic language belonged to the individual early Renaissance forebears no more exclusively than it does to one self: “Took up and put down again / Like so much gorgeous raw material.” And by choosing poets (two rather than one) whose signature originations (the first English sonnets, hence some of the early poetic representations of voiced subjectivity in modern English language) arose as translations of prior Italian

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sonnets (so that the voices and the formal actions behind the “I” in their first sonnets are less their own than Petrarch's), Ashbery helps us to recognize that one of the salient features of the English sonnet may be the form's way of confronting head-on, so to speak—while also developing thematic entailments and analogues for—a more general lyric venture: the impersonating of an individuality whose very means of expression impugn any claim for unique self-possession.^[3] Indeed Ashbery's earlier “Sonnet,” whose twelfth line reads, “Traffic is the reader's pictured face,” has no first-person singular at all.^[4]

Just as there may be no person without impersonation, no persona without the word's reference to an actor's facial mask, we may come to wonder whether the sonnet's weirdly consistent attentiveness to the image of the “pictured face” may enable it to surpass other poetic forms, or any philosophical or sociological discourse, in pressing us to suspect that there may never be a face (sonnet or no sonnet, poetry or no poetry) that isn't a picture—something made up, as the word face's etymology betrays, and as Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, and many others have emphasized. Wyatt's first sonnet speaks of a “fayned visage”; his second shows the face invaded by “pretence.” Eliot's revisionary love song, whose title and whose first fourteen lines (with their closing couplet's reference to a maker not only of visual art but of love sonnets) indicate no slight relation to the sonnet, has its persona sing, “there will be time/; To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Or as James Merrill has the flayed speaker of his eponymous sonnet “Marsyas” describe his fatal insult against Apollo, “I made a face. Then crash!”

Appearing to suggest a new level of intimacy, a close-up on inwardness, the sonnet paradoxically depended on the face, or on what Hamlet called the “haviour of the visage,” precisely to constitute, by opposition, the alleged substance of whatever “passeth show.” My sense is that this very contingent dependency on surfaces—inseparable from the surface of representation as such—leaves its uneasy mark on the sonnet's obsessive traffic between face and heart and that this traffic exposes the suspicion that the sonnet's language travels between a constructed face mask and an interiority whose alleged harborings or sighing vacancies (so often and uncoincidentally afflicted by desire or grief) can only be guessed at, as if between the song-lorn boughs where “yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang” or as if beneath the fourteen-runged grate of a drain covered by a fabric of borrowed, fallen, or translated foliage.^[5] Beginning his sonnet sequence, Sidney seeks “to paint the blackest face of woe,” by “oft turning others' leaves”; and however scornfully he is urged to look into his heart

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and write, neither this advice nor the figures of the Muse and the legible heart have fallen far from the tree.

In addition to its expressions of praise, its meditations on beauty, love, transience, mortality, or power, and despite its historical, religious, or topographical amplifications in the work of Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Wordsworth, Lowell, and others, the sonnet—from sonnetto (little sound)—may therefore involve the relatively small fictional voicing of an appeal for a greater degree of personifiable presence and for some enduring form of acknowledgment of whatever may be said to lie behind the face. Whether directed toward the face of another self, a beloved, a vision of place, a star, a god, or God, that voice usually emerges for us across rather than through a screen whose dubious surface may give away the anxiety that whatever seems to remain concealed at the supposed core of personhood may be not simply least representable or enduring but perhaps least substantial, personal, or possessible in the first place.^[6]

Also, because the sonnet's address always includes the reader or auditor, even though the speaker faces a prospect or describes a different, admired countenance, the poem is at least two-faced—a condition mirroring or perhaps even projectively aggravating the many accusations of duplicity that Shakespeare's sonnets are not alone in casting on the beloved. If desire, loss, blame, entreaty, or praise are some of the dominant motifs of the English sonnet since Wyatt, it is not surprising, in the face of its giveaways, that some of the form's earliest and most pronounced emotional or thematic entailments turn out to be frustration, betrayal, and shame, as well as various attempted acts of persuasion. Evocations either of a mediator or of the fugitive beloved's presence (seldom separable from self-presence) consequently often solicit at best a hoped-for image of cosmic or cosmetic redress. Hopkins's Petrarchan sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame” ends: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men's faces.” Quoting Wyatt (“how like you this?”), Heaney's final Glanmore sonnet concludes with “The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.”^[7]

“Look in my face.” The imperative opens one of the final sonnets in D. G. Rossetti's The House of Life. Perhaps designed to speak as the image of a face might speak, sonnets as objects conform more closely than any other lyric to the proportions of the human visage—and the pictura for its poesis may indeed be that of a person's countenance.

In beginning to focus on the poetic image of the face, and in thinking about any image-making in poetry, I am indebted to Elaine Scarry's

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inspiring account of mental imaging at large. In particular, it would have been impossible for me to contemplate as fully the properties of the sonnet as an object—one that is both the occasion and product of poetic imaging—were it not for the precision with which Scarry analyzes how the size and other attributes of certain objects, such as a flower, affect the ease and degree of vividness with which they may be imaged in the mind. Revealing, for example, that a blossom can be imaged more readily than can a life-sized face, partly because it better fits within “the small bowl of space in front of one's eyes,” Scarry's argument could also lead us to recognize that a sonnet may be perceived not as seeking literally to mirror a face but rather to construct an object within whose dimensions a face may be more poetically envisioned. Viewing the flower as an object exemplarily equipped to supply what she calls a “template” for mental imaging, Scarry shows how the mind may in turn build the image of a face on that of a blossom (the flower becomes “the work table on which imaginative life gets processed”), and although the sonnet lacks several but not all of the attributes of a flower, it is in this sophisticated and powerful sense that the sonnet may be said to accommodate a proportionately modeled image of a face.^[8]

Assuming this linkage between sonnet and imagined face, it is no coincidence that the conventions of the sonnet form emerged—via the work of Guittone d'Arezzo, Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and others—during the thirteenth century, just as Giotto and other painters were beginning to depict more realistically expressive faces than those of Byzantine or Gothic icons. Cimabue was in fashion then, as Dante says, Giotto now.^[9] Giotto painted a portrait of Dante, as did Signorelli and others. And during the 1340s, by which time Petrarch had secured and would lend his name to the Italian form, one of the laureate's sonnets actually celebrates his friend Simone Martini, the great painter who “portrayed [Laura] on paper, to attest down here to her lovely face.” In the following century the sonnet evolved throughout northern and southern Europe alongside the quattrocento refinement of personal portraiture (Memling, Van Eyck, Parmigianino, Antonello da Messina), appearing in England by the 1530s, soon after Dürer and Leonardo had begun deliberately to theorize the formal representation of the face so as to negotiate between ideal and mimetically accurate depictions not merely of individual features but of what Leonardo called “the motions of the mind.” It is more than fortuitous that Holbein drew his unforgettable portrait of Wyatt's face during the very years that Wyatt inaugurated the English sonnet.^[10]

Before turning to the substance of particular sonnets, we could continue

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to speculate on the formal exchanges between sonnet and face, pointing out frequent references to reading a face and to its attendant semiotics. (Is it a coincidence that the Italian volta, used to describe the turn to the sestet, is scarcely distinguishable from the word volto, often used by Petrarch and others to mean the face, the part of us that turns and signifies with the most expressiveness?)^[11] At the outset of the Vita Nuova Dante confesses, “I spoke of Love because I bore on my face (nel viso) so many of his signs (insegne) that it could not be concealed.”Insegne will show up in the forehead (fronte) of the very sonnet of Petrarch to which we will soon see Wyatt and Surrey turn; and Petrarch spells it out repetitively as in e'l cor negli occhi et ne la fronte o scritto (and my heart is inscribed in my eyes and on my brow). To take one of many examples from Shakespeare's sonnets:

	so love's face
	May still seem love to me, though altered new,
	Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place
	˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
	In many's looks, the false heart's history
	Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange
	But heaven in thy creation did decree
	That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell.
	(Sonnet 93)

As if moving in the other direction, Sonnet 86 ends: “But when your countenance filled up his line,/ Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine.”^[12]

Quite literally, we could add that the measured way in which many Renaissance sonnets about the loved face descend from eyes to mouth is closely matched by facial proportions as depicted in several contemporary works by Duürer, Leonardo, Holbein, Titian, and others—in which the ratio between the distances (1) from the top of the forehead across the eyes down to the tip of the nose and (2) from the tip of the nose across the mouth to the bottom of the chin, is that of eight to six.^[13] Anatomizing one of the fourteen-line sections of his first canzone, Dante writes: “This second part divides in two; for in one I speak of her eyes, which are the source of love; in the second I speak of her mouth, which is the end of love.” Regarding a further sonnet, he comments: “This sonnet has three parts: in the first I tell how this lady reduces this potentiality to act in consequence of the very noble part which are her eyes; and in the third

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I say the same in consequence of the very noble part which is her mouth; and in between these two is a particle that is a quasi-petitioner of aid for the previous and subsequent parts, and it begins: Help me, ladies.”^[14]

But the sonnet is yet more deeply implicated with representations of the human face. From Niccolo Degli Abbizi, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Milton, and Sor Juana Ineés de la Cruz to Rimbaud, Ashbery, Heaney, and Merrill, the form reiterates a fascination both with the explicit image of the face and with what occurs there.^[15] If such a focus seems superficial, I hope to show how many inner lineaments of the tradition it may reveal and how the very positings of depth or inwardness greatly depend on the sonnet's ambivalent facial poetics. Without the image of the personal face the sonnet would be less equipped to generate its images of a mind behind the face; still more opposingly, it would not be as equipped to suggest the hidden depths of the heart.

Skipping a fuller account of this matter in Vita Nuova and Rime Sparse, I want to recall three lines from what might be Wyatt's first sonnet, a translation of Petrarch 102: “So chaunceth it oft that every passion/ The mynde hideth, by colour contrary,/ With fayned visage, now sad, now mery.” If this is a critique of dissembling, in which the face serves as a medium for the mind's misrepresentation of the passions, we may wonder what would happen if the face were to reveal the true “colour” of the heart: what response would it elicit, and to what extent could such an appearance, however “honest,” serve the inner life it is supposed to lay bare? These questions take us to Wyatt's sonnet “The longe love,” rendered from Petrarch 140:

	The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar
	And in myn hert doeth kepe his residence,
	Into my face preseth with bolde pretence,
	And therin campeth, spreding his baner.

	She that me lerneth to love and suffre,
	And willes that my trust and lustes negligence
	Be rayned by reason, shame and reverence,
	With his hardines taketh displeasur.

	Wherewithall, vnto the hertes forrest he fleith,
	Leving his entreprise with payn and cry;
	And ther him hideth, and not appereth.

	What may I do when my maister fereth
	But in the feld with him to lyve and dye?
	For goode is the liff, ending faithfully.[16]

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Because one can't read the first lines without noticing it, and because it distinguishes Wyatt from Petrarch, from Surrey, and from almost everyone after, we might begin by taking in some of the characteristic irregularity of Wyatt's prosody, whose every ripple or rift in the abstract metrical principle of iambic pentameter is loaded with expressive ore. Not surprisingly, there is a strong tie between Wyatt's rhythmic idiosyncrasies and his departures from literal translation. Neither Petrarch nor Surrey says anything directly about the length of love's residency. With two immediately consecutive strong accents (“The longe love, that”), involving a reversed, and caesura-severed, second foot, Wyatt literally stresses his aberrant modifying of love's temporality. (Contrast Surrey's immediate march, after the first foot, into the lockstep of normative iambic pentameter—“Love, that doth reign and live within my thought”; or how anemic it would have been merely to introduce an adjective with the same meaning but without syncopation—“The lengthy love that in my heart doth keep.” So, too, Petrarch and Surrey have no harbar: Wyatt draws attention to his use of the word by making it a trochee despite its final position in the line.)

Wyatt's initial modifier, longe, proves crucial on many counts. As most poets, especially the honorary Proust, have known, one of the more effective ways to construct the semblance of subjectivity is to summon interior time, usually by “remembrance of things past.” Although Wyatt's index of duration augments the inwardness that will prove so at odds with an acceptable facial expression, it also highlights the contrast between the length of love and the brief social moment in which it will be made manifest in an actual face-to-face situation.^[17] Charging the impending flare of self-exposure, Wyatt's stressed temporality also gives a far more loaded arc of pathos to the whole poem's carefully scored movement through time, a movement that falls cadentially toward the ultimate liftand drop of “For good is the life ending faithfully.”^[18] Afterall, this final stress-losing rhythm of the final line—in its poignant contrast to the stress-charged opening of the poem, and in its prosodically recessive demurral against the line's own semantically upbeat rationalization—this rhythm does more than mark a purely aesthetic ending: like the pulse of a faltering heart it carries the speaker, however faithfully, toward death.

Great prosody is seldom extricable from syntactic genius. Petrarch ends his sonnet on the word more (dies). Surrey has “Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.” Wyatt's adverb faithfully (neither Petrarch nor Surrey mentions faith) trails its verb dependently, as if to evince yet posthumously

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gainsay the truth of ending. Even the reverse-stressed word, ending, is internally complicated by the manner in which its weak syllable dangles from a stem whose accented end- (made yet more emphatic by irregularly succeeding the strong-stressed liff, as well as by the severe preceding caesura) the participial suffix prods out of its noun-like inertia into a verb that now lingers in an ongoing present tense. It is to this persisting action that the adverb can then add faith.

Prosody and syntax conspire equally well in staging the poem's initial crisis. Stripped to a skeleton of subject plus verb, the main clause of the first quatrain-sentence would simply be “love preseth.” With his first caesura and with a barrier of interpositional clauses, Wyatt pens love into its chambers (spatially matching the temporal construction of inwardness) while literally blocking the agent from its main act of predication. Creating what we might call syntactic desire and its frustration, Wyatt builds up the pressure that will give actual force to the word preseth. And we can't help noticing that the last and therefore most pressured membrane between love and preseth is the syntactically flushed or engorged face:

	The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar
	And in myn hert doeth kepe his residence,
	Into my face preseth with bolde pretence,
	And therin campeth, spreding his baner.

The impatient energy of the main verb furthers itself by linear position, grammar, and rhythm. First note how the three verb forms (subordinate, subordinate, main) in the opening three lines migrate ever-leftward toward the front. Petrarch's choice from his inventory of words for face here is fronte; and given the subsequent language of battle we might say love is moving toward the front lines. Now add the difference between doeth harbar, doeth kepe, and preseth. Whereas harbar and kepe (both verbs of stasis) are deferentially led by the auxiliary doeth, the kinetic preseth pushes any intermediary out of the way—a grammatical microchip of the sonnet's way of dramatizing the problem of mediation at large. All this importunacy is irregularly front-loaded by the trochee of preseth, a prosodic rush in which the strong stress refuses to wait for its normatively weak intercessor, just as the verb presses one syllable nearer to the front. (Contrast the relative inertia of Surrey's “Oft in my face he doth his banner rest”—there being no word for pressing in Petrarch.) And to keep the sonic capillaries in play, the sound and action continue by a kind of alliterative and assonantal blushing out to the very end of the line, where

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the word pretence emerges, only to be transfused yet further in the next line by the very word spreding, as the whole invasion takes possession of the quatrain and of the sonnet thus far.^[19]

Two remarks before turning to the second quatrain. First, pretence literally stretches—its etymons associate it with the taut string of a musical instrument—between the meaning of extending a claim (as in pretender to the throne, no light matter in Wyatt's time) and that of disguise (the kind of hypocritical courtliness Wyatt despised). Whereas Wyatt's pretence is here tilted more toward revealed feeling than to its opposite, the word is uncomfortably close to its counterfeature—the sense of fakery for which Sor Juana's early-seventeenth-century Petrarchan sonnet, scoring the falsification inherent in her painted self-portrait, uses the Spanish pretendido.

Second, and more to the issue of disempowerment, there is no personal agency at work thus far within the represented action. Everything is love's doing, not the speaker's. This abeyance is intensified by the next quatrain, where instead of meeting the speaker's attempt to regain control, love encounters and is soon overwhelmed by the beloved's disdain. Syntactically, as well as thematically, She dominates the second quatrain-sentence, as he (love) had dominated the first. The speaker is in the object, or even abject, position (he has yet to use the word I). Not even a principal combatant, he is an increasingly passive amalgam: a suffering student, a site of occupation and contest, a servant of love the loser.

Regarding the language of the second quatrain, a quick scan takes in wills, a verb that works its way through so many Shakespeare sonnets, just as shame, trust, lust all appear in Sonnet 129. But nuances of Wyatt's language in this second quatrain call for renewed attention:

	She that me lerneth to love and suffre,
	And willes that my trust and lustes negligence
	Be rayned by reason, shame and reverence,
	With his hardines taketh displeasur.

In terms of diction “lustes negligence” dramatizes its meaning by the clash of Anglo-Saxon and Latinate vocabulary (almost as if he says lust, she says negligence, he says “lustes negligence”). Hardines has its witty vascular relation to the spreading banner and lies nicely alongside the negation of whatever pleasure it might have offered. (Thanks to this quatrain, I now know—as one might have suspected from the context—that the suffix nes is from Old English, whereas -ence is Latinate, so the sonnet could almost be seen as a struggle, enmeshed with translation itself, between the

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two, aligned as they are with a native impulse colliding with an external code.) The line Be rayned by reason, shame and reverence takes up the Platonic figure of reined horsepower, melding it with the language of chivalric pursuit. But as we shall see, the particular triad of reason, shame, and reverence invites a more extended reflection, particularly in the light of the volta, which now pivots about the flag of displeasur—whose syntactic and linear position formally displaces that of love's baner.

	Wherewithal, vnto the hertes forrest he fleith,
	Leving his entreprise with payn and cry;
	And ther him hideth, and not appereth.

Given love's precipitous retreat and concealment, and given the absence of implicit or explicit reveren. As cultural historians and philosophers from E. R. Dodds to Bernard Williams have recognized, shame involves not just a sense of exposure but a loss of face. And if sonnets engage with the imaging of faces, it is hardly surprising that they have a pronounced interest in this kind of loss. This essay cannot go into the cultural evolution of shame in general, but we should recall that one of its origins was in the field of warfare. Williams quotes Homer's Ajax: “What countenance can I show my father Telamon?/ How will he bear the sight of me / If I come before him naked, without any glory?” And it is Ajax who exhorts: “Dear friends, be men; let shame be in your hearts.” There's no lack of fusion in the Iliad between military and erotic conquest, but it was the engine of chivalry that most transferred the values of warfare into those of eroticized contest and allegiance. The military tropes are clearly at work in Petrarch and Wyatt (who was a champion jouster, as well as a heroic soldier). But whereas Petrarch's and Surrey's love wears enough armor (talor armato / Clad in the arms) to shield its libido, Wyatt drops the figure of defensive armor altogether, while adding both preseth and hardines.^[20]

The sexual element in shame is present as early as the ancient Greek

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term itself. Bernard Williams points out that “aidoia, a derivative of aidos, ‘shame,' is a standard Greek word for the genitals.”^[21] Although Williams mentions that “similar terms are found in other languages,” he focuses exclusively on Greek origins, thereby missing or perhaps taking for granted how intensely the linkage of shame and sexual exposure drives one of the most foundational moments in Genesis, where the fall from being “unashamed” at nakedness (2.25) to the sensation of shame leads both to the first-ever act of hiding (“among the trees of the garden”—Wyatt's forest?) and to the first human artifactual making of any kind: the sewing together of leaves to make a covering for what thereby becomes both concealed and private.^[22] Perhaps shame is a two-faced instrument, operating not just for normative control but for the very production of inwardness?

Rather than map the dense prehistory of the Italian sonnet's engagement with shame, let us stay with Wyatt's demonstration of shame in action. Hideth is what we do when ashamed. “The reaction is to cover oneself or to hide” (Williams, 78). In a move that is paradigmatic for so many sonnets, Wyatt's love turns away from the face, back into the heart—withdrawing from circulation, so to speak (a circuit that may only be renewed via the displacement from blood to ink and by the subsequent circulation of the poem). For the poem to advance its action, however, and to deepen its construction of inwardness, love can't simply go back to where it was in the first two lines. It can no longer occupy a harbor or residence. In fact, only now do we learn that the heart has a forest—unbuilt, uncultivated, the selvaggio/savage region of obscurity where Dante's pilgrimage begins.^[23] Love flees (a frequent verb in Wyatt); and the image of the heart thereby grows to include interior wilderness. There can be no direct speech within such wilds, which is why love's entreprise (with its faint echo of preseth) is left “with payn and cry.” We hear no words. Certainly Wyatt's poem is the “cry of its occasion”; but because neither pain nor a pure cry have words—think of Bishop's “oh! of pain”—the little sound of his sonnetto must translate itself not just out of Petrarch but (as if all translation must stage a reentry to language itself) into human speech.

My guess is that part of the overall occasion of the cry in Wyatt's poem is a variously redoubled shame: the shame of exposure; the humiliation of defeat and loss of face; the speaker's shame at his tortuously passive relation to a baffled love that he can serve but cannot quite claim as his own. Shame probably feeds on itself—aggravated by the hiding that it provokes, deepened by disclaimers of self-possession or of primary agency.

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Hence one may be ashamed at feeling shame because one feels the intensified lack of whatever inner sufficiency might have allowed one to outface the world. Many sonnets beyond Petrarch's and Wyatt's may come into being in large part to construct or repair enough sense of interiority, enough of some otherwise unmanifested capacity of another kind, so that they can address and maybe redress whatever has shamed them into being. They need to save face via a detour behind and beneath the face—usually toward the heart.^[24]

Closing the poem's third sentence, line 11 thus reaches inward to the furthest reaches of the heart's privacy and privation. In a poem about the very problem of coming into appearance and of (self-)representation, the truest counterlimit from which strength (or nourishment, as Petrarch said) may be drawn is that of disappearance (and not appereth will be made to rhyme with fereth). It is only now that the speaker begins to regain ground—or rather to regain territory on other grounds:

	What may I do when my maister fereth
	But in the feld with him to lyve and dye?
	For goode is the liff, ending faithfully.

For the first time (but very much at last!) the speaker uses the word I. And although he presents it as a question, the issue is precisely one of agency:What may I do? The most crucial thing to notice here is not the fact that he goes on to answer his own question—an answer whose strength is somewhat vitiated by its claim that there is little choice—but rather that he poses the question at all. Why? Because the turn to the question of agency (a turn here constituting the shift from a given present to a possible future) is made inseparable from an explicit turn toward the reader.

In other words, having broached the wilder regions of interiority, the speaker compensates for the disappearing act of love by putting himself forward, as an “I,” into the more overtly summoned presence of the reader. This is in large part what he can do. This is what he does. Certainly he departs with his master, but first he remains to tell us what he is choosing and the grounds on which he makes the choice. In a sense he makes up for the loss of face by facing us—by acknowledging that he has been addressing us all along. By occupying a third position offered by poetry, he has found a way to step outside the binary face-off between love and the lady. (We can register the subtle shift even in topography as the forest leads back out to the exposure of the field.) Admonished by reason and

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reverence, preoccupied by love and then by shame, he has counterclaimed harbor and residence within the sonnet—a form whose independently fixed dimensions suit it for this provision of some other, stable premises. Having fallen out with the beloved, the speaker falls in with an array of possible appellants, just as Dante began the poetry of Vita Nuova by literally sending his first sonnet to “a number of poets” and by internally orienting that sonnet so as to “greet all Love's faithful servants.” Falling toward and beyond death, Wyatt's speaker falls forward across time and space into the present and presence of ourselves.

This action is, I believe, what lends conviction to the final line, even to the point of its final word. For having hoisted the I, having raised the question of agency and choice that invests that I with ethical identity, having summoned the reader into this very terrain of relation and present choice—having done all this within the increasingly secured precincts of the poem (now extended to the penultimate line of its own life)—the speaker can perform his final action: the making and declaring of a judgment. Not just any judgment but a judgment and conferral of value.

If the experience of shame and hiding recapitulated the primal fall, there is something astounding in Wyatt's now reiterating the archetypal first judgment “that it was good.”^[25] (He even brings it transformatively into the present tense: “For good is.”) The sequence has moved from human shame to an echo of divine benediction—a step up—as if a ladder had been found leaning against the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Intriguingly the action of judgment (sealed and given a heightened claim on our attention by its position as the fourteenth of fourteen lines) reinforces the way in which the question What may I do? had begun to bind the inside and outside of the poem. I don't mean that it does so simply by a literal framing action. The judgment faces the feld of impending death (to lyve and dye), while facing out to that indeterminate but nonterminating field of readers on whose attendance the question had called and within whose poetically mediated presence an evaluative claim is now made. Instead of the loss of a singular face, the poem has produced the potential for many faces—its own repeating face and (to return to Ashbery) the prospect of many readers' pictured faces.

“Traffic” indeed. As in exchange or trade. By a final breathtaking yet breath-giving turn, Wyatt follows the phrase “lyve and dye” with the verbal resurrection of liff. And although he cannot save that life, he can as we have seen revise and indefinitely defer the nature of its end. If there be an actual end achieved here at all, it is form that will accomplish and enforce it.

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Which leaves us with the poem's last word. Faithfully has more than syntactic and prosodic interest, more even than that of its significance as a term qualifying the previously opposed forces of reason and emotion or as an attribute that substantiates the recent judgment of goodness. I would propose briefly that Wyatt's assertion of faithfulness takes on trenchancy and purpose in the political and cultural context of the 1530s. Wyatt's poem at large has responded to perils of appearance, shame, concealment, loyalty—all increasingly problematic in the intrigue-ridden, centralized court culture that was emerging out of the ruins of a feudal world. Wyatt's father had been tortured by Richard III for his feudal loyalty to Henry Tudor. According to the Wyatts' domestic chronicler, the exchange went as follows. Richard: “Wyat why are thou such a foole? thou servest for moonshine in the water, A beggarly fugitive, forsake him, and become mine, who can reward thee.” To which Henry Wyatt: “If I had first chosen you for my Master, thus faithfull would I have been to you, if you should have needed it, but the Earle, poor and unhappy, tho he be, is my Master, and no discouragement or allurement shall ever drive, or draw me from him, by Gods grace.”^[26]

Many of Thomas Wyatt's poems contest the “strange fashion of forsaking.” Behind this thrust is the urgent work of preserving continuity itself in an age of unprecedented disruption: here again the sonnet's relative constancy to its own formal imperatives, and to its own cross-cultural and extratemporal community of writers and readers, makes it ideally equipped for such work, even as its brevity makes it ever aware of “ending.” The cultural and literary historian David Wallace has recently proposed the year 1536—marked by the execution, possibly witnessed by Wyatt from his cell in the Tower, of the poet's ex-lover, Queen Anne Boleyn—as one of the most dramatic points of rupture between two entire world orders in England.^[27] Despite the primarily secular context for Wyatt's final word, we might bear in mind the degree to which the Henrician Reformation made faith itself a matter of lethal personal, national, and international conflict. Or we may recall Henry Wyatt's implicit binding of feudal loyalty to “God's grace.”

In addition, then, to Wyatt's repairing to the poetic principle and to the poetic “field” as a realm in which to save face, to mediate between love and the beloved, to construct and conserve an interior as well as exterior image of personhood, to reclaim displaced agency, to provide words for an otherwise wordless cry, to make judgments conferring value, to give voice to an identity that is pitched beyond the orbits of mere

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reason, shame, lust, or even love—the poet has staked out (at and as the extreme limit of his poetic practice) a last resort for the profession of faithfulness.

Lest we become too flushed by reparation, too excited by Wyatt's mastery in the lists of poetry—in which all English sonnets will bear a trace of his remains—it is worth taking in the word maister. Yes it is love. But in order to end faithfully within a sonnet, Wyatt must serve the impersonal, transhistorical orders forwarded to him by the poet whom Puttenham referred to as Wyatt's “maister.” Even the question “What may I do when my maister fereth?” takes on cogency when we recall Petrarch's repeated fearfulness within and on behalf of his heart (che temo del cor), and Petrarch's allegiance to a poetic form and system associated with Dante's fearful initiatory confrontation with the one who says Ego dominus tuus (I am your master) and who then adds Vide cor tuum (behold your heart) as he hands over the poet's heart to be eaten by the beloved. If there is mastery here, it is in the art of being mastered.

To break off this swatch of a larger study of Wyatt, and perhaps of the sonnet, I return first to Ashbery—not to his “Sonnet” but to the poem with which I opened, having left the poet imagining someone sitting in the yard waiting to pick up the “gorgeous raw material” left around by Wyatt and Surrey.^[28] Twenty-nine lines later Ashbery's speaker turns back (but now also turns directly) to Surrey: “Surrey, your lute is getting an attack of nervous paralysis/ But there are, again, things to be sung of/ And this is one of them.”

What has happened to Wyatt in the intervening lines? Has he disappeared, only to reappear implicitly via his immediate successor, whose principal elegy (“Wyatt resteth here that quicke could never reste”) recalled the “visage sterne and mylde” of the nobleman who, although being Surrey's social inferior, had been his poetic master? (Surrey's additional elegiac sonnet for Wyatt ends: “His lively face their breasts how did it freet/ Whose cinders yet with envy they do eat.”) Or has Wyatt's nature, absorbed into the “gorgeous raw material,” become more generally “subdued/ To what it work[ed] in, like the dyer's hand” of Shakespeare's Sonnet 111? Not just the dyer's hand, we'd have to say—also his face, and heart.

Finally, I turn back to a sonnet writer before Petrarch. I've not tried to find more information on Niccolo Degli Abbizi, other than what Rossetti appended to his translation of a single “prolonged sonnet.” He includes Niccolo with one or two other of the earliest sonnet writers, noting,

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“These poets, of whom practically nothing is known, flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century.” I believe that my initial and delayed responses to this poem led in large part to the writing of this essay.^[29]

When the Troops Were Returning from Milan

	If you could see, fair brother, how dead beat
	The fellows look who come through Rome today,—
	Black yellow smoke-dried visages,—you'd say
	They thought their haste at going all too fleet.
	Theirempty victual-waggons up the street
	Over the bridge dreadfully sound and sway;
	Their eyes, as hang'd men's, turning the wrong way;
	And nothing on their backs, or heads, or feet
	One sees the ribs and all the skeletons
	Of their gaunt horses; and a sorry sight
	Are the torn saddles, cramm'd with straw and stones.
	They are ashamed, and march throughout the night;
	Stumbling, for hunger, on their marrowbones; Like
	barrels rolling, jolting, in this plight.
	Their arms are gone, not even their swords are saved;
	And each as silent as a man being shaved.

NOTES

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