Frustration and the downfallen Angel : Woman Thomas Wyatt's expression of transcendence What is Wyatt's mean of transcendence and

how is this expressed in his work, through difference in gender ? What is the main paradox that creates frustration in his work ?

Females in Wyatt are depicted as cruel and disdainful. The woman is an Authoritative mistress, whose characteristic is an extreme carelessness towards her lover. Wyatt, as opposed to Petrarch, knows1 his mistress, intimately : and with this physical knowledge comes the discovery of an alive creature, a mortal creature who will also one day rot2. Wyatt's mistress is available, and this makes her fall from a pure, platonic figure to a wicked and entangling creature whose soft skin only contrasts with her rough and hard heart. She opens her arms3 only to prize him within her hooks. Petrarch presents her as an unreachable perfection : for Wyatt, she is a strong and almost masculine predator4a, from which it is Wyatt who escapes4b! She has great power over the poet : despite her fragile appearance, she decides whether she will give her lover a brief pleasure or coldly resist his desire5. Perhaps this is Wyatt's desperate attempt at recreating the image of a Divine Woman : instead of being an unreachable ethereal being who he longs for, she is the one who taught him about pain : a powerful sadistic goddess.

In contrast, Senec and Plato6 are ethereal and benevolent friends : Plato is, to Wyatt, indeed not the human Plato but the idea Plato, the writer whose work is immortal and idealized, the Plato who will never die, never rot, and never be subject to newfangleness. And it is through literary work that Wyatt should attain higher grounds, if he really were mature and old enough that Love was merely an old souvenir7. This is an understandable behavior : the female having fallen from her pedestal, disoriented Wyatt needs a purposeful heavenly figure, and the fact that this figure resembles him gender-wise only makes things better. But are these male figures able to balance the powerful pull of romantic relationships with women ? Wyatt is still sore8 from his past loves and still longs for his lover(s). He presents himself as a man who is pulled, almost against his own will, from the company of a rather mousy male virtue to ill-natured women.

So why would an intelligent person like Wyatt spend all of his time lose all of his time9 thinking about love ? Most of his poetry is dedicated to Women. His use of the Ancients Plato and Senec as chaperons is not convincing; if they were really more interesting, why would he still be aching from his past affairs? A lover is really his only mean of transcending his condition of courtier, she is his only hope of counterbalancing the hypocrisy he encounters daily in court, by touching his heart with romantic emotions. In this sense her role is really divine but the very fact that she is able to offer him physical intimacy10 makes her become real again, and there lies the source of frustration : she is merely human. And in the fall from heaven to earth, she becomes evil, like Lucifer, the god-like fallen angel. How to be just, and flee from doubleness / When [he] knows where is an hind ?11 There lies an open field of paradoxes in Wyatt's poetry and desires.

1 : Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt, line 1 : I know where is an hind... versus Let no one touch me and she disappeared, Petrarch, Sonnet 190. 2 : Wyatt, Farewell To Love, last line : Me lusteth not longer rotten boughs to climb. 3 : Wyatt, They Flee From Me, second stanza, line 5 : And she me caught in her arms long and small. 4a : Wyatt, Farewell To Love, line 6 : that pricketh 4b : Wyatt, Farewell to Love, line 8 : And scape forth, since liberty is lever. 5 : Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt. 6 : Wyatt, Farewell To Love, line 3. 7: Wyatt, Farewell To Love, lines 10 and 11 : In me claim no more authority / With idle youth go use thy property. 8 : Wyatt, Farewell to Love, line 6 : that pricketh aye so sore. 9 : Wyatt, Farewell to Love, line 13 : For, hitherto I've lost my time,... 10 : His alleged lover, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII wife's, was beheaded for adultery, and Wyatt was accused and imprisoned for adultery several times in his life. 11 : Wyatt, What Vaileth Truth, line 3. Wyatt, Whoso List To Hunt, line 1.

ENG 32200 February 24th, 2012

Mara Grand

Frustration and the downfallen Angel : Woman Thomas Wyatt's expression of transcendence