February 13, 2020 23
Like You This
Dan Chiasson
The Long Public Life
of a Short Private Poem:
Reading and Remembering
Thomas Wyatt
by Peter Murphy.
Stanford University Press,
246 pp., $90.00; $28.00 (paper)
Sometime around 1535, Sir Thomas
Wyatt, a poet and ambassador in the
court of King Henry VIII, had a scribe
copy into his personal commonplace
book a poem that Wyatt had composed.
The text was centered on the page and
written out in “Secretary Hand,” an
elaborate formal script often used for
legal documents, in part because it was
difficult to forge. Wyatt appears to have
carried the book along with him on his
diplomatic business all across Europe:
its one hundred or so poems, including
some of the most important English
lyrics before Shakespeare, were written
down and revised over time, in several
hands and varieties of ink. Wyatt likely
kept it by his side while in the Tower
of London, where he was imprisoned in
1536 for adultery, and where—accord-
ing to legend—he witnessed the ex-
ecution of his lover, Anne Boleyn. He
was probably carrying the book when
he died of a fever in 1542, at the age of
thirty-nine; his son, the rebel Thomas
Wyatt the Younger, inherited the book,
and passed it on to other members of
his father’s circle before he was ex-
ecuted in 1554. The book is known as
the Egerton manuscript, and now re-
sides at the British Library.
“They Flee from Me” (the title was
assigned by later editors) is one of fifty-
nine poems in Wyatt’s notebook that he
signed with his abbreviated signature,
“Tho.,” in the margins. It is arguably
the greatest English lyric poem of the
sixteenth century. The poem has been
mislaid and rediscovered many times
in its history, but it survived its brushes
with oblivion to become part of the
foundation of En glish poetry. Wyatt’s
notebook, with his own version of the
poem, ended up in the hands of a friend
and ally, Sir John Harington, who
seems to have used it partly as scrap
paper (the page containing “They Flee
from Me” has math problems scrawled
in the margin); an altered version, cop-
ied down during Wyatt’s lifetime by a
member of his coterie, exists in a sepa-
rate notebook. Still another, perhaps
originating from Wyatt’s own draft,
was published in 1557 in Richard Tot-
tel’s Songs and Sonnets (often referred
to as his Miscellany), the best-selling
Elizabethan anthology.
In the eighteenth century, Wyatt’s
notebook resurfaced when a member
of the Harington family, capitalizing
on a sudden demand for volumes of
old poetry, found it mildewing on the
shelves and passed it to Bishop Thomas
Percy, an anthologist and friend of
Samuel Johnson who was editing a
new edition of Tottel’s Miscellany. In
the twentieth century, a young Cleanth
Brooks, who became a Yale professor
and critic, helped edit Percy’s corre-
spondence, and included “They Flee
from Me” in his legendary textbooksAn Approach to Literature and Under-
standing Poetry (the latter coauthored
with Robert Penn Warren). All these
branching tributaries flowed out of and
back into a single poem, which never-
theless existed, for much of this time,
underground.
“They Flee from Me” is still routinely
taught in the early weeks of English lit-
erature surveys like the one I teach at
Wellesley. I often introduce the poem
by pointing students to a highlight
in its second stanza: a specimen of
quoted speech so uncannily intimate
that it feels as though it was whispered
directly into our ears from across the
centuries. The poem can be found on-
line in its entirety, but here is that mag-
nificent second stanza, in which Wyatt,a courtier now worryingly out of favor,
recalls a lover’s vanished tenderness:Thanked be fortune, it hath been
otherwise,
Twenty times better; but once in
special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise
When her loose gown from her
shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms
long and small,
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “dear heart, how
like you this?”There’s nothing in English literature
quite like that moment of five-hundred-
year-old pillow talk: “Dear heart, how
like you this?” The shiver that line pro-
vokes in readers was first felt by Wyatt.
He cannot believe such pleasure was
ever his to possess, nor can he quite
fathom that its powerful memory can
be revived by a mere quotation. After
a stanza break that suggests temporary
speechlessness, he returns, only to un-
derscore his own amazement: “It was
no dream: I lay broad waking.” The
final stanza is in the key of aftershock.Peter Murphy’s The Long Public Life
of a Short Private Poem: Reading and
Remembering Thomas Wyatt is the
story of how a twenty-one-line poem
has persisted for five hundred years,
despite the vagaries of power and taste.
Something already lost—that snippet of
reported speech—was recovered when
Wyatt first composed the poem. From
that moment forward, the poem, car-
rying the delicate freight of that quota-
tion, entered culture, which, over time,
scuttles much more than it keeps. T. S.
Eliot, in “East Coker,” described “the
fight to recover what has been lost/And
found and lost again and again: and
now, under conditions/That seem un-
propitious.” The conditions are always
unpropitious for a lyric poem on a pri-
vate subject by a long-dead aristocrat,
and what looks like recovery sometimes
entails significant loss. This paradox is
in the poem itself, which memorializes
a moment and a voice it also marks as
cruelly and abruptly vanished. Almost
as soon as it was written down, read-
ers of the poem sometimes preserved it
while stripping parts away. As MurphyWhen... you’re a Ben Roethlis-
berger [quarterback for the Pitts-
burgh Steelers], and you... recover
from your daze, and you’ve got a
trainer by your side, and the crowds
are cheering, this is a different con-
text from when you wake up after
an IED blast...where people have
been killed, and friends may be
badly injured, and they may still be
shooting at you.What researchers couldn’t agree
upon, however, was the relationship
between the two signature wounds.
Debate raged over whether mild TBI
could lead to PTSD, whether the same
incident could produce both con-
ditions, and whether mild TBI was
being overdiagnosed at the expense
of PTSD. The good news, says Kieran,
was that the army now accepted the
premise that “behavioral health issues
were medical problems to be solved
through rigorous, evidence-based
research.”
One comes away from Signature
Wounds with a healthy respect for
the military’s attempts to understand
and manage these problems, and an
even greater contempt for the arm-
chair hawks most responsible for
creating them. Old stigmas were con-
fronted, leading to the medicaliza-
tion of illnesses once disparaged, and
new programs were begun to prepare
the troops (and their families) for the
punishing conditions ahead.At the VA, meanwhile, a flurry of
initiatives confronted a disturbing rise
in active-duty suicides, which by 2007
exceeded the civilian suicide rate (ad-
justed for factors like age and gender)
for the first time ever. Some—like a
twenty-four-hour crisis hotline, better
tracking of soldiers with suicidal be-
havior, and more rapid counseling—
seemed long overdue; others—such as
gently encouraging troubled veterans
to remove firearms from their homes—
were canceled after raising the ire of
Fox News and the gun lobby. It wasn’t
necessarily combat stress or TBI that
caused most suicides, studies found;
it was the deteriorating relationships,
financial troubles, legal difficulties, drug
problems, and day-to-day anxietiesbrought on by the hectic pace of train-
ing and relocation. Suicide rates among
active military remain significantly
higher today than they were in 2003—
yet another legacy of the disastrous
Iraq incursion.
Signature Wounds, says Kieran, is “a
story of an Army that worked incred-
ibly hard to care for soldiers under the
unprecedented strain of the nation’s
longest wars.” What makes it so unset-
tling is the knowledge that most of the
reforms he describes were put in place
to enable soldiers to withstand condi-
tions of perpetual combat that are un-
reasonable and most likely intolerable.
“The human mind was not made for
war,” General Casey remarked. “That’s
the starting point for everything.” QThomas Wyatt; drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, circa 1535RoyalCollection^Trust