Becoming the Other/the Other Becoming in Wyatt's Poetry

Abstract

Describing woman in Wyatt's poems, Michael McCanles calls her the totally 'other,' alien. Building on that premise, David Rosen maintains that she is distant because she is complex to be contained. 2 thesis that woman differs in genus from speaker posits a mystique. She is unknowable, he unknowing; she is superhuman, he all too human. By arguing for her obscurity and his solidity, critics deny her reality as a woman, his potential as a man.3 Such essentially Petrarchan readings fail to take fully into account dynamics of speaker's relationship to woman who propels Wyatt's poetic persona so remarkably into being. I of many Wyatt poems is, in fact, so mobileso responsive to other-that occasionally it allies itself to its inspiration. This identification is most complete in Whoso list to hunt, where speaker complains that he can no means [his] mind / Draw from deer. Here Wyatt calls his implantation inexorable. He cannot separate himself from her. In certain poems which might be linked together, Wyatt's I changes in ways that make obsessiveness of Whoso list to hunt understandable. These transformations progress through three stages, mounting in intensity from playful imaging to serious redefining. First, Wyatt becomes as he connects to source of his pain (From these high hills, Behold, Love, The long love); then he imagines lady becoming him, as she learns to appreciate his hurt (She sat and sewed, Blame not my lute), and to feel his pleasure (They flee from me); finally in Whoso list to hunt he begins to acknowledge her position. To know other by feeling as other is to acquire power through identification, to experience through likeness. But ultimately and conversely, these transformations illustrate helplessness of human experience. In Wyatt's poetry, women and men are, as in Ovid, equally