I know right well my face, my lowke, my teeres,
Myn Iyes, my Wordes, and eke my drery chiere
Have cryd my deth full oft unto your eres;
Herd of belefe it doeth appere, appere!

A better prouff I se that ye would have
How I ame dede; therefore when ye here tell
Beleve it not all tho ye se my grave.
Cruell, unkynd! I say farewell, farewell!

Wyatt's best love lyrics reveal his speaker's evolving rejection of the typically pathetic and servile role of the courtly lover in favor of a more practical and self-serving, yet more self-aware, persona: Wyatt's lover no longer sees himself through the eyes of his beloved, as did the courtly lover. "Hevyn and erth and all that here me plain," Egerton 73,¹ plays with the courtly ideal of a lover dying for love and concludes by interpreting the metaphor literally and exposing the falseness of the courtly code. Wyatt ironically starts with a traditional lover's complaint and ends with the realization that even if this courtly metaphor became a physical reality and the lover actually died for love, the lady would still not be satisfied, and so there is no point in continuing to "cry in vain," Wyatt's lover may be making a traditional complaint in the first half of the poem, but he shows a new awareness of his position and hers in the second half. Through the rhetorical techniques of repetition and manipulation of the refrain, Wyatt's poem becomes more than a "dully" conventional complaint; indeed the poem reflects the debunking of a convention.²

The poem consists of nine stanzas and is rhetorically divided into two halves, with the fifth stanza acting as the pivotal one. The first four stanzas set forth the lover's conventional complaint, using the traditional terminology of courtly love, but even in the first half of the poem there are hints that this is not going to be the same old tiresome complaint that every lover makes again and again. To make sure that the reader first recognizes the genre, however, Wyatt's speaker pointedly uses the word "plain," "plaint," or "complaint" in each of the first four stanzas whereas, from the fifth stanza on, he never again uses any form of the word "complaint." Indeed he concludes in the fourth (and final stanza of the first half) that this is his "last complaint."

In the first stanza, the lover's complaint takes the traditional form; the speaker cries that he is dying as a result of his unrequited love and begs for her "mercy": "Mercy, madame, alas, I dy, I dy!" The repetition of the last two words stresses the courtly lover's exaggerated stance. On the other hand, why does the speaker insist that everybody who can hear him understands his grief, with one exception "alone," if not to enlighten the reader as to the true nature of the courtly lover's predicament by comparing his hyperbolic complaining to her incredible insensitivity?

The second stanza is a further development of the critical note already pres-

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ent in the first and, at the same time, a continuation of the traditional lover's complaint. If she is asleep, he expects her to "forbere," since she is the cause of his suffering, and hear him out, and yet he makes this request "humbly" and, in the conventional manner of the courtly lover, asks his "dere hert" to wake and hear his "plaint" because he is burning "in this fire."

The third stanza takes up where the second leaves off, so far as the critical thread is concerned; specifically, the lover proceeds logically from a mere request that she "awake, awake!" in the "refrain" of the second stanza to a justification for using "force" "to breke" her sleep. He justifies "now" disturbing her sleep with his complaint by pointing out that she has "so oft" in the past caused him to lose sleep. Wyatt's speaker is already beginning to suggest, "gently," but heretically according to the conventions of Provençal love poetry, that what is good enough for him is good enough for her: if he stays awake crying over her, then she should stay awake listening to his complaint. Still, he ends the stanza on a traditional note, emphasizing his "right pitious case," as a courtly lover, by echoing the "alas" of the last line of the first stanza, "crieng alas, alas!"

In the fourth and final stanza of the first half of the poem, the speaker continues to plead for pity "at lest" and describes himself as the woman's "poure unhappy slave." "Dispere" has brought him to this pathetic state, and once again, in the last line, he echoes the "alas" of the last line of the first stanza, in addition imitating its refrain, "I dy, I dy!" The repetition in the poem exaggerates the pathetic protestations of the speaker and therefore emphasizes the exhibitionist stance of the courtly lover; indeed the repetition of "I faint, I faint!" at the end of the final stanza of the first half, in imitation of the, "I dy, I dy!" at the end of the introductory stanza, makes a mockery of the traditional notion of a courtly lover dying from unrequited love. Fainting is an imitation or mockery of the act of dying; it can even be regarded as a false death in that it has the appearance of death without its reality.

Wyatt opens the fifth and pivotal stanza of the poem with the same construction that he used to open the final stanza of the first half. However, instead of positively declaring, "It is the last trouble," and going on to explain that this is the "last complaint" the woman will have to hear from the speaker, Wyatt uses the negative form of the construction to indicate that he no longer serves her "faithfully": "It is not now, but long and long ago."

Although at the end of the fifth stanza the speaker states that he has asked for "nothing" from his lady, at the beginning of the sixth he states the one exception: "Save of your grace only to stay my liff." In the refrain of the very first stanza of the second half of the poem, suddenly, the lover makes it clear that the dying he has been complaining about all along is "an inward deth," a metaphorical death: "An inward deth hath fret my mynde, my mynd."

The seventh and eighth stanzas echo the idea presented in the introductory

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stanza; even though the speaker has used all the traditional methods of communication, his lady still finds his death "herd of belefe," just as in the introductory stanza, "Hevyn and erth and all that here me plain," with the exception of her, "perceve what care doeth cause me cry."

The "refrain" word at the end of the eighth stanza is "appere": it appears that it is difficult for her to believe that he is dying. In the final stanza of the second half, and of the poem, the speaker takes up this notion and comments that the mere appearance of death is not enough for his lady. Wyatt links stanzas eight and nine to say that inasmuch as the lover's traditional methods of communicating his suffering to his lady (his look, tears, eyes, words) have not convinced her, she would only be convinced by the actual sight of his dead body: "A better prouff I se that ye would have / How I ame dede. . . ." "Therefore" the speaker tells her not even to accept the "prouff" of his "grave" because it, too, merely signifies death. The speaker's point is that the lady does not believe him when he says he is dying for love of her; the metaphorical or "inward deth" of the courtly lover is meaningless to the lady, who is "cruell, unkynd!" Furthermore, she is neither "kind" in the modern sense of "caring," nor "kind" in the medieval sense of behaving "naturally," according to the "laws" governing her "kind"; indeed she is inhumanly cruel.

Finally, Wyatt echoes the phrase, "I se," of the first line of this stanza with the phrase, "ye se," of the third line. What the speaker sees in the concluding stanza is that the courtly love conventions are "dead" and that the metaphor of a dying lover no longer has any real meaning; his lady would not be convinced of the extremity of his suffering unless he literally died, unless she actually saw him dead. He exaggerates the lady's extreme point of view by stating sarcastically that "therefore when" she hears of his death, she should not believe it even though she sees his grave.

Wyatt also echoes the phrases, "I se" and "ye se" with the phrase, "I say" in the final line. And what does the speaker ultimately say to the lady now that he realizes that the old courtly language will no longer do and that she no longer abides by the code? "Farewell, farewell!" Indeed there is no reason for the speaker to go on suffering and composing traditional love complaints if his lady refuses to play by the rules of courtly love; he therefore replaces the conventional attitude of the closing line of the first half of the poem, "For in dispere, alas, I faint, I faint!" with his own unusual point of view: "Cruell, unkynd! I say farewell, farewell!" The method that Wyatt's speaker uses to show the reader what he thinks of the subservient role of the courtly lover is to start with a seemingly traditional complaint and then develop his own unique argument step by step until he logically reaches the opposite pole in this quite untraditional rejection of the lady in his final line.

-- BARBARA ODABASHIAN, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

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