Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Invention of the Self. Before everything changed, I talked to Peter Murphy, an English professor at Williams, about a very, very old poem, “They Flee From Me,” written in the 1530s by Thomas Wyatt. I was worried that no one would be interested in a conversation about an old poem right now. But listening back, I often felt a jolt of recognition. In the 1500s, of course, epidemics happened every few years. There was a viral pneumonia going around and something the English called sweating sickness, with symptoms very similar to those we’re seeing now, only you’d die within 12 to 24 hours of developing symptoms. And there was the bubonic plague, which Henry VIII was so terrified of that whenever he had to travel somewhere, he sent surveyors ahead to check on any of the towns on route and if they found sick people, they were carried out of their houses and into the fields and left to die. Henry VIII is often described as the worst king England has ever known. He inherited a fortune but blew it all on his fancy lifestyle and stupid wars. He married six times and had two of his wives executed. He was famously paranoid and would turn on his most trusted advisors on a whim, he locked them into the Tower and often ended up executing them. One of these trusted advisors was Thomas Wyatt, the author of our poem. Wyatt worked as an ambassador for the court and had close ties to Anne Boleyn. He too, by the way, ended up imprisoned at the Tower, twice in fact. But he survived and each time he went right back to working and writing poems. One of these poems, “They Flee From Me,” has kept Peter Murphy busy for the almost two decades. In his book, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem, Peter Murphy follows this long, long thread: from its author, Thomas Wyatt, to his friend, who copied the poem in her own manuscript, making a few changes, to the family that inherited the original and stored it in their home library for centuries, to the various printers and scholars throughout the ages who fought over what version was best, all the way to the present, when the poem has become something of a staple of English literature textbooks. So why this poem? Because to contemporary ears, “They Flee From Me” is not the easiest. If I were to give you a very rough summary, a man remembers a time when he was popular, especially with women, but nowadays, they flee from me. It’s not the most compelling story ever told but the story is not the point. It’s who’s telling it. At various points throughout the book, you sort of say that Wyatt as a person, as a character, makes his appearance in the poem and that that was a new thing, that before that was more of this anonymous, unified court voice or something.

Peter Murphy: Yeah. You can feel it in Wyatt's poems, that they have that texture of introspection, like declarations about the nature of his inner life or the nature of inner life. I like thinking of it as a moment of invention. It's right here in this moment, let's say it's 1535, though we can't be sure, but it's someplace right close to 1535. Here it is. It's the invention of the lyric in English. In some fine-grained detail, I don't think that that's strictly accurate, but it feels that way.

Helena de Groot:  That's so interesting. Today, literature is almost synonymous with inner life. In movies, it's much harder to get to the inner life of the characters, you’d have to do cheesy things like a voice over whatever … flashbacks.

Peter Murphy: (LAUGHS) Yeah, exactly.

Helena de Groot: But in literature, that’s what it does best. Can you take me back to before we started doing that? What were we writing then?

Peter Murphy: Yeah, I mean it's such an interesting subject and there's a lot of mysteries associated with it. It's not a kind of continuous and smoothly developing story from people inventing language to the day of Thomas Wyatt and then to our own. But in the period right before Wyatt, I mean we're talking about shorter poems, lyric poems, I think it's mostly true to say that the accomplishment that people were interested in in poetry was largely as a kind of design. The poems about love, for instance, that Wyatt would know that are in English, they're poems that would feel to us to be highly artificial. They have stanza forms that mean that they repeat themselves a lot and you can feel that some of the satisfaction of making such an object is actually just to do it. Like here, I made this complex stanza form and look, all the words appeared in all the right spots. And I don't think of that as a low form of entertainment. There's a lot of expressive objects that have that quality, that wow, that's a neat thing.

Helena de Groot: Like a Fabergé egg or something,

Peter Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Where you're like, wow, that's well done. I mean, I don't know what it's for. (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: (LAUGHS) Yeah, that's exactly right. There must be what amounts to a satisfaction in the kind of controlling or designing of the process of thought that is in such an artificial poem that clearly people liked. I think it feels quite foreign to us. We're used to a more nuanced and flowing and even inconsistent picture of inner life and so, with Wyatt, we have a few poems where what feels like the picture of inner life has this kind of dramatic and compelling texture and it's just so noticeable, especially if you're sitting reading a lot of poetry from the period, it's just so noticeable.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Could you read the poem? And I was thinking, because I don't want to assume that everyone has sort of a fluency in 16th century English, could you take it stanza by stanza and paraphrase it as we go along?

Peter Murphy: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, here's the first stanza:

(READS POEM)

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

***

So, I think that one of the things that people like in this poem, is just that magnetic first line: "they flee from me that some time did me seek." You know, it's old English. It has a little bit of a foreign air, but we can understand that line.

Helena de Groot: Mm hmm.

Peter Murphy: And then the evocative air of the poem, the sort of summoning of stuff. “With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.” So, who are they?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: Those first two lines, that's the part that caught me, and I think that part catches a lot of people. And "sometimes they put themselves in danger / to take bread at my hand; and now they range, / busily seeking with a continual change." That's the substance of the first stanza, it’s about change. The second:

(READS POEM)

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;

And therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

***

So, you have this first stanza about these beings that now are gone and then the thing that's gone now appears to be this really beautiful, intimate moment.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: And, you know, especially if you're reading poetry from this period, this stanza is just, you know, I might be wrong in some very detailed way, but in a general way what I want to say is, there's nothing else even remotely like this. People love to retell this stanza. They love to just talk about and think about the sort of intimate energy that just suddenly appears in this stanza. Which, that kind of intimate energy is just so unusual in this period. You know, we've gotten so used to it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's hard almost for me to hear what you hear because, for me, it is the thing that we still do, right? We recollect something and then we will hint at some details to make it really visual for the one who's reading. You know, “her arms long and small" and that is so common to us, that.

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: What is the newest thing about this then?

Peter Murphy: It's that it feels like an actual recall. Like, this is a thing that happened.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: In a lot of poetry in the period, I'm not sure people would have been very interested in doing that. That is an actual recall might even... You might even think about it as a flaw. It reduces the sort of designed and performative aspect of a short poem about feelings. And you can imagine someone thinking, well, no, these are actual feelings. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about, as you said, is the Fabergé egg. I want something more beautiful and more, you know, abstract in effect. And even if you're reading Wyatt's poems, “They Flee From Me,’ this poem is different.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: So, here's the last stanza:

(READS POEM)

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

***

I'm not sure you would guess that the poem is going to turn in this bitter direction.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right.

Peter Murphy: And I think that bitterness, unfortunately, is a really common quality in what is loosely described as love poetry in this period.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Peter Murphy: There are all these conventions about how men get to complain about women not paying attention to them.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: So, I think that readers in the period or people encountering this poem in the period would have … This complaint about her behavior is something they would have read a thousand times. You know, "The Lover's Complaint" is often a title for poems of that type in this period. And yet, in this stanza also, it's not a very decorative complaint. It seems unhappily genuine and the bitterness is part of that genuineness, right?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right. No, that’s true.

Peter Murphy: So, he gets into this stanza and there is just this little… it’s the place where I think people would have felt the tincture of self to be just a little bit too much: “But since that I so kindly am served, I would fain know what she have deserved,” especially that sort of dead rhythm in the last line, “I would fain know what she had deserved.”

Helena de Groot: Aha.

Peter Murphy: You know, not very musical. That’s one of the things that gives it its sort of unhappy feel of genuineness, like, he just wrote out those words because he was so angry he didn’t even have time to institute his iambic pentameter.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, that’s true. Like it has this sort of obstinate feel to it, almost. Like he’s sort of leaning on every word. “I would fain no know what she hath deserved.” (LAUGHS) Okay!

Peter Murphy: I think that’s exactly right. That's what I call the kind of dead rhythm of it. And I think what’s happening in that line is this … (LAUGHS) it’s just an insistence on a feeling that feels genuine enough to be a little uncomfortable. Like in a conversation at a cocktail party, if someone says something all of a sudden, you’re like … uh … well … look at that, I need to go get a glass of wine or you find a way to slide out. And so, the poem, as it appears in this very closely related manuscript, it’s a manuscript that’s been maintained by Wyatt’s friend, they changed that line. And I just figured, if they changed that line, they knew Thomas Wyatt, they had sympathy with his problems.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: If they changed that line, then something’s happening in that line. It clearly made people uncomfortable.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah. I mean, I was a little uncomfortable with it now, like however many centuries? Five, you know, 500 years later.

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I thought, oh, you know, doing that typical nice guy thing like, well, I was being kind and she doesn't want me, you know. (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: (LAUGHS) Exactly! The bitterness that shows up.

Helena de Groot: Bitter. Yeah.

Peter Murphy: Yeah. I think of that as a technical innovation, I think, on Wyatt's part. He's making the poem respond to feeling in a way that people would not have been used to.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me a little bit, when you look at that page today, or even the entire book that this page is a part of, what sort of interesting scribbles and drawings appear in the margins of the poems?

Peter Murphy: There's this math on the left-hand side, which is … It's a version of algebra. I had the great fun of getting to read 17th century algebra textbooks to figure out the notation.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: And it took a little bit of work to even figure out what's written there. But you know, again, what a pleasure to read a 17th century work of mathematics and figure out that that squiggle actually means X squared and so on.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: But the math is a sign that the person doing the math didn't care about the poem.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Peter Murphy: And in the rest of the manuscript this is much more obvious. There are, on other pages, straight lines drawn through each of the lines of the poem and then the page is just covered with other kinds of writing.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: So, the person …

Helena de Groot: Just like struck through basically?

Peter Murphy: Yeah, simply struck through. So then, sometimes the pages are covered in prose. Sometimes there's a geometry problem so there are triangles that are drawn over poems. And the idea that a person is sitting with this, you know, a book that we now consider a priceless treasure.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: And the reason that it's a priceless treasure is that there's a poem written on the page, that there’s a person sitting there with this book who actually can't see the poem.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: Right? So, it's exactly the opposite of us. We look at that page and it's like, oh, was there math on the left-hand side? I'm sorry, I didn't see it. I was reading the poem. And that seemed to me to be … it's just a really important part of the life of this poem that there are people and that … you know, my thought is that there is a resonance between that and the contemporary world where a lot of people wouldn't be interested in that poem. And I tried to tell that story sympathetically. That is, there's lots of reasons why you wouldn't be interested in that poem and it doesn't make you a bad human being and it doesn't mean that you're not sympathetic with other humans or that you don't have a nuanced inner life yourself or that you're not interested in the inner life of others. It just means you're not interested in that poem. And so, you know, it's like it’s a healthy tonic that you can drink while you think about the history of this poem because there's always this temptation to regard it as some kind of, mystified, magical and holy relic.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: And it really is not that. It's a poem. Written by a person in 1535.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right. Right. Yeah. You know, if you tried to write about these people who scribbled in the margins sympathetically, well, you've succeeded because I really have such warm feelings for them. You know, this John Harrington, I mean they're all called John Harrington.

Peter Murphy: (LAUGHS) They're all called John Harrington. Yes., many generations.

Helena de Groot: So, let’s just call this guy MP, because he was a …

Peter Murphy: Yeah, the person who wrote the math was a member of parliament.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. What I love so much about him is that he seems like the antithesis of a poet in sensibility. He likes math. He works in government. He's sort of interested in science and he's very practical. And so, he uses it to conduct his business and to also just write down notes. Sort of like a to-do list or something, you know?

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: One of the things … what was it again? That he wrote something like, I helped my friend's son. I'm constipated.

Peter Murphy: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Just like sort of a, you know, whatever. That was also sort of like you say, an inner life ... but of a different sort (LAUGHS).

Peter Murphy: That’s right. There's many, many people who wrote things into this book after Thomas Wyatt wrote in it. But John Harrington, who's the person who wrote the math, he wrote really a lot into this book. He was a judge. He was a magistrate. And there's addresses to juries that are sketched out in this book. And what I ended up thinking about as I meditated on Harrington’s lack of interest in the poems, his diary and his daily life, is that in this really broad way, there's a generic resemblance between his diary and the poem that is somehow the writing out of the things that happened to him, some of them very intimate. You know, not very appealing, constipation is not generally a great subject for a lyric poem, but there is a resemblance between his urge to write out the stuff about himself. These are things that happened to me. There is a resemblance between that and the work of lyric poetry, which is somehow the writing out of an account of inner life makes us feel that it's more manageable or that it is more, maybe it makes it more thoroughly a thing of the past, if that's what we want. Or it makes it more understandable. And so that relationship between writing and what amounts to self-understanding or just the management of everyday life is not entirely different from Thomas Wyatt’s use of that book. It's just really different from Thomas Wyatt's use of that book.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean, that's a gorgeous way of looking at it. And it really seems to be exemplified also in the way that the MP or the judge, John Harrington, how his son used that book. He used it sort of to learn how to write, right? Like he was a little kid and had a tutor and he had to sort of, you know, do his alphabet and stuff. And what is so lovely is how you described that this kid was maybe not the most interested in school and that he sort of would draw these monsters in the margins (LAUGHS). 

Peter Murphy: Yeah, exactly. I find that part, like you, really beautiful actually.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: You know, in my general feeling that poems are things that people write because they have reasons for writing them … like Thomas Wyatt, it can be in some ways about his job as an ambassador or his desperate hope to stay alive in Tudor England. And, again, there's this kind of generic resemblance between that and little Will Harington, there is finally a Harrington who's not called John Harrington. You know, this little Will Harrington drawing this little monster in the manuscript, you know, there is a kind of habit of mind where we think, well, you know, it's a kid and he's just drawing a monster. But again, it’s that act of sort of getting something out of your head and onto the paper and then you look at it and it's done something for you. Something that was inside your head is now out there on this piece of paper. And so, again, it seems like it's a good companion for the poems in that book. It's the same kind of movement of the spirit. 

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Now that the manuscript lives in at the British Library, which bought it in at the end of the 19th century, now it sort of lives its museumified existence. It can no longer be doodled in, let's say. Of course, it's great because now it's public.

Peter Murphy: Exactly.

Helena de Groot: And people with the right accreditations can go and consult it and stuff and write books about it. That's cool. But it also in a way, it's now dead.

Peter Murphy: Yeah. I'm really happy that that manuscript wasn't destroyed in the course of its long centuries. And I'm really happy that Will Harrington drew a monster instead of making paper airplanes with the page that “They Flee From Me” was written on and so on.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: So, I'm happy that it was preserved and I'm happy that I can see it. And my ability to see it is entirely dependent upon the kind of mummification that happens to that book in the British Library. But at the same time, it's fun and interesting to think of people using that manuscript as a legitimate human activity, that they're interested in that book, that adding things to it was their way of participating in the kind of general life of this book that had all these interesting things in it. So, you know, there's the two sides to it. It gets saved for us so that I can call what the British Library did to it the sort of vaguely derogative term mummification. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right.

Peter Murphy: I really understand that irony, but it does seem like it that it's important to register it. I went to the British Library; I went there several times to look at this book which was a neat experience. One time I went, I had done all the things I was supposed to. I had sent e-mail beforehand and presented my credentials and I had a little card and so on, but on this day, which is the last time I looked at it, they somehow the library just …  I just didn't seem legitimate enough to them.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: And I had to go speak to another person, you know, who is off in a different room. And this person was, you know, saying what I was doing, and this person actually said, looking at me, I guess, “you're a professor?” she said. And I thought, wow. All right. You know, in some ways I'm happy that somehow I could be misidentified as something maybe more interesting or glamorous than an English professor.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: But at the same time, what is it about me that makes me seem like a person who shouldn't be allowed to look at this ancient manuscript? They did eventually let me do it, but they made me wait like three hours just to make sure is was [inaudible]. 

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Oh, God. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's also really interesting about your book is that you sort of … you show what it took for someone to gain access to that book and in the 18th century, you write about Percy who was a self-made scholar, this kind of careerist guy who was great at introducing himself and seeming very important and making that a self-fulfilling prophecy. And he is the person who actually finds – I mean, we're skipping over a whole lot of history here, but we're just gonna have to because of the time – but he's the first one to sort of reunite the idea of the poem with sort of the original manuscript of it.

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And so, you write that he marks up the book with this little code to basically indicate, okay, this is a manuscript that it comes from, this is a page in the original manuscript that it comes from.

Peter Murphy: Yep.

Helena de Groot: And so you write, at that point, that Percy decided to write in the book rather than, who knows, like write a paper about it or something because he couldn't … he didn't have the sense of institutions that would provide a continuous security that his paper with his findings would actually stay with the book, you know, so he thought, okay, let's just write in the book.

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And what I was wondering about, what your sense is about that. Now, the pendulum has swung in the completely other direction. We’re so reliant on our institutions and even just the way that we digitize stuff, it seems like we're so confident that these digital copies, that they're gonna be around or that we’ll even … we’ll always have the capacity to read them.

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like we do too much of that? That we're risking our heritage in a way?

Peter Murphy: Well, you know, there'll be other people who'll be much smarter about that. But my instinct is yes, certainly. I'm not the only person who has noticed things like the wonderful interest that's available, for instance, in the letters of people who lived in the past. So, where is that information gonna be? Will that be on hand? It's all in e-mail now, actually, it's in text or no, I don't know what it's in. It's in a tweet that disappeared. I don’t know, it's a beautiful insight available through the history of this manuscript, this book sort of calmly … it's a stack of paper that survives for five hundred years.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: And it just does. It survives the unbelievable and bitter carnage of the Tudor world, it survives its owner getting his head cut off, that is Thomas Wyatt's son got his head cut off in the rebellion against Queen Mary. And then it just wanders around, it ends up in a family library, we might think of a family library as a place that's, I don't know, sort of unofficial and dangerous, but that turns out to be an incredibly secure location for it, even though people are using it for all kinds of other things.

Helena de Groot: Mm hmm.

Peter Murphy: And so, it just makes its way in one way or another. And so, there's something about the survival of a physical object in the story about the poem that I find really … it's just kind of great. It's because it was an object. That means it could have gotten lost and it's because it was an object that it didn't get lost. And so, there's something really beautiful about that story, that it's just some paper. And yet, this stack of paper, you can go see it today, if you have the right credentials and if they believe you.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) If you look professorial.

Peter Murphy: (LAUGHS) Yeah, if you look professorial enough.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah. You write somewhere that the study of literature for you has always been connected to the study of everything.

Peter Murphy: Hmm.  

Helena de Groot: And I really love that. I mean, it's so true about your book and it made me think about those kinds of books that are like The History of Sand or something like that or The History of Paper or whatever. It’s of course, it's not just the history of sand. It's the history about human beings and sand, it's just sort of the excuse.

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Why do you prefer to do it through poems?

Peter Murphy: Well, I think for one thing, I think that when I began this book which … in the year 2000, right, it's a really long time ago actually, from a personal point of view.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: I think that there was actually a surge of the kind of books that you mentioned. And I really liked those books. I was really interested in them. And so that feels like a kind of accurate observation about, in some ways, the source of the shape of the idea. (LAUGHS) Roland Barthes, the French literary critic, has this neat moment at the beginning of a book called S/Z where he talks about a certain Buddhist practice of conjuring a landscape out of the skin of a bean, and it feels a little bit like that, that you take a little bean and you conjure the whole world out of it.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Peter Murphy: But I think that doing such a project with a poem, some of the satisfaction of it is that a poem is about human beings. And, you know, even this poem, it’s written so long ago. The sum of the interest of this poem is that it was written by Thomas Wyatt, who is a courtier in the court of Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn got her head chopped off and the story of Anne Boleyn is a bizarre and interesting and terrifying one. And so, it’s just that to tell a kind of extended story about this aspect of English-speaking culture using a poem, it just allows you to talk about the pains and pleasures of being a person at every moment, in essence. And so, as I was working on it, my feeling was like who wouldn't want to write a book like this? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Murphy: I mean, it's just the perfect thing because, for one thing, anything could be absorbed into it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Murphy: So, for almost 20 years, everything I thought was … I would think, can this go in in the book? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yes.

Peter Murphy: Oh, here's something about ink. Well, maybe I should write a thing about ink. And the lives of people are so interesting and the attempt to imagine the intimate texture of lives of people who lived long ago is both interesting and I think really good for us. And the record, to think about the long history of people trying to assemble their inner life, just that daily struggle that we have. (LAUGHS) You wake up and you think, wow, what a great day, I'm doing so great today. By afternoon, it's like, gosh, what a terrible day …

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Peter Murphy: … I really feel I've lost control, the thread of my life has just now frayed. And then the next day, you're feeling good again. To be able to talk about that texture over this long period, it just was so rewarding. It was so rewarding and so interesting that when I finished this project, I was sad. I mean, I was like, gosh, I wish there was more history. Is there a century I forgot about that I could, you know, just go backwards and think about more?

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Peter Murphy is the author of The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem: Reading and Remembering Thomas Wyatt. Before that, he wrote a book about the tension between poetry as art or livelihood focused on the Romantic poets. That book is titled Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain: 1760-1830. He’s a professor at the English Department of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts and got his education at Johns Hopkins and Yale. He’s currently at work on a book about storytelling, but he warned me that it could be another twenty years. You can find “They Flee From Me” and more poems by Thomas Wyatt on the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. I hope you are still going strong. Thank you for listening.