To think about the relationship between my work as a medievalist and my writing as a poet is to run straight into the conundrum of the chicken and the egg. It’s also to think about birds—though parrots, hawks, and sparrows rather than hens. I wrote many of the poems in my first collection, A Grip on Thin Air, while simultaneously working on a doctoral thesis on the poetry of John Skelton (?1463–1529), a Tudor poet best known as a satirist, whose work includes the poems Ware the Hauke, Phyllyp Sparowe, and Speke Parott. As a would-be academic, I was teasing out Skelton’s idiosyncratic definitions of poetry, his difficult relationship with the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, and the precise significance of his repeated assertion that poets are divinely inspired. At the same time, I was fascinated by details of his biography—especially his period as Rector of Diss, in Norfolk, which he seems to have experienced as a form of exile—and by the question “why so many birds?” Neither of these seemed helpful to the thesis; instead, I addressed them in two linked poems, “Skelton at Diss” and “Skelton and the Birds,” both of which envisage him as a figure haunted by the sense that neither his life nor his poetic ability is fully under his control. In “Skelton and the Birds,” he stands by the Thames as a flock of imaginary birds slips away from him; in “Skelton at Diss,” a mysterious corpse discovered in the mere at Diss gives rise to fears that he is losing his faith as well as his poetry:

I enjoyed creating these imaginary narratives—but ultimately they weren’t quite satisfying. Just as, in Speke Parott, Parrot ventriloquises not only a dazzling array of literary, Scriptural, and proverbial sources but also, ultimately, Skelton himself, my poems were using Skelton as an alter ego as much as they were thinking about his own life and work.Footnote ² In both ways, they felt slightly superficial.

In later books, there are several poems that now seem to me to fuse creative and critical practices more effectively. One of these is “A Room of One’s Own,” written at a desk under the window in the first study that was unequivocally mine, where I was also writing an article on Stephen Hawes’s long, allegorical poem The Pastime of Pleasure (1509) and a review of Deryn Rees Jones for the TLS. Especially at night, when reflections of lampshade and door frame and bookcase were superimposed on the long dark view down the garden, shifting slightly with the movement of the trees, my physical space and the mental space in which I was trying out new combinations of ideas seemed coterminous; seeing my own face, too, gazing back at me from outside, I felt both like the lady who is the object of the quest, high in her tower, and like the knight who quests for her. These images sprang directly from Hawes, whose protagonist, Grand Amour, is educated specifically as a poet; his lady, Pucelle, hovers on the edge of standing for his muse, even for Poetry itself. Writing about this convergence, I didn’t want to use Hawes as a pseudo-autobiographical figure, as I had with Skelton, but instead to capture the experience of being so fully in the moment whilst also working with old materials—with archetypes—and realising the new truth of them:

Reading this again today, what most strikes me is that quotation: “By worde the worlde was made orygynally.” I’ve recently become interested in the role played by “given” phrases (such as quotations, proverbs, clichés, and self-repetitions) in the process of poetic composition—and it strikes me that this line of Hawes’s succinctly expresses what that role is. Enacting what it describes, it suggests that there is no matter without words. This is something that I’m now exploring academically, in a book with the working title The Thing in the Mind: Memory, Untranslatability and Poetic Practice. It teases out the primacy of word over matter in the work of a number of late-medieval poets, bringing their work into conversation with modern theories that define lyric by its privileging of the material and punningly playful qualities of language over its communicative ones. This is the first time I’ve directly acknowledged the extent to which my academic work is inflected by my poetic practice, and it feels almost illegitimate to do so. Even so, the two have always been inextricable. Reading other poets, whether medieval or modern, I intuit very quickly how a poem works as a structure, both formally and aurally. I also read with my antennae out for words or phrases containing multiple meanings that are simultaneously brought into play. It’s the literary equivalent of gazing down through layers of water to the bottom of the harbour—a suspension of linear analysis whose effect is neatly captured by Stanley Corngold when he writes of the process of translation that: “This play of languages issues forth into languagelessness and a patient abiding in the place where language-is-about-to-be. Comparison reacquaints us … with the sense of the Ursprung or ‘origin’ of articulated thought.”Footnote ⁴

Corngold is writing of literal translation from one language into another, but the state of negative capability that he identifies also applies to the metaphorical act of translation that is writing a poem. It applies, too, to the reverse translation that is reading a poem—where “reading” does not mean paraphrasing, but rather restoring the words on the page to their condition of potential, listening through or beyond the literal sense of the words for what they evoke aurally or connotatively. To illustrate how this kind of reading might work in practice, here’s a poem of Thomas Wyatt’s:

Before fully engaging with this, let’s start with the obvious. Reduced to an outline, it is a poem “about” self-reliance. The speaker begins by invoking “Senec” and “Plato” as authors whose stoic teaching provides a way of resisting the deceptive delights of eros, yet it swiftly appears that it is not philosophy but the “sherpe repulce” of love itself that prompts him to change his ways; the vindictive comparison of the poet’s lovers to “rotten boughs” in the final line, with its implication that they too are (venereally) diseased, confirms that he is far from having achieved a position of disinterested detachment.Footnote ⁶ Then, considered formally, the poem is an end-rhymed sonnet in decasyllabic verse with four main stresses per line.Footnote ⁷ But reading with antennae out, it’s possible to identify alternative sound patterns based on internal rhyme and assonance. There is pronounced alliteration, including “welth” and “wit” (line 4), repeated /s/ sounds (line 6) and /th/ and /t/ sounds (lines 12-13). And there are also other, more idiosyncratic aural patterns. Within just the first three lines, “ffarewell,” “all,” “shall,” “tangill,” and “call” echo one another, as do “idill” (line 11), “britill” (line 12), and “all” (line 13). The vowel sounds and /c/ consonant of “perfaict” (line 4) recall those of “senec” (line 3), while the first-person pronoun “I” (line 5) aurally anticipates “ay” (line 6), and “errour” and “perseuer” (both line 5) mirror one another. Similarly, “libertie” (line 8) harks forward to “me” (line 10), as does “yeuth” (line 11) to “lusteth” (line 14). Perhaps most curiously, the concluding rhyme “tyme” and “clyme” is pre-empted four lines earlier, in “clayme.” One of the main innovations that Wyatt makes to the sonnet form he inherits from Petrarch is the substitution of a final rhyming couplet for Petrarch’s interlaced rhyme across the sestet, yet the near-homonym of “clayme” and “clyme” resists the couplet’s potential to offer closure.

Bringing paraphrase and formal analysis together, we might say that Wyatt’s multiple sound-patterns create aural cross-purposes that mirror the speaker’s self-contradictions. But it’s not the consonance between form and content that interests me; it’s the way that Wyatt’s formal choices suggest that he is listening for the sound of the words as much as for their sense. Specifically, they suggest that he is haunted by the short lines and swiftly recurring end-rhymes of a native English lyric tradition that goes back at least to the early fourteenth century.Footnote ⁸ This is a form that he himself also uses frequently—as for example in the untitled poem that begins:

The pattern of this first stanza repeats throughout: each of the subsequent stanzas also contains lines of just two stresses and consists of a single grammatical sentence made up of two clauses, with the break between them falling at the end of the fourth line; each ends in the refrain word “libertie,” which therefore also provides a consistent c-rhyme across all stanzas. One effect of this structure is that rhyme and line-break serve as a form of punctuation—and it is this kind of aural articulation of parts that is reflected in the longer decasyllabic lines of “Ffarewell Love.” The palimpsestic patterning of the sonnet suggests that it witnesses an extended act of listening on Wyatt’s part: a dwelling between formal possibilities. Rather than giving metrical shape to a statement, he creates a multifaceted aural construct: one that doesn’t depend purely on end-rhyme, but on the play between end-rhyme and a series of unpredictable yet constant counterpoints. Its knottiness is the knottiness of his thought, but the reason his thought is knotty is not that it “expresses” his sense, but because it is inseparable from the material reality of the verse forms through which it is expressed.

Wyatt’s use of “libertie” as refrain word reflects an equivalent kind of dwelling between possibilities, but at the level of sense rather than form. Formally, the word consistently signals both the end of a stanza and the end of the statement it contains; by harking back to the final word of the fourth line, its rhyme reaffirms the effects of containment and conclusion. Yet this formal consistency masks pronounced variations in sense. On first appearance, in the stanza quoted above, “libertie” is used in the sense of an exalted indifference to everyday concerns. In the second stanza, it takes the sense of “libertinism”: the poet suffers because of his lover’s freedom with others. In the third, it fuses both senses; the poet lacks both mental freedom from care and the physical freedom to sleep with his mistress. In the fourth, loss of life is described as liberty in a parodically stoical sense: freedom from concern, but as the result of death, not of inner resourcefulness; the following stanza is equally paradoxical, positing the speaker’s liberty as something entirely in the gift of his lover. This play on the various senses of “libertie” might be brought to bear on the single use of the word in “Ffarewell Love,” revealing how its primary sense of mental liberty, or stoicism, is haunted by a range of alternative meanings that quiver just below the surface, complicating the speaker’s express desire for mental freedom because the language itself will not allow it. But the oxymoron of using “libertie” as a refrain word whose return is governed by rule itself also speaks to the innately material quality of Wyatt’s thought. Like the intrusive clayme/clyme assonance in “Ffarewell Love,” it is a formal choice that disrupts rather than expresses sense, enabling Wyatt’s readers to share the writer’s experience of suspension between different meanings, dwelling in the moment where multiple possibilities are held in play.

I began writing this piece thinking that what “reading as a poet” enabled was a unique understanding of a finished poem. Considering what I have written, I now suspect that equivalent interpretations could be achieved by other means.Footnote ¹⁰ What does seem to me distinctive, though, is the process on which my interpretation depends—an act of listening that privileges potential over finality—which in turn enables the perception that Wyatt himself engaged in an equivalent act of listening. It’s probably no coincidence that he is the writer who gave me the title for my book; I adapted the phrase “the thing in the mind” from his poem “My mothers maydes,” in which he exhorts his reader:

Although Wyatt is here, again, thinking about self-reliance, he uses both language and verse forms in a way that renders them, too, “things” that can be felt both in his mind and in those of his readers, so that this philosophical statement is also key to his poetics—and to my own. Or so it seems. And this brings us back to the question of chicken and egg: does my way of reading late-medieval poetry spring from my own writing habits, or the other way around? But that may not be the right question. What matters is the understanding that theory and practice are bound in an endless knot, and that their connection is less in the material thought about than in the material thought with. Or: what matters is the understanding of world as made from word, with the result that (as another poet put it), it is “crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.”Footnote ¹²