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Whoso List to Hunt Summary & Analysis
by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Whoso List to Hunt Summary & Analysis
by Sir Thomas Wyatt

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind”

1Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

2But as for me, hélas, I may no more.

3The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

4I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

5Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

6Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

7Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,

8Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

9Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

10As well as I may spend his time in vain.

11And graven with diamonds in letters plain

12There is written, her fair neck round about:

13Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

14And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Introduction

    • “Whoso List to Hunt” is a Petrarchan sonnet written by Sir Thomas Wyatt. It is partially a translation and partially an imitation of Francesco Petrarch’s Sonnet 190. It was likely written in the 1530s or 1540s, making it one of the first sonnets written in English. It is thus an important precursor to some of the most significant poems in the history of English literature, including Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Like those poems, “Whoso List to Hunt” is about love; its speaker describes love as a desperate and violent pursuit, in which a man attempts to hunt down the woman he loves. This pursuit has failed, so the speaker spends the poem explaining why he is giving up the hunt.

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Summary

    • If anyone wants to go hunting, I know where you can find a deer. But, alas, I cannot keep hunting. The pointless pursuit has left me so exhausted that I'm all the way at the back of the group of hunters who are going after the deer. Even so, I cannot stop my tired mind from pursuing the deer, and so as she runs away I follow her, almost fainting. I am giving up, since trying to catch her is like trying to catch the wind in a net. If anyone wants to hunt her, let me assure you, you will be wasting your time, just like me. There is written in diamonds in easy-to-read letters around her beautiful neck, “Don’t touch me, for I belong to Caesar, and I am wild, though I seem like I'm tame.”

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Themes

    • Theme Lust and Violence

      Lust and Violence

      “Whoso List to Hunt” is a poem about unrequited love, but it’s not exactly romantic. The speaker describes pursuing a woman (rumored to be Anne Boleyn, with whom Wyatt had an affair in real life) and uses an extended metaphor to convey the dynamics of their relationship: it's like hunting a deer he can’t catch. The poem portrays love as a violent sport, just like hunting. Though “Whoso List to Hunt” can be read as an eloquent expression of devotion, it also hints that such devotion is threatening, even violent, to its object (that is, to the woman being “hunted”).

      The poem begins by comparing love to a “hunt.” The male speaker is a hunter (one of several hunters, in fact), while the woman he pursues is compared to a “hind”—a deer. She is the animal being hunted. The speaker portrays himself as exceptionally dedicated to this woman—or, at least, exceptionally dedicated to pursuing her. He has chased her to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. The poem itself constitutes an extended admission of defeat: the speaker admits that he cannot catch the woman, and he challenges other men to try their hand at pursuing her, confident that they will end up as exhausted and dejected as he is. The poem is thus a testament to the depth of the speaker’s love—and the extent of his frustration.

      But the extended metaphor he uses betrays something darker in the poem. The reader might pause and imagine what would happen if the speaker were to catch the “hind.” Metaphorically, at least, he would kill her. On the one hand, it is just a metaphor: one imagines that the literal results would be somewhat less violent. But on the other hand, the metaphor still reveals something important about the speaker: he does not quite separate sexuality from violence. He thinks the two are similar enough that one might reasonably be compared to the other. The poem’s expression of devotion is thus thrown in shadow by the terms the speaker uses to express his devotion.

      The poem also suggests that the woman he pursues (the “hind”) stands above or apart from the violent sexuality that the speaker describes. In the final lines of the poem, he notes that the words noli me tangere are inscribed on a necklace around her neck—“Do not touch me.” This is arguably an allusion to Jesus saying “touch me not” to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection. It casts the woman as something purer--or even holier--than the men pursuing her, beyond their brute and violent physicality. Thus, even as the poem celebrates the speaker’s unrequited love, it expresses a rather frightening vision of that love. And, in the figure of the woman he pursues, it also presents an alternate model of sexuality and love.

    • Theme Agency, Gender, and Control

      Agency, Gender, and Control

      The extended metaphor of “Whoso List to Hunt” proscribes strict roles to the speaker and to the woman he pursues: his job is to conquer, while her job is to flee. Wyatt’s poem doesn’t challenge gender roles within his society. Instead it reinforces them: the speaker’s comparison of love to a hunt dramatically limits the possibilities for women, who are relegated to the status of animals or even property.

      The woman at the heart of “Whoso List to Hunt,” however, refuses to be captured. She thus upsets, and perhaps subverts, the speaker’s expectations about how love should work, and finds a measure of agency within the constraints the speaker places on her. However, the poem calls into question even this freedom by suggesting that the woman might belong to another, more powerful, man—and thus has no choice but to refuse the speaker’s advances.

      The woman whom the speaker pursues so obsessively doesn’t have much opportunity to shape the dynamics of their encounter—or, indeed, to refuse that encounter altogether. Her choices are, metaphorically at least, to flee or be killed. For the speaker, then, men take an active role and women a passive role in relationships: that of pursuer and pursued. Within these constraints, the woman finds a kind of power in refusing to be caught. She evades the speaker with such skill that he is forced to give up the hunt. Though she is still acting within a role that he creates for her, she nonetheless finds a way to shape their dynamic so that she can have some control over it.

      In the final lines of the poem, however, the speaker calls into question even this limited form of agency, revealing a key detail about the “hind” he pursues. This is the first time in the poem he has described her in any detail at all, and it is notably only in relation to another man: she has a diamond necklace around her neck, and the diamonds spell out the Latin phrase noli me tangere. This is, in part, an allusion to the Roman author Solinus. According to Solinus, white stags found in the Roman empire 300 years after Caesar’s death had the words Noli me tangere, Caesaris sum inscribed on their collars. The Latin words translate to, “Do not touch me, I am Caesar’s.” They express, in other words, that the emperor owns the stags—even long after his death. They cannot be hunted by anyone else.

      Similarly, the allusion to the phrase in “Whoso List to Hunt” suggests that the deer at the center of the poem has already been captured and in fact belongs to a powerful person. According to traditional interpretations of the poem, this person was King Henry the VIII, whom Wyatt served as an ambassador and courtier; the woman in question was Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife—a woman with whom Wyatt allegedly had an affair before she became queen. However, one need not resort to biographical speculation to understand the import of the allusion. Though the speaker suggests throughout the poem that he cannot capture the “hind” because she is so skillful and fleet of foot, he finally reveals that the real reason is that she has already been marked as off-limits by a powerful man.

      Though the poem largely presents the hind as possessing a strong capacity to refuse and elude the men her pursue her, the final lines of the poem suggest that this agency is not entirely her own: she possesses it because she is already under another man’s control. Women, then, the poem suggests, can never be truly free; any relative freedom they find comes only in the form of protection by men.

    • Theme Unrequited Love

      Unrequited Love

      The speaker of “Whoso List to Hunt” pursues his “hind” with considerable energy and devotion. Indeed, he does so even though he knows that the task is pointless. While he describes his hunt as a painful and frustrating experience, he nonetheless seems to derive real pleasure from the act of pursuing his beloved. The speaker thus offers a complex, ambivalent portrait of love. For him, love is a matter of obsession: a fixation sustained by unhealthy devotion. For this speaker, part of the thrill of love lies in the chase itself, even though that chase can lead only to frustration.

      The speaker of “Whoso List to Hunt” begins the poem by declaring defeat. He cannot catch the “hind” he has pursued with such energy and devotion. He describes his pursuit of her as a kind of obsession. Though he knows the project is “vain,” he can “by no means [his] wearied mind / Draw from the deer.” That is, he can't stop thinking about her; his mind, though tired, keeps hunting no matter what. Indeed, the task itself is pointless: it is, he notes in line 8, like trying to catch the wind in a net. Yet he continues to pursue her, even to the point of “fainting”—even, that is, if doing so harms him physically. In this sense, unrequited love is portrayed as dangerous, obsessive, and frustrating.

      However, the speaker also seems to take a kind of pleasure in describing his pain and suffering: he is almost bragging about the extent of his devotion, the depths of his anguish in love. One wonders whether he would enjoy pursuing a woman who did not refuse him, who did not drive him to despair. (And one also wonders whether he would bother to write a poem about such a love.) The speaker thus seems to suggest that part of the thrill of any love is the chase—of wanting what you can’t have.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind”

    • Line 1

      Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

      "Whoso List to Hunt" opens with a bold pronouncement from its speaker: if anyone out there wants ("lists") to go hunting, he knows where you can find a deer ("an hind"). The poem thus addresses its readers directly: the speaker seems to be inviting the reader to join the hunt. Through this use of apostrophe, the speaker positions his poem as a public statement: he is speaking to a broad, general audience, making a pronouncement. It will thus come as a surprise in the following lines when he describes, with almost obsessive detail, his feelings of despair and disappointment. In the first line of the poem, the reader does not yet receive any hints about the speaker's failure in his hunt; instead, it reads almost like a boast.

      However, the speaker does use this first line to set up the extended metaphor that structures the poem: though this poem is outwardly about hunting, its real subject is love—passionate, unrequited love. The speaker does not yet give the reader any concrete clues that the poem is about anything other than hunting--that will come in the following lines. But the speaker's use of sound in the first line sets the stage for some of the dynamics that will gradually unfold over the rest of the poem. For instance, the first line of the poem contains consonance: "hunt" and "hind." (The difference between /nt/ and /nd/ is slight, particularly in spoken English). The consonance punctuates the line's two clauses, marking the close of each, and it also suggests a relationship between them. That is, the "hind" exists in this poem to be hunted: she has no existence outside of the hunt. The consonance between the two words reinforces that limitation on her freedom, her agency.

      More broadly, the sound of the first line is rich, with strong alliteration in "hunt" and "hind" (which reinforces the link between the two words) and in "whoso" and "where." The speaker is showing off, demonstrating his literary skill—fittingly enough. "Whoso List to Hunt" was one of the first sonnets to be written in English, so it makes sense that the poet is trying to show his readers that one can write sonnets in English--that the language is capable of literary beauty. In doing so, he makes an allusion to one of the most prominent and prestigious writers of sonnets, Francesco Petrarch, who popularized the form in the 14th century: "Whoso List to Hunt" is an elaborate rewriting of Petrarch 190. As Wyatt brings the sonnet into English, he uses English meter: "Whoso List to Hunt" is in iambic pentameter, a meter developed by the English poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer, working from French models. However, Wyatt writes at a period early in the development of English meter, and his meter accordingly lacks the polish that one finds in later writers. The first line of the poem is metrically ambiguous, even confused. (Most plausibly, it could be scanned as an anapest followed by four iambs). Though this metrical confusion likely reflects the poet's relative lack of sophistication, it also suggests the speaker's confusion and distress—which becomes the subject of the following lines.

    • Lines 2-4

      But as for me, 
      hélas
      , I may no more.
      The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
      I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

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    • Lines 5-8

      Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
      Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
      Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
      Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

    • Lines 9-10

      Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
      As well as I may spend his time in vain.

    • Lines 11-14

      And graven with diamonds in letters plain
      There is written, her fair neck round about:
      Noli me tangere
      , for Caesar's I am,
      And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Symbols

    • Symbol Hind

      Hind

      The "hind"—the deer that the speaker pursues, fruitlessly, and that symbolizes the woman he desires—is a potent and suggestive symbol in western literature. The animals were sacred to the Roman goddess Diana (Artemis, in Greek mythology), and because Diana was chaste, a virgin goddess, they were often associated with chastity and virginity. This makes the speaker's extended metaphor particularly apt: he compares this woman, so successful in her refusals, to an animal which is already associated with refusal and resistance to sexuality.

      Furthermore, some scholars have seen an allusion to the myth of Actaeon in the poem. A hunter, Actaeon stumbled on Diana bathing in the woods. In retribution, the goddess turned him into a stag—and his hunting dogs devoured him. If there is an allusion to Actaeon in the poem, it suggests a kind of lingering anxiety on the part of the speaker: he fears the power of the woman he pursues, perhaps worrying she might inflict such a punishment upon him. However, this allusion remains faint—though it would've likely been in the back of early readers' minds, it is not explicitly summoned in the poem. (By contrast, Petrarch's 190—Wyatt's source for "Whoso List to Hunt"--is much more explicit in its invocation of the Actaeon myth).

      Finally, the Latin author Solinus claims that 300 years after Caesar's death all the white stags in Rome still had the words "Noli me tangere" ("Don't touch me") inscribed on their collars—marking them as the dead emperor's property. As a symbol, the deer calls to mind this kind of eternal ownership, and indeed the speaker explicitly places her within it in line 13. It seems, then, that the hind symbolizes not only women's status as objects to be pursued, but also the way that men effectively own them in escapable ways.

    • Symbol Wind

      Wind

      The speaker of "Whoso List to Hunt" does not have a literal net, nor is he literally trying to capture the wind. Rather, the wind in line 8 is another symbol for the woman the speaker is pursuing--and an important one, since it is one of the very few places in the poem where the speaker directly describes her.

      As a symbol, the wind suggests that she is unusually swift and unusually capable of escaping: even the tools designed to catch her (like the net) cannot hold her. She thus appears as a powerful and crafty figure, almost supernatural in her ability to evade capture. Though the speaker does not provide substantial information about the woman he pursues in the poem, the symbol allows the reader to grasp some of her power. Tellingly, though, wind is also insubstantial, a characteristic that hints at the later revelation that the woman is actually owned by another man, rather than evading the speaker through her own individual strength.

    • Symbol Diamonds

      Diamonds

      In line 11, the speaker provides a surprising detail: the "hind" he's been pursuing has a collar around her neck (even though she's "wild"), and that collar has a message written on it in diamonds. It is likely that these diamonds are literal—as literal as anything can be in a poem like "Whoso List to Hunt," which uses an extended metaphor to explore love and desire. But the diamonds also serve as a symbol of luxury and wealth. They suggest that whoever put the collar on the "hind" is both wealthy and powerful--rich enough to use diamonds on a collar for a wild deer. Furthermore, diamonds are very hard.

      They are thus symbols of permanence and endurance. They suggest the power of Caesar (or, more likely, another powerful man similar to Caesar) over the "hind" is not transitory: it will endure long past the speaker's patience—indeed, past his life time. As a symbol, the diamonds thus serve to reinforce the sense that some other man—through his power and wealth—has permanently blocked the speaker's access to the "hind."

    • Symbol Caesar

      Caesar

      "Caesar" was the name of the first two Roman emperors, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. (And later it became a title that all Roman emperors used.) The name thus serves as a symbol for political power. Although the speaker plays on a tradition—which holds that 300 years after the death of the first Caesar, all the white stags in Rome still wore collars proclaiming that they belonged to the dead emperor—he also invokes the Roman emperors as a way of characterizing the man who has assumed control over the "hind." This man is someone of considerable power, and thus someone who the speaker must be careful to avoid offending.

      Even more specifically, the symbol of Caesar may represent King Henry VIII himself, who was married to a woman (Anne Boleyn) whom Wyatt was rumored to love. In either case, the symbolic use of the name Caesar makes clear the fruitlessness of the speaker's pursuit of the "hind:" she belongs now to someone very powerful, whose authority the speaker cannot contest.

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Enjambment

      "Whoso List to Hunt" employs enjambment sparingly. The first four lines of the poem are all end-stopped, creating a kind of regularity and deliberateness to the organization of the poem as the speaker gives out instructions to his fellow hunters. This creates a sense of measured control—it sounds like the speaker has accepted the reality that he's never going to catch this deer (a.k.a. the woman he loves), and has resigned himself to trailing behind the other hunters and doling out thoughtful advice. However, that regularity dissolves in lines 5 and 6, both of which are enjambed.

      Here, the speaker's thoughts detach from the line. These enjambments closely mimic the speaker's mood: they convey his anxiety, his sense of exhaustion and frustration. The calm resignation of the earlier lines might just have been a brave face. In these lines, it's as though the speaker's true feelings break through—and in his exasperation he's foregone the calm, controlled tone he'd been using up until now.

      The enjambment reflects the specific content of these lines, in which the speaker says that under no circumstances can he stop his pursuit and that no matter how tired he gets, where the deer goes he must follow. The speaker can't help but trail after the deer despite knowing that it's a hopeless hunt, and the structure of the lines mimics that sense of helpless following. The enjambment encourages readers to push on seamlessly from one line to the next for the conclusion of the speaker's thoughts, much the like speaker himself is pulled along by his desperate desire for the deer.

    • End-Stopped Line

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    • Caesura

    • Refrain

    • Metaphor

    • Extended Metaphor

    • Allusion

    • Apostrophe

    • Personification

    • Alliteration

    • Consonance

    • Assonance

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Whoso
    • List
    • Hind
    • Hélas
    • Travail
    • Draw
    • Sithens
    • Graven
    • Noli me tangere
    • Caesar
    Whoso

    • "Whoso" is now an obsolete word. It can mean either "whoever" or "if anyone." Wyatt most likely uses the word in the first sense here. In combination with the next word, "list," then, the opening clause of the poem might be summarized as: "Whoever wants to hunt" or "If anyone out there is interested in hunting." The word is broad enough that the speaker might be directly addressing a specific, contained group of people—or he might be speaking to a bigger audience, like the general public.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind”

    • Form

      “Whoso List to Hunt” is a Petrarchan sonnet. Its author, Sir Thomas Wyatt, is widely credited as the first poet to write sonnets in English. The sonnet began as a form of popular song, sung in medieval Italian taverns and festivals. But, thanks largely to the poet Francesco Petrarch, it eventually became one of the most popular and prestigious forms of poetry, with sonnets and sonnet sequences written across Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. England, however, was one of the last places to adopt the form. Wyatt introduced it to the language in the 1530s and 1540s by translating and imitating Petrarch’s sonnets. (“Whoso List to Hunt” is a rewriting of Petrarch 190).

      Wyatt closely follows the form of Petrarch’s poem. Though Petrarchan sonnets are often one stanza, they can be divided into two parts within that single stanza: an initial eight lines, called the octave, and a final six lines, called the sestet.

      Traditionally, the first eight lines of the sonnet lay out an argument or a scenario; the final six lines complicate that argument or add nuance to the scenario. The pivot between the octave and the sestet is called the volta, or the turn: it's the place where the poem pivots, changes its mind, or begins to dispute its own premises.

      Wyatt’s poem follows this formula. The first eight lines of the poem lay out a scenario: the speaker is a hunter who has been pursuing a single deer with obsessive energy; he’s giving up the chase, though, because the deer is too quick for him to catch. The final six lines complicate that scenario, explaining why he can’t catch the deer: she already belongs to another man, a powerful person. Lines 9 and 10 serve as a kind of volta, reiterating the poem's first line, though they don't add as much complication or nuance as a traditional volta might; rather, they simply underscore just how desperate the speaker's quest has become.

    • Meter

      “Whoso List to Hunt” is in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter became—partially due to Wyatt’s influence—the standard meter for sonnets in English. (Other languages use different meters. For example, most French sonnets are written in iambic hexameter). Wyatt likely chose the meter because the popular 14th century poet Geoffery Chaucer used it in his work. (Chaucer had adapted the meter for English from French models). In his choice of meter, then, Wyatt signals his affiliation with an emerging canon of English poetry. He is eager to position his own poem as a contribution to and extension of that canon, building the prestige of English poetry—at a time when many readers in England and in continental Europe looked down on poems written in English.

      However, because Wyatt wrote at a moment early in the development of English meter, it sometimes plays out imperfectly here. Although he writes in recognizable iambic pentameter, the poem is peppered with strange metrical substitutions. For example, the first line begins in metrical ambiguity. It might be best scanned as an anapest followed by four iambs:

      Whoso list | to hunt, | I know | where is | an hind

      But the line is metrically ambiguous. It could also be scanned as a series of trochees that gradually settle into an iambic rhythm in the second line:

      Whoso | list to | hunt, I | know where | is an hind
      But as | for me, | hélas, | I may | no more.

      Each scanning is plausible (though the first is more elegant and better fits the poem's syntax). The confusion is only multiplied by line 9, which closely echoes line 1:

      Who list | her hunt, | I put | him out | of doubt

      Though the line is strongly iambic, it complicates the scanning of the first line; there is a kind of broken symmetry between the two lines' meters that further clouds the reader's sense of the poem's rhythm.

      Wyatt's meter is not the kind of strong, polished meter one expects in the opening line of a sonnet. Instead of establishing a compelling rhythm for the poem, the poem begins in confusion and uncertainty—fittingly for a poem about exhaustion and despair. Though it is tempting to read the metrical oddities of Wyatt’s poem as evidence of a lack of sophistication and skill, the strained meter of “Whoso List to Hunt” may also reveal important things about the speaker’s desperate and unsteady mental condition.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      “Whoso List to Hunt” is a Petrarchan sonnet—one of the first ever written in English. It closely follows the expected rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet. Its first eight lines form one group of rhymes and its final six lines take on a different scheme. The rhyme scheme overall follows this pattern:

      ABBAABBACDDCEE

      The first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet always rhyme ABBAABBA. The rhymes in the first section of this poem are simple and direct: Wyatt rhymes with one-syllable words most of the time. The repetition of just two rhyme sounds gives these lines an obsessive quality, which closely mimics the speaker’s own obsession with the “hind.” Just the as the speaker “may…by no means [his] wearied mind / Draw from the deer,” so too is his mind caught up in these insistent, repeated rhyme sounds.

      Typically, the poet writing a Petrarchan sonnet has more freedom when rhyming in the final six lines, though there are established patterns—one of which Wyatt follows here. In the final six lines of "Whoso List to Hunt," the rhyme scheme shifts and three new rhyme sounds are introduced into the poem: CDDCEE.

      Again, the rhymes are simple and direct, almost all one-syllable words. (The rhyme in the poem’s final couplet may seem like a slant rhyme, but this is due to changes in pronunciation since Wyatt’s time: for Wyatt and his early readers, “am” and “tame” would’ve sounded like a perfect rhyme).

      The new rhyming sounds in this second part of the poem corresponds with a shift in the poem’s content: instead of focusing on his own feelings of exhaustion and frustration, the speaker turns his attention outward, describing the deer and her relationship with a powerful man, “Caesar.” The new sounds, then, mirror the broadening of the poem’s concern; in these lines, the speaker becomes willing to engage with the external world after his obsessive focus in the opening lines of the poem.

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Speaker

    • The speaker of “Whoso List to Hunt” is ostensibly an anonymous hunter. He has been pursuing a single deer for a long time—and, as he announces early in the poem, he is giving up hunting her: "I may no more. / The vain travail hath wearied me so sore..." He is frustrated, exhausted, and worst of all, he admits that the deer he seeks already belongs to someone else: a powerful person whom he calls “Caesar.”

      But the speaker of “Whoso List to Hunt” is not actually a hunter: rather, he uses hunting as an elaborate extended metaphor for love. He is a lover, someone pursuing a relationship with a woman who eludes him and refuses his advances. The metaphor reveals some interesting things about the speaker and his view of love. It suggests, for instance, that he has expectations about the way men and women will behave in love. Men are active; they pursue. Women are responsive; they flee. This metaphor also suggests that, in the speaker's eyes, love involves violence. Finally, it allows him to cautiously explain the reasons why he has been disappointed in love: the deer he seeks has already been captured by someone else. If the speaker is a lover, he is a lover who lives in close proximity to powerful and dangerous people, whom he must be careful not to offend. This strengthens the sense that the speaker is a political figure, someone who serves a ruler and seeks his favor. It further suggests that readers should treat the poem as a political instrument, part of the rituals of the English court, in which courtiers used poetry to curry favor and make subtle complaints to the king.

      Indeed, Wyatt himself was a prominent figure at Henry VIII's court and was involved intimately in the King's various love affairs and marriages. Accordingly, it's often rumored that the speaker of this poem is really Wyatt himself, who was said to have had an affair Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, before she became queen.

  • “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Setting

    • “Whoso List to Hunt” is, on its surface, a poem about hunting. It is thus most likely set in a wood or deer park (a part of the countryside fenced off so that aristocrats and royalty can use it to hunt). The poem does not focus on its setting, however; indeed, the speaker does not describe it all. This marks a significant shift from the poem’s source, Petrarch 190, which describes the “green grass” and the “laurel’s shade” where the speaker first encounters the “pure white hind” he pursues. Where Petrarch’s poem focuses on the external world, Wyatt’s focuses instead on the internal landscape: the despair and exhaustion the speaker feels after his long and fruitless pursuit.

      “Whoso List to Hunt” is, however, only outwardly about hunting; the hunt actually serves as an extended metaphor for the dangers and frustrations of pursuing love at court. The implied setting of the poem, the forest where the speaker hunts for the “hind,” is thus also a metaphor: a metaphor for court itself, perhaps even the court of King Henry VIII, in which Wyatt served. The speaker suggests that the court is a wild and uncivilized place, full of violent sports and desperate pursuits.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind”

      Literary Context

      Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt" is somewhere between a translation and a rewriting of "Una candida cerva sopra l'erba," by the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch was one of the earliest poets, alongside Dante, to write in his own language rather than Latin. Additionally, he is widely credited with taking the sonnet—a form that had previously mostly been used for drinking songs in Italian taverns—and turning it into an exalted, prestigious literary form. Over the course of his life, he wrote more than 300 sonnets, all in praise of a single woman, Laura. As he describes it in his sonnets, his love for Laura is passionate and ultimately unrequited.

      Wyatt is generally considered to be the first poet to bring the sonnet form into English. He did this by translating Petrarch's sonnets directly and by adapting, imitating, and loosely rewriting some of Petrarch's poems.

      In Petrarch’s original version of this poem, the speaker discovers a white deer in the forest and pursues her, even though he notes that "'Touch me not,' in diamonds and topaz, / was written round about her lovely neck." Petrarch's poem is also a kind of dream or vision: it ends with the speaker falling "into water, and she vanished." Wyatt adapts many of the details of Petrarch's poem: the beautiful deer, the necklace and its warning, the speaker who is part voyeur, part hunter. But he eliminates much of the dream imagery and focuses instead on the emotional and physical strain the speaker experiences as he pursues his beloved. The result is a much more physical, immediate poem.

      To modern eyes, it may seem that Wyatt has plagiarized much of his poem from Petrarch. However, in the context of Renaissance poetry, it was common—even expected—for poets to closely imitate other peoples' poems, particularly poems written by famous authors in the past. In doing so, Wyatt takes on some of Petrarch's prestige for himself and for English poetry, at a time when poetry written in the English language was not highly regarded. It is as though he's saying, "See! We can do this in English, too!"

      Historical Context

      Sir Thomas Wyatt lived in the early part of the 16th century in England—a time of considerable political turmoil. In 1532, King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church, making England a nominally Protestant country. The reasons why he did so are complex, but they include at their center the king's desire for a divorce from his wife, Catherine of Aragon—a divorce the Pope refused to grant. Once England had split from the Catholic Church, Henry divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn, an English noblewoman, in 1533. (The marriage lasted only three years; she was executed in 1536).

      Wyatt was at the center of this political storm. He came from a prominent political family, served as an ambassador to Rome (where he may have encountered Petrarch's sonnets), and was a close friend of Anne Boleyn's. Indeed, many have speculated that Wyatt and Anne Boleyn had an affair in the 1520s, prior to her marriage to the king; if this was really the case, it's possible that "Whoso List to Hunt" is about Wyatt's relationship with Boleyn—and about his frustration at losing her to the king.

      Whether these biographical speculations are accurate or not, poetry played an important role in political life at the English court. Courtiers would recite poems to win favor from the king (and later the queen); they would also use them to express personal and political grievances indirectly, without offending the king. This was an important and difficult project during Henry VIII's reign—he was a famously difficult and moody king who often lashed out against those who served him. Wyatt's poem expresses a sense of exhaustion and insecurity that may reflect a frustration with the arbitrary moods and rules of Henry's court. But the poem does not challenge those rules; it is an admission of defeat, not an expression of defiance.

  • More “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” Resources

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