Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade Andrew Marvell The Garden How is the Led Zeppelin classic Stairway to Heaven connected with Venice? Or with gardens or deer or Henry VIII? All In Green Went My Love Riding takes its title from the eponymous poem by ee cummings. It’s a self-conscious imitation of a medieval lyric in which the speaker’s beloved sets out on a dappled morning of gold-green shade in pursuit of a pack of curiously mutable deer. It ends with the death of the heart. The chase is a common and highly malleable metaphor for love and desire in Renaissance poetry, in which the lover can figure as both hunter and quarry. In English, a deer is also a “hart”: fleet, evasive, wounded, submissive, alluring as the poet chooses to render it (and often very boring too, as any student who has been made to parse the excruciating word-play of the deer-hunt scene in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost can testify). Cummings’s poem is also a meditation on colour. An early draft of the work in the Ransom Archive at the University of Texas sets out his original chromatic scheme for the piece as follows, where the elements of the rhyme scheme each represent a particular colour: 1 2 3 4 5 6 a-Green a-Green b-Gold b-Gold c-Silver c-Silver b-Gold a-Green a-Green a-Silver c-Silver b-Gold These colours are echoed in a much earlier Italian poem, Petrarch’s fourteenth century Candida Cerva, and in turn of the English poet Thomas Wyatt’s transmutation of the work, Whoso List to Hunt. A comparison of the two pieces begins to answer the question posed above. Both describe an encounter between the poem’s speaker and a deer. In Petrarch’s rendering, the golden horned deer is found in an enclosed garden, an hortus conclusus between two silver rivers (the Canale Giudecca and the Canale Grande?) on a sparkling spring morning. The lyric concludes with the injunction “Nessun mi tochi”-touch me not. The words echo Christ’s command in John 20:17 “Noli mi tangere”. Petrarch’s deer is a religious allegory. She is untouchable because she is given to the Lord. Her lack of freedom is, paradoxically, a liberation from earthly desire, from the yearnings of the flesh. She exists in a spiritual realm, the gold and silver colours of her collar signifying her purity. Una candida cerva sopra l’erba «Nessun mi tocchi – al bel collo d’intorno verde m’apparve, con duo corna d’oro, scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi – : fra due riviere, all’ombra di un alloro, libera farmi al mio Cesare parve». levando ’l sole a la stagione acerba. Et era ’l sol già vòlto al mezzo giorno, Era sua vista sì dolce superba, gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi, ch’i’ lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro quand’io caddi ne l’acqua, et ella sparve. come l’avaro che ’n cercar tesoro con diletto l’affanno disacerba. 1 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini, 2 vols., Torin (...) Wyatt’s version does something else entirely: Who so list to hount, I knowe where is an hynde, Who list her hount, I put him owte of dowbte, But as for me, helas, I may no more: As well as I may spend his tyme in vain: The vayne travail hath weried me so sore. And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain I am of theim that farthest commeth behinde; There is written her faier neck rounde abowte Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde Noli me tangere, for Cesars I ame; Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore, And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame.4 Faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore, Sins in a nett I seke to hold the wynde. 4 Muir, The Collected Poems cit., p The diamonds about the neck of Wyatt’s deer signify a very different kind of possession. Thomas Wyatt left England in 1527 on a diplomatic mission to Italy on behalf of King Henry VIII. The itinerary included Rome, Bologna and Venice, where Wyatt was received by the Doge, Andrea Gritti. His departure was expedient in that he had formed an attachment to Anne Boleyn, whom the king himself had begun to woo the previous year. In Wyatt’s rendering of Petrarch, the deer is Anne, the possession of Caesar, and the poet himself the despairing, exhausted hunter who trails hopelessly and helplessly in her careless wake. Petrarch’s liberation from the flesh becomes in Wyatt a carnal prison. There is no garden, no optimistic springtime, and, unlike Petrarch’s deer, Wyatt’s cannot be held. Her collar sparkles with menace, with warning. When Anne Boleyn was put on trial (and ultimately beheaded) for treasonous adultery less than a decade later, Wyatt was the only one of her alleged lovers to escape with his own head. Anne’s lutenist, a young man named Mark Smeaton, was unique amongst the accused in that he pleaded guilty. Smeaton’s compositions for Anne included a version of Greensleeves (later and erroneously attributed to the king himself). The set of the piece is the passamezzo antico, a ground bass chord popular in renaissance music and attributed to Giacomo de Gorzarin, a blind lutenist active in Trieste at the time of Wyatt’s visit. “Alas my love you do me wrong Greensleeves my heart of gold.” The ‘romanesco” version of the passamezzo, C major chord in A minor, gives the set of Greensleeves. The set of the misattributed lyric is also echoed in the Led Zeppelin classic. When Anne Boleyn danced with both Wyatt and the King in 1526, in a court masque in which she played “Perserverance”, her gown was green. Wyatt’s poem is the first in the English language to use the sonnet form, from whence we also derive “sonata”, “little song”, named from the Italian “suonare”. The sonnet represents a small, intensive form whilst the sonata constitutes a large, extensive and intensive mould. Both state, develop and bring to a conclusion an antithetical experience within a tightly knit fabric. Both are organic, sensitively signalling any change to their internal structure. As a sonneteer, Wyatt is the pupil of Venice, who brought the sonata from Petrarch and Gorzarin to poor doomed Mark Smeaton, who pursued his hind to the scaffold. Desire and lack, love and despair, gold and silver and green, alive and mutating within a garden that encloses in its walls the resonance of a form derived from Venice which coloured the language of a new world. In 1527, Rome was sacked by Imperial troops, the event which Wyatt’s mission for his cuckolded king was meant to prevent. Rilke wrote of the date that 1527 was one of those gashes in history that “tears the until the from the ever since”. All In Green Went My Love Riding
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