This combines your third and fourth 5% take-home tests.
Note: The answers must be your own.
Early Modern English
Whoso List to Hunt
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind. 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.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain. And graven with diamonds in letters plain There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere,* for Caesar's I am, *don't touch me
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame
Background: Thomas Wyatt is said to have fallen in love with Anne Boleyn at first sight (future wife of King Henry VIII), sometime early in the 1520s. This poem is believed to be his declaration that he will no longer actively seek her affections.
1. Language analysis:
(i) Find one word and one affix (i.e. 2 things) in the text that are common enough in Old and Middle English, but do not survive or are now considered archaic in Modern English.
(ii) Which of Wyatt's rhyme words no longer rhyme in Modern English?
(iii) What is the origin and meaning of travail? Why does Wyatt use this word here rather than an English synonym?
(iv) Wyatt uses list three times in this text. About 70 years later, Shakespeare also uses a word list in Hamlet;
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love . . . (Hamlet: Act.1, Sc.5, ll. 21-3) Are these the same or different uses of list? Give its / their meaning.
2. Literary:
(i) What form of poem is this? What is its country of origin?
(ii) It is by no means certain that the poem is about Anne Boleyn, but the word hind
(l.1) at least confirms it is about a woman.
What is a hind?
How does its confirm the poem is about a woman? What kind of literary device is this?
(iii) The line, ‘And wild for to hold, though I seem tame' contains what kind of literary device? (Hint: It is a type of contradiction, but ‘contradiction' is not the answer)
(iv) What kind of imagery does the poet use to describe his failed pursuit of the woman? List three (3) different words in the poem associated with this imagery.
(v) The word deer occurs in Old English, but its meaning was different. Wyatt uses it in its modern sense. What did deer mean in Old English and what word took its place?
(vi) Which full line is a metaphor for ‘I am trying to do something that is impossible'?