Absence, desire and the female other in Petrarch and Wyatt

Abstract

'Absence gives rise to desire and desire gives rise to the poet's song, but desire itself is never to be fulfilled, never to secure its object.' This thematized model of the origins of the lyric tradition lies at the heart of Francis Petrarch's formulation of the paradigmatic Western idiom of desire as expressed in his Canzoniere. In what follows, I will be focusing on such a formulation and on its appropriation and transformation by Sir Thomas Wyatt, particularly as exemplified in his poems They flee from me and Whoso list to hunt. In examining the interplay between absence and desire, I will attempt to recover the muted voice of the displaced and objectified female figure in both Petrarch's and Wyatt's verse. While acknowledging the appeal of the recovery of the female muted voice in male-authored texts, especially the feminist appropriation, the underlying danger of creating a presence or plenitude which never really existed in the first place will also be considered. The female figure in Petrarch's Canzoniere and in Wyatt's body of verse is, after all, a masculine construct that tells us less about female desire and more about male fantasy.