“This maketh me at home to hunt and hawk,
 And in foul weather at my book to sit,
 In frost and snow, then with my bow to stalk,
 No man does mark whereas I ride or go: 
 In lusty leas at liberty I walk.”

It is easy to see that poetry as a melodious and enriched expression of a man’s own feelings is in its infancy here.  The new poets had to find their own language, to enrich with borrowings from other tongues the stock of words suitable for poetry which the dropping of inflection had left to English.  Wyatt was at the beginning of the process, and apart from a gracious and courtly temper, his work has, it must be confessed, hardly more than an antiquarian interest.  Surrey, it is possible to say on reading his work, went one step further.  He allows himself oftener the luxury of a reference to personal feelings, and his poetry contains from place to place a fairly full record of the vicissitudes of his life.  A prisoner at Windsor, he recalls his childhood there

“The large green courts where we were wont to hove,
 The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game. 
 With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of love
 Have missed the ball, and got sight of our dame.”

Like Wyatt’s, his verses are poor stuff, but a sympathetic ear can catch in them something of the accent that distinguishes the verse of Sidney and Spenser.  He is greater than Wyatt, not so much for greater skill as for more boldness in experiment.  Wyatt in his sonnets had used the Petrarchan or Italian form, the form used later in England by Milton and in the nineteenth century by Rossetti.  He built up each poem, that is, in two parts, the octave, a two-rhymed section of eight lines at the beginning, followed by the sestet, a six line close with three rhymes.  The form fits itself very well to the double mood which commonly inspires a poet using the sonnet form; the second section as it were both echoing and answering the first, following doubt with hope, or sadness with resignation, or resolving a problem set itself by the heart.  Surrey tried another manner, the manner which by its use in Shakespeare’s sonnets has come to be regarded as the English form of this kind of lyric.  His sonnets are virtually three-stanza poems with a couplet for close, and he allows himself as many rhymes as he chooses.  The structure is obviously easier, and it gives a better chance to an inferior workman, but in the hands of a master its harmonies are no less delicate, and its capacity to represent changing modes of thought no less complete than those of the true form of Petrarch.  Blank verse, which was Surrey’s other gift to English poetry, was in a way a compromise between the two sources from which the English Renaissance drew its inspiration.  Latin and Greek verse is quantitative and rhymeless; Italian verse, built up on the metres of the troubadours and the degeneration of Latin which gave the world the Romance languages, used many elaborate forms of rhyme.  Blank verse