HIND (after Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt”)

Kristen Case

“Whoso List to Hunt” wrests the sonnet from Petrarch’s Italian into English. It is made of hunger.

Picture an animal moving through bright leaves. You like to hunt? Wyatt asks. He is a hunter speaking to hunters.

Just before the turn at the end of line eight, the hunter’s breath gives out, becomes general: wind from a net.

The sestet repeats the octave’s opening line but with a difference: the generalized infinitive to hunt is particularized via an object: You want to hunt her?

Though his body fails, the poet may not withdraw his mind from the deer, his captor. This is his travail—the way the mind bolts from the exhausted body, tugging at its leash.

Fainting I follow marks a metrical disruption, a dactyl followed by a troche, five syllables of what is sometimes called “falling meter.” This is where he falls.

Travail comes from medieval Latin, trepalium, meaning “three stakes” and referring to an instrument of torture.

In the sestet, the poet imagines his replacement, another hunter whose time will be spilled out like breath or like semen. The sonnet makes an economy of these expenditures.

Graven draws writing back to the kill, which is, though the beauty of the poem almost lets us forget it, the object of this hunt.

Noli me tangere—touch me not—is from Pliny the Elder, who describes deer wearing the inscription around their necks 300 years after Caesar’s death. In the

gospel of John, it is what Jesus says to Mary Magdalene after he rises from the tomb. In both cases, linked to deathlessness.<

The voice of the hind is not a voice at all but a collar decorated with an I, a circular form in which total possession becomes a wildness and wildness a form of possession.

The last lines have eleven and nine syllables respectively, and so seem unsteady in the context of the poem’s overall ten syllable line pattern. I imagine this unsteadiness as the holy ghost of an actual animal.

The hind is barely there at all, only a fair neck. Anybody’s. You like to hunt?

Sometimes a slight constriction of the throat. You can’t take it off.

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Kristen Case is the author of three books of poems, most recently Daphne (Tupelo Press, 2025). A scholar of 19th and 20th century American literature, she is also the author of Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar: Charts and Observations of Natural Phenomena (Milkweed Editions, 2025). She lives in Maine.

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Daphne
Tupelo Press

North Adams, Massachusetts

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Daphne is a meditation on the centrality of predation to the Western lyric tradition. The book is punctuated by lyric essays which circle obsessively around questions of what knowing is, what is possible to know with certainty, and whether it is possible to know another person.

"What does tradition afford the figure eclipsed or possessed by its foundational gestures? Drawing on sources as diverse as the haunting myth of Daphne and Apollo and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Kristen Case engages the Western tradition to examine the way violence disrupts and yet paradoxically unleashes understanding, illuminating the ways that knowledge is inextricably tied to experiences of both beauty and brutality. The recurring refrain from Wittgenstein’s lover, 'I long to be with you in any open space,' serves as a poignant motif throughout the collection’s brave yearning for connection that transcends predatory impulses. Daphne’s tonic utterances make way for such an opening."
—Karla Kelsey

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