Poem of the Day: ‘They Flee from Me’

Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) is both too-little and too-well known since the 20th century restored him to a high place in the canon of English poetry. He was never entirely forgotten, credited with introducing several Romance-language verse forms into English, particularly the sonnet, with such work as “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind” and “My Heart I Gave Thee, Not to Do It Pain” (which the Sun ran as a Poem of the Day this past June). Meanwhile, as a courtier for Henry VIII, Wyatt rose and fell in the maelstrom of British royal politics, never knowing whether he was to be imprisoned or rewarded for his public work, particularly his diplomatic missions to the Europe. 

Modern critics looked to him, however, less as a historical curiosity and more as a figure for whom the creation of English poetry was still new. He could use the language in a way that poets a hundred years later — after, say, work by Shakespeare (1564–1616), Donne (1572–1631), and Milton (1608–1674) — could not. Genius had gleaned too many of the naive and original possibilities of the language and closed possibilities for unself-consciousness.

Those critics were not wrong, but the establishment of Wyatt in English anthologies has made much of his poetry familiar, weakening the freshness with which it was first reencountered. We need to look again at his work simply as poetry, shaking from the history of its reception and recognizing its skill and insight. “They Flee from Me,” today’s Poem of the Day, contains three seven-line stanzas of pentameter, rhymed ababbcc. Playing on the metaphor of a woman as a wild creature, the poem speaks of a woman’s unexplained turn away from her lover.