Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poem They Flee from Me

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th century poet and statesman. Today we would call him a Renaissance man, and did as much pioneering and inventing in English poetics as American renaissance men such as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison did in more mechanical respects. Wyatt delved into erotic subject matter with grace and civility so as to make it socially acceptable to read. His poem They Flee from Me can be explicated as such, especially by looking at the extended metaphor used.

Wyatt was skilled in using metaphors of animals and nature to tone down the true undercurrent of his poems – which were sexual in nature. They Flee from Me is no acceptation to this. The scansion of the poem is irregular iambic pentameter, dipping to nine syllable lines and even tetrameter in line thirteen: “Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,” (13). It consists of twenty-one lines with irregular rhyme (A/B/A/B/B/C/C/D/E/D/F/F/G/H/I/H/I/I/J/J). As is typical with Wyatt, the poem is written with relatively plain language (a kind of “poetry for the everyman”) without any real didactic purpose.

As analysis begins, the first seven lines seem to be some sort of discourse about animals that the speaker once knew. Upon closer reading it becomes apparent what the speaker is truly talking about. The first hint at this is within the second line of the poem, “With naked foot stalking in my chamber” (2) . The key to starting to unlock the metaphor is the words “naked foot”. When thought of in relation to other parts of the poem, its becomes apparent that “naked” does not denote a hoof or foot any animal; it is more likely trying to communicate skin like that of a human foot. 

In the remainder of the eight lines (bearing in mind the explication above) the metaphor can be explicated in the same manner:

I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change. (3-7)