They Flee from Me (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Sir Thomas Wyatt
- First Published: 1557
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Gender roles, Dreams, Women, Deer, Gifts
The Poem
“They Flee from Me” is a short lyric poem of twenty-one lines divided into three rhyme royal stanzas—seven lines rhymed ababbcc. As in many of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s lyrics, the first-person voice of the poem, not Wyatt himself but a dramatic persona whose impressions the reader needs to examine critically, complains of a beloved who has left him for another lover.
The opening stanza depicts the beloved as a deer—a conceit or extended metaphoric image, which Wyatt and later English poets borrowed from the sonnets of the fourteenth century Italian...
[The entire page is 1465 words long]
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