[In the following essay, Kay analyzes the Chaucerian elements in Wyatt's “They flee from me,” in an effort to understand the effect of the poem on its original audience.]

Wyatt's poems, as Alastair Fowler has observed, are “so rooted in their society that their survival is incomplete”: many of the characteristic qualities of the world from which they sprang are, inevitably, lost beyond hope of recovery.¹ To read his poems intelligently is to realize that the past, or at least the early Tudor court, is a foreign country. Yet Fowler has himself shown that some of the destruction wrought by time can be repaired, that it is possible to piece together some fragments of understanding that may serve to guide the reader through some of the difficulties and obscurities that Wyatt's verses now present to us. In a sense the very remoteness of the milieu from which Wyatt's verses emanate renders some of its elements accessible to investigation; this is especially true of the profoundly literary character of the world of the “Game of Love,” as Stevens described it, in which Wyatt and his associates participated.² And it is not merely the obviously “courtly” poems, that by their very vocabulary and situation declare themselves beyond the immediate grasp of modern sensibilities. It is true also of works in which generations have delighted, pieces whose “lean and sinewy” masculinity appears to bridge the gulf of time, that we are confronted with an alien language and system of values, some of whose components may be identified and investigated in ways that can yield further clues as to the nature and scope of Wyatt's art.³

They Fle From Me is Wyatt's most repeatedly interpreted poem.⁴ Yet it seems clear enough that the qualities for which it has been prized are highly various, sometimes contradictory, and readers have reached markedly different conclusions about what it might mean and about how the speaker is to be apprehended. Fowler surmises that the explanation for the work's lasting appeal lies in its “rhetorical conduct: argument, coordinating concetto, and what Hallett Smith has called ‘general strategy,’” in other words the movement from “figurative musing” through “specific memorial narration” to “moral questioning.”⁵ I should like to propose, however, that the original audience of the poem—whoever they were, but assuming they were members of the same circle as the poet—would have had rather more to interest them than the movement or organization of the work, and that they would have had available to them many more indications to sharpen their perception of what was being proposed, remembered, and requested by it.

It is obvious, for example, that the poem's stanza and its language derive from and participate in that specifically English version of fin amor which flourished at the court of Henry VIII and whose primary inspiration and model was Chaucer's Troilus.⁶ What follows here is an attempt to highlight the Chaucerian elements of the poem, with the aim of showing how they help to define the subject and character of the speaker's complaint and at the same time steer the audience's judgment both of the speaker and of his predicament. If Wyatt's immediate poetic predecessors are largely ignored, it is chiefly because, as I hope to demonstrate, the materials of which They Fle From Me is composed are so overwhelmingly Chaucerian—even when they seem commonplace—that the poem appears to have been carefully and deliberately placed in a specifically Chaucerian imaginative world. In this work at least, I shall argue, we can recapture sufficient of the emotional content of Wyatt's verse to respond more fully to the obligations it urges: if it is true that “Wyatt's poems constantly invite evaluation” (and this applies particularly to a demande d'amour like They Fle From Me), we have here more evidence than has previously been supposed, and the invitation may with due caution be accepted.⁷

The poem opens by establishing contrast, antithesis, as one of its central procedures: thus the gulf between the past and the present, seeking and fleeing, bliss and bale becomes the cantus firmus of the speaker's complaint. It further creates, or begins to sketch, an image of the speaker's mental condition, both as an individual and as an exemplary lover. Chaucer and his imitators followed Petrarch in using this strategy, which possesses, in Southall's words, “a peculiar power to conjure up conflicting states of mind, a preoccupation with instability and insecurity, over which Fortune is president.”⁸ It was through the management of such ultimately Petrarchan devices, and especially antithesis, that generations of English poets, in Forster's analysis, gained what he termed a “training in poetic diction.”⁹ But the terms of the antitheses in Wyatt's poem are more morally loaded than they may initially appear:

They fle from me / that sometyme did me seke
          with naked fote stalking in my chambre
          I have sene theim gentill tame and meke
          that nowe are wyld and do not remembre
          that sometyme they put theimself in daunger
          to take bred at my hand & nowe they raunge
          besely seking with a continuell chaunge

To begin with the first line. The word “fle” carries less the sense of “escape” than “shun” and “avoid”: Chaucer frequently employed it thus, often in a moral or spiritual context (as an “flee ydlenesse,” “flee shrewednesse” [B.Mel. 2785-2790, 2880-2885], “flee fro peyne” [I.Pars. 225-230], “but flee we now prolixitie” [TC.2.1564], etc.).¹⁰ In Chaucer, seeking is usually what one is exhorted to do to achieve the right course of Christian action—not to mention seeking in connection with the “straunge strondes” of palmers, or the “hooly blisful martir” of the Canterbury Pilgrims. It normally implies a specific purpose or quest, a clearly defined objective. In this sense it contrasts powerfully with the final line of the first stanza here, “besely seking with a continuell chaunge.” From the outset of the poem, clearly, Wyatt's speaker loads the familiar device of antithesis—entirely characteristic of a love-complaint—with an implicit moral censure and judgment.

The following line continues the process more overtly. There are, it will be recalled, several amatory stalkings in Chaucer. Thus in The Miller's Tale:

Doun of the laddre stalketh Nicholay,
And Alisoun ful softe adoun she spedde;
Withouten wordes mo they goon to bedde,
Ther as the carpenter is wont to lye.

(A.Mil.3648-3651)

A futher and more ominous instance is the description of the arrival of Tarquin at the house of Lucrece in The Legend of Good Women:

Doun was the sonne, and day hath lost his lyght;
And in he cometh into a prive halke,
And in the nyght ful thefly gan he stalke,
When every wight was to his reste brought.

(LGW.1779-1782)

When Pandarus recounts to Criseyde how he heard the sleeping Troilus utter an address to Love (“Lord, have routhe upon my peyne, …” [TC.2.523ff.]), he explains that he “gan … stalke him softely byhynde” (TC.2.519). We learn of the sergeant sent to abduct Griselda's daughter in The Clerk's Tale that when he “wiste his lordes wille, / Into the chambre he stalked hym ful stylle” (E.Cl.1524-1525). When Palamon succeeds in escaping from prison he needs to find a safe refuge:

And til a grove faste ther bisyde
With dredful foot thanne stalketh Palamon.

(A.Kn. 1478-1479)

The feet which engage in this stalking—an activity whose Chaucerian pedigree invests it with connotations of the furtive and the illicit—are naked. Inevitably and naturally so, perhaps. Yet bare feet to Chaucer were much more frequently linked with penitence and pilgrimage than anything else, and they are additionally the attributes of women who have been subjected to humiliation, degradation, or desertion, such as Griselda and Ariadne. Thus: “to goon peraventure naked in pilgrimages, or bare-foot” (I.Pars. 105-110); Griselda “in her smok, with heed and foot al bare / Toward hir fader hous forth is she fare” (E.Cl. 895-896); when Ariadne runs to the shore to call back Theseus, “to the stronde barefot faste she wente” (LGW. 2189). The first of these senses links pleasingly with the moral and religious connotations of “seke” (although, of course, Wyatt's use of “naked fote” instead of the formulaic “barefoot” accentuates the erotic purpose of the “pilgrimage”): the second adds to the audience's developing apprehension of the speaker's character as he presents himself. He seems already to be claiming to be someone who, unlike Walter or Theseus, provided comfort, a welcome refuge perhaps, for wronged women who now, apparently forgetful of his former generosity, seek others and spurn him. Through allusion, he paints a picture of himself as an unselfconscious virtuous innocent.

The remainder of the stanza, as R. L. Greene pointed out, alludes to lines from a satirical carol whose subject is the nature of womankind:

Sum be wyse, and sum be fonde;
Sum be tame, I understond;
Sum will take bred at a manus hond

and the terms employed are commonly associated with both human and animal subjects, as many of the poem's commentators have been quick to note.¹¹ Once again, however, it is instructive to consider the moral weight of Wyatt's terms. “Gentill” is the most apparently straightforward of all, with its status as part of the technical vocabulary of fin amor. But the sense “noble” is less prominent in the present context than is “gracious”—used on several occasions by Chaucer in this way—or, in keeping with the animal imagery of the carol and of the stanza as a whole, to express the refined superiority of the noblest animals. There are many instances of the word used in this sense in The Parliament of Fowls (196,337,575, etc.). The case of “tame” is the reverse. Its primary application is to beasts: thus we have “An Egle tame” (A.Kn. 2178), “Ful many a tame leon and leopart” (A.Kn. 2186); there is a tame beast in Anelida and Arcite (315), and a tame ruddock in The Parliament of Fowls (349). It is also applied to humans, in two usual senses. First as the opposite of “wyld” (“passionate”), as in “Al were this Odenake wilde or tame” (B.Mk.3481), and second, as “submissive,” as in “The Proudest of yow may be mad ful tame” (Compleynt of Mars, 278). A similar double application obtains with “meke.” The dove is meek (PF. 341); people are said to be as meek as a maiden (A.Prol. 69; A.Mil. 3202) or as a lamb (E.Cl. 538; G.Sn. 199); the word is paired with terms expressing submissiveness, tractability, docility (as in buxom [B.Sh. 1432], debonair [B.Mel. 2930-2935, 3050-3055], patient [D.WB. 434, D.Sum. 1984]). Most strikingly, perhaps, it is applied on several occasions to Griselda; when the sergeant arrives to seize the child:

Grisildis moot al suffre and al consente;
And as a lamb she sitteth meke and stille,
And leet this crueel sergeant doon his wille.

(E.Cl. 1567-1569)

As the scene unfolds, she asks the sergeant “mekely … So as he was a worthy gentil man” if she may kiss her child farewell (548-549): the same quality is again attributed to her as she finally gives up her child to her husband's agent:

Wel myghte a mooder thanne han cryd “allas!”
But nathelees so sad stidfast was she
That she endured al adversitee,
And to the sergeant mekely she sayde,
“Have heer agayn youre litel yonge mayde. …”

(E.Cl. 563-567)

On the other side of the speaker's antithesis, “wyld” possesses, in addition to its obvious animal sense of “undomesticated,” a general association with moral indiscipline, and especially with lechery. Thus the escaping horse in The Reeve's Tale

                                                                                          gynneth gon
Toward the fen, ther wilde mares renne,
And forth with “wehee”, thurgh thikke and thurgh thenne.

(A.Rv. 4064-4066)

Alison in The Miller's Tale is “wylde and yong” (A.Mil. 3225). The word commonly implies lack of restraint or self-control: thus Criseyde responds to Pandarus' suggestion that they “don to May som observaunce” by exclaiming:

                                                                                          … be ye mad?
Is that a widewes lif, so God yow save?
By God, ye maken me ryght soore adrad!
Ye ben so wylde, it semeth as ye rave.

(TC.2. 112-116)

The act of remembering, which the speaker claims his mistress neglects, is sometimes presented by Chaucer as a highly deliberate process, of actively dwelling upon some notable example (“Remembre yow of Socrates” [Book of the Duchess, 717]), or of calling to mind one's sins (see The Parson's Tale, 130-135, 1000-1005 for instances). “Daunger,” one of the great staples of fin amor, here seems to mean less the usual “disdain” than the rarer, and more modern “peril” (as in “His stremes, and his daungers hym bisides” [A.Prol. 402]), or, as Muir and Thomson suggest, the speaker's power or dominion (as in the Prologue's account of the Summoner:

In daunger hadde he at his owene gise
The yonge girles of the diocise,
And knew hir counseil, and was al hir reed.

[A.Prol. 663-665])¹²

In Chaucer “besely” can mean “diligently, zealously” (A.Prol. 301, A.Mil. 3763; TC.4. 486), or “earnestly” (A.Rv. 4006, TC.1. 771; 3. 11523), or “eagerly” (F.Sq. 88, F.Fkl. 1051).¹³ It occurs in conjunction with seeking on a couple of occasions: “For I have sought hir ever ful besely / Sith first I hadde wit or mannes mynde” (The Complaint Unto Pity, 33-34): we learn how the distraught Troilus “Ful bisyly Criseyde, his lady, soughte” (TC.5. 452). These senses connect with the meaning of “continual” as “persistent,” “persevering,” “abiding”: thus Walter observes Griselda “ay sad and constant as a wal, / Continuynge evere hire innocence overal” (E.Cl. 1047-1048), while we read that the first motive to contrition is the recollection of sin, and that “ye trespassen so ofter tyme as dooth the hound that retourneth to eten his spewyng. / And yet be ye fouler for youre longe continuying in synne and youre synful usage” (I.Pars. 135-40). “Chaunge,” in the sense of “alteration” is comparatively simple, but in this context it is worth remembering its secondary implication of “exchange”: in both senses it is, as is to be expected, applied to Criseyde on numerous occasions.

It would be perfectly possible, though tedious, to move through the entire poem in this fashion, but I hope that sufficient evidence has been accumulated to establish that the vocabulary used by Wyatt in this work is not only generally characteristic of the “Game of Love,” with its concepts of Service, Danger, Gentilesse and the rest, but also intensely and specifically Chaucerian. The result is twofold: while placing his poem in the world of Troilus and other Chaucerian contributions to the cult of fin amor, Wyatt also subtly shapes the reader's (or listener's) perception of the character of the speaker, the dramatic voice that has selected this particular class of language to plead his case and depict his plight to the Court of Love. He can be seen loading potentially bland or neutral terms so as to predispose his judges in his favor. Our unsatisfactorily general and imprecise modern sense of what the first stanza is about may, I argue, be sharpened by pursuing the implications of the linguistic choices Wyatt shows his speaker as having made. Thus we hear him identifying past liaisons with grace, solemnity, seriousness, succor, good faith—at least on his part: there is perhaps a nice ambivalence in the lady's naked feet that stalk (with its connotations of amatory furtiveness) in his chamber as if on a pilgrimage. In contrast with that past idyll is the present state—that which had been undertaken with the naked feet and with the sweetness of a wronged Griselda, has become ranging, the condition of constant change. It might indeed be said that Wyatt's speaker transforms these women not just into stereotypically fickle females but into emblems of inconstancy, of mutability. That is the predicament which he tries to outline for his judges: what, they are to be asked to determine, is he to do? Before he listens to their verdict, he has more evidence to present.

In his edition of Wyatt, R. A. Rebholz classes this poem as a “Ballade,” and notes, as others have, that it uses, as do other poems of the same general kind, the stanza form of Troilus: but the connection between They Fle From Me and the great repository of amatory and poetic conventions and situations is much stronger and more specific than that, especially in the central stanza, whose very vividness and immediacy have perhaps obscured its profoundly literary character.

Thancked be fortune it hath ben othrewise
          twenty tymes better but ons in speciall
          in thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse
          when her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall
          and she me caught in her armes long & small
          therewithall swetely did me kysse
          and softely saide dere hert howe like you this

To begin with the phrase “dere hert.” Nothing could be more obviously formulaic, less specific, less morally loaded. Yet to consider briefly its occurrences in the works of Chaucer is to be forced to pause before accepting it so casually as a standard and unexceptional phrase. It appears, as far as I have been able to tell, forty-two times in his works. In only two does it occur more than once. In The Legend of Good Women Thisbe recognises Pyramus, “hire herte deere” (868), Dido addresses Aeneas as “My dere herte, which that I love most” (1294). and Theseus swears love and loyalty to Ariadne as “My dere herte, of Athenes duchesse” (2122). The phrase occurs no fewer than thirty-two times in Troilus, a sufficient number for it to become one of the phrases by which the liaison between the lovers might be recognised or suggested. Within Troilus it appears twice in each of the first two books, and three times in the fifth, but ten times in the fourth, and fifteen in Book III. Such statistics do not diminish the status of the phrase as a commonplace of intimate love dialogues. Indeed Chaucer, when pointing out Anelida and Arcite as examples to his readers, says of the lady:

That for her liste him “dere herte” calle,
And was so meke, therefore he loved her lyte.

(Anelida and Arcite, 199-200)¹⁴

But the frequency of its use during the most intense and intimate parts of the Troilus story would surely have made it subsequently an immediately recognisable allusion to Chaucer's poem, although only in a very general way, as an utterance of archetypal lovers. For the speaker's purpose, more apt and striking parallels with Troilus are adduced throughout the stanza.

In Book III of Troilus, as the action proceeds to the sexual union of the lovers, each, as part of swearing love to the other, employs the “dear heart” catchphrase (“‘Nay, dere herte myn,’ quod he, ‘iwys’” [Troilus, l. 1181]; “‘Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte deere, / Ben yold, ywis, I were now nought heere!’” [Criseyde, ll. 1210-1211]). As he rejoices in Criseyde's physical beauties, and as a prelude to the address of Love which forms the pinnacle of his fortunes and the center of the poem, Troilus is thus described by Chaucer as he embraces Criseyde; the passage obviously anticipates Wyatt's second stanza:

Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe,
Hire sydes longe, flesshly, smothe, and white
He gan to stroke, and good thrift bad ful ofte
Hir snowisshe throte, hire brestes rounde and lite:
Thus in this hevene he gan him to delite,
And therwithal a thousand tyme hire kiste,
That what to don, for joie unnethe he wiste.

(TC.3. 1246-1253)

Chaucer echoes this passage himself shortly afterwards, when he describes the rapturous incredulity of Troilus at his good fortune:

                                        … so he gan goodly on hire se,
That nevere his looke ne bleynte from hire face,
And seyde, ‘O deere herte, may it be
That it be soth, that ye ben in this place?’
‘Yee, herte myn, God thank I of his grace,’
Quod tho Criseyde, and therwithal hym kiste,
That where his spirit was, for joie he niste.

(TC.3. 1345-1351)

The mistress's attributes recalled by Wyatt's speaker may be located in other texts: examples include the “armes smale” cited by the Wife of Bath (D.WB. 261) and the “myddel smal, hire armes longe and sklendre” of January's fantasy (E.Mch. 1602). And the episode may equally plausibly recall Ovid as well as anticipating Squire Meldrum.¹⁵ Yet the verbal resemblances between the Chaucerian passages and the speaker's narrative seem to me so strong as to make it very likely that his contemporaries would have recognised not just a general flavor of the Troilus, but an allusion to a specific part of it. Once again, however, the speaker moves on before developing the implications of the connection. But Wyatt's speaker is concerned less about dwelling on the felicities of the past than obtaining speedy judgment in his favor from his audience.

He continues:

It was no dreme I lay brode waking
          but all is torned thorough my gentilnes
          into a straunge fasshion of forsaking
          and I have leve to goo of her goodenes
          and she also to vse new fangilnes
          but syns that I so kyndely ame s'ued
I would fain knowe what she hath des'ued

This final stanza, of course, resembles those erotic dream poems of the period, in which the disrobing of a former mistress is suddenly interrupted as the dreamer wakes.¹⁶ Perhaps the Devonshire MS ending—“what think you bye this that she hat deserved”—makes the urgency of the conclusion more sharp, but the demande that is proposed is obviously a real one, and represents an issue upon which theorists of love disagreed.¹⁷ Thanks to Fowler's clear-headed investigation, the nature of the issue, and of the speaker's predicament, may be surmised with some exactitude.¹⁸

“Forsaking” (not a Chaucerian word) did not carry a strong sense of “abandonment” or of “relinquishing” in Wyatt's day: much more common is the sense of “denial” or the “refusal of something offered.” “Straunge” could mean “aloof,” “distant,” “cold,” or “remote” as well simply “unfamiliar”: thus Criseyde

                    that hadde hire herte on Troilus
So faste, that ther may it non arace;
And strangely she spak, and seyde thus:
‘O Diomede, …

(TC.5.953-956)

So his lady distantly refuses what is offered. She has determined to grant the speaker his freedom and spurn any further advances from him: advances which, according to some theorists, he was entitled to make until such time as he acquired a new mistress.¹⁹ He tries to present his case as something of greater significance than that which merely distresses him as an individual: it seems designed to strike his audience as a deviation from accepted behavior, as a contravention of the laws of love. The “new fangilnes” he accuses her of claiming as her right under the new dispensation she has announced is familiar enough from Chaucer. In The Manciple's Tale, for instance, we read:

Flessh is so newefangel, with meshaunce,
That we ne konne in nothyng han plesuance
That sowneth into vertu any while.

(H.Mcp. 193-195)

The longest discussion of the state is in The Squire's Tale, where there is a brief digression on the topic:

Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse,
As briddes doon that men in cages fede.
For though thou nyght and day take of hem hede,
And strawe hir cage faire and softe as silk,
And yeve hem sugre, hony, breed and milk,
Yet right anon as that his dore is uppe,
He with his feet wol spurne adoun his cuppe,
And to the wode he wole, and wormes ete;
So newefangel been they of hire mete,
And loven novelries of propre kynde,
No gentillesse of blood ne may hem bynde.

(F.Sq. 610-620)²⁰

This specifically masculine species of inconstancy appears also, and in no more favorable a light, in Anelida and Arcite:

This fals Arcite, of his newfanglenesse,
For she to him so lowly was and trewe,
Tok lesse deynte of her stidfastnesse,
And saw another lady, proud and newe. …

(141-144)

In the assembly of birds honoring St. Valentine in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, the participants yield

                    honour and humble obeysaunces
To love, and diden hire other observaunces
That longeth onto love and to nature;
Construeth that as yow list, I do no cure.
And thoo that hadde doon unkyndenesse—
As dooth the tydif, for newfangelnesse—
Besoghte mercy of hir trespassynge, …

(LGW.F.149-155)

The most explicit attack upon female newfangleness is to be found in the balade, Against Woman Unconstant:

Madame, for your newefangelnesse,
Many a servant have ye put out of grace.
I take my leve of your unstedfastnesse,
For wel I wot, whyl ye have lyves space,
Ye can not love ful half yeer in a place,
To newe thing your lust is ay so kene;
In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene. …
Ye might be shryned, for your brotelnesse,
Bet than Dalyda, Creseyde or Candace;
For ever in chaunging stant your sikernesse;
That tache may no wight fro your herte arace.
If ye lese oon, ye can wel tweyn purchace;
Al light for somer, ye woot wel what I mene,
In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene.

(1-7, 15-21)

But what are we to make of the man who can thus accuse his lady? That is the real question the poem invites us to address. Wyatt's speaker is clearly anxious to blame his mistress, to liken her by implication to Criseyde, while claiming kinship himself with Troilus: yet what is the next step to be? He would hardly be making his complaint if he were willing to follow his model, or if he wished to ally himself with the dove in The Parliament of Fowls, who contributed to a discussion of this very problem thus:

“Nay God forbede a lovere shulde chaunge!”
The turtle seyde, and wex for shame al red,
“Though that his lady everemore be straunge,
Yit lat hym serve hire ever, til he be ded.
Forsothe, I prayse nat the goses red,
For, though she deyede, I wolde non other make;
I wol ben hires, till that the deth me take.”

(582-588)

By the use of innuendo, allusion, and implicit comparison the speaker has produced an artfully insinuating prosecutor's speech dressed as frank statement, spontaneous revery, and perplexed, decently confused request for moral guidance. In this brilliant, Browningesque, performance the general issues of praise and blame in this species of amatory dispute are fleshed out by a vivid and self-revelatory plea by one of Wyatt's most fully realized dramatic voices. As with Chaucer's Pardoner, our attention, it seems to me, is divided equally between the problem and the man; yet the judgment each requires, and which the poem urges, can hardly be given in isolation. The audience is faced with a display by a virtuoso of luf-talkyng, whose art and cunning shine through the pose of the bemused innocent he purports to be: but while that makes it harder to believe the mistress is like Criseyde, it also makes it harder to recommend that he should behave like Troilus.

The texture of this illusion, as I hope I have demonstrated, is to a large, and perhaps surprising degree, literary: Wyatt at his most dramatic, his most vividly immediate, is simultaneously at his most allusive.²¹ In this balade, Wyatt shows that he possessed, in some smaller measure and in a briefer compass, his master Chaucer's gift for achieving the illusion of life through the accumulation of art, for combining earnest and game, and for displaying to his reader a vivid and wholly convincing slice of existence composed of familiar fictions edged into sharpness through the unobtrusive alchemy of his skill as a maker.²²

Notes

1. Alastair Fowler, “Obscurity of Sentiment in the Poetry of Wyatt,” in his Conceitful Thought (Edinburgh, 1975), 19.

2. John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961), 154-229.

3. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford, 1954), 230.

4. To the bibliography by Burton Fishman, “Recent Studies in Wyatt and Surrey,” ELR 1 (1971): 178-191, esp. 186, add Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 11. The best recent study of Wyatt's use of Chaucer is Helen Cooper, “Wyatt and Chaucer: A Re-appraisal,” Leeds Studies in English ns XIII (1982): 104-123. See also Alice S. Miskimin, “Counterfeiting Chaucer: The Case of ‘Dido,’ Wyatt and the ‘Retraction,’” Studies in Medieval Culture, 19 (1976): 133-145; Carolyn Chiapelli, “A Late Gothic Vein in Wyatt's ‘They Fle From Me,’” Renaissance and Reformation, ns 1(1977): 95-102; Stanley J. Koziskowski, “Wyatt's ‘They Flee From Me’ and Churchyard's Complaint of Jane Shore,” N& Q, 223, ns 25 (1978): 416-417. References to the text of Wyatt's poem are to the transcription of the Egerton manuscript to be found in Richard Harrier's The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 131-132.

5. Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 18; Smith, “The Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt,” HLQ 9 (1946): 323-355.

6. See E. M. Seaton, “The Devonshire Manuscript and its Medieval Fragments,” RES ns 7 (1956): 55-56; R. Southall, The Courtly Maker. An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and his Contemporaries (Oxford, 1964), 26ff.; Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry, 1-92; R. H. Robbins, “The Lyrics,” in B. Rowland, ed., A Companion to Chaucer Studies (2nd edn., Oxford, 1979), 380-402; M. Stevens, “The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature,” PMLA 94 (1979): 62-76.

7. Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 19.

8. Southall, Courtly Maker, 32.

9. L. Forster, The Icy Fire. Five Studies in European Petrarchism (Cambridge, 1969), 61-83.

10. Chaucer is cited from the edition by F. N. Robinson, The Poetical Works of Chaucer (2nd edn., Boston, 1957). I have used the Concordance compiled by J. S. P. Tatlock and A. G. Kennedy (Washington, 1927) and A Chaucer Glossary, edited by N. Davis, D. Gray, P. Ingham and A. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1979). Abbreviations follow the conventions of these works.

11. R. L. Greene, ed., The Early English Carols (2nd edn., Oxford, 1977), No. 401, 236. See D. M. Friedman, “The Mind in the Poem: Wyatt's ‘They Flee From Me’,” SEL 7 (1967): 1-13. The wild/tame antithesis is also explored in Whoso List to Hunt; see the commentary in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. K. Muir and P. Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), 266-267, and Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 2-6.

12. Collected Poems, ed. Muir and Thomson, 299. This gloss appears in later editions: J. Daalder, ed., Sir Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems (Oxford, 1975), 32; R. A. Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978), 397.

13. OED records (s.v. Range v.¹, III, 7.a) that “range” could mean “To move hither and thither over a comparatively large area … Sometimes including the idea of searching … Especially of hunting dogs searching for game” (cited by Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 12).

14. It retained in Shakespeare's day an association with considerable intimacy: that is the point of Sir Toby Belch's beginning the ballad Corydon's Farewell to Phillis, “Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone,” in Twelfth Night (II.ii.102). Less ironic instances from the Sonnets are “The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part” (46.12), “Take heed, dear heart, of this large privilege” (95.13), and “Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside” (139.6). Text from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston, 1974).

15. Amores, III.7 and I.7 were proposed by C. E. Nelson, “A Note on Wyatt and Ovid,” MLR 58 (1963): 60-63; Squire Meldrum, 933 ff. is cited by Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 16, who notes, however, that the woman who enters the squire's bedchamber, wearing a “courlike kirtle,” revealing her “paps … hard, round and white” is, in Fowler's words, “a faultless … heroine.”

16. See, for example, the three lyrics “In a goodly night, as in my bede I laye”; “Late on a nyght as I lay slepyng”; “As I my-selfe lay thys enderz nyght,” from Bodley MS Rawlinson C.813, a volume rich in Chaucer allusions; also “The lovere met he hath his lady wonne” (PF 105). I am grateful to Dr. H. L. Spencer for this reference. On the propensity of lovers to have visions, see HF. 36-40.

17. Variant text of Devonshire MS from Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry, 132. The points at issue, and guidance for those called upon to judge such cases, will be found in Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and tr. P. G. Walsh (London, 1982), Book II, chapter VI (“Si unus amantium alteri fidem frangat amanti”), 236-251. The passage will be found in Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love. tr. J.J. Parry (New York, 1941), 159-167. Of a man who continues to love a woman who has been unfaithful to him, Andreas counsels: “It seems to serve the interests of the human race better if we leave him to his own will, and his wounds untreated as though he were dead, than to teach him the remedies for love” (“Magis enim videtur hominum utilitatibus expedire, si proprio illum relinquamus arbitrio et eius tanquam mortui vulnera negligamus intacta, quam amoris eum remedia doceamus”) (ed. Walsh, 242-243).

    The ensuing paragraph may also have some bearing on Wyatt's poem:

    But what if a woman offers kisses to a stranger, or admits him to her arms' embrace, but grants him nothing more? I would confront her with appropriate censure, and say that a woman acts basely by granting the favours of kissing or embracing to a stranger, because they are always thought to be signs of love, usually offered as a token of the love to come.

    (Sed quid si mulier extraneo praestet oscula viro aut ipsum suscipiat amplectendo lacertis sibi nulla alia concedendo? Et huic volumus digna increpatione occurrere, et dicimus quidem quia turpiter agit femina, si alicui extraneo sui osculi vel amplexus munera praestet, quum haec indicia semper credantur amoris et in signum futuri amoris soleant hominibus exhiberi.)

    (ed. Walsh, 244-245)

    See Leigh Winser, “The Question of Love Tradition in Wyatt's ‘They Flee From Me,’” Essays in Literature, 2 (1975): 3-9.

18. Fowler, Conceitful Thought, 13-17.

19. Andreas, ed. Walsh, 242-243. Andreas further asserts that “… verus amans nunquam potest amorem exoptare novitium, nisi primitus ob certam iustamque causam prioris cognoverit advenisse defectum”—“a true lover can never desire a fresh love unless he first perceives that a blemish has appeared in the old, for some definite and proper reason” (241-245).

20. This parallel is noted in W. M. Tydeman, ed., English Poetry 1400-1580 (London, 1970), 19, and in Daalder's edition, 32.

21. The first line of the poem itself appears to quote Charles d'Orleans (noted by Muir and Thomson in their edition, 299):

    Yet when so be as that it lust thee soo
    To doon me thynke vpon my fayre maystres
    Anoon displesere woo and heuynes
    They flee fro me they dar not onys abide
    But and they fynde me from thi company. …

    (The English Poems of Charles of Orleans, ed. R. Steele, E.E.T.S. os 215 [Oxford, 1941], 46 [Ballade 38, lines 1344-1358]).

22. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, (Cambridge, 1973), 187-202. Others who have taken a similar view of Wyatt's creation of dramatic characters include D. M. Friedman, “Wyatt's Amoris Personae,” MLQ 27 (1966): 136-146; R. G. Twombly, “Thomas Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David,” TSLL 12 (1970): 345-380; R. A. Rebholz, “Love's Newfangleness: A Comparison of Greville and Wyatt,” SLI 11, i (1978): 17-30. See also Nancy S. Leonard, “The Speaker in Wyatt's Lyric Poetry,” HLQ 41 (1977-78): 1-81.