Wyatt's "They Flee from Me": Bitterness and Misogyny
This essay analyzes Thomas Wyatt's sixteenth-century poem "They Flee from Me," exploring how its three stanzas trace a progression from wistful reflection to bitter sarcasm. The paper examines the poem's central metaphor of wild birds as a stand-in for the women in the speaker's life, its ABABBCC rhyme scheme, and its use of sexual imagery and diction. The analysis argues that the speaker's plural pronoun "they" signals a pattern of failed romantic encounters rather than a single lost love, and that his misogynistic framing ultimately fails to generate reader sympathy, leaving him exposed as self-pitying and unable to sustain genuine emotional commitment.
- Overview of Form and Central Metaphor: Rhyme scheme, rhythm, and wild-birds metaphor introduced
- Structure and Stanza Progression: Three stanzas mirror the relationship's emotional arc
- The Plural Pronoun and the Speaker's Self-Pity: Plural 'they' signals repeated failed romances
- The Second Stanza: Sensuality and Climax: Seduction scene and emotional and figurative climax
- The Third Stanza: Sarcasm and Bitter Resignation: Ambiguous 'kindly' and the speaker's near-curse
- Sexual Imagery and Thematic Focus: Diction of desire reveals fleeting, loveless encounters
- Conclusion: A Poem of Bitterness, Not Love: Speaker exposed as self-absorbed and sexist
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What makes this paper effective
- Close textual engagement: the essay consistently grounds its claims in specific line references and direct quotations, making the argument traceable and credible.
- Thematic coherence: the central argument — that the speaker's bitterness reveals misogyny rather than genuine heartbreak — is introduced early and reinforced through each stanza analysis.
- Tonal awareness: the paper identifies and tracks shifts in tone (wistful → sensual → sarcastic) across the three stanzas, mirroring the poem's own progression.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The essay demonstrates diction analysis as a primary literary critical tool. By isolating individual words — "kindly," "fashion," "strange," "meek," "tame" — and unpacking their multiple possible meanings, the writer shows how ambiguous word choice reinforces the poem's larger themes of bitterness, blame-shifting, and sexual power dynamics. This technique is applied consistently and builds cumulative interpretive force.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an introduction that establishes the poem's context, speaker, and central argument. It then addresses form and rhyme scheme before moving through the poem stanza by stanza, analyzing tone, imagery, and diction in sequence. Later sections zoom out to consider sexual imagery and the speaker's failure to generate sympathy before the conclusion reframes the poem as an expression of bitterness rather than romantic longing. The structure mirrors the poem's own progression.
Overview of Form and Central Metaphor
Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee from Me" is an enigmatic poem written in the sixteenth century. The central metaphor is that of wild birds, which have occasionally fed from the speaker's hands. Now, the birds have flown. Because the metaphor of wild birds to describe the human spirit is a common one, it is relatively easy to understand that the narrator recounts an unrequited love with a woman who has a flighty heart. The overall tone of the poem is bitter, an emotion that grows progressively stronger throughout the 21-line poem. The speaker recollects a brief relationship with a mixed sense of longing, confusion, and loneliness. However, "They Flee from Me" is not about one relationship, but many. The speaker describes a string of sexual encounters, which is why the titular pronoun is "they," and not "it" or "she." Because the poem progresses from dreamy reflection through sentimental longing onto bitter sarcasm, it is clear that the speaker has been unlucky in love and therefore harbors misogynistic feelings.
Wyatt's poem uses a well-constructed rhyme scheme and a fairly even but not rigid rhythm. The rhyme scheme follows the general pattern of ABABBCC, followed by DEDEEFF, and so on. There are three stanzas of seven lines each. Most of the lines contain ten syllables, but there is some variation in metric feet. The use of a consistent rhyme scheme and rhythmic pattern anchors the reader's attention, and the musicality of the poem makes it memorable.
Structure and Stanza Progression
The three stanzas differ from one another and follow a course that mirrors the relationship being described. The progression of the poem reflects the changes in the speaker's heart, and especially the changes in the relationship itself. The first stanza is the most wistful of all, as he recalls the relationship and his lover using the metaphor of birds. Using natural imagery makes the relationship itself seem natural, and the poet thereby captures the reader's attention and garners sympathy for the narrator.
Using long sentences, the poet creates a languishing first stanza that is also the most mysterious in the poem. It is not even immediately clear whether the speaker is talking about birds at all. The biggest clue to the character of the "wild" creatures is that "sometime they put themselves in danger / To take bread at my hand" (lines 5–6). Other animals — a deer, for instance — could also take bread from a hand. Regardless of exactly which animal is used in the metaphor, the overall concept is one of a brief encounter with something wild. The speaker harbored hope that the wild creatures would become permanently tame: a clear metaphor for his desire to tame a wild woman. The second and third stanzas show with utter certainty that the speaker has failed. "They Flee from Me" tells the story of how the relationship began, how it developed, and how it ended. The reader also learns of the impact the relationship had on the speaker, who seems bitter about love and romance.
References
Stein, Arnold. "Wyatt's 'They Flee from Me.'" The Sewanee Review, vol. 67, no. 1, Winter 1959, pp. 28–44.
Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry.
Wyatt, Thomas. "They Flee from Me." The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
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