Wyatt and Chaucer: "They Fle from Me" Revisited

Abstract

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.' 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 modem 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

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