The poem, “They Flee From Me”, by Thomas Wyatt, concerns a man and his tenuous relationship with not only women, but a special woman in particular. Wyatt compares the man’s efforts to seduce women to animal imagery, more specifically imagery of a deer. In order to establish this metaphor, Wyatt associates the behaviors of a deer to the actions of a woman.
In the opening of the poem, the speaker remarks how the women flee from him, but at one time they did in fact seek him. In the man’s bedroom, the woman, whose feet were naked, would stalk around the room, indicating the intimate nature of their encounters. The speaker of the poem notes that he has seen the women gentle, tame and meek, at times. Despite this, the women are now wild and …show more content…
The speaker comments about how her dress would fall from her shoulders onto the ground while they were together in his chamber. The woman would hold him in her long arms, and when Wyatt says, “she me caught”, he is showing the reader that the woman enticed the speaker, not the other way around. While the man was in her arms, she would sweetly give him a kiss and softly would ask, “Dear heart, how like you this” (14). This entire scene was no dream, the speaker assures the reader, as he was wide awake for all of it. The speaker believes that his gentleness has turned her away from him and caused her to forsaken him. Nevertheless, the goodness that she once had has now vanished and, the man allows her to go chase other men in order to find new loves. The speaker concludes with a statement of confusion. He acknowledges that she treated him kindely, but he would gladly like to know what she deserved from their relationship since he does not understand what she …show more content…
In doing so, Wyatt purposely associates deer with women because this allows him to emphasize his point that woman can often be fickle and hard to seduce. The first few words of the very first line “They flee from me...” alludes to the nature of the deer and of the women that the speaker use to be intimate with (1). The speaker likens women to deer because in spite of the fact that they appear calm, they can easily be flustered and thus, flee. Women may seem to be calm on the surface, but they can be hard to approach and are scared off easily. Wyatt illustrates this noticeably when he refers to women as “gentle, tame, and meek” (3). Each of these words seamlessly causes the reader to connect women’s behaviors with deer because these words create an image of innocence, similar to a wild deer. Again, Wyatt makes this point clear by saying that they are, “wild and do not remember” (4). In the same way that a wild deer would forget a man that once fed her, the women choice to forget the precious relations they had with the speaker. The women who once willingly slept with the speaker, now look to find other loves, or take bread from another’s