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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sir Thomas Wyatt's technically spectacular opening stanza in "They
Flee From Me" was an excellent vehicle for Winters' prowess, and a fine
example of the subjects and attitudes of which he approved.
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves
in
danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Here a kind of musical garland is composed of innumerable slight vari–
ations on a deceptively primitive iambic pattern. Beginning with the
tension of sound and stress in the opening foot, and continuing with inter–
nal rhymes, half-rhymes, repetitions, and delicate changes of pace in each
line, and with subde emphases produced by caesuras, enjambments, and
end-rhymes, this stanza beautifully illustrates the possibilities of a simple
language whose emotional charges are released by exquisitely minute
departures from rigorous expectations.
Consider, for example, the variants of the "e" sound in the first line,
emphasized by the slight quickening in "sometime" and "seek," the latter
lifting the pace, opening as if to flyaway with the double "ee" sound and
then abrupdy and firmly closing to mark the end both of the line and of
the action. Or the effect of the repetition of "sometime"-
sometime did me seek
sometime they put themselves
in
danger;
or of the three feminine rhymes "chan1ber," "remember," "danger." Or the
tremendous difference Wyatt manages between "seek," which, as I have
already said, firmly closes the opening line and thought, and "seeking,"
which does the opposite. The final line of the stanza contains an excess of
short syllables that either skip and waver ("busily") or glide ("continual"),
mimicking the reversal from constancy to inconstancy.
As with the versification, so with the argument. The opening clause-–
"They flee from me ..."-evokes the whole world of loss that in various
ways we encounter in the entire body of plain style verse. The poem's
themes are quickly and effordessly introduced in the next few lines; these
themes are constancy and inconstancy, desire and loss. The stanza's courdy
pun turns on the ambiguities of "stalking," with its suggested multiple con–
traries and changes of role: those who were meek are wild; those who were
stalked do the stalking; those who were in danger are dangerous; those who
