Sarah Roorda
Anna Barcis
Genres & Periods
Wyatt poem analysis
In the poem “They Flee from Me,” Wyatt uses a rhyme scheme of ABABBCC in
every line of all his three stanzas. His opening line uses a lot of assonance, he uses the
words flee, me, me, seek. But there isn’t any more throughout the poem.
He also uses iambic pentameter throughout the entire poem. This means that
there are 5 beats per line that go dat da.
To me, the poem sounds like he is talking about sleeping with many women and
that he enjoys taking their virginity, in line 9 he says, “Twenty times better, but once in
special.” Also, in line 3 and 4, he says that the girls were once “gentle, tame, and meek”
but now they are “wild and do not remember”
And it’s like they give him pleasure but he doesn’t really return the favor if you
know what I mean. In the last two lines, he says “that I so kindely am served, I fain
would know what she hath deserved.” Sounds to me like an ex-boyfriend of mine. Not a
good situation, because I fled from him like he was the plague.
We both agreed that the women that he is talking about could be prostitutes that
he uses for sex. He is “served” by them in the second to the last line and that is what give
the impression of them being prostitutes. The one girl that he speaks of, he may have
loved her and thought that she was the “one” for him, but obviously she didn’t feel the
same.