They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek

The Hunt in the Forest (Paolo Uccello) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England

They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek
Sir Thomas Wyatt

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 have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be to Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special:
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream, -I lay broad waking.
But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking:
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use new-fangledness.
But since that I unkindly so am served,
I would fain know what hath she now deserved.


I have been thinking a lot about poetry lately. And when I do, I find that I must split my mind between what I have learned all of my life to be of beauty in this art form, and what today is defined as poetry by many modern poets. “Publishable poetry” today, from what I am told, is narrative unrhymed poetry. Any other type of poetry, the rhymed type, for example, is considered by “great minds” in the poetry world to be unpublishable. I sometimes wonder whether that is more a dictum on their part than an observation. As the one or two people that have read this blog since I began posting on it last December must surely recognize, I have a problem with dictums of any sort on what is, and what is not, good poetry. In one of my first posts, “Ars Poetica,” I comment on what I believe poetry to be, and say very little about what I think it is not. In a poem I posted a little later, in fact twice, entitled “There Seems to Be No Time For Rhyme Anymore,” I speak to this issue with tongue in cheek. However, you can leave your tongue in your cheek for just so long before you run the risk of biting into it accidently. Even the name of this blog, “I had fallen in love with words”, a quote from the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, hints at my belief in the main element of good poetry, the power of words; and, because of that belief, leaves me with a problem of “split personality."

To begin with the older perception, since my student days when I was introduced to poetry in elementary school, through high school and into higher education, as well as over forty years of teaching literature, I, like Dylan Thomas, had fallen in love with words, and found that love affair most realized in the reading of, study of, and appreciation of, poetry. From the alliteration of the Anglo-Saxon poets all the way through to the present day, all poetry touched me with its linguistic beauty. And yet, much of the poetry I have studied all of my life is, to those who dare to define the art today, is tolerated in its own time, but anathema today. And I am left to wonder, and to be amazed at the elements of beauty in this “past poetry.” How I wish I could write as they. How I wish I could make words do my biding in the way those poets of the past harnessed them to do.

At the beginning of this entry, I have posted a painting and a poem that is both romance and metaphor. The painting, The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello is both a renaissance metaphor for the pursuit of romance; and, for me, a metaphor for the elusive nature of the art of writing great poetry. The poem, by the English renaissance poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, is too again for me a metaphor for the same two modalities that lie within the painting. And I, as I read both, are left to ponder long, and to convince myself that, in truth, it was no dream.