SOURCE: Kay, Dennis. “Wyatt and Chaucer: They Fle From Me Revisited.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 47, No. 3 (Summer 1984): 211-25.

In the following essay, Kay analyzes the Chaucerian elements in Wyatt's “They flee from me,” in an effort to understand the effect of the poem on its original audience.

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.¹ 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...