Why Thomas Wyatt’s They Flee From Me still means Something, and How.
Picture a bright modern classroom, somewhere, in which students sit, perhaps in a semicircle facing the Professor. A screen glows at the front, and on it is displayed a poem, first written down on paper in the 1530s, a poem that has only three stanzas and so fits tidily in the inevitable PowerPoint slide (or Blog Post). It begins, “They flee from me, that sometime did me seek”:
The Professor asks a question about it, and someone answers. If we forget for a moment just how common this scenario is, and try to explain why it is happening, or could happen in the first place, a whole crowd of questions immediately appear. My book, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem, is an effort to answer all of them: one at a time, and repeatedly, for some, since the answers change over the slow centuries. For instance:
How do we know about this poem, which Tudor-era diplomat and courtier Thomas Wyatt’s secretary wrote down for him and which Wyatt initialed in the margin on this beautiful page?
How do we know the words which have traveled from that page to this screen are the right words, since we have inherited three different versions from the sixteenth century? Here is the version that occurs in the Devonshire manuscript:
How did the Choice between these versions get made, and what thinking guided the Choosers? How do we know anything at all about old poetry and its authors—where does the knowledge come from, and how did it get to us? How is it even possible that a book Thomas Wyatt carried around with him in the course of his exceptionally dangerous life in the murderous court of Henry VIII survived to now rest quietly in the British Library?
More than that: what the heck is this poem doing in a classroom, bought and paid for by students and parents and taxpayers? What good could studying a 500- year-old description of feelings do for anyone? People didn’t always study old poetry in English, so when did they start, and why? Take a breath, and then ask: what is a Student of English, and when did she first appear?
Let’s say the students then write an essay about the poem, which the Professor evaluates. (And what is an essay, and when did students first start writing them?) Some parts of these essays are judged to be “Wrong.” Let’s say one of these students is mesmerized by the poem, repeating it to himself, sending versions of it to his friends, posting it online, but he’s misunderstood part of it. He doesn’t know that in the sixteenth century “small” means “slender,” or that “gentleness” is an important word which Wyatt would have found in Chaucer. Maybe he thinks the poem is a sonnet, when in fact it is in rhyme royal stanzas. Is his love for the poem wrong? Should it be corrected? How so? Is it actually possible to get it “Right,” and what would right be, after all?
I pursue these questions by following the poem on its long journey from Thomas Wyatt’s head to the modern classroom. Wyatt’s book, into which his secretary copied the poem, shows the way, as it was alternately valued and forgotten, written in, borrowed, lost, purchased, decorated, and eventually declared a National Treasure. The little scribble at the top-right center of the page, above, was written post-Wyatt, around 1560 or so, by someone trying to sort out and arrange the material. The book had fallen into his hands from out of the terrifying confines of the Tower, where Wyatt’s son had recently been executed for his part in the attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. The mathematical entry next to the poem was written a century or so later by a person who clearly was not interested in the poems the book contained. He liked the blank pages and the wide margins and wrote vast quantities into these spaces. Why wasn’t he interested? And around 1790, the notes in the top corners were left by someone else, someone who actually was on the hunt for old poems. But why would this person, a very knowledgeable man named Thomas Percy, have written in an astonishingly rare manuscript he understood and valued?
This is all to say that the book contains in itself the long drama of remembering and (mostly) forgetting which is the essence of History. And the poem itself is also about remembering and forgetting. The little drama of loss it enacts is painfully familiar in various ways, factually, metaphorically, or generally. It is carefully designed, a little island of order, but it is about the bracing entropic rush of our lives and of the universe itself. And so other questions arise, about what this kind of cultural object does for us. Is the poem a victory or a story of defeat? When we read it, are the feelings we ponder ours, or Thomas Wyatt’s? One of the versions we’ve inherited is less bitter than the one in Wyatt’s book. Can we like that version better for that reason, or would this be an insult to his feelings and thoughts? When we read the poem, do we even need to care about Thomas Wyatt, or can we just think about Ourselves?
My own Mesmerization by this poem began, long ago, when I was Caught by the first line, with the things that Flee, since it seems so plainly descriptive of one angle on everyone’s daily life. Later, I was absorbed by the fascinating half-light of our understanding of the Tudor world, horrifying and romantic by turns, and by the need to explain how such a delicately patterned thing could come out of such a world. And then, one day, nearly twenty years ago, I was reading a book that detailed all the different versions of Wyatt poems that we have, and noticed the competing versions of this, his (now) best known. All at once, in a single moment, The Idea for my book arrived, descending from that mysterious purgatory where such thoughts live before they come to us. It was Destiny. Following the story was a continuing joy, and the project was dogged by good luck at every turn. When I needed the poem to be present at some important moment, it was. When I finished, I was actively sorry not to be able to write it any more.
Amidst the accumulating moments of daily life, in which things seem so ready to fly apart and vanish, the long story of They Flee From Me documents a profoundly robust, forward-moving cultural life-force that kept the poem alive through five hundred years of happenstance and disasters of various kinds. This story is an epic of survival, with the inevitable tincture of death, loss and forgetting. Telling it allows me to talk about everything I know, about poetry, and how the world goes, and the way the Universe is organized.
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