What Sparks Poetry

The Poems of Others

Read the introduction to The Poems of Others

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.

In the series The Poems of Others, we’ve invited poets to pay homage to a poem that first sparked poetry in them—a poem they read that gave them permission to write poetry or the idea that they might write it—a poem that led them down the path to becoming a poet.

James Longenbach on Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me”

The first time I read the poem we call “They Flee From Me” was in the late nineteen-seventies, when I encountered it in a class on Renaissance poetry. This was years before I wrote a poem myself, years before I knew that Wyatt’s early sixteenth-century lyric was also one of George Oppen’s favorite poems; he had recited it silently to himself over and over during World War II, trapped in a foxhole beside two dead companions, as he waited many hours to be rescued: “They flee from me that sometime did me seek / With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”

My first reading also took place years before I knew that, when Wyatt wrote the poem down, “They Flee From Me” had virtually no punctuation. But Wyatt was no Emily Dickinson, flouting or even ignoring conventions; we English-speakers simply did not use spelling or punctuation with any regularity until the 18^th century, and Wyatt’s text is unremarkable. Still, how thrilling it is to read the opening of the last of the poem’s three stanzas as Wyatt punctuated it: “It was no dream I lay broad waking.”

Is that an iambic pentameter line? The gorgeous line before it certainly is, punctuated or not (“And softy said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’”), and Wyatt is known as one of the popularizers of that line in English. It might have taken modern ears to hear what Wyatt was doing, but I didn’t think the poet was nodding when I first read “They Flee From Me” more than forty years ago, and I don’t think so now. For whether punctuated (as it usually is) or not—

                It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
                But all is turned thorough my gentleness
                Into a strange fashion of forsaking

—that line stabs the poem with a prosaic flatness hitherto unavailable in “They Flee From Me”; it takes what might otherwise be read as Petrarchan allegory and says this happened, whether it happened or not.

I’ve never much cared if a poem is metered or not, rhymed or not, and I found the twentieth century’s transformation of these formal tools into weapons by and large distracting. All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that.

Read Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem, "They Flee From Me"

Writing Prompt

Whatever else it is, “They Flee From Me” is one of the strangest poems in the English language, despite its being written in the 16^th century. Try rewriting it in your own language, the language of twenty-first century America. An example of just this might be found in “Before Time,” from James Longenbach’s Fleet River.

Read Longenbach’s “Before Time” here.

— James Longenbach

Share This Post

Print This Post

Photo:
Langdon Hammer

James Longenbach

James Longenbach is the author of six books of poems—most recently Forever, published this past June by W.W. Norton—and eight books of prose. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors, he lives in Rochester, New York.