Wyatt's THEY
FLEE FROM ME
It would seem that that ambiguous, ambivalent, and compendious word "kynde" is at the bottom of the bemusement and perplexity occasioned by Wyatt's famous lyric from the moment of its publication, and one would suppose that the puzzlement of the reader was part of Wyatt's intention. The simplest and most sensible reaction to the "kyndely" of line 20 is that it is, as Joost Daalder says, "ironic for unkindly, cruelly, as D's gentillye suggests." 1 But Daalder admits that it could mean "according to her nature," which is given to newfangleness; and that's fair enough too, and what she deserves is to be jilted in turn. The more one thinks about it, though, the more it becomes clear that the lover who is being served kindly (strange reversal for the cavaliere servente) 2 is receiving payment in kind, in the sense of being hoist with his own petard, or being done by as he has done. For it is clear that in stanza one we have a picture of the ascendant young male playing the field, bidding and dismissing a series of playmates, allowing himself the luxury of newfangleness: he is free; they are tame ("in [his] daunger"). In the second stanza he allows the fittest of his mistresses not only to survive but to get a hold upon him, so that he is "caught," while she in her thin array and loose gown is free, and there is a note of triumph in her "how like you -3- |
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this?" In the third stanza (guilty now of "gentilnes" or tameness) the dwindling playboy, like the tamest of the playmates of stanza one, is found expendable and given his walking papers; and he can only hope that the whirligig of the wooing game will maintain its round and bring in its inevitable revenges after its own kind. Besides describing the falling action which we have been observing (the rake with many mistresses, the rake with one mistress, the forsaken rake), the poem maintains an intertwining, give-and-take pattern of images of freedom and bondage. We have seen that the amorist, presented as keeper of tame creatures in stanza one, is very significantly "caught" in stanza two, and we can also see that the freedom he is accorded in stanza three is heavily ironic: he has "leve to goo." But the freedom of the going-concern in the love game "to use newfangilnes" is not without its own slavishness—a compulsive busy seeking after continual change. The hunter and hunted confusion is established in the first two lines with "fie" and "seke" and the ambiguous "stalking." The girls (or birds) of stanza one certainly receive ambiguous and ambivalent treatment, an ambiguity and ambivalence which is rounded off in the forsaking and letting go of stanza three, in which the lively huntress lets a jaded quarry go in favour of fresher game. —JOHN P. LEVAY, York
University, Canada NOTES
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