bility, had brought blood and gore into the practice of chivalric love, through the beheading of Anne Boleyn, making it more than a simple amusement.In his poem ‘They Flee From Me,’ Wyatt’s satiric voice can be identified through his clever use of contradictions. The story in the poem contrasts the past with the present; ‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,’ and also serves as a superficial indication of the poem’s deeper set of contradictions. In the first stanza of the poem the speaker depicts a time when he dominated women, but in the following stanza he immediately refutes this dominance with one particular instance of his own submission ‘When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,/ And she me caught.’ The women in the first stanza, though they are submissive to the speaker, are only drawn to his passivity, the stillness of the hand ‘That sometime they put themselves in danger/ To take bread at.’ The passivity’s purpose changes in each stanza; ‘in the first stanza, it seems to be disguised aggression; in the second, an ecstatic release from aggression; in the third, a form of victimization.’ Because Court poetry put little emphasis on the individual and his experiences, the speaker in this poem is more likely a symbol of a collected group, ‘hence, the ambiguity of the speaker’s passivity has its roots not in the quirks of a complex personality but rather in the conflicting cultural codes that fashion male identity in Tudor court lyrics.’ The passivity introduces yet another contradiction between religious and diplomatic expectations. Passivity, in the Lutheran context, is a transcendent quality, but is a sign of weakness and ‘the failure to manifest one’s power’ in the context of Henrician diplomacy. Neither God nor the King, during the Tudor period, could determine man’s identity according...
