Point of View

"They Flee from Me" is written from the first-person perspective of a speaker who is lamenting the loss of romantic encounters he used to have with numerous women. As in most lyric poetry, the first-person perspective places the poem in an intimate register where the speaker is essentially confessing to the reader. And, if one were to interpret this poem according to the dominant contextual theory that it is about the end of the speaker's affair with Anne Boleyn, the speaker would be offering the reader quite the confession indeed. Regardless of whether one considers the context behind the poem, however, the first-person perspective allows the speaker to compare his memories of the past with his current, much more bleak circumstances: having once been able to "tame" women who frequented his bedchamber, the speaker now mourns the "wild" or fickle nature of women who have...