Gender and Power Dynamics

"They Flee from Me" is one of Thomas Wyatt's poems that uses the metaphor of taming deer to describe a sexual relationship between the speaker and a woman – or in the case of this poem, multiple women. Early on in the poem, the speaker figures himself as the one who tames the deer, or even, perhaps, as one who hunts the deer (in his other deer-centric poems, the speaker is much more clearly labeled as a hunter, pursuing women with the same caution as a hunter in the woods). He says, "I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, / That now are wild and do not remember / That sometime they put themself in danger / To take bread at my hand" (3-6). Here, the speaker recalls when the women in his life were happily "tamed" by him and obedient, comparing himself to someone who...