Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder - "Farewell, Love": Analyze One Significant Word

In Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder’s “Farewell, Love,” the word “younger” is of central importance since it embodies all of the poem’s themes in one word. “Farewell, Love” is an apostrophe addressed to Love by an unnamed speaker, who laments the pain that Love has inflicted upon him, then instructs Love to leave him forever and explains that he now desires liberty and knowledge instead. The word “younger” summarizes the poem by encompassing both this remorse for the past and this aspiration for a new future; it also furthers and clarifies the poem’s meaning by providing an explanation for how the speaker has progressed from desiring Love to valuing wisdom and freedom.

Obviously, the word “younger” means “of less age;” however, it can also mean “having less experience or practice” and “less advanced,” and these definitions seem applicable in the context of Wyatt’s poem (Oxford English Dictionary). The speaker dispels Love and expresses how it has pained him when he pleads that it “go trouble younger hearts, / And in [him] claim no more authority” (Wyatt 9-10). This conveys the idea that when he himself was younger, and therefore less experienced, Love’s “many brittle darts” plagued him (Wyatt 12). He further describes his afflictions, saying that Love “pricketh aye so sore” and “[tangled him]” in its “baited hooks” (Wyatt 6, 2). The speaker shows remorse in mourning over the loss of his own youth, further tying in with the word “younger,” when he reflects that “[he has] lost all [his] time” (Wyatt 13). Being young is an opportunity that he now feels he has wasted, even as he proclaims his readiness to abandon the very force that has robbed him of this youngness.

The word “younger” also ties in with the speaker’s hope for a happier future, however. It describes the new recipients to whom Love should give itself, allowing the speaker “to perfect wealth [his] wit,” or focus himself on education, which will bring him well-being (Wyatt 4). Since Love will leave him for “younger hearts,” the speaker is able to say “Farewell” to “Love, and all [its] laws forever,” freeing him of the pain he has avidly described (Wyatt 9, 1).

Finally, in addition to encompassing the literal meaning of the poem, the word “younger” also deepens this meaning by explaining the speaker’s change of heart from valuing Love to valuing freedom and knowledge. Now Love shall leave him to plague those younger than him, since he has learned “to set in trifles no store, / And ‘scape forth since liberty is lever” (Wyatt 7-8). In other words, the speaker’s aging, through experience and practice, has taught him that “trifles,” such as the passionate, physical love of a young man, hold little true value, whereas freedom from this passion brings contentedness. After the passing of his youth, “[He] lusteth no longer rotten boughs to climb;” he realizes that this sort of young, violent Love cannot support him for long, and will soon send him crashing down to the ground (Wyatt 14). Interestingly enough, Plato is mentioned in the poem as “[calling]” the speaker away from Love’s “lore,” and this idea of “younger” seems to further Plato’s hierarchy one must ascend in order to understand beauty, as we discussed in class (Wyatt 3). The painful, unsteady Love described in Wyatt’s poem seems to imitate the sort of beauty found on the bottom rungs of Plato’s ladder: loving a beautiful body, loving beauty in all bodies, and even loving beauty in the human soul. The speaker of the poem, however, seems to have ascended to a higher level of understanding, that of loving social order and knowledge. Age and experience permit one to reach this level of “old man love,” as it was described in class, and likewise in the poem, “youngness” pertains to physical, passionate love, while the older and wiser speaker has come to a love and appreciation for more lasting, concrete ideas.