The Full Text of “I Find No Peace”
1I find no peace, and all my war is done.
2I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
3I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
4And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
5That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
6And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
7Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
8And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
9Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
10I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
11I love another, and thus I hate myself.
12I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
13Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
14And my delight is causer of this strife.
The Full Text of “I Find No Peace”
1I find no peace, and all my war is done.
2I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
3I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
4And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
5That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
6And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
7Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
8And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
9Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
10I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
11I love another, and thus I hate myself.
12I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
13Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
14And my delight is causer of this strife.
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“I Find No Peace” Introduction
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"I Find No Peace" is a sonnet by the influential 16th-century British writer and courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt. The poem's lovesick speaker exist in a state of utter turmoil, twisted this way and that by a love that's as painful as it is pleasurable. Through a series of paradoxes (such as burning with passion and freezing "like ice," wanting to die and wanting to live all at once), the poem captures love's complexity and its ability to completely overwhelm those it strikes. As with many of Wyatt's sonnets, "I Find No Peace" is an adaptation of an earlier poem by the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch.
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“I Find No Peace” Summary
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I'm not at peace, even though I'm not fighting anymore.
I'm both scared and hopeful. I burn with passion yet feel as cold as ice.
I soar into the sky, yet I can't even get up.
I don't have anything, and yet I have the entire world.
Love, which variously loosens and tightens its grip on me, holds me in a prison.
At the same time, I'm free to leave. But there's no way for me to escape.
It won't let me live nor kill myself,
even though it makes me want to die all the time.
I see without sight and complain without speaking.
I want to die, but I also want to live longer.
I love someone else, and that's why I hate myself.
I sustain myself with sorrow and laugh through constant pain.
Similarly, both the idea of life and of death disappoint me.
My pleasure is the cause of all this trouble.
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“I Find No Peace” Themes
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The Joy and Pain of Love
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “I Find No Peace” expresses the glorious and terrible contradictions that come with being in love. Love, here, is both torture and pleasure, ugliness and beauty, life-giving and life-denying. In short, the poem shows love to be not one single emotion, but an unending rollercoaster of extreme—and often conflicting—feelings.
The speaker’s world has been turned upside down by love, which has made him feel a bunch of paradoxical things at once—both happy and sad, loving and hateful, trapped and free. The speaker finds no peace, though he has no “war” to make. In other words, he’s not in a conflict with his lover right now, but he still feels like he is. He both “burns” (suggesting the heat of physical passion) and “freezes like ice” (suggesting the metaphorical coldness of emotional distance). He’s scared but hopeful, feels like soaring “above the wind” but is also stuck, both imprisoned and unbound.
In short, the speaker expresses the intense flurry of conflicting emotions that go along with being in love, a contradictory state that pulls the speaker—both painfully and joyfully—in many directions at once. Love, then, is hardly a stable or predictable experience in this poem, and the speaker is in a state of constant, violent flux. One day he feels like he has everything, and the next he has nothing. His love will neither let him live nor die, making him a kind of zombie at the mercy of love itself. In other words, love hurts.
What’s more, the speaker knows he’s in a bad way, yet he can’t help but perpetuate his own sorry state. His head—his ability to think rationally—is completely beholden to his heart. Through this, the poem shows how love makes people act against their own interests, drawing out their own suffering just to keep the flame of love alive. When the speaker says that he wants to “perish” and die, he doesn’t really. What he really wants is more of that love that has made him feel like he wants to end it all. He thus readily sacrifices himself at the altar of his love, “feed[ing]” his sorrow with more of the same desire and hating himself all the while for doing so. All in all, then, “I Find No Peace” powerfully captures the tender, painful complexity of love. Love isn't just one emotion, this poem argues, but many, often contradictory feelings all held closely together.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “I Find No Peace”
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Line 1
I find no peace, and all my war is done.
This sonnet launches right into the heart of the action, finding its speaker in utter turmoil. The speaker offers no specifics about his situation, instead beginning a series of paradoxical statements that capture the twin joys and pains of love. In other words, he's lovesick, and he's got it bad!
Almost every line offers a new metaphor—sometimes two—that describes the speaker's tortured, conflicted state. The first line refers to the speaker feeling no "peace" despite his metaphorical warring being "done" (perhaps referring to some fight with his lover that is now technically over). The absence of war is, logically speaking, peace—but the speaker feels anything but peaceful! Whatever "war" he went through is still with him internally even if it isn't actually taking place at this very moment.
The caesura sets up this paradox, with peace on one side of the comma and war on the other:
I find no peace, || and all my war is done.
This parallel grammatical structure, which will repeat throughout the poem, is an important part of how the reader experiences the speaker's fraught mindset. Think of the speaker as being pulled in two opposite directions—towards and away from the one he desires—and how that threatens to tear him in half.
The end-stop after "done" is also rather ironic, creating a solid pause despite the fact that the speaker insists this situation is far from over. Throughout the sonnet, full stops like this will create a sense of weariness—as though composing the poem itself is a torturous act, precisely because it forces the speaker to express how he feels.
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Lines 2-4
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on. -
Lines 5-8
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion. -
Lines 9-11
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself. -
Lines 12-14
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.
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“I Find No Peace” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration helps give the reader a sense of the speaker's fraught state of mind. Generally speaking, this is a very repetitive poem—and that's because the speaker himself is stuck in a very repetitive cycle of passion and self-hatred. Alliteration like "loseth" and "locketh" in line 5, then, is one element of all this repetition that works at the level of sound. In other words, the poem's repetitive sounds here reflect the idea that speaker is going on circles.
These words are also essentially opposites (being let loose versus locked up), but the alliteration here connects these concepts—in turn emphasizing the fact that the speaker feels both trapped and free at once!
The same thing happens with the shared /d/ sounds of "displeaseth," "death," and "delight" in the poem's final two lines. The alliteration here links opposites together, reflecting the speaker's conflicted state and how the very thing that's causing him "displeasure" and "death" is also what's making him happy ("delighting" him).
On a broader level, note how the poem passes the baton of alliteration from the /l/ sound to the /d/ in line 7:
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
The speaker moves from the /l/ sounds of "letteth me live" to /d/ sounds of "die at my device," and then goes on to use only /d/ alliteration throughout the rest of the poem. This thudding sound lends a heaviness to the poem's second half—an imposing, almost violent quality that echoes the speaker's half-wish for his own death.
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Caesura
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End-Stopped Line
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Metaphor
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Paradox
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Parallelism
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Repetition
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Simile
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"I Find No Peace" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Nought
- Seize On
- Loseth
- Locketh
- Holdeth
- Scape
- No Wise
- Letteth
- Giveth
- Occasion
- Eyen
- Plain
- Perish
- Displeaseth
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Nothing.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “I Find No Peace”
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Form
Given that this poem is an adaptation of a poem by the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, it's no surprise that this is a Petrarchan sonnet! That means it has 14 lines that can be broken up into an eight-line stanza called an octave and a sex-line stanza called a sestet. —The octave can further be broken up into two quatrains, and the sestet into two tercets.
Sir Thomas Wyatt actually introduced the sonnet form to the English language, and made some tweaks on it as he did so. In a Petrarchan sonnet, for example, the transition from octet to sestet represents a turn in direction, known technically as a volta. This is a moment when the poem starts responding to the first eight lines in some way. It's notable, then, that this sonnet doesn't really turn when it's supposed to! That is, the poem opens in turmoil, stays in turmoil, and ends in turmoil. This captures the speaker's troubled and singular state of mind. He's totally, utterly, lovesick, and can think of nothing else but his love—so a real shift in the direction of his thoughts proves impossible.
The poem is also very repetitive, and intentionally so. Look, for example, at how the speaker ties himself—and his reader—up in grammatical knots in the second quatrain. This paradoxical language makes it clear that the speaker is a kind of walking, talking paradox, torn in two completely different directions by his desire on the one hand and his longing to be free from that desire on the other.
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Meter
As is the case with most sonnets, "I Find No Peace" uses iambic pentameter throughout. This means there are five feet called "iambs" per line, each of which follows an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern (da-DUM). The first two lines are perfect examples of this:
I find | no peace, | and all | my war | is done.
I fear | and hope. | I burn | and freeze | like ice.Generally speaking, iambic pentameter gives the poem a steady, regular pulse.
There is quite a bit of metrical variation in this poem, however! In lines 5 to 7, for example, the speaker ties himself up in grammatical knots, mirroring the way his life has become similarly complicated through conflicting emotions. Here, the meter starts to lose its way, giving the reader a sense of the speaker's troubled and disorderly state of mind:
That los- | eth nor lock- | eth hold- | eth me | in prison
And hold- | eth me not | —yet can | I scape | no wise—
Nor let- | teth me live | nor die | at my | device,There are some extra syllables and anapests (da-da-DUM feet) here. On the one hand, this just help keeps the poem sounding interesting. It also subtly evokes the prison/freedom metaphor in these lines: the meter seems to want to break free and stay in its box all at the same time!
Other lines feature similar variations, but the speaker brings it home with one last line of straight-up iambic pentameter:
And my | delight | is caus | er of | this strife.
This give the last line a sense of finality. The poem's return to a steady form suggests that there's little chance of the speaker's situation changing anytime soon; his will steadily exist in this unsteadiness.
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Rhyme Scheme
"I Find no Peace" follows a typical Petrarchan sonnet rhyme scheme, though it deviates from the specific rhyme scheme found in Petrarch's Rime 134 (the Italian poem on which Wyatts is based). The first two quatrains (the first eight lines) use two rhyme sounds throughout, a set-up that's easier to achieve in Italian than English! The sestet then uses three more rhyming sounds, making the overall pattern:
ABBA ABBA CDECDE
For the most part, the rhymes work to propel the poem forward. Not all the rhymes are perfect, however, and many read like slant rhymes (especially to modern ears). This occasional mismatch between rhyme sounds ("ice" is not a perfect match with "arise," for example) make things seem ever so slightly off-kilter.
At two points, the poem's rhymes also seem to sum up the speaker's situation pretty neatly. Line 10 and line 13 pair "health" with "death" (a slant rhyme to modern ears), which represent the two sides of the speaker's dilemma. He wants to live and love, but he also wants to die and be done with that very same love. Meanwhile, the rhyme between "myself" and "strife" suggests how the speaker does this to himself by continuing to indulge his desires. That is, he goes against his better judgment time and time again, prolonging his misery.
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“I Find No Peace” Speaker
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Readers don't know much about the poem's speaker, apart from the fact that this person is suffering from serious love sickness. The lack of identifying factors make it easy for anyone who has felt similarly to identify with the poem's dramatic (and hyperbolic) speaker.
The speaker repeatedly draws attention to himself throughout the poem (note all those "I" pronouns), suggesting the speaker's fixation on his own predicament and the cyclical nature of his lovesick troubles. He is pulled this way and that by the twin joys and pains of his love, and all this "I" gives the impression that his sense of self is almost at breaking point. Indeed, in line 11 he professes to hate himself because he loves another.
Every line in the poem portrays the speaker as conflicted. He fears and hopes; his spirit soars and he feels stuck on the ground like a stone. He wants to be free from his lover, but all he really wants is to be held by that same lover. He wants to live, he wants to die, and yet, somehow, he wants neither of these. He is, then, a kind of walking, talking paradox, with every though that comes out of his mouth immediately undercut by its opposite.
We've used male pronouns in this guide for simplicity's sake and because many critics take the speaker to be Wyatt himself. That said, historians and literary critics still speculate about how much of an autobiographical element can be read into Wyatt's poetry. The answer, predictably, is that it varies from poem to poem—and that, given the centuries between then and now, it's not getting any easier to answer these kinds of questions. In truth, it's not even really necessary in understanding or enjoying the poem itself.
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“I Find No Peace” Setting
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The poem gives little away about its setting. Because the speaker rarely talks literally, it's probably best to see this poem as set in the speaker's mind itself. His psyche is tortured, pulled this way and that by his desire; similarly, the poem never settles, lurching from one hyperbolic metaphor to the next. The lack of a clear setting also implies that the speaker's pain will follow wherever he goes. His torment is tied to his mind rather than a specific place.
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Literary and Historical Context of “I Find No Peace”
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Literary Context
Sir Thomas Wyatt is generally considered one the most important English poet of the first half of the 16th century (writing shortly before Shakespeare came along and gave everyone a run for their money!). Wyatt was a considerable poetic technician and innovator, setting up some formal conventions in English poetry that still hold firm today. In fact, Wyatt even introduced the sonnet form to the English language. Wyatt was well-schooled in classical literature, and was also heavily influenced by Geoffrey Chaucer, a 14th-century poet often dubbed the "father of English poetry."
Wyatt took his sonnet cues, though, from Petrarch, an Italian poet operating in the 14th century (full name Francesco Petrarca). Wyatt produced numerous translations of Petrarch (among many other writers), which can also be thought of as adaptations. This particular poem uses Petrarch's Rima 134 as its inspiration.
Other English writers, including Shakespeare, would go on to tweak the sonnet form, but Wyatt sticks to Petrach's model here. This means the poem consists of an octave and a sestet (more on that in the Form section of this guide). By contrast, Elizabethan, or Shakespearean, sonnets tend to end with a rhyming couplet and use more rhyming words (Italian is better suited to rhymes than English). On that note, it's worth checking out Shakespeare's "Sonnet 147"—which finds its speaker in a very similar lovesick situation to the one here. Wyatt's well-known "They Flee From Me" also looks at the painful complexities of love and desire.
Historical Context
Sir Thomas Wyatt lived from 1503-1542, meaning he grew up under the rule of the notorious English king Henry VIII. Like his father before him, Wyatt's life was entangled with the life of the court (the small elite society that surrounded the monarch). Wyatt served in various official positions under Henry VIII, including as a diplomat. He also fell out favor on more than one occasion, even ending up in prison faced with potential execution (Henry VIII thought Wyatt, like many others, was getting a little too close to Anne Boleyn).
Henry VIII was part of the Tudor dynasty, which ruled England from 1485 till 1603. Henry's reign was a time of particular upheaval, in which the king completely upturned the religious structures governing English society. Court life, though lavish, could also be dangerous! Henry VIII ruled with complete authority, punishing those who upset or disobeyed him with ruthless indifference. It was also a place of sexual encounter and intrigue, and numerous poems of the era display sex and love as a kind of power game not unlike those taking place at the political level.
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More “I Find No Peace” Resources
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External Resources
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Wyatt's Life and Work — Check out Wyatt's biography from the Poetry Foundation.
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"Whoso List to Hunt" — An interesting article about another of Wyatt's poems, offering insight into the relationship between his poetry and Petrarch's.
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Love and the Court — An interesting essay that explores the relationship between love and politics in Wyatt's poetry.
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Petrarch's Original — The poem from which Wyatt adapted his, shown in Italian and an alternative translation.
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The Egerton Manuscript — A compilation of poems made during Henry VIII's reign, including some poems written in Wyatt's own hand.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt
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