Critical appreciation of the poem, "I Find No Peace".

"I Find No Peace", a typical Petrarchan sonnet, written by Thomas Wyatt is about the effect of love on an earnest lover. The poem exposes the mental agony of a lover who has lost himself in the intense passion of love. He is pendulating between the contradictory passions like love and hatred, hope and fear, earnestness and passivity, freedom and captivity, delight and depression, desire for life and death. At first, he did not actually understand the cause of such restlessness, but finally he comes to discover that it is an inordinate ecstasy of love for his lady love. And now nothing is in his grip. He has lost all control over himself as he says, "all my war is done."

          As a Pioneer of sonnet dinner in England, he is very much influenced by Petrach and other Italian sonneteers. In this sonnet he also borrows the theme of unrequited love which was the typical theme of conventional petrarchan sonnet. The very title of the poem suggests this theme of love.

       Not only in the matter of theme, but in structural construction, he is also owed to the Italian sonnet. He divided his poem into octave and sestet. But he deviates from Petrarch in one way, though in Petrarchan sonnet the subject matter is stated in the octave and developed in the sestet,  Wyatt here represents the theme of love-lorn heart of a passionate lover althrough the poem. And here he also introduced the concept of coupler which foreshadows Shakespeare's concluding couplet.