This sonnet by Sir Thomas Wyatt is about unrequited love. He compares love to the rather violent act of hunting, reinforcing patriarchal gender roles by portraying the woman he loves as a deer that, as prey, tries to run away from the hunters. She is elusive, she resists, only to reveal at the end that she is already the property of another man (the irony).
My concept was simple, to visually show this aggressive hunt and pointless chase, I wanted to make the poem somewhat difficult, annoying to read. I chose contrasting typefaces: the entire text of the sonnet is printed in small size Caslon, and the highlighted words in larger size Univers overlaying on top. Intentionally disrupting the reading flow, their dynamic should create a feel that the lines are chasing the emphasised words, just as the hunters chase the deer.
The closing two lines of the poem are capitalised as a whole, as I believe, these are the most beautiful and most important part of the piece. The rhyming couplet is spoken by the deer, the woman, thus subverting Renaissance gender stereotypes by her having the last words.
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