The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn
Wanton troopers riding by have shot her fawn, and the girl who kept it sets out what it was: a parting gift from a faithless lover, fed on roses, so white and so fast that it outran her through the garden of lilies she planted for it. The complaint moves back and forth between the animal's habits and the man's desertion until the two griefs are hard to keep apart. Read as pure pastoral, as an allegory of the Civil War and as an emblem of the wounded Church, and none of those readings has settled it.
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- 48% · 10 shared