What is the Nymph Complaining For?

Abstract

Andrew Marvell's for the Death of her Fawn is ostensibly a simple soliloquy by a young girl whose pet has been fatally wounded. wanton troopers riding by / Have shot my fawn and it will die, she laments at the beginning of the poem, and then in anguished tones she goes on to cry out against the motivelessness of the act, concluding that while such a cruel crime demands expiation there is no creature in the world pure enough to act as a sacrifice in any ritual of appeasement. Following this outburst, the Nymph's attention shifts to the history of her relationship with her pet: the fawn, she tells us, was given to her by one Sylvio, her erstwhile lover who since proved to be Unconstant; after his abandonment of her, the Nymph lavished all her care and love upon the fawn, and in the little wilderness of her garden she and her pet had played contentedly together; and her reminiscence comes to an end with her remembrance that the fawn had fed so much upon the roses of her garden and had rested so often amidst its lillies that Had it lived long, it would have been / Lillies without, roses within. Then in anguished tones once more she turns to the dying fawn, and as its spirit departs she determines that she will die too, just as soon as she has given directions for a fitting memorial to be placed over its grave. This memorial she conceives of as a statue of herself with the fawn at her feet-or more pointedly as a statue of weeping stone, which is what she envisions herself as having become. Insofar as the poem seems thus to be about the grief of a young girl over the death of her pet, the Complaining has for its subject a touching but after all a rather slight affair. The emotional impact generated by the poem, however, has been so profound that few critics have been content to view it as such. In a great poem, the emotion evoked must be in proportion to the instance used to evoke it, and generally speaking grief over the death of a pet is not a subject for high tragedy and, if treated that way, it would normally produce only bathos. Now with almost no exceptions, critics agree that Marvell's Complaining is a great