An Elegy For Charles I

Ostensibly a simple soliloquy, "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn" tells of a seemingly trivial story of a young girl weeping for the death of her fawn cruelly shot by horse soldiers. By such a story, Andrew Marvell intends to express his attitude toward regicide, as he has done in his other poems. While "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" deals openly with regicide, "The Nymph Complaining" concerns allegorically with the covert topic of regicide.The association of deer hunting with aristocratic prerogative and militarism is ancient and runs deep. If the one kind of responses to the pathos of a slain deer is the arousal of pity, the other kind of reaction remains one of hard-eyed envy:most people long not for the abolition of deer hunting but for the freedom to pursue it themselves. Both reactions are political. If compassion for butchered inferior creatures could encode empathy for victims of seigneurial power, deer hunting when practiced by the common man enacts spirited retaliation against that power, which has sought over centuries, with dubious legality, to monopolize the hunting. In the light of contemporary hunting connotation, with its savage finale of troopers havocking the king's deer, the poem's association of the Fawn with Charles I seems logical. That the slain Fawn is at one level the martyred king is surely unmistakable to an interregnum reader. In linking images of hunted and butchered prey to King Charles I, the poets of the post-Civil War era tend to emphasize humanitarianism and empathy, those qualities distinctive of the later poetics of sensibility. They interpolate images of maimed animals in order to illustrate more clearly the sheer brutality of which men are capable and to vivify the consequent pain and suffering experienced by the vanquished monarch.The shot fawn as beheaded Charles I is explicit. Firstly, compared with Virgil's episode which treats the killing of the deer as a highly pathetic and unfortunate one in the desirable course of the establishment of a new and greater nation, it is wholly possible that Marvell uses this history as a similar yet more regrettable episode in his attempts to reshape England into a new commonwealth. The suggestion of a parallel with Virgil's episode implies that Marvell feels the new order is as inevitable as that represented by Aeneid. An older, more ideal world of pastoral sanctity is invaded and its prime representative destroyed by the invasion. Secondly, religious allegorists identifying the fawn with Christ have relied for their exegesis primarily on The Song of Solomon just as the political allegorists rely on Aeneid. However, most of those religious allegorists stop here without exploring the relationship between Christ and Charles I. The historical-political and the Christological allusions fit Charles I, who himself promoted the comparison between himself and Christ; this same comparison was often made in sermons and poems right after the king's death. Indeed, the concept of Charles I as martyr, fanned by the popularity of Eikon Basilike, was ubiquitous. Lastly, a comparison of "An Horatian Ode" and "The Nymph Complaining" further reinforces the reading of "The Nymph Complaining" as an elegy for Charles I.