ABSTRACT

Andrew Marvell poems are replete with emblematic moments of creative annihilation: Cromwell and the severed head; Appleton House and the ruined abbey; the mower and his scythe. Nymph and fawn define one pair of antitheses; each of them is related to the troopers. The poem isolates the participants in the situation; trap them forever in their positions: irredeemable troopers, irrecoverable fawn, inconsolable nymph. The fawn's relationship to the troopers is simultaneously glancing and absolute, casual and causal. Moreover, as transgressors of the boundary of the pastoral idyll, the troopers trespass those exclusionary limits in precisely the antithetical form of the one upon whom they have encroached, the fawn. The prayer to forget is the hope of re-membering the fawn, of reconstituting the fawn through forgiveness, through the admission of destruction in the pastoral union. The fawn is the nexus of all antithetical relations, the place where the nymph's desire and the 'wanton Troopers" bullets meet.