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Death, Loss, and Marvell's Nymph

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Phoebe S. Spinrad
Phoebe S. Spinrad*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
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Abstract

Paradoxically, the key to Marvell's “Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun” is the controversy the poem has inspired. Each critical interpretation is both true and false: none can stand alone; each must be combined with all the others, no matter how seemingly antithetical, to form an overall pattern that is “traditional” in the broadest sense of the word. The “Complaint” is not solely for a fawn, nor is it a lament only for the passing of an old world order, pastoral simplicity, Christ, love, or innocence; it is an elegy for all things that must die and an accurate portrait of the mind's attempt to deal with the inevitability of pain and loss.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 50 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

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References

Note 1 Evan Jones, “ ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun,‘ ” Explicator, 26 (1967), item 73.

Note 2 The text of the poem is that given in Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski and Andrew J. Sabol (New York: Odyssey, 1973); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

Note 3 Guild, “Marvell's ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun,‘ ” Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (1968), 394; Miner, “The Death of Innocence in Marvell's Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun” Modern Philology, 65 (1967), 9–16.

Note 4 The text used is The Aeneid of Virgil, 2 vols., ed. T. E. Page (1900; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1970); translations mine.

Note 5 Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), pp. 108–09.

Note 6 Hartman, “ The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun': A Brief Allegory,” Essays in Criticism, 18 (1968), 113–35.

Note 7 Toliver, Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. 136. An interesting pattern emerges from this book. Toliver, perhaps unconsciously, seems to look askance at any of Marvell's female figures who show a reluctance to go to bed with, or surrender emotionally to, the male personas. Colie is quoted from her “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 89–90; Hyman from his Andrew Marvell (New York: Twayne, 1964), pp. 24, 25.

Note 8 Spitzer, “Marvell's ‘Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun’: Sources versus Meaning,” Modern Language Quarterly, 19 (1958), 231–43.

Note 9 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 239.

Note 10 Q. Horatii Flacii Carminum Libri IV, ed. T. E. Page (1883; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1956), p. 52 (Bk. ii, Poem 14, 11. 1–2).

Note 11 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Revels

Plays, ed. John Russell Brown (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), i.i.359.

Note 12 The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 275. It is possible that Keats may have had in mind such diverse images as the “deadly honey-dew,” the “rose-kiss” of the fawn, Ariel's “Where the bee sucks” (Tempest v.i.88), and Othello's “O thou weed / Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet / That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!” (lv.ii.67–69).

Note 13 In Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Stephen Gwynn (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 305.

Note 14 Cynthia Gooding, Queen of Hearts, Elektra Records, EKL-131, 1953.

Note 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream i.i.149. It would be futile in an essay such as this to try to compile a list of references to mutability in Renaissance literature. Their name is Legion.

Note 16 Idler, No. 103, in Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, 1971), pp. 214–15.

Note 17 Allen, Image and Meaning, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), p. 166.

Note 18 Catullus, ed. Elmer Truesdell Merrill (1893; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 7–8 (Poem 3,11. 11–18). My translation.

Note 19 Autumn Journal ix.49, in Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. E. R. Dodds (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 118. Echoes of and references to this lyric by Catullus occur in such poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, and even Dorothy Parker.

Note 20 An Elizabethan Song Book, ed. W. H. Auden, Chester Kallman, and Noah Greenberg (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 127.

Note 21 “O Mother Go and Make My Bed,” in Gooding.

Note 22 “The Banks of Green Willow,” in Gooding.