Analysis of The Fawn

Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892 (Rockland) – 1950 (Austerlitz)



There it was I saw what I shall never forget
And never retrieve.
Monstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to
believe,
He lay, yet there he lay,
Asleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft
small ebony hoves,
The child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer.

Surely his mother had never said, "Lie here
Till I return," so spotty and plain to see
On the green moss lay he.
His eyes had opened; he considered me.

I would have given more than I care to say
To thrifty ears, might I have had him for my friend
One moment only of that forest day:

Might I have had the acceptance, not the love
Of those clear eyes;
Might I have been for him in the bough above
Or the root beneath his forest bed,
A part of the forest, seen without surprise.

Was it alarm, or was it the wind of my fear lest he
depart
That jerked him to his jointy knees,
And sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling
On his new legs, between the stems of the white
trees?


Scheme XAXABXCX XCDD BXB ECEXC DXCXXC
Poetic Form
Metre 111111111001 01001 100100110111 01 111111 011011111101 11001 01101011101 10110110111 11011100111 101111 1111010101 11110111111 110111111111 1101011101 11110010101 1111 11111100101 101011101 01101010101 11011110111111 01 1111111 011101100100 11110101101 1
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 932
Words 191
Sentences 7
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 8, 4, 3, 5, 6
Lines Amount 26
Letters per line (avg) 28
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 146
Words per stanza (avg) 38
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 04, 2023

57 sec read
412

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism more…

All Edna St. Vincent Millay poems | Edna St. Vincent Millay Books

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