Explore "The Fawn" by Edna St. Vincent Millay on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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 hooves, / 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 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?