I have never understood what precisely is happening in Marvell's "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn."
At the same time I'm afraid to think about it too long because the answer may somehow be Jesus. Which it tends to be in Marvell (and Gene Wolfe, which makes solving his elaborate puzzles equally annoying), though not as bad as in Herbert, whose Jesus annihilates him so thoroughly that he pretty much just is the-annihilation-of-Herbert, a universe-destroying masochism pretty close to the worst moments of Kafka (and at least with Kafka you can grab him and say no, no, no and lift him back up and shake him and remind him of where he'd been taking you). With Herbert it's like he came up with every possible riddle where the answer was Jesus, thus making you hate riddles, while implying that everything in the world is such a riddle, thus rendering hateful life.
But Marvell's Jesus-land is also nature-land, like in Spenser, which makes no sense but permits moments of innocence and beauty composed with the assurance of Jesus promises - as though the world, and they really believed it, were a fulfilled Jesus promise. As though the imperfect were okay because the perfect had said so. Being able to look at nature with the awe of true religion, rather than saying you should like we never cease to, is a startling thing, a delicate one, an almost Renaissance-only rarity. Clearly one needs to avoid the siren song of sense-making, with Marvell - but it's difficult, because you think, what if the sense when you find it proves Jesus is just a mist who smiles and waves bye and dissolves and there you are in nature in its innocence and beauty and Marvell meant to take you there?
What if he's never been talking about sin etc. but about what Kafka's talking about in his best moments, how you're at home in what you're made of when you can fight sufficiently free of - or into - what you're made for? How the person called God, the intention, or rather the thought of such a person with such an intention, perverts the intentionless place called Heaven, which is Earth, which is here, which you're made of?
I'd like the statue part to be a mockery of the Christian afterlife. I'd like the soldiers to be the idiotic God-warriors of the 17th century. I'd like Sylvio to be the most God-like thing in a godless world, the plan to our natural heritage, that has indeed betrayed us and must not again be trusted but that has given us such marvelous things. Not even Heaven is perfect, but it's full of most marvelous things.
(But also it's unclear if we're talking sex or masturbation or a green-red-white daydream subsuming them.)
