Faun
Faun - meaning Summary
Transfiguration Into a Faun
The poem depicts a startling metamorphosis in a moonlit, marshy landscape: a man’s call summons owls that watch as his human limbs shift into hooves and goat-horns, until he becomes a faun or pastoral god and gallops into the woods. The scene compresses mythic transformation and animal instinct, exploring liminality between human and beast and the eerie witness of nature as passive congregation to a sudden, pagan change.
Read Complete AnalysesHaunched like a faun, he hooed From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost Until all owls in the twigged forest Flapped black to look and brood On the call this man made. No sound but a drunken coot Lurching home along river bank. Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank Of double star-eyes lit Boughs where those owls sat. An arena of yellow eyes Watched the changing shape he cut, Saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout Goat-horns. Marked how god rose And galloped woodward in that guise.
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