The Hunted Stag and the Beheaded King

Seventeenth-century poets of postwar England address the aftermath of regicide through traditional elegy and funereal lament. As the century wears on, however, artists come to write about the beheading of the king using a more sophisticated sentimental idiom. Poets such as John Denham, Margaret Cavendish, and Andrew Marvell utilize the allegorical figure of the stalked deer to illustrate more clearly the brutality of which men are capable and to vivify the pain and suffering experienced by the vanquished monarch. This essay examines their methods and reasons for fusing Charles's memory with the pathetic symbol of the hunted stag.