46THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORYnotes that the stag’s nobility allows him to be read as an allegorical rep-
resentation of the ill-fated king. Like Menely, though, Carson sug-
gests that the effectiveness of the allegory—aimed at producing
sympathy for the royalist movement—depends upon “the acceptance
of animals as sensitive beings” and a broader cultural awareness that
nonhuman animals could feel and express pain, have desires, and face
death with horror and pity.^26 This is an allegory, in other words, that
depends upon a deep sense of the similarity between deer and king. The
result is a poem whose allegorical impulse seems repeatedly to shift
between man and animal. The poem begins by methodically setting up
allegorical resonances, including a Spenserian rendering of the forest
as a labyrinth and home to anthropomorphized trees. The hunt begins
when the stag leaves the forest to feed upon a farmer’s field: “The Owner
coming there, he soon espies: / Strait call’d his Dogs to hunt him from
that place.”^27 The stag goes from narcissist to thief, implying another
justification for the hunt, and not simply an allegorical one, since the
raiding of crops, or more broadly, competition for resources, has long
been a reason for killing animals of all kinds. The stag has left its “natu-
ral” domain, and also the safety of the royal forest, and stumbled onto
private property.
The hunting of the stag is thus overdetermined, which perhaps
explains why so much of the poem is given over to a description of the
chase: “At last it came to be a forrest chase” (58). The poem’s remaining
eighty-two lines narrate the hunt. At this point too the stag becomes the
heroic victim who tries to outrun and outsmart his pursuers, to no avail.
The length and detail with which the hunt is described forces readers to
dwell on the violence of the hunt and the terror experienced by the stag,
suggesting the poem really is about a deer hunt.
The Stag with feare did run, his life to save,
Whilst Men for love of Mischiefe dig his Grave,
The angry Dust in every Face up flies,
As with Revenge, seeks to put out their Eies.
Yet they so fast went on with such loud Cries,
The Stag no hope had left, nor help espies.