A walker comes upon a fawn at a brook, and for one long instant neither of them moves. That is nearly the whole event of "The Fawn," and yet I. L. Salomon turns it into a small tragedy of misunderstanding. The speaker means no harm. He is moved, even happy, at the sight of her. But from where the fawn stands, a human figure in the woods can only mean one thing, and the poem lives in the gap between what the speaker feels and what the animal is able to read.
That gap opens with the first question. "How could the fawn count me as one / Who walked the woods without a gun?" The speaker is not asking whether he is innocent; he is asking how anyone could possibly know. The poem is built from questions of this kind. The second is the sharpest: "How could she tell my hunger apart / From the hungry urge of the hunter's heart?" The word "hunger" is doing double work here. His is a hunger to look, to take in beauty; the hunter's is a hunger to kill. To a frightened animal the two are indistinguishable, and the speaker, to his credit, doesn't pretend otherwise. He doesn't scold the fawn for fearing him. He understands her fear as reasonable, which is what makes the poem sad rather than merely sweet.
Salomon handles the moment of stillness with striking physical language. The fawn is "Unmoving, bound," held "stiff as rock" by terror, so that fear turns a living creature into something like stone. Then the poem reverses itself in the fourth stanza, where her eyes, once "gentle fires," become "Desperately dark with flame." The same image, fire, carries two opposite meanings: first warmth and softness, then panic. It is a quiet piece of craft, showing the change in her without ever leaving the eyes. The stanza ends by claiming that her "wary nerves defined / The aching tremor of the mind," as if her fear were so complete that it became a kind of knowledge, an understanding of vulnerability itself.
The form is neat and controlled, which makes a good contrast with the emotion it holds. The poem runs in rhymed couplets, five stanzas of four lines, and the rhymes are mostly clean: "me" and "privacy," "sense" and "difference," "brook" and "rock." Their tidiness has an interesting effect. The lines have the steadiness of a small ritual, as if the speaker is holding the scene carefully, the way one holds still near a wild animal. The line lengths are short and even, with a rhythm close to a tight, stepping beat, and that restraint keeps the poem from sliding into sentimentality. When the fawn finally flees, her hooves "sped / Noiselessly to her secret bed," and the enjambment of those lines lets her slip away almost before we notice, quick and silent.
Then comes the turn. The last two lines break from the careful description into direct feeling: "But, oh, the pain in her startled eyes / Is wild in my heart! How deep it lies!" The exclamations are the first moment the speaker's composure cracks. Notice, too, the word "wild." Throughout the poem the fawn has been the wild creature and the speaker the intruder, yet in the end the wildness passes into him, lodging in his heart. He came to look at nature from the outside and leaves with it inside him, in the form of pain he can't put down. The poem ends not with the fawn's escape but with what stays behind in the person who frightened her.
That is what gives such a modest scene its weight. Salomon suggests that good intentions are not always visible, and that simply being human, in a world where humans have so often been the danger, can make us a source of fear even when we long to be gentle. The poem asks nothing grand of us. It only holds up one frightened animal and one regretful watcher, and lets the regret linger.