Hart-Leap Well

It was interesting to read Hart-Leap Well after reading We Are Seven last week because both, in slightly different ways, deal with death. We Are Seven dealt with the idea that death is natural, but in Hart-Leap Well, the narrator says “Nor will I mention by what death he died;” (30). At first, this appears an attempt to gloss over death or to treat it as shameful, but later in the poem the hart’s death becomes a thing of glory for Sir Walter and the place of its death is given an almost religious significance.

As the narrator speculates on the hart’s reason for choosing that place to die, he suggests it is because it is a place where the hart was close to nature “on the grass perhaps asleep” (149), again comparable to the graves in We Are Seven. The hart is definitely not separate from nature, even in death, “This beast not unobserv’d by Nature fell,” (163) and eventually “These monuments shall all be overgrown.” (176) suggesting that man’s constructions and rituals around death are worthless next to the power of nature. Sir Walter himself dies and the things he built are taken back to nature in the same way both his body and the body of the hart are. It seems that it is not so much the matter of the hart’s death, but the means of his death, hunted by Sir Walter, that is important and unnatural.