Summary
In “All in green went my love riding,” an unnamed speaker describes his love, a hunter. She is wearing green, riding a golden horse, and heading out into the wilderness at dawn. The hunter and her hounds chase after wild deer, which the speaker describes as being swift, red, tall, and soft. The deer are eventually captured and killed—the hunter blows her horn, and shoots the deer down with her arrows. At the end of the poem, the speaker falls dead, revealing the fact that he is one of the deer pursued by his love the hunter.
Analysis
The poem can be divided into four parts: stanzas 1 to 4, 5 to 8, 9 to 12, and 13 to 14. Stanzas one to four establish sensory imagery, which is crucial to an imagist poem like “All in green went my love riding.” These stanzas also evoke the myths and narratives to which this poem alludes. In addition, they also provide a prototype for the rest of the poem. The triplet-couplet-triplet-couplet format is repeated in the three sections that follow. The syntactical structure of each triplet or stanza, too, is replicated in the stanzas to come. Some notable phonetic devices in these stanzas include the alliterations in “merry deer ran,” “dappled dreams,” “swift sweet,” “red rare,” “red roebuck,” and “white water,” and the assonances of “hounds crouched” and “cruel bugle.”
Stanzas 5 to 8 develop the images established in the first four stanzas, while repeating their structures and patterns. It is as though the poem were taking us deeper into a dream, by means of more complex, elusive, and synesthetic images (“riding the echo down,” “Softer be they than slippered sleep,” “the famished arrow sang”). These stanzas also continue to build upon the deer image, further emphasizing its symbolic significance. The sound devices in these stanzas include the slant rhyme of “down” and “dawn,” the assonances in “level meadows” and in “famished arrow,” and the alliterations in “Horn at hip,” “slippered sleep,” “lean lithe,” and “fleet flown.”
The role of stanzas 9 to 12 is to prepare the reader for the final two stanzas of the poem. They introduce the idea of death, transition into a more extreme and perhaps more dangerous spatial setting, and emphasize the triumph of the hunter. These stanzas, like those that precede them, feature a plethora of phonetic devices, some of which are the alliterations in “Bow at belt,” “daunting death,” “sleek slim,” and “tall tense,” and the assonances in “sheer peaks” and “lucky hunter.”
The final two stanzas—perhaps like the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet—provide the conclusion, but also take the poem to an unexpected twist. Stanzas 13 and 14 reshape our reading of the previous parts of the poem: The elaborate images of deer turn out to be the speaker’s projections of his own desire, vulnerability, urgency, and tension, onto other wild animals, and the entire poem turns out to be an allegoric comparison between a hunt and a violent love affair. Formal elements of these last two stanzas also closely approximate the content of the poem. The stops caused by the monosyllabic words “my,” “heart,” “fell,” and “dead” highlight the suddenness of the speaker’s death; the omission of the latter triplet and couplet from this section mimics the abrupt ending of the narrative. The sense of emptiness conveyed by these missing stanzas perhaps mirrors the speaker’s emotional response to the violence of a love affair.
