Fauns

Fauns are invoked as legendary woodland presences that remain outside the secluded bower of Adam and Eve. Their brief appearance in the garden scene helps define the enclosure as sacred, human-centered, and untouched by the mythic creatures associated with wild nature.

Identity and Imagined Nature

Fauns belong to the catalogue of beings associated with pastoral and classical mythology. The poem places them alongside Pan, Silvanus, and Nymphs as creatures imagined to haunt shaded rural retreats. They are therefore not presented as ordinary animals or as inhabitants of the garden’s visible ecology, but as supernatural or mythic figures belonging to a broader cultural imagination of the woodland.

Exclusion from the Garden

When Adam and Eve arrive at their bower, the narrator emphasizes that the place is more sacred and secluded than any retreat where Pan or Silvanus might sleep, or where Nymphs or Fauns might roam. The wording makes Fauns part of a hypothetical comparison: even these beings do not haunt the inner recess. Their absence is consequently meaningful. The bower is not merely private or beautiful; it is set apart from the entire field of legendary nature.

Relation to Adam and Eve

The exclusion of Fauns contrasts with the animals, birds, insects, and worms that are explicitly barred from entering the garden enclosure because of their awe of man. Fauns are not said to fear Adam and Eve directly, but their nonappearance reinforces the same hierarchy. The human pair occupy a privileged position within creation, and the bower becomes the innermost site of their union, worship, and marital life.

Thematic Significance

Fauns function less as developed characters than as boundary-markers. By naming beings conventionally connected with untamed woods and sensual pastoral myth, the poem clarifies that Adam and Eve’s dwelling exceeds even the imagined sanctuaries of classical nature. The reference also places sacred human intimacy against a wider mythological landscape: the bower absorbs flowers, fragrance, shade, and living abundance, yet remains closed to the creatures that would traditionally personify the wild. Their absence thus strengthens the poem’s distinction between created nature under human stewardship and a profane or merely fictional wilderness outside the appointed human order.