Nearby the shepherd Silvius is speaking with Phoebe. Silvius is explaining to Phoebe that her rejection of his suit will be the death of him. Silvius uses a metaphor: he compares Phoebe to an executioner who is about to cut off a prisoner’s head with an axe. He explains that Phoebe is crueler than the executioner because even an executioner asks the prisoner for forgiveness before he cuts off his head. Silvius is asking Phoebe to have some pity for him. He wants her to have some emotion or feeling for his situation.
As Phoebe starts to respond, Rosalind, Celia, and Corin enter at the back of the stage and listen to her reply.
Phoebe tells Silvius that she has no desire to hurt him. So, she will leave him alone since he had implied that her presence is killing him (that he will die because she is rejecting him). In love poetry an oft-used cliché is that the woman’s look of rejection or scorn will kill the man. Silvius apparently used that cliché with Phoebe, for Phoebe then explains that the soft eyes of a woman have no power to hurt or kill anyone. To prove her point, she frowns at Silvius (line 15) and gives him a cold look; but Silvius does not faint or swoon or become hurt in any way. Phoebe’s response thus agrees with Touchstone’s earlier comments that love poetry is false or dishonest.
Silvius then responds that the wounds of love appear not in the body, they appear in the heart: