One of the more convincing conclusions, however, made by John Finnis and Patrick Martin in their essay “Another Turn for the Turtle” suggests that it refers to the real life couple Anne and Roger Line, he being exiled and she martyred for their Catholic beliefs.165 As Finnis and Martin rightly conclude, “the invocation to a requiem suggests a Catholic rite” (12), and the poem’s final line, calling the reader to “sigh a prayer” for the dead, “emphasizes the poem’s detachment from the official reformed Church’s rejection of all prayer or intercession for the dead.” They agree that the allegory is “more reticent, artificed, opaque and resonant than [their] discussion may suggest [because] it makes no display of Catholic belief, or even of common Christian hope for life beyond death” (13), but they also bolster their argument by reading the poem alongside scenes from The Merchant of Venice and Titus Andronicus.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1517&context=gc_etds
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