Although Paz's work has been extensively reviewed and analyzed in Spanish and English, there are no sustained critical treatments of "Fable" in English. The work is generally discussed with the other poems in the 1954 volume Semillas para un himno (Seeds for a Hymn), which is often viewed as representing a particular phase in Paz's career as a thinker and a poet. Its initial reception in Mexico was mixed. Paz published the volume shortly after returning to his native land after eleven years abroad, six of which were spent in Paris among André Breton and other French surrealists. The surrealist elements and tone of Semillas para un himno are obvious. Many Mexican critics were appalled at the work, which they said had no social or political relevance to what was happening in Mexico at the time. Jason Wilson, in his study of Paz's life and career, explains the reaction of critics and poets to the volume: "The period of the mid-1950s in Mexico saw the term 'surrealist' become the 'forbidden word' ... For Raúl Leiva the poems [in Semillas para un himno] were hermetic with a total loss of feeling for humanity. Silva Villalobos found them inhuman and not Mexican. ... That surrealism could still provoke reactions in 1954 may surprise. Augusto Lunel, reviewing the same book, claimed that the term surrealist became an adjective for whatever could not be understood." There were also favorable reviews of the collection, but in general critics viewed Semillas para un himno as evidence that Paz had been "corrupted" by his stay in Europe.

The interest in and popularity of "Fable" in English is indicated by its inclusion in two important English-language collections of Paz's early poetry. The poet Muriel Rukeyser translated the poem and included it in Early Poems: 1935-1955, and it appeared in Eliot Weinberger's Octavio Paz: Selected Poems, which appeared in 1969 and was reissued several times. Unfortunately, only a few critics have offered any remarks at all on the poem, and those who mention it do so only in passing, summarizing it in a sentence or two. Rachel Phillips, writing in 1972, in discussing mirror imagery in Paz's work, notes that the mirror motif in "Fable" "acts as one of the threads unifying Paz's great themes of epistemology, solitude, and language." Gordon Brotherston's 1975 discussion of Latin American poetry offers the provocative suggestion that the "golden age" Paz describes is an ironic reminder of the triteness of the perfect society as a political entity. Jason Wilson, is his 1986 study of Paz's life and work, sees the poem as depicting an original world where there is no alienation. He sees it as a world "bound by interlocking metaphors ... the original metaphorical quality of language itself released from its twentieth-century straitjacket."

Although the poem "Fable" itself has not received much notice by English-language critics, this is by no means an indication of Paz's general reputation among readers outside Mexico. He is admired throughout the world not only as one of the masters of the Spanish language but, as indicated by the Nobel committee, as a giant figure in world literature whose work is marked by "impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity."