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Students will create a 1 page-long typed response to one of three review prompts. Responses must be in MLA format. Purpose: Explore in writing what you have read/watched and what we have presented in the modules.Instructions: Reply to only 1 of 3 topics/questions located below.Students are to submit their assignment by Jan 14th, 11:59 pm using the submission link on this page. Use citations and supporting evidence from texts/videos found in Modules Week 1-2. Restate the chosen topic/question in the first few sentences of your response. MLA Format Review Purdue WebpageLinks to an external site.Topic/Questions:1.Choose two different works that were interesting to you, including Pollock’s work and Marvell’s work. What characteristics of these works entice you? What can you tell about the author’s/artist’s identity? Do the works’ characteristics represent anything of your own identity?
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Andrew Marvell
1621–1678
Andrew Marvell is surely the single most compelling embodiment of the change
that came over English society and letters in the course of the 17th century. In an
era that makes a better claim than most upon the familiar term transitional,
Marvell wrote a varied array of exquisite lyrics that blend Cavalier grace with
Metaphysical wit and complexity. He first turned into a panegyrist for the Lord
Protector and his regime and then into an increasingly bitter satirist and polemicist,
attacking the royal court and the established church in both prose and verse. It is as
if the most delicate and elusive of butterflies somehow metamorphosed into a
caterpillar.
To be sure, the judgment of Marvell’s contemporaries and the next few generations
would not have been such. The style of the lyrics that have been so prized in the
20th century was already out of fashion by the time of his death, but he was a
pioneer in the kind of political verse satire that would be perfected by his younger
contemporary John Dryden and in the next generation by Alexander Pope (both
writing for the other side)—even as his satirical prose anticipated the achievement
of Jonathan Swift in that vein. Marvell’s satires won him a reputation in his own
day and preserved his memory beyond the 18th century as a patriotic political
writer—a clever and courageous enemy of court corruption and a defender of
religious and political liberty and the rights of Parliament. It was only in the 19th
century that his lyrical poems began to attract serious attention, and it was not
until T.S. Eliot’s classic essay (first published in March 1921), marking the
tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, that Marvell attained recognition as one of the
major lyric poets of his age.
In recent years postmodernist theory has once again focused on Marvell as a
political writer, but with as much attention to the politics of the lyric poems as to
the overtly partisan satires. Doubtless what sustains critical interest in Marvell and
accommodates the enormous quantity of interpretive commentary attracted by his
work is the extraordinary range and ambiguity of theme and tone among a
comparatively small number of poems. Equally uncertain are the nature and timing
of his personal involvement and his commitments in the great national events that
occurred during his lifetime. Nevertheless, despite the equivocal status of many of
the details of Marvell’s life and career, the overall direction is clear enough: he is a
fitting symbol for England’s transformation in the 17th century from what was still
largely a medieval, Christian culture into a modern, secular society. In his subtle,
ironic, and sometimes mysterious lyrics, apparently written just at the middle of
the century, we have one of our finest records of an acute, sensitive mind
confronting the myriad implications of that transformation.
The son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell, Andrew Marvell
spent his boyhood in the Yorkshire town of Hull, where his father, a clergyman of
Calvinist inclination, was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of
the Charterhouse when the poet was three years old. His father was, Marvell wrote
years later in The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part (1673), “a Conformist to
the established Rites of the Church of England, though I confess none of the most
over-running or eager in them.” Not surprisingly then, at the age of twelve in 1633,
Marvell was sent up to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was the very year that
William Laud became archbishop of Canterbury. If not such a stronghold of
Puritanism as Emmanuel College (alma mater of Marvell’s father), Trinity was
characterized by a moderation that contrasted sharply with a college such as
Peterhouse (Richard Crashaw‘s college), which ardently embraced the Arminianism
and ritualism of the Laudian program. Indeed, the liberal, rationalistic tenor of
Marvell’s religious utterances in later life may owe something to the influence of
Benjamin Whichcote, who in 1636 as lecturer at Trinity Church began to lay the
foundation for the latitudinarian strain that was so important in the Church of
England after the Restoration. Such tenuous evidence as exists, however, does not
suggest Puritan enthusiasm on the part of the youthful poet. The story that
Marvell, converted by Jesuits, ran away from Cambridge and was persuaded to
return by his father, who found him in a London bookshop, has never been
properly verified (although embarrassment over such a youthful indiscretion might
go far to explain the virulent anti-Catholicism of his later years). More provocative
is the lack of any evidence that he participated in the English Civil War, which
broke out a few months after his twenty-first birthday, and the Royalist tone of his
poems before 1650.
Marvell’s earliest surviving verses lead to no conclusions about his religion and
politics as a student. In 1637 two pieces of his, one in Latin and one in Greek, were
published in a collection of verses by Cambridge poets in honor of the birth of a
fifth child to Charles I. Other contributors were as diverse as Richard Crashaw,
who would later be a Catholic priest, and Edward King, whose death by drowning
that same year was the occasion for John Milton’s Lycidas (1638). Marvell’s Latin
poem, “Ad Regem Carolum Parodia,” is a “parody” in the sense that it is a close
imitation—in meter, structure, and language—of Horace, Odes I.2. While the
Roman poet hails Caesar Augustus as a savior of the state in the wake of violent
weather and the flooding of the Tiber, Marvell celebrates the fertility of the
reigning sovereign and his queen on the heels of the plague that struck Cambridge
at the end of 1636. Marvell’s contribution in Greek asserts that the birth of the
king’s fifth child had redeemed the number five, of ill omen since attempts had
been made on the life of James I on August 5, 1600 and November 5, 1605. It
would be easy enough to condemn the poem’s frigid ingenuity but for a reluctance
to be harsh with the work of a 16-year-old capable of writing Latin and Greek
verse.
If little can be made of these student exercises, the poems written in the 1640s that
imply a close association between Marvell and certain Royalists furnish intriguing
(if meager) grounds for speculation. The mystery is further complicated by a lack
of evidence regarding Marvell’s whereabouts and activities during most of the
decade. In 1639 he earned his BA and stayed on at the university, evidently to
pursue a MA degree. In 1641, however, his father drowned in “the Tide of
Humber”—the estuary at Hull made famous by “To his Coy Mistress.” Shortly
afterward Marvell left Cambridge, and there is plausible speculation that he might
have worked for a time in the shipping business of his well-to-do brother-in-law,
Edmund Popple. It is known that sometime during the 1640s Marvell undertook
an extended tour of the Continent. In a letter of February 21, 1653 recommending
Marvell for a place in his own department in Oliver Cromwell’s government,
Milton credits Marvell with four years’ travel in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain,
where he acquired the languages of all four countries. Regrettably Milton casts no
light upon the motives and circumstances of this journey. Modern scholarship has
generally assumed that Marvell served as the companion/tutor of a wealthy and
perhaps noble youth, but all the candidates brought forward for this role have been
eliminated by one consideration or another. Some have suggested that Marvell was
merely avoiding the war, others that he was some kind of government agent.
Although the explanation that he was a tutor seems most plausible, there is no
certainty about what he was doing.
Whatever the purpose of his travel, its lasting effects turn up at various points in
Marvell’s writings. The burlesque “Character of Holland” (1665), for example,
draws on reminiscences of the dikes of the Netherlands: “How did they rivet, with
Gigantick Piles, / Thorough the Center their new-catched Miles.” “Upon Appleton
House” describes a drained meadow by evoking a Spanish arena “Ere the Bulls
enter at Madril,” and a letter “To a Friend in Persia” recalls fencing lessons in Spain
(August 9, 1671). The circumstantial detail of “Fleckno, an English Priest at
Rome,” a satire very much in the manner of John Donne’s efforts in that genre,
suggests that Marvell actually met the victim of his poem in Rome when Richard
Flecknoe was there in 1645-1647. Flecknoe is, of course, the man immortalized as
Thomas Shadwell’s predecessor as king of dullness in John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe
(1682). Marvell mercilessly ridicules both the poverty of Flecknoe’s wit and his
literal poverty and consequent leanness. The jokes at the expense of Catholic
doctrine seem almost incidental to the abuse of Flecknoe’s undernourished penury:
Nothing now Dinner stay’d
But till he had himself a Body made.
I mean till he were drest: for else so thin
He stands, as if he only fed had been
With consecrated Wafers: and the Host
Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast.
Doubtless these lines play irreverently with the Thomist teaching that the Body
and Blood of Christ are both totally contained under each of the eucharistic
species, as well as with accounts of the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, who is said
to have subsisted for several years with no other nourishment than daily
Communion. But the real object of this quasi-Scholastic wit (again, much in the
style of Donne) is the absurdity of Flecknoe, and it lacks the virulent loathing that
characterizes Marvell’s attack on the doctrine of Transubstantiation years later in An
Account of the Growth of Popery (1677). His mockery of the narrowness of
Flecknoe’s room makes a similar joke with the doctrine of the Trinity, which was
accepted by virtually all Protestants at the time:
there can no Body pass
Except by penetration hither, where
Two make a crowd, nor can three Person here
Consist but in one substance.
While the jocular anti-Catholicism of “Fleck-no” hardly implies militant
Puritanism, by placing Marvell in Rome between 1645 and 1647, it raises the
possibility that he met Lord Francis Villiers, who was also in Rome in 1645 and
1646. This would strengthen the case for Marvell’s authorship of “An Elegy upon
the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers” and bring to three the number of Royalist
poems that he wrote. Two poems published in 1649, Richard Lovelace and “Upon
the death of Lord Hastings,” are both indisputably by Marvell and indisputably
Royalist in sentiment. It is not simply that both poems celebrate known adherents
of the king’s failed cause, but that they do so with pungent references to the
triumphant side in the Civil War. The death of Henry, Lord Hastings, in 1649 at
the age of 19 may have resulted immediately from smallpox, but the ultimate
source of his fate is that “the Democratick Stars did rise, / And all that Worth from
hence did Ostracize.” The poem to Lovelace is one of the commendatory pieces in
the first edition of Lucasta (1649). Marvell observes how “Our Civill Wars have lost
the Civicke crowne” and refers with explicit scorn to the difficulty encountered in
acquiring a printing license for the volume:
The barbed Censurers begin to looke
Like the grim consistory on thy Booke;
And on each line cast a reforming eye,
Severer then the yong Presbytery.
In subsequent lines Marvell refers to Lovelace’s legal difficulties with Parliament,
especially his imprisonment for presenting the Kentish petition requesting control
of the militia and the use of the Book of Common Prayer.”
“An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers” was first published in the
H.M. Margoliouth edition (1927) from an apparently unique pamphlet left to the
Worcester College Library by George Clarke (1660-1736) with an ascription of the
poem to Marvell in Clarke’s hand. Villiers (1629-1648), posthumous son of the
assassinated royal favorite George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, died in a
skirmish against Parliamentary forces. Here the poet celebrates not just a Royalist,
but a Royalist killed in military action against the revolutionary government.
“Fame” had “Much rather” told “How heavy Cromwell gnasht the earth and fell. /
Or how slow Death farre from the sight of day / The long-deceived Fairfax bore
away.” Villiers is credited with erecting “A whole Pyramid / Of Vulgar bodies,” and
the poet recommends that those who lament him turn to military rather than
literary “Obsequies”:
And we hereafter to his honour will
Not write so many, but so many kill.
Till the whole Army by just vengeance come
To be at once his Trophee and his Tombe.
All the evidence suggests that Clarke was a reliable witness; there is nothing in the
style of the poem that rules out Marvell as the author; and, though more extreme
politically, it is certainly compatible in sentiment and tone with the Hastings elegy
and the commendatory poem for Lucasta, which Marvell is known to have written
about the same time. If the Villiers elegy is in fact Marvell’s, then it casts a rather
eerie light on the man who would the following year write “An Horatian Ode upon
Cromwel’s Return from Ireland” and in 1651 become tutor to the daughter of
Thomas, third Baron Fairfax.”
The “Horatian Ode” is undoubtedly one of the most provocatively equivocal
poems in English literature. It has been read both as a straightforward encomium of
Cromwell and as an ironic deprecation. There is plentiful evidence for both
extremes as well as for intermediate positions. Interpretations are only more
confused by the fact that the poem can be narrowly dated. Its occasion is the return
of Oliver Cromwell from one of the more brutally successful of the many British
efforts to “pacify” the Irish, at the end of May 1650. It anticipates his invasion of
Scotland, which occurred on July 22, 1650. During the interval Thomas, Lord
Fairfax, already unhappy about the execution of King Charles, resigned his position
as commander in chief of the Parliamentary army because he disapproved of
striking the first blow against the Scots. His lieutenant general, Cromwell, was
appointed in his place and proceeded with the attack. Little is known about
Marvell’s footing with the Royalists whom he honored with poems in 1649 or with
his Puritan employers, Fairfax beginning in 1651 and later Cromwell himself;
hence it is futile to infer the attitude of the 1650 ode from the sketchy biographical
facts.”
Whatever was in Marvell’s mind at the time, the “Horatian Ode” succeeds in
expressing with surpassing finesse and subtlety a studied ambivalence of feeling
sharply bridled by the decisive grasping of a particular point of view. Written near
the exact midpoint of the century and very nearly in the middle of the poet’s 57
years, the ode on Cromwell establishes its portentous subject as a paradigmatic
figure of the great transformation of English culture then unfolding—as both a
cause and effect of the final dissolution of the feudal order of medieval
Christendom. The argument of the ode, which shares something of the driving
energy of the “forward Youth” and of “restless Cromwel” himself, is almost
completely devoted to the exaltation of the victorious general as a man in whom a
relentless individual will to power and an inevitable historical necessity have
converged to refashion the world. Cromwell is described both as conscious,
deliberating agent and as an ineluctable force of nature:
So restless Cromwel could not cease
In the inglorious Arts of Peace,
But through adventrous War
Urged his active Star.
And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first
Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
Did through his own Side
His fiery way divide.
He is exonerated for the violence and destruction of his campaigns because he is
the instrument of divine wrath, but he is also given credit for character, courage,
and craftiness:
‘Tis Madness to resist or blame
The force of angry Heavens flame:
And, if we would speak true,
Much to the Man is due.
Marvell accepts the contemporary rumor that Cromwell deliberately engineered
Charles’s flight from Hampton Court, by “twining subtile fears with hope,” so that
after the king’s recapture his loss of crown and head was more likely; but the device
is adduced not to exemplify Cromwell’s malice, but his “wiser Art.” Cromwell is
thus the rehabilitation of Niccolò Machiavelli. Even the closing stanzas, while
asserting the continued necessity of military force to maintain the regime, in no
way condemn it. Writing in the year before Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan
(1651), Marvell has come independently to the same conclusion, that power is
essentially its own justification:
But thou the Wars and Fortunes Son
March indefatigably on;
And for the last effect
Still keep thy Sword erect:
Besides the force it has to fright
The Spirits of the shady Night,
The same Arts that did gain
A Pow’r must it maintain.
Undoubtedly Marvell means that Cromwell is to keep his “Sword erect” by keeping
the blade up, ready to strike; but the assertion that it would thus “fright / The
Spirits of the shady Night,” notwithstanding precedents in Homer’s Odyssey and
Virgil’s Aeneid, still calls to mind the opposite procedure: holding up the hilt as a
representation of the cross. By implicitly rejecting the cross as an instrument of
political power, Marvell obliquely indicates that one effect of the vast cultural
revolution set in motion by the Civil War was the banishing of religion from
political life, just one aspect of the general secularization of Western civilization
already under way at the time.”
Of course what distinguishes the “Horatian Ode” is the emotional shudder that
pervades it, acknowledging the wrenching destructiveness of massive social change.
Marvell concedes that Charles I, in some sense, has right on his side, but he will not
concede that the right, or justice, is an inviolable absolute to which a man must
remain unshakably committed. A terrible exhilaration marks the stanza in which
the “ruine” of “the great Work of Time” is regretted but unblinkingly accepted:
Though Justice against Fate complain,
And plead the antient Rights in vain:
But those do hold or break
As Men are strong or weak.
There is a finely calculated irony in the way “the Royal Actor” on the “Tragick
Scaffold” occupies the very center of an ode dedicated to Cromwell’s victories and
furnishes the poem’s most memorable lines:
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable Scene:
But with his keener Eye
The Axes edge did try:
Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight
To vindicate his helpless Right,
But bow’d his comely Head,
Down as upon a Bed.
These lines are moving, and they seem to reflect Marvell’s genuine admiration for
the king as well as a vivid realization that some ineffable cultural value was lost
irrecoverably with Charles’s head, but nostalgia for what was passing away is
subsumed in the excited awareness of the advent of what was new: “This was that
memorable Hour / Which first assur’d the forced Pow’r.” The word forced is not
pejorative here; force is, finally, the hero of the poem even more than the individual
Cromwell.”
The brilliant ambivalence of feeling is enhanced by Marvell’s deft deployment of
classical precedents. The obvious Horatian model is Odes I.37, a celebration of
Augustus’s naval victory at Actium that closes with a tribute to Cleopatra’s courage
in committing suicide rather than facing the humiliation of a Roman triumph. In
addition, Marvell has drawn upon the language and imagery of Lucan’s Pharsalia,
both in the original and in Thomas May’s English translation. That Marvell’s
language describing Cromwell is mainly borrowed from Lucan’s descriptions of
Caesar (whom Lucan detested) is not an encoded condemnation of the English
general; it is an aspect of Marvell’s strategy for praising Cromwell not merely in
spite of, but because of, qualities that are conventionally condemned. The point of
the “Horatian Ode” is that Cromwell has ushered in a new era that renders “the
antient Rights” obsolete.”
Given the radical character of the “Horatian Ode,” it is actually easier to account
for the apparent anomaly of Marvell’s poem “Tom May’s Death.” May, who died
on November 13, 1650 and whose translation of Lucan seems to have influenced
some passages of the “Horatian Ode,” had made his reputation as a poet at the
court of Charles I and apparently hoped to succeed Ben Jonson as poet laureate
upon Jonson’s death in 1637. According to his enemies—including the author of
“Tom May’s Death”—it was chagrin at having been passed over in favor of William
Davenant that led May to switch sides and became a propagandist for Parliament.
In the major action of the poem the shade of Ben Jonson, in “supream command”
of the Elysian Fields of poets, expels May from their number for “Apostatizing from
our Arts and us, / To turn the Chronicler of Spartacus.” Critics have wondered how
the same man who celebrated Cromwell in the “Horatian Ode” could only a few
months later scornfully equate the Parliamentary rebellion against the king with the
revolt of Roman slaves under Spartacus, or depict the two best-known regicides of
the classical world thus: “But how a double headed Vulture Eats, / Brutus and
Cassius the Peoples cheats.” What Marvell may well be doing in this poem is simply
distancing himself from May, who seems to have been a loutish individual
(according to contemporary accounts he died in a drunken stupor) and whose
political choices seemed to have been determined by sheer expediency as well as
personal pique. His death perhaps afforded Marvell an opportunity to deal with
residual Royalist sentiment in conflict with his judgment and even to assure himself
that his own changing allegiances were not motivated by venality. Given the
ambiguity of Marvell’s politics in 1650, it is not reasonable to exclude a poem from
the canon because it seems politically incompatible with another poem. It is also
difficult to deny Marvell lines such as these:
When the Sword glitters ore the Judges head,
And fear has Coward Churchmen silenced,
Then is the Poets time, ‘tis then he drawes,
And single fights forsaken Vertues cause.
He, when the wheel of Empire, whirleth back,
And though the World’s disjointed Axel crack,
Sings still of ancient Rights and better Times,
Seeks wretched good, arraigns successful Crimes.
It is by no means displeasing to think that Marvell had second thoughts about his
dismissal of the “antient Rights” in the “Horatian Ode.”
Perhaps before the end of 1650, but certainly by 1651, Marvell was employed as
tutor in languages to the twelve-year-old daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, who
had returned to his Yorkshire estates after resigning his military command. It is not
known who recommended Marvell for the post, but doubtless his own Yorkshire
background was a factor. Marvell remained with Fairfax until early 1653 when he
sought employment in the Cromwell government with John Milton’s
recommendation. Instead Cromwell procured Marvell a position as tutor to
William Dutton, who was being considered as a husband for Cromwell’s youngest
daughter, Frances. Marvell served as Dutton’s tutor until 1657, living in the house
of John Oxenbridge, a Puritan divine who had spent time in Bermuda to escape
Laud’s reign over the Church of England. In 1657 Marvell did receive a
government post with Milton as his supervisor. The period of the poet’s
employment as a tutor is generally thought to be the time when his greatest lyrics
and topographical poems—the works on which his twentieth-century reputation is
founded—were written.”
Undoubtedly having their source in Marvell’s sojourn with Fairfax are three poems
on the general’s properties at Bilbrough and Nun Appleton: “Epigramma in Duos
montes Amosclivum Et Bilboreum. Farfacio,” “Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow To the Lord Fairfax,” and “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax.” The
first two of these poems, the Latin epigram and its English companion piece,
allegorize topographical features in and around the Fairfax manor at Bilbrough to
praise the character of Marvell’s patron. The Latin poem attributes to Fairfax both
the forbidding ruggedness of Almscliff and the gentleness of the hill at Bilbrough:
“Asper in adversos, facilis cedentibus idem” (the same man is harsh to enemies, easy
on those who yield); while the English poem elaborates upon the agreeable qualities
of Bilbrough as an emblem of the man who modestly withdrew from “his own
Brightness” as a military leader to a life of rural retirement. “Upon Appleton
House” takes up the theme and develops it through nearly 800 lines into a subtle
and complex meditation on the moral implications of choosing a life of private
introspection over action, of withdrawal from the world rather than involvement in
its affairs. Beginning as a country-house poem in the mode of Jonson’s “To
Penshurst,” Marvell’s poem expands into a leisurely survey of the entire landscape
that moves with an ease that is the antithesis of the urgency of the “Horation Ode.”
“Upon Appleton House” covers an array of topics with an extraordinary range of
wit and tone, but its central preoccupation is the identical theme of the ode on
Cromwell, only in reverse: while that poem gives an exhilarating account of the
career of Cromwell’s “active Star,” moderated by a keen sense of the violence of “the
three-fork’d Lightning,” the poem on Fairfax expresses a deep affection as well as
respect for its hero, tempered by just a hint that Fairfax’s scruples and modesty may
have been excessive and detrimental to his country. Marvell comments on the
incongruity between the floral ordinance of Nun Appleton’s fort-shaped flower
beds and the actual warfare that had laid England waste; then he suggests that, had
Fairfax’s conscience been less tender, it might have been within his power to set
England right:
And yet their walks one on the Sod
Who, had it pleased him and God,
Might once have made our Gardens spring
Fresh as his own and flourishing.
But he preferr’d to the Cinque Ports
These five imaginary Forts:
And, in those half-dry Trenches, spann’d
Pow’r which the Ocean might command.
The fine discrimination of these lines defies comment: Is there an intimation,
however slight, that preference for “imaginary Forts” is not worthy of a man of
Fairfax’s gifts during a national crisis? But even to suggest this much is to suggest
too much: it is never put in doubt that Fairfax is listening to his conscience; that is,
to God. While there is regret that the best man is impeded by his very goodness
from assuming the position for which he is fitted, there is no recrimination; the
sorrow is, finally, a result of the inherent condition of fallen mankind:
Oh Thou, that dear and happy Isle
The Garden of the World ere while,
Thou Paradise of four Seas,
Which Heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the World, did guard
With watry if not flaming Sword;
What luckless Apple did we tast,
To make us Mortal, and The Wast?
If Fairfax himself has succeeded in withdrawing from the world—now become “a
rude heap together hurled”—into the “lesser World” of Nun Appleton, “Heaven’s
Center, Nature’s Lap. / And Paradice’s only Map,” his daughter must go out into that
world in marriage to carry on “beyond her Sex the line.” Always the individual hope
of happy retirement is threatened by the historical necessity of society:
Whence, for some universal good,
The Priest shall cut the sacred Bud;
While her glad Parents most rejoice,
And make their Destiny their Choice
We can only wonder how Marvell responded to the marriage of his former pupil
when it came in 1657, and Maria Fairfax was joined with George Villiers, second
Duke of Buckingham, elder brother of Lord Francis Villiers, and one of the most
notorious rakes of the notorious Restoration era. Such a “destiny” may have shaken
even the poet’s cool detachment.”
Many of Marvell’s best-known lyrics are associated with his tenure as Maria
Fairfax’s tutor because they deploy language and themes that appear in “Upon
Appleton House.” The Mower poems, for example, provide a particular focus on
the undifferentiated figures of the mowing section of “Upon Appleton House”
(lines 385-440). Four in number, the Mower poems are a variant of the pastoral
mode, substituting a mower for the familiar figure of the shepherd (as Jacopo
Sannazaro’s Piscatorial Eclogues [1526] substitutes fishermen). “The Mower against
Gardens” is the complaint of a mower against the very idea of the formal enclosed
garden planted with exotic hybrids—an increasingly fashionable feature of English
country estates in the 17th century, condemned by the mower as a perverted and
“luxurious” tampering with nature at her “most plain and pure.” The theme is
unusual, if not unprecedented, with the most familiar treatment coming in Perdita’s
argument with Polixenes in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (IV.4). As is so
often the case in Marvell’s poems, the point is stated in its most extreme form by
his censorious mower: it is not just excess that offends him, the “Onion root [tulip
bulb] they then so high did hold, / That one was for a Meadow sold”; but the very
notion of the luxuriant, ornamental garden as an improvement over nature: “‘Tis
all enforc’d; the Fountain and the Grot; / While the sweet Fields do lye forgot.” The
poem is thus pervaded by hints of timely references to the revolutionary situation
of England at mid-century: the mower’s strictures against formal gardens recall the
Puritan’s suspicion of religious images and courtly extravagance, the laboring man’s
bitter disdain for the self-indulgent idleness of his social “betters,” and the whole
vexed issue of land enclosures. Yet these are overtones not arguments, and the
single-minded moralizing of the mower is certainly not in the poet’s own style,
although a part of his nature would doubtless sympathize with the mower’s “rootand-branch” viewpoint.”
The other three Mower poems, “Damon the Mower,” “The Mower to the GloWorms,” and “The Mower’s Song,” all express Damon’s frustration at his rejection
by a certain “fair Shepheardess,” Juliana. It cannot be determined whether Damon
is to be identified with the speaker of “The Mower against Gardens,” but the voice
in all the Mower poems displays the belligerent intensity of wounded selfrighteousness. “Damon the Mower” is in a line of pastoral figures beginning with
the Polyphemus of Theocritus (Idylls 11) and Ovid (Metamorphoses 13) and the
Corydon of Virgil (Eclogues 2), all of whom enumerate their clownishly rustic
wealth and personal attributes with incredulous frustration at the beloved’s refusal
to respond favorably to their advances. In keeping with the classical precedents,
Marvell tempers the lugubriousness of his unhappy mower by endowing him with
a certain threatening aura. In “Damon the Mower” the frantic activity of the
lovesick laborer results in “Depopulating all the Ground” as he “does cut / Each
stroke between the Earth and Root.” When he inadvertently cuts his own ankle, he
is solemnly mocked with the line “By his own Sythe, the Mower mown”; but
Damon dismisses this wound as inconsequential compared to that given by
“Julianas Eyes,” and the poem closes with a sinister reminder of the symbolism of
the Mower: “‘Tis death alone that this must do: / For Death thou art a Mower
too.” Similarly, in “The Mower’s Song” his obsessive fixation on desire disdained is
expressed in a grim refrain, the only one in Marvell’s verse, closing out all five
stanzas: “For Juliana comes, and She / What I do to the Grass, does to my
Thoughts and Me.” Even “The Mower to the Glo-Worms” leaves its disconsolate
speaker benighted despite the friendly efforts of the fireflies, “For She my Mind
hath so displac’d / That I shall never find my home.” There are undoubtedly
political resonances in the vociferous mower—sprung out of the soil, brandishing
his scythe, and denouncing wealthy gardeners and shepherds and scornful
shepherdesses—but his menacing air is blended with a larger measure of absurd
pathos. The Mower poems are thus characteristic of Marvell’s aloof irony.”
“The Garden“ shares in this equivocal detachment, as the endless debates about its
sources (in classical antiquity, the church fathers, the Middle Ages, hermeticism,
and so on), its relation to contemporary poetry, and its own ultimate significance
show. The poem has been regarded as an account of mystical ecstasy by some
commentators, of Horatian Epicureanism by others; some find in it an antilibertine
version of the poetry of rural retirement, while others interpret it in terms of “the
politics of landscape.”
