Characters: Marvell's most famous personae are Damon, the hapless mower in love with Juliana and hostile to gardens, the sentimentally grieving "Nymph," and his mute but memorable "Coy Mistress."  His own persona is more ambiguous, masked by its playful use of langauge and standard poetic conventions.

Issues: Andrew Marvell presents us with an interesting literary reflection of the "binary paradoxes" (my term) inflicted upon English authors by the Civil War (1642-8), the parliamentary dictatorship (1649-60), and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II (1660-85).  Are English gardens good or bad?  Have humans ruined nature, or worse, the New World, or have they "discovered" and "improved it"?  Is the poetic art good for religious subjects or does it ruin them?  Is love Marvell had worshipped in both the Church of England and the Roman Christian church, and had written to support both the royalists and the parliamentarians.  To those who would accuse him of lacking principles, we should ask how they would explain his defense of Milton after the blind poet was imprisoned and near execution by the Restoration government.  Like many people who live intimately with civil war, Marvell had friends on both sides of the conflict, and to be fair, the conflict was less a mere governmental dispute than a shift in culture from medieval to modern mentality. He also is a good example of a post-Miltonic poet, one who seemingly measures his gifts and ambitions against the epic poet and finds himself lacking the will and skills to challenge his immediate predecessor.

• "Coronet" is a religious poem that we cannot date due to its late publication by Mary "Marvell" Palmer (see #1 below), but which may have been influenced by George Herbert's poems (pub. 1633).  It also may reflect both poets' common response to the problem of faith in a nation divided by wars over religious observance (among other causes).  Compare its use of "wreaths" as a synonym for poems with Donne's "pretty rooms" ("Canonization") and the threat that the persona's subtle corruption by art may require God's violent attack to purge it (Holy Sonnets, "Hymn to God My God in Sickness").
  • What is the moral effect of poetry?
  • What debts does the author of a poem incur?
• "Bermudas" is a framed poem, purporting to have been overheard across the water from a small boat being rowed by English sailors.  First, acknowledge that any tunes sung by English sailors of the period doubtless would have had an earthier subject or, at least, a less smooth meter.  However, you can find chanteys that praise the bounty of the New World and the freedom of the seas in contrast with the Old World's conflicts and familiar economic tangles.  Compare this with Ralegh's "Discovery" for a similar sense of this land as a New Eden, a place "Safe from storms, and prelate's rage" (11).
  • Given this similarity, why does Marvell cast the poem as a song overheard, not his, though of "An holy and a cheerful note"(38)?
• "A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body" is an old medieval motif which reminds us of Everyman, almost a piece of closet theatre, in which the stanzas, alternating, present the view of human life from these two radically differing points of view.  Note the potential for comparison with "Coronet" and (hence) with Donne's religious poems and those of Herbert.
  • Does the dialogue sound sympathetic or hostile to the Body's situation?

  Especially note the introduction of the notion that ensoulment, and life in society, constitutes a kind of fall into construction doomed to failure (ll. 41-44).   Marvell does much more with this in the "Mower" poems.  The Norton footnote (1687) has been changed from the 6th edition note which says "The outsize last stanza, the inconclusive ending, and the fact that the body has the last word, all suggest that the poem as we have it is incomplete" (6th edition, 1418).

  • Why do you suppose they changed their opinion?  With which reading of the poem's irregularities do you agree?
• "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn" has two background allusions, the first to the classics: Virgil's Aeneid VII, in which the Trojans are brought to open war with the Latins when Aeneas' son, Ascanius, while hunting, slays a stag which he does not realize is the tame pet of Silvia, daughter of the warden of the king's game.  For the passage in question (translated by John Dryden), click here.  The other allusive reference is the (female) soul's lament for the slain Innocent who was crucified by Man.  In both instances, men are "wild" when they are untrue (see Sylvio's behavior, ll. 33-36) but the garden is another form of "wilderness" (74) in which natural relations are properly observed.  Her behavior in ll. 93-110 can be compared with a medieval saint's worship, including the relics and reliquary she constructs to hold them.
• "To His Coy Mistress" is (with Herrick's "To Maidens to Make Much of Time" and "Corinna's Gone A-Maying") one of the era's most famous expressions of the carpe diem motif.  Note the comparisons one might make with Donne's and Jonson's poetic flights of fancy regarding the lover's claims about the vast world's riches, and the cosmic scale of time.  The phrase "But at my back I always here" shows up in Eliot's "The Wasteland," with a slightly different sound accompanying the persona's observation.  Note that, like many Marvell poems, this one unfolds in stanzas that work like verse paragraphs, opening with a hypothetical exposition of timeless love, changing to the dreadful effects of time (see Spenser and Shakespeare), and turning the threat into the motive for reversing the effect of "devouring time" ("Now let us sport us while we may, / And now, like amorous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapped power.").  His closing three couplets are a triumph of the metaphysical conceit's power to represent the human condition in violent, memorable, and witty metaphor.   Wylie Sypher often uses this poem as an example of the peculiar restlessness and disturbed proportions by which he defines "Mannerist" style in English literature (e.g., Four Stages of Renaissance Style 118-9).  There he says "Marvell's sharp but sustained attack [upon conventional Renaissance poetic formulas] . . . is like the loose and surprising adjustment and counter-adjustment of figure to figure in Parmigianino's paintings, with their evidence of subjective stress . . . [which] relies upon an involved energy, not a closed design [which produces] equilibriums [which] are always momentary and undependable" (119).  To test Sypher's visual metaphor, compare the poem's stretching of perspective and explosive shifts of point of view to the structure of Parmigianino's "Madonna dal Collo Lungo" (1534-40).
• "The Definition of Love" attaches Donne's navigation motifs to an allegory about the birth of Love out of Despair.  The poem addresses love forbidden by social inequality.  Might there be a pattern here?
• "The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers" is like a proud parent showing you photographs of the Blessed Babe's first booties.  I cannot defend its wisdom, but its structure contains an amazing resemblence to a stanzaic structure called the "bob and wheel" which is famous for the medieval poem, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (see 158-210 in the Norton 7th edition.).   The penultimate line of each stanza is the dimeter "bob" and the pentameter line that follows rounds out the stanza by resolving its stage in the poem's argument.
• "The Mower Against Gardens" is the first of the "Mower" sequence, an attack on the sophistications of human invention and a praise of Nature's proper mixture vs. the hybrids' "Forbidden mixtures" and "nutriment" that changes our kind.  The poem's disgust with the freaks produced by science is balanced with the praise of Nature's "wild and fragrant innocence" (34).
  • Do you see a Herrick connection here?
• "Damon the Mower" exploits the figure of paradox in eleven 8-line stanzas of tetrameter couplets.  The mistress's "cruelty," refusing to return Damon's love, distracts the mower until his scythe does to him what he did to the grass.  The figure of love as a wound also is used--it could be compared with many a Petrarchan conceit, but here it is combined with the pastoral mode.  Think about about the powerful nostalgia this poem reflects.  What motivates nostalgia?
• "The Mower to the Glowworms" continues to evoke the distracting and destructive effects of love by wishing the glowworms might show the Mower the way back to himself, which he has lost in his delirium.
• "The Mower's Song" continues the "mower mown" paradox of "Damon" within a more complex stanza structure.  Note that, throughout the poem, Damon is unable to simply name the deed by which he makes his living ("to mow") and instead employs circumlocution.
  • Why should he be unable to name the act?
  • And why should the approach of the Beloved seem like Godzilla coming through the meadows?
• "The Garden" returns to the praise of idealized Nature and contrasts it with the fallen state of things under human domination.  The quest to re-imagine the un-fallen world leads the poet to a kind of ekstasis in which his language becomes almost nonsense: what exactly would one be thinking were one to think "a green thought in a green shade" (48).   This return to Eden leads the persona to imagine God-the-Gardener and Adam as the first Gardener's helper.  This has direct relevance for Milton, who was Marvell's mentor and predecessor as Cromwell's Latin Secretary.
• "An Horatian Ode: Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" sets up the praise of the de-facto dictatorial ruler of England in terms that allow Marvell to put his deeds in context with the inexorable political realities which the Parliamentary cause hoped to outwit.  Most impressive, for this political climate, are Marvell's ability to praise Charles I's conduct in defeat and to caution against English patriotic fervor after the end of the Irish uprising.   The poem is a continuous effort to balance current appearances against the message of time and the poetic tradition.
• ["Upon Appleton House: To My Lord Fairfax":] this "country house poem" is not assigned, but you may want to read it if you are interested in the process by which poets changed from writing as servants of wealthy aristocratic patrons (i.e., willing to support artists who, in turn, embellish their households with art) to writing as entertaining instructors of mass audiences of patrons (i.e., those who buy from bookstores).  Click here for a brief guide to a poem that is, itself, a guide to a huge estate.  Click here for the Marvell Society Newsletter (3:1 [Summer 2011]) containing an article by Mark Heumann, a Marvell fan who visited the site of the Fairfax estate and brings us up to date on the current situation there.  Hint: the house is gone, long gone.  What might Marvell have thought about that, one wonders?