ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
tetrameter line in English. Nearly half of his poetry—twenty out of the fortyfive
poems generally attributed to him—are strictly in tetrameter verse, while
another eight make considerable use of the line. Take away the octosyllabic line,
and it is tempting to say of the canon what Marvell said of the nuns’ priory in
“Upon Appleton House” at the moment of its disappearance: “as when
th’Inchantment ends/The Castle vanishes or rends” (ll. 269–70). The second
point is that in spite of the many obstacles presented by the canon itself,
Marvell’s poetry speaks, however indirectly at times, to the conditions of
England in the middle decades better than that of any contemporary poet,
including Milton himself. In this century, Marvell, the poet, might have initially
come into vogue because of Donne, but he has shown remarkable lasting power
because of his uncanny reach into his culture, because of his ability to frame, as
it were, many of the more pressing concerns of his day.
These two issues, the more strictly technical and the more broadly cultural,
are not unrelated. Both speak to the opportunistic use Marvell made of poetry:
in the one case capitalizing on a metrical line that had become an increasingly
important resource for lyric poets of the early seventeenth century; 6 in the other
seizing upon poetry more generally as a way to celebrate, eulogize, or criticize—
sometimes in a single poem—a number of the more important people and
occasions in the seventeenth century. In part because Marvell was so successful
at cultivating an image of himself in his verse as modest and deferential, almost
morbidly bashful at times (hiding, for instance, his fishing “utensils” as if they
were something else when he spots the “young Maria” walking the grounds of
Appleton House), it is still possible to forget that he served and wrote poems
about two of the most influential men in English history in Thomas Fairfax,
Commander-in-Chief of the Parliamentary Army during the Civil War, and
Oliver Cromwell, made Lord Protector of England in 1653; that in one of the
poems he drew a portrait of the memorable scene of Charles’s execution
unrivaled for its compassionate yet unclouded view of events; that he was on
familiar terms with the most important poet of the era; and that his
commendatory poem written for the second edition of Paradise Lost in 1674
stands alone in commemorating in its native language the epic that was soon to
be regarded as the greatest long poem in English. Marvell had a keen eye for
spotting not only birds in flight but epochal moments in the making and the
people associated with them. Indeed, Jonson might have been envious of the
opportunities afforded this poet, a point perhaps not entirely lost on Marvell,
who, in “Tom May’s Death,” represents Jonson denouncing the royalist-turned-
Parliamentarian May precisely because May has so magnificently failed to rise
to the poetic challenge presented by the radical historical changes being wrought
in England at mid-century.
But Marvell rose to these challenges in his own peculiar and baffling way. His
easy assimilation of past and current literary examples, for instance, points not
to his derivative status as a poet but to his independence, a feature that, in turn,
has led some modern literary historians sometimes to characterize Marvell “as
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