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