ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
the greatest minor poet in the English language.” The phrase belongs to Hugh
Kenner, although the idea can be traced back to Eliot;7 and while I think it is
risky to consider Marvell in any way a minor poet, especially in a book that has
already reserved that laurel for Herrick and at a moment in our own history
when that claim is being turned into a self-evident virtue, I think conjoining
“greatest” with “minor” is just the kind of oxymoron that Marvell would have
appreciated. It points to a composite of interests, indeed, to a “perspective,” that
both partially aligns him with his Cavalier contemporaries and yet profoundly
differentiates him as well.
In this context, Marvell might be said to have made a virtue out of necessity,
made “his destiny his choice,” in a way that would have been impossible for
either a Drayton or Milton, to name two other “patriotic” poets. As a great
lyricist, as perhaps the quintessence of what we mean by a lyricist of the
Renaissance, whose graceful conclusion he is often thought to supply, Marvell is
nearly unrivaled in the respect he shows for small objects that are the frequent
subject of Caroline lyric poetry. This practice, this habit of seeing, carries over
especially into his pastoral poetry, in which Marvell generally eschews the more
prophetic strains of Spenserian pastoral, exploited by Drayton and Milton, in
favor of emphasizing the special features of lyric, often at their most emotionally
wrought and intellectually complicated: the long, psychologically riven, elegiac
moment of the Nymph’s complaining for the death of her faun (in the poem
with that title), for instance, or the plangent reflections of “The Mower’s Song,”
which begins,
My Mind was once the true survey
Of all these Medows fresh and gay;
And in the greenness of the Grass
Did see its Hopes as in a Glass:
When Juliana came, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
But even at its most concentrated and isolated, lyric does not function in
Marvell as a perfectly enclosed form. “The difference in scale between Marvell
and, say Herrick—good as Herrick is—” writes Barbara Everett, “might be
summarized as the greater openness of a Marvell lyric. It contains more of life; of
the world; of its time.” 8 The Nymph’s complaint, as many have remarked, is
initiated by “wanton troopers” who seem to have wandered into her intensely
private pastoral domain from a nearby battle (the usage of “trooper” first became
current in the early 1640s); and though no one has been able to produce a
completely satisfying, extended allegorical reading of the poem, most readers
register the belief that the lyric is also—whether through allusion or echo or a
combination of the two—deeply interfused with history and politics.
The same may be said for the mower poems. The mowers themselves don’t
generally speak more than they mean and therefore “glance” at a larger political
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