ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
world. With the exception of the mower in “The Mower against Gardens,” they
are as forlorn as any broken-hearted shepherd out of Theocritus or Sidney:
perhaps even more so because of Marvell’s acute concentration on the mowers’
psychological as well as emotional “condition,” a practice made possible by
shifting the intellectually taut and self-focused concerns of the lyric as developed
by Donne and Herbert onto the naive pastoral speaker. But the poems speak
more than they mean, or at least they suggest they do even when they sometimes
protest to the contrary, as in the following stanza gleaned from “The Mower to
the Glo-Worms”:
Ye Country Comets, that portend
No War, nor Princes funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the Grasses fall.
We do not have to produce a specific historical referent for war, a prince’s
funeral, or the fall (of Troy? Caesar? Charles? mankind?), to understand that
Marvellian pastoral invites us to see double, inside and outside, the small with
the large; and partly because Marvell likes to draw boundaries in order to erase
them, he teases us into thinking that his mowers might be said to possess a
leveling mentality, imaged in the shape of the scythes they carry and heard in
their repeated “sighs”: the pun is Marvell’s in “Damon the Mower.” And while,
in turn, these pastorals do not insist that in order to understand them we must
forge a link between the disappointed hopes of these “scythe” bearers, who seem
drawn to their own doom, and the Leveller party in England, Marvell himself
hints at this possibility by making the equation more exact in “Upon Appleton
House.”
In a sense, Marvell the amphibian keeps having his lyric cake and eating it
too, swallowing it—to shift metaphors yet again—into a maze of other cultural,
social, and religious concerns. In sharp contrast to Herrick’s verse, which
Marvell’s resembles in so many superficial ways, the minor never quite remains
minor, the accidental incidental. The mower in “The Mower’s Song” fantasizes
a tomb for himself in the manner of an aspiring member of the gentry:
And thus, ye Meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the Heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my Tomb;
For Juliana comes, and She
What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.
So, too, at the end of her complaint, the Nymph presents herself as not simply
the most exquisite of mourners, reckoning in the faun’s tears a comparison (no
less) with those of “the brotherless Heliades”: the three daughters of Helios who,
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