ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
after mourning the death of their brother Phaeton, were turned into amberdropping
trees. She also seeks, in the Niobe-like statue she imagines of herself
“cut in marble,” a scale of gendered significance in—and through—
representation denied her in life: 9
First my unhappy Statue shall
Be cut in Marble; and withal,
Let it be weeping too: but there
Th’Engraver sure his Art may spare,
For I so truly thee bemoane,
That I shall weep though I be Stone:
Until my Tears, still dropping, wear
My breast, themselves engraving there.
There at my feet shalt thou be laid,
Of purest Alabaster made:
For I would have thine Image be
White as I can, though not as Thee.
In the construction of these “minor monuments”—both those within the poem
and the poems themselves—we witness in part the legacy of Theocritean and
Virgilian pastoral operating in its most distilled form: the incidental not being
divided from but incorporating the significant; matters of pastoral retreat
appearing inseparable from acts of personal assertion. 10 The wit and pathos of
“The Mower’s Song” might be said to result in the uncanny linking of the
mower’s greatest moment of self-assertion, the moment when the “I” appears (in
a Spenserian alexandrine, no less), with the moment of his self-cancellation.
With the swing of a scythe, he simultaneously presents himself as a reflex of what
Juliana does to him, or more accurately, does “to my thoughts and me,” Marvell’s
closing words, repeated in the refrain at the end of each stanza, signifying the
self-division that is the poem’s subject.
But the legacy of this kind of paradox need not be restricted to conventional
pastoral in Marvell, much as “pastoral” in Marvell is too inclusive a way of
thinking to be limited to poems with nymphs, shepherds, and mowers. 11 The
small is constantly impinging on the large in Marvell; epic is continually being
folded into lyric in ways that both distinguish Marvell from his many courtly
(mostly royalist) contemporaries and explain why the master of octosyllabics
might eventually become the defender of Paradise Lost. “On a Drop of Dew,” to
take perhaps the most microscopic of Marvell’s poems, differs from its
Neoplatonic counterpart in Vaughan (“The Retreate”), for instance, not simply
because of the greater reflexive intricacy of Marvell’s poem, astonishing as that
is. 12 What the soul yearns for in Marvell—indeed remembers, recollects, and
expresses—is nothing less than an heroic version of itself, a “greater Heaven in
an Heaven less”:
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