ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray
Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day,
Could it within the humane flow’r be seen,
Remembring still its former height,
Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green;
And, recollecting its own Light,
Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express
The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.
Whereas Vaughan writes as a disenchanted visionary of the episcopal
church, hoping in the “weaker glories” of “some gilded Cloud, or flowre,” to
spy “Some shadows of eternity,” Marvell invites a concentration on the tiny
so intent that he takes us to the vanishing point of vision itself—“Could it
within the humane flow’r be seen”—then carries us through to the other
side, in which the small suddenly becomes tall, a circling thought an image
of heaven itself, and then further outward, on our way toward imagining a
heavenly return almost as hugely triumphant as Cromwell’s in the “Horatian
Ode.” With an exit that is more like an exodus, as the allusion to the
manna of Exodus 16:21 happily indicates, Marvell concludes his musings
with a note of eager spiritual militancy. And with it, all the pent-up,
“congeal’d” energy of the poem is exquisitely released in the penultimate
line through the strong enjambment on “run” that helps further animate the
emphatic “glories” of the last line:
Such did the Manna’s sacred Dew destil;
White, and intire, though congeal’d and chill.
Congeal’d on Earth: but does, dissolving, run
Into the Glories of th’ Almighty Sun.
In “On a Drop of Dew,” the little globe and the global, the precious and the
penultimate are yoked together in a manner that is characteristic of Marvell at
his most “conceited” or emblematic; and in a way that is further characteristic
of his thinking, the terms in which these different scales are expressed here have
a tendency to spiral outwards and beget others: the difference between stasis and
mobility, for instance, or between retreat and involvement, between selfreflection
and self-immolation, between courtly and Puritan. And these
differences in turn, or rather Marvell’s perspective on these differences, reappear
sometimes in highly refracted form in poem after poem. As Richard Poirier has
observed in another context, “a poem ‘gives you somewhere to go from,’ not
something on which to repose.” 13 If size is often a matter of perspective in
Marvell, breadth is a feature of the rebound.
The exit which is an exodus in “On a Drop of Dew,” for instance, leads in
many directions. On the farthest horizon, imaginatively and geographically, lies
the beautiful gospel song of “Bermudas,” which begins in telescopic fashion:
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