ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Where the remote Bermudas ride
In th’ Oceans bosome unespy’d,
From a small Boat, that row’d along,
The listning Winds receiv’d this Song.
The poem then shifts to a close-up view in which we overhear many voices in
perfect unison:
What should we do but sing his Praise
That led us through the watry Maze,
Unto an Isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where he the huge Sea-Monsters wracks,
That lift the Deep upon their Backs,
He lands us on a grassy Stage;
Safe from the Storms, and Prelat’s rage.
Although the lyric might well have been composed while Marvell was tutor to
Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, and residing in the home of John
Oxenbridge, a Puritan divine who had himself traveled twice to the Bermudas,
the first time in 1635 in order to escape ecclesiastic persecution under Laud, it
is typical of Marvell’s allusive habits that the basis for imagining the historical
context comes from within the poem. Whoever these gospellers are—and
Marvell wants them to remain mysteriously “remote”—they are Puritan émigrés
who have fled religious persecution. Their hymn of praise is a hymn of
deliverance woven unobtrusively out of the psalms and yet celebrating a God
whose sense of decorative purity is also undeniably poetic: 14
He gave us this eternal Spring,
Which here enamells everything;
And sends the Fowl’s to us in care,
On daily Visits through the Air.
He hangs in shade the Orange bright,
Like golden Lamps in a green Night.
And does in the Pomgranates close,
Jewels more rich than Ormus show’s.
Nature in the New World is imagined in the Old in the manner of a mid-century
“cabinet of rarities.”
But for all the attention given to purity in this most Ariel-like of utterances—
and Marvell has gone so far in the direction of the ethereal as to cast “the
listning Winds” as the primary audience for the song—he also manages, in a
characteristic twist, to turn his lyric inside out, as it were, and to give his poem
at the end a dynastic or epic touch:
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