ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The Gospels Pearl upon our Coast.
And in these Rocks for us did frame
A Temple, where to sound his Name.
Oh let our Voice his Praise exalt,
Till it arrive at Heavens Vault:
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Eccho beyond the Mexique Bay.
Marvell speaks of “the Empire of the Ear” in “Musicks Empire.” Here in
“Bermudas,” he imagines in small an empire of sound: the voice of the Puritan
elect hoping their hymn of salvation and praise (the poem we have been
overhearing) will spread throughout the New World. By encouraging us to
view their song as an expression of their sense of election in this expanding
context, Marvell also resituates the heroic internally—as Milton will later
do—and perhaps, as Annabel Patterson has suggested, as part of an
ideologically motivated “correction” of Edmund Waller’s sybaritic, mockheroic,
royalist “Battle of the Summer Islands,” published in 1645. A carefully
modulated modesty (the later parenthetical “perhaps” answering to the earlier
parenthetical “boast”) and the elegant simplicity of Marvell’s octosyllabics
together fine-tune our sense of the overblown in Waller’s mock-heroic poem.
Marvell does so, too, while still maintaining, indeed subtly insisting on, the
link between the “purity” of the lyric experience and the patriotic associations
of the gospellers. In our final glimpse of them, what was earlier described as
only “a small boat” is now “the English boat.” We also now understand, in one
of Marvell’s richest reversals, that the purpose of their labor—their rowing—is
not so much to move them with Draytonian gusto toward the New World as
to “guide” them in their singing or rather their “Chime,” to use Marvell’s
harmonically suggestive word. This faraway “ring” to the Puritan’s song might
even have pleased Herbert, who spoke of hearing “Church-bels beyond the
starres” in “Prayer [I].”
In the ever-elastic physics of Marvell’s universe, sounds rebound within
poems, across poems. Closer to home—to Marvell’s Hull, at least—lies “To his
Coy Mistress,” the chime of the closing “sun/run” rhyme echoing in reverse the
“run/sun” rhyme at the end of “On a Drop of Dew.” The difference is subtle, even
precious, but the emphasis on mobility at the end of his great “carpe diem” poem
suggests a wish on Marvell’s part not simply to outrun the sun as a sign of
physical desire but also to outrun his many courtly contemporaries in this literary
venture: to query the meaning of “seize” in “seize the day” by readmitting into
the genre some of the original sexual energy from Catullus that got lost in
translation. Milton, too, will later “seize” upon “seize” to describe, from Eve’s
perspective, the original moment of wooing in Paradise Lost (4:488–9), and, in
doing so, plant a suggestion of sexual desire that will ripple throughout the
poem.
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