ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.
For Lady you deserve this State;
Nor would I love at lower rate.
In a way that could never have happened in the Jacobean court, the urbane and
the apocalyptic are now partners in rhyme.
Like Herrick, Marvell too will play with the occasional polysyllabic word, as
in the unforgettable “vegetable Love” quoted above. The difference, though, is
that Marvell’s polysyllables are usually associated not with shimmering surfaces
but images of impending vastness (“Annihilating all that’s made/To a green
Thought in a green Shade,” for instance) that disrupt what he elsewhere
describes as the chaste purity of the English language: 15 the spaciousness of
“desarts of vast eternity,” for instance, in the next paragraph, when internal
rhyme seems to expand our sense of “eternity” itself; or the long preservation of
innocence that is nonetheless doomed in the memorably macabre phrase, “then
Worms shall try/That long preserv’d Virginity.” To look ahead for a moment to
the “Horatian Ode,” the polysyllabic “climacteric” and “indefatigably” seem even
more loaded and portentous, performing thematically as specific repositories of
energy—verbal equivalents of the shocking image of the “bleeding head” that is
seen to animate and justify the revolutionary powers.
A full response to “Coy Mistress” would have to go beyond measuring epic
longing (and epic tropes like the familiar “Times winged Charriot” in the middle
section) and the polyphonic reach of diction and address the “climactic” finale
itself, the collapse into the present “now.” Here the violence imagined does seem
nearly to overwhelm the urbane speaking subject of the previous lines. 16 Jonson
had remarked, somewhat casually, upon “proving,” while we may, the “sport of
love” in his “Song to Celia.” In Marvell, proving assumes a level of urgency
(now…now…now…) that Jonson had identified in Volpone—the original
setting of his song—with the ravenous appetites of the villains in that play, the
expression of which barely falls short of rape itself. Marvell does not allow for
such nice moral discriminations in his conclusion. Sexual violence of a heroic,
apocalyptic kind is the way to a new order, even if Marvell leaves us guessing
about the specific means:
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing Soul transpires
At every pore with instant Fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
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