ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow’r.
Let us roll all our Strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one Ball:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the Iron gates of Life.
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
As the allusion to the riddle of Samson in Judges 14:14 indicates (“Out of the
eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness”), Marvell
has exchanged the courtly qualifications of “if you please” and “some, I think,”
along with the playful roll of the tongue in “Shoulds’t Rubies find,” for Hebrew
heroics; and while specific referents for the “one Ball” and “the Iron gates [or
grates] of Life” are likely to remain matters of scholarly debate, 17 there can be
little doubt about the general tenor of Marvell’s argument here, or about its
oblique connections to other moments in his poetry in which the act of
defloration seems to be part of a larger, often barely specified, response to
historical change—in this case, one to be embraced triumphantly.
* * *
Sounds rebound. So does sense. Pre-eminently a lyricist, Marvell seems born to
vex linear thinking. A poem like “To his Coy Mistress” manages, as his poems
so often do, to look in not one but two directions, reminding us (once again)
that the dialogue and the dialogical are where Marvell most often lives, moves,
and has his being. The 1681 Miscellaneous Poems, we might recall, is introduced
by “A Dialogue Between The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure,” and while
Donne could represent ecstasy in the poem of that title as “a dialogue of one,”
Marvell usually insists on differentiating, as precisely as art can do, the one
perspective from the other: the “Resolved Soul,” in this case, defending himself
in tight-lipped, heroic “tetrameter” couplets (if there is such thing, it is realized
in this poem), against that most courtly of tempters, “Created Pleasure,” who
speaks alluringly of the five senses in a far more relaxed trochaic meter, made
even looser by the occasional use of alternating rhymes.
Differentiating and exploring, or better yet, differentiating and experiencing:
so pointed and concentrated is Marvell’s lyric imagination that it often gives the
double sense of an idea being simultaneously entertained and yet taken to its
farthest limits and thereby exhausted in the process. Never was “vegetable Love”
given a greater hearing, for instance, than in that wonderful off-shoot from “To
his Coy Mistress,” “The Garden.” Or is it the other way around, the erotic
pleasures associated with plants in “The Garden” finally discovering a “straight”
outlet in “To his Coy Mistress”? In any event, Marvell would be almost
unthinkable without “The Garden” in the same way that he would appear a far
more diminished poet without its mirror opposite, “An Horatian Ode upon
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