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