ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Cromwel’s Return from Ireland,” as if the sought-after sweetness and strength in
“To his Coy Mistress” were suddenly unrolled, with lyric pleasure all going in
one direction and power all in the other.
In an important sense, the two poems, different as they are from each other
and because of their differences, are central to any full understanding of Marvell,
even if what they illuminate is Marvell’s ability to imagine living in the
seemingly divided and distinguished worlds of lyric and epic. The one poem is
undatable in its composition and dedicated to describing the timeless pleasures
found in the “green” world. The other is precisely datable in the historical event
it purportedly celebrates: the return of Cromwell from Ireland, which happened
in May 1650, just before he set out for Scotland in July of the same year; it is
committed to understanding and evaluating the great changes suddenly brought
about in England.
“The Garden” has been typically described as private, the ode as public, and
from this set of oppositions many others are quickly generated: the difference
between feminine playfulness and masculine doing, between a Neoplatonic
celebration of the mind and a Machiavellian consent to power, between a
protoromantic defense of poetry reminiscent of Sidney’s, and an Horatian
recognition that poetry should not surrender itself either to fancy or annihilation
but scrupulously evaluate what’s “there.” 18 If—to reverse the order of the
comparison—the ode is “grim, witty, exuberant, explosive, savage, elliptical,
elegiac, apocalyptic but not balanced and transcendent,” as David Norbrook
suggests, 19 then “The Garden” is pliant and whimsical, happily slippery rather
than savagely elliptical, its nine stanzas (each with eight lines of eight syllables
each) beautifully proportioned to reflect nine ways of thinking about—reflecting
upon—the pleasures of horticultural retreat.
So sharply differentiated are these two poems and the experiences they
explore that a critical history of Marvell’s reception (and perhaps that of
seventeenth-century verse more generally) could almost be written from the
point of view of which poem has been more in favor at any given moment. It
would no doubt begin with the excision from the 1681 Miscellaneous Poems of
the “Horatian Ode” and Marvell’s other two Cromwell poems by a printer
possibly intimidated by Tory reprisals; but in the same way that Marvell’s Puritan
and political sympathies cannot be neatly limited to these three Cromwell
poems 20 —the prelate still rages in “Bermudas”—so the imaginative boundaries
separating “The Garden” and the ode are occasionally and strategically blurred:
the one poem including within its perspective a glancing reflection of the world
it would seem otherwise to deny.
In this context, “The Garden,” whimsical and worldly, ought to be read
(lightly) against a contemporary celebration of retreat like Mildmay Fane’s “To
Retiredness” from Otia Sacra (1648). Marvell’s ironies and eccentricities—the
very mental habits Fane declines—expose through overstatement the
underlying claim that pastoral is the expression of “a mind ambition-free,” as
the Earl of Westmoreland puts it. Perhaps because pastoral had become
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