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