ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
And how the mind, imagining a totalizing pastoral, is not without fantasies of
“annihilation”:
Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.
In “The Garden,” Marvell might be said to have his lyric cake because he eats
it. The fullest admission of pastoral coincides simultaneously with the moment
of “annihilation” itself, that strange Cromwellian word (like “Clymacterick”) that
seems to lie at the end of the labyrinth like the minotaur ready to devour the
poem’s horticultural offerings in a single apocalyptic gulp. At the farthest reach
of worldly ambition, Marvell seems to say, lie ambitions of another kind—the
fantasy of bodily transcendence “here at the Fountains sliding foot,” or a belief
in the absolute self: “Such was that happy Garden-state,/While Man there
walk’d without a Mate.” The latter attitudes, especially, might be said to underlie
the many expressions of pastoral retreat in the 1640s and 1650s. But it would be
wrong to think of “The Garden” as simply a work of genteel demystification, as
has been sometimes claimed. If Marvell invites us to see, from many angles, the
fictitiousness of the pastoral, he also stresses in the final stanza that our pleasures
are also dependent upon recognizing their limitations. Gardens, like poems, are
beautiful places to go from:
How well the skilful Gardner drew
Of flow’rs and herbes this Dial new;
Where from above the milder Sun
Does through a fragrant Zodiack run;
And, as it works, th’industrious Bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholsome Hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!
That sentiment, in conjunction with the final stanza, almost serves as the perfectly
adequate bridge to its apparent opposite in the “Horatian Ode”: more trustworthy,
in some regards, than a speculative chronology that attempts to pinpoint the
moment when Marvell, once and for all (at least until the Restoration), crossed
over to the Parliamentary side; more trustworthy because more responsive to the
kind of reflective doubling that goes on elsewhere in Marvell’s poetry. In fact,
Marvell’s unusual designation of the Ode as specifically “Horatian” would seem to
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