ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
signal at the outset a range of interpretive possibilities. Having originally sided
with Brutus and Cassius against the triumvirate of Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius
in the Roman civil wars, but then eventually finding preferment under Augustus,
with the patronage of Maecenas, to whom he dedicated the first three books of
Odes in 23 BC, Horace seems almost a readymade multivalent political symbol in
1650. 22 He could be thought of as figuring either republican or monarchical
sympathies or as embodying an example of individual change in the context of
wider historical fortunes; and at one point or another, as criticism this century has
ably demonstrated, Marvell’s poem touches on all three of these possibilities.
Although few critics today are likely to read the “Ode” as a crypto-royalist lament
for Charles, it is equally the case that readers who fail to register the multivalent
tenor of Marvell’s argument—and so disruptive and subtle are the tonal shifts
that responses can vary significantly not only between readers but between
readings—will also risk turning the “Ode” into panegyric of the kind written either
by Crashaw and Cowley in the 1630s in their several salutes to the returning
king 23 or by Marvell himself several years later in “The First Anniversary of the
Government under O.C.”
These poems are fully shaped by the public events they wish to
commemorate. The “Ode,” by contrast, is a signal instance, in Barbara Everett’s
apt phrase, of Marvell’s “thinking aloud,” or perhaps “rethinking aloud.” In this
context we should regard the ending of “The Garden” as forming only an
imperfect bridge to the “Ode.” Beautiful as they are to go from, gardens—and
the poetry and perspectives they generate—also never quite get left behind in
Marvell, even when the poet suggests the contrary as in the celebrated opening
to the “Horatian Ode”:
The forward Youth that would appear
Must now forsake his Muses dear,
Nor in the Shadows sing
His Numbers languishing.
’Tis time to leave the Books in dust,
And oyl th’unused Armours rust:
Removing from the Wall
The Corslet of the Hall.
The “Ode” is a measure of Marvell’s reflective capacity as a poet to gauge the
tremendous forces at work in history by registering their effects on poetry. No
other poet of the period, it bears mentioning, put the case for a historically
determined generic shift so succinctly, just as, some months earlier in his poem
to Lovelace, no one had defended poetry against the “barbed Censurers” so
sharply:
The Ayre’s already tainted with the swarms
Of Insects which against you rise in arms.
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