ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions,
Of wit corrupted, the unfashion’d Sons.
But for Marvell to say that he is rejecting pastoral in favor of the heroic is also
not quite the same thing as either rejecting pastoral outright or folding it
seamlessly into the heroic as Milton does in his sonnet to Cromwell written less
than two years later. When the older poet concludes his celebration by exhorting
Cromwell, now that Scotland has been conquered, to save “free conscience”
from “hireling wolves” at home, the turn in the sestet is in a characteristically
Miltonic and inward direction, but the heroic idiom in which the new challenge
is cast doesn’t skip a beat. England’s chief spiritual advisor continues to advise
Cromwell, “our chief of men.”
In the “Horatian Ode,” the heroic beat is powerfully registered, especially
in the drumming tetrameter couplets, but it occasionally skips a note—this is
one way to describe the frequently softening effect of trimeter in this poem—
or takes a long pause in between. The most obvious suspension is the lengthy
inset dedicated to Charles’s execution near the center, the poem’s “sovereign
moment” as it is sometimes called when Cromwell disappears altogether from
sight. The note of hesitation sounded at the outset of the “Ode” when Marvell
speaks of how the forward youth “must now forsake his Muses dear”—think of
the tonal difference if Marvell had simply used the offhand “forget” instead of
the reluctant “forsake”—gets resounded and expanded upon in the central
panel:
That thence the Royal Actor borne
The Tragick Scaffold might adorn:
While round the armed Bands
Did clap their bloody hands.
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable Scene:
But with his keener Eye
The Axes edge did try:
Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight
To vindicate his helpless Right,
But bow’d his comely Head,
Down as upon a Bed.
In this highly cinematic scene, Marvell momentarily substitutes one version
of heroic behavior for another: the dignified fall of a prince who plays his
part to the end replaces the military prowess of the cunning warrior
embodied in Cromwell. But Marvell does not insist on reconciling the two
or subordinating one form of heroic behavior to the other. In a sense, he
doesn’t need to because history has already made that judgment, and
whether as apology or explanation —and Marvell makes it extremely
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