ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
difficult to know exactly where to draw the line here—the poet urges that
at this particular moment,
’Tis Madness to resist or blame
The force of angry Heavens flame.
The climactic fusion of providential history and personal ambition has somehow
transmuted “th’industrious Bee” of pastoral into the prodigious figure of
Cromwell who “Could by industrious Valour climbe/To ruine the great Work of
Time” (my italics).
Still, resistance to an easy or complete assent is what this poem is largely
about. Just as Cromwell is given a moment in his “private Gardens,” much is
still due to the king: much but not everything. The eye that measures Charles
(or for that matter Cromwell) is as exacting as the royal eye that measures the
axe’s edge. But in seeing events sharply, it also sees further, as was the case in
“On a Drop of Dew.” The moment of greatest sentiment in the “Ode” is
registered in the figure of the “comely Head” bowed down “as upon a Bed,” and
it is given a full pause, as if responding in a more disciplined and compassionate
key to the noise of the soldiers’ gruesome clapping; but then that moment is
passed through or by, neither forsaken nor forgotten, but seen instead to assume
a foundational place in England’s new history in a characteristically Marvellian
way: the large gesture somehow implicated in the small, the “comely” now with
the bloody, Caroline lyric with Roman epic:
This was that memorable Hour
Which first assur’d the forced Pow’r.
So when they did design
The Capitols first Line,
A bleeding Head where they begun,
Did fright the Architects to run;
And yet in that the State
Foresaw it’s happy Fate.
The poet of the “Horatian Ode” would not have been surprised by Walter
Benjamin’s oft-quoted, postmodernist epigram: “there is no document of
civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” in part
because Benjamin’s response squares so perfectly with a Renaissance truism
quoted by Marvell’s countryman and contemporary, Marchamont Nedham: “all
governments have had their beginning and foundation upon force and
violence.” 24 But Marvell would have called the events documented in his poem
something else: post-Caroline pastoral. At this percipient moment in the poem
and in English history, a “bleeding head” can spell again, as it once did, the
grandeur of Empire. Marvell alludes here to an anecdote found in Pliny among
others that ascribes prophetic import to the discovery of a man’s head at the
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