ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
foundations of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. The conceit of yoking together
two heterodoxical ideas (death and birth) and cultures (Rome and England)
seems a natural, or rather unnatural, outgrowth of an early, equally metaphorical
moment in the poem where Cromwell gives a meteor-like Caesarian birth to
himself while on the way to blasting Charles’s “head at last”:
And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first
Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
Did thorough his own Side
His fiery way divide.
But the “bleeding Head”—“bleeding” is Marvell’s addition that pushes the image
in a slightly fetal direction—born out of this climactic event also spells a new
set of political obligations and contingencies. Power (and “sway,” as it turns out)
is not simply resituated in a new political system. It is made a more prominent
and problematic feature of it, an embodiment of Cromwell himself:
Nor yet grown stiffer with Command,
But still in the Republick’s hand:
How fit he is to sway
That can so well obey.
He to the Commons Feet presents
A Kingdome, for his first years rents:
And, what he may, forbears
His Fame to make it theirs:
And has his Sword and Spoyls ungirt,
To lay them at the Publick’s skirt.
So when the Falcon high
Falls heavy from the Sky,
She, having kill’d, no more does search,
But on the next green Bow to pearch;
Where, when he first does lure,
The Falckner has her sure.
What may not then our Isle presume
While Victory his Crest does plume!
The equipoise here is remarkable even for Marvell. The concluding optative
couplet, balancing “presume” against “plume,” gestures toward a utopia that is
nonetheless dependent on a whole series of conditions continuing into the
future involving Cromwell’s subservience to the new republic that now bears,
almost as a logo, the image of the falconer holding the falcon “sure.” But in its
representation of deadly brute force falling “heavy from the Sky,” the simile cuts
in another direction as well. For all the deftly woven comparisons between the
king and Cromwell, in the end it is one thing to have had Charles on the
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