ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
throne, his head surrounded by laurels, and another thing to have Cromwell
perched on a green bough preparing himself not for “longer flight” by “Casting
the Bodies Vest aside” (“The Garden”) but for attack. Poems give you a place to
go from:
But thou the Wars and Fortunes Son
March indefatigably on
but also, while going, something to think about:
And for the last effect
Still keep thy Sword erect:
Besides the force it has to fright
The Spirits of the shady Night,
The same Arts that did gain
A Pow’r must it maintain.
Whatever the exact relationship between “The Garden” and the “Ode,” neither
poem serves as a last word on what is for Marvell a remarkably continuous, openended
debate centering on those mid-century imponderables involving the
active and the contemplative life, ambition and retirement, the heroic and the
lyric: alternative modes of imagining England that were also immediate realities
for Marvell, who, in the early 1650s, was tutor to Maria Fairfax on her father’s
estate at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire and also seeking a place in the new
government under Cromwell. The end of the “Ode,” in fact, manages to glance,
like so many of Marvell’s poems, in both directions. In the militant image of the
erect sword frightening the spirits of the shady night, we can glimpse a view of
Marvell, the defender of Cromwell in “The First Anniversary,” exploiting, with
renewed vigor, the extended reach of the pentameter couplet into contemporary
affairs of state. But in the compressed verse of the “Ode” and the distance
Marvell “maintains” on his heroic subject, the poem also leaves room for a fuller
exploration of post-Caroline pastoral in the ninety-seven stanzas of octosyllabic
verse that make up “Upon Appleton House.” “Marvell’s most original and
ambitious poem,” it is the most interesting long poem written in the 1650s, as
the amount of recent scholarship amply testifies. 25
But the poem’s ambition is understood and carefully qualified by subject
matter and circumstance. “Upon Appleton House” is Marvell’s pre-eminent
effort at aristocratic entertainment, but one written also in the aftermath of
Charles’s execution and Fairfax’s decision, upon point of conscience, not to lead
English troops into Scotland. The Lord General’s wife, Anne Vere Fairfax, had
spoken out against the execution of the king in a scene much remarked on by
contemporaries, while Fairfax himself had only demurred. But he stated his
opposition to heading up the Scottish campaign with a meticulousness worthy
of Marvell: “It is probable there will be war between us, but whether we should
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