ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Out of these scatter’d Sibyls Leaves
Strange Prophecies my Phancy weaves:
And in one History consumes,
Like Mexique Paintings, all the Plumes.
What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said
I in this light Mosaick read.
Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
Hath read in Natures my stick Book. (stanza 73)
A whimsical pastiche of prophetic exotica—a “light Mosaick,” deliciously
punning, hovering between Pentateuchal illumination and airy design; this
stanza is a set-up to annoy serious scholars of a Marxist inclination. 28 It is
not about knowledge won through laborious study, as even “Il Penseroso”
manages to be. But criticism of this kind is also quick to forget that the
subtitle of “Upon Appleton House” is “to my Lord Fairfax.” Along with his
own attempts at “light” scholarship, Fairfax had also recently been the
dedicatee of a travel narrative written by the Protestant minister Thomas
Gage, one that included, along with the usual anti-cloister satire—this time
of gambling friars not lesbian nuns—detailed descriptions of Mexico. 29 John
Wallace’s remark that “one may suspect that [the poem] contains personal
allusions only Lord Fairfax would have understood” 30 seems right on the
money.
And by calling Marvell’s poem a virtuoso “performance,” I mean, in this
honorific context, to point to something more than the calculated, open-ended
ease with which the persona moves, like quicksilver, about the estate and
through the landscape: sometimes speaking as a tour guide with an antiquarian’s
knowledge of the family’s past, relating “The Progress of this Houses Fate” (l.
84); at other times marking his abrupt descent into the nearby fields—“And now
to the Abbyss I pass/Of that unfathomable Grass” (ll. 368–9); and at still other
moments marking the spectacular effects of young Maria on nature in a stanza
that begs to be quoted in full:
Maria such, and so doth hush
The World, and through the Ev’ning rush.
No new-born Comet such a Train
Draws through the Skie, nor Star new-slain.
For streight those giddy Rockets fail,
Which from the putrid Earth exhale,
But by her Flames, in Heaven try’d,
Nature is wholly vitrifi’d.
274
(stanza 86)
I mean, too, the many ways in which Marvell leaves his own signature in the
poem, especially in the compressed ease with which he handles many different