ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
to Marvell’s own desire to win a post in the new government, a shift that has
often been greeted with puzzlement and disappointment for either personal or
literary reasons by readers who are generally more comfortable thinking of
Marvell as the last great gasp of the English Renaissance rather than one of the
first to anticipate—or participate in—the creation of a public verse shortly to
be associated with Dryden. I do not think it is altogether surprising that Marvell
himself should partake in this outward “turn,” however epochal such a shift in
the dominant modes of poetic address has come to seem in retrospect. If the
conjunction of the heroic and the worldly helps to distinguish the courtly
Marvell from his Cavalier contemporaries, it is only a small step—adding an
extra foot, in fact—for Marvell to make the heroic or the mock-heroic into the
poem’s generating perspective.
It is also the case, too, that the turn outward in these poems has less to do
with Marvell’s response to an incipient rise of a new, dominant mode of poetry
than with the desire simply to speak out on a number of different occasions and
for different reasons. Although Marvell could certainly write heroic couplets
with the pointed symmetries of later Neoclassicists—these features are especially
apparent, for example, in the satiric descriptions of the monarchs and the
encomia to Cromwell in “The First Anniversary”—he seems more preoccupied
with defending a version of the heroic that he sees under threat at a particular
moment in history than he does with defining enduring heroic traits in and of
themselves. (The same motivation lies behind the commendatory poem to
Lovelace.) In this context, it might be helpful to think of the poems as cultural
“interventions”—as attempts to save something perceived in the poem as having
potentially significant value to many, not just to a few. In Marvell’s case,
moreover, the impulse has less to do with enunciating a set of continuous
political beliefs than with ensuring a future for both the specific artifact—
whether the state or a poem—and the individual architect or poet. Pragmatic,
yes; idealistic, yes, but with a concentrated emphasis on distinguishing freedom
from tyranny, acts of public significance from attempts at private gain, within a
generally Protestant view of history and England’s place in that scheme.
To underscore the problem of the heroic in these later poems is not to deny the
poetry the deeply circumstanced political resonances that recent scholarship has
been so good at detecting. Nor is it to question their rhetorical sophistication. But
it is to suggest that part of their political and rhetorical strategy is to resist the
tyranny of the local in favor of a more cosmopolitan or global perspective on the
subject. In the case of “The First Anniversary,” for instance, sensitive though
Marvell is to the issue of Cromwell’s official status as England’s Protector rather
than England’s King, he invites us to consider these issues in light of a larger, more
basic question. What would England be like without Cromwell at all? To think of
the poem with this question in mind is to see, at once, its affinities with other
“anniversary” poems; Donne’s come readily to mind as they perhaps did to Marvell
since Donne’s poetry went through three editions in the brief time from 1649–
1654. But it is also to mark out salient differences between the two, the most
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