ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
obvious being that Donne’s is a full-scale anatomy of the world in the wake of
Elizabeth Drury’s actual death, the anatomy revealing in as many gruesome and
witty ways possible “all coherence gone,” while Marvell’s “Anniversary” is only a
dress rehearsal for Cromwell’s demise, though a highly revealing one.
Near the center of the poem, almost always the location for crucial moments
in his verse, Marvell recounts Cromwell’s coach accident in Hyde Park on 24
September 1654. The event was matter for individual poems by Denham and
Wither. Marvell, on the other hand, “interweaves,” as he says, “this one Sorrow
…among/The other Glories of our yearly Song,” and, indeed, sees this act of sorrow
as if it were occasioned by an actual death and to be mourned appropriately: “So
with more Modesty we may be True/And speak of the Dead the Praises due.” The
solemnities, replete with pathetic fallacy and “loud shrieks,” invite us to imagine
the funeral scene for Cromwell, but it also serves the wider goal of the poem by
staging Cromwell’s Elijah-like apotheosis from the “low world.” The allusion to
Elijah is only one of several to Biblical heroes in the poem (Gideon and Noah
being the other obvious ones); and in conjunction with the earlier extended
comparison of Cromwell to Amphion in the remarkable section on the creation
of the Commonwealth (ll. 49–98), it helps to establish Cromwell’s heroic status.
(The Commonwealth section also presents, unequivocally, Marvell’s credentials
as a keen observer of the political state, just as he had been a keen participant in
the pleasures of Fairfax’s garden estate.)
What secures this vision of a heroic Cromwell crucial to England’s future,
however, is not Cromwell’s imaginary Biblical heritage but something more like
the opinion of the international community. Cromwell may be a Noah figure who
has planted “the Vine/of Liberty”—“sober Liberty,” as Marvell is quick to qualify;
but he is equally quick to insist that a “Chammish issue still does rage” in the land,
and nowhere more so than in the derisive responses by sectarians occasioned by
Cromwell’s “fall.” Indeed, heresy materializes at this moment in the poem, as it
were, with the slip of Cromwell’s “Foot.” Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Ranters,
Feake and Simpson: the whole bunch emerges as if their multiplying presence
signifies the true meaning of Cromwell’s Fall (and England’s along with it). Their
appearance, in turn, invites some of Marvell’s most explosive invective:
Accursed Locusts, whom your King does spit
Out of the Center of th’unbottom’d Pit;
Wand’rers, Adult’rers, Lyers, Munser’s rest,
Sorcerers, Atheists, Jesuites, Possest;
You who the Scriptures and the Laws deface
With the same liberty as Points and Lace:
Oh Race most hypocritically strict!
Bent to reduce us to the ancient Pict;
Well may you act the Adam and the Eve;
Ay, and the Serpent too that did deceive.
280
(II. 311–20)