ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
On one level, Marvell’s is a vision of “all coherence gone”; but on another,
the incoherence is only seen to underscore further England’s need for
Cromwell: to encourage not just a sigh of relief in the reader that Cromwell’s
“fall” has not been fatal but a renewed commitment to England’s destiny as a
world power.
* * *
Marvell’s last two poems—at least the two that can be confidently assigned to
him—take us deep into Restoration England. “The Last Instructions to a
Painter” (1667) and “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost” (1674) might profitably be
read together. As generically different as they are, both are ambitious,
complicated poems; both represent profoundly immediate responses to other
poems and the political worlds they invoke and inhabit; both assess problematic
versions of the heroic; and both come to radically different conclusions. In “The
Last Instructions to a Painter,” the heroic might be described as everything that
was missing from England after the return of monarchy. Indeed, a reader coming
to this poem right after “The First Anniversary” and forgetful of the intervening
ten years (and Restoration censorship) might readily respond: “Cromwell thou
shouldst be living at this hour.” Little remains of England as imagined in the
earlier poem: not the Commonwealth as a “listening structure” in all that phrase
implies—a Parliament made sturdier by debate, a country made stronger by
hearing the voice from abroad—nor a ruler unwavering in his Protestantism and
capable of making England into a world power. All is tainted and painted.
Marvell’s extended verse essay in this popular Restoration mode delivers a
portrait of England overblown with corruption. “The Last Instructions”
presents a reverse image, if you will, of the “ship of state” in “Bermudas”: no
longer an open boat, guided by a common spirit as reflected in the aerial
lightness of song, it is secretive, unwieldy, militarily impotent. As Marvell
notes near the end of the poem, the factions at court have striven “to Isle the
Monarch from his Isle” (l. 968), and England has become vulnerable to
invasion from either the Dutch or the French. The immediate historical
occasion prompting the poem was “the unmitigated naval disaster of 10–12
June 1667, when…the Dutch sailed up both the Thames and Medway, and
burned the English fleet at Chatham.” 34 But as Steven Zwicker has remarked,
“it is the low-mindedness of this poem that carries its most urgent
arguments”: 35 one argument being to deconstruct, in domino fashion,
preceding attempts by Waller (in “Instructions to a Painter”) and Dryden (in
“Annus Mirabilis”) to mythologize England’s heroic exploits at sea.
Another is to make the visual into a site of excess. The exaggerated fleshy
body is now seen, as it were, through the new technological advances provided
by the microscope (l.16). Here is the salacious and Brobdingnagian Henry
Jermyn, once “Master of the Horse to Henrietta Maria in 1639, and at her
request created Earl of St. Albans in 1660”: 36
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