ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Paint then St. Albans full of soup and gold,
The New Courts pattern, Stallion of the old.
Him neither Wit nor Courage did exalt,
But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.
Paint him with Drayman’s Shoulders, butchers Mien,
Member’d like Mules, with Elephantine chine.
Well he the Title of St. Albans bore,
For never Bacon study’d Nature more.
282
(ll. 29–37)
The profusion of topical jokes defines both the immediate appeal of this kind
of writing and the difficulties it presents to later readers (a “Drayman” was
someone who drew a cart—a dray—and therefore had large shoulders; Bacon,
of course, had been Viscount of St. Albans); but one also sees in these
relentless reductions the satirical Marvell whom Swift, with reference to The
Rehearsal Transprosed (1672–3), will later commend as a “great Genius.” 37 As
for heroic representations, they are either of the Dutch whose bravery seems
designed more to offset England’s manifold weaknesses—its soft underbelly—
than to celebrate Dutch accomplishment (ll. 523–50); or of “the valiant
Scot,” Archibald Douglas, whose homoerotic description and extravagant
death seem performed almost for the benefit of upbraiding a watchful George
Monck (ll. 649–90).
Of course Cromwell is not living at the present hour. Charles II sits on the
throne, or rather, doesn’t. Marvell’s last portrait is of the king, and if one purpose
of this sprawling poem is to bring pressure to bear on Clarendon’s unscrupulous
behavior in the naval debacle—the closing allusion to his “foaming tusk” (l.
941) grotesquely suggests rapacious ambition worthy of a Richard III—it does so
as part of a larger warning for the king to clean up his act, even his bedroom
act, as Zwicker has argued, and to hear the drums of France now within earshot.
To provoke him in this direction, moreover, Marvell summons a bit of the king’s
family history. In a scene that smacks of Senecan violence of an Elizabethan
order, Charles is visited in a dream by victims from both sides of his family,
grandfather and father alike:
Shake then the room, and all his Curtains tear,
And with blue streaks infect the Taper clear:
While, the pale Ghosts, his Eye does fixt admire
Of Grandsire Harry, and of Charles his Sire.
Harry sits down, and in his open side
The grizly Wound reveals, of which he dy’d.
(ll. 915–20)
Then, with a flick of his painterly wrist, Marvell draws a “line” that stands out
from all the others in its sharply etched, luminous coloration: