ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
And ghastly Charles, turning his Collar low,
The purple thread about his Neck does show.
283
(ll. 921–2)
Cromwell is dead, but his mark in history lives on, more substantial and less
fleeting, at the present moment, than the English navy itself.
* * *
It might be of little consequence that the word “majesty” is never used in “The
Last Instructions”; Charles is referred to as monarch or king. But the appearance
of this word, for perhaps the only time in Marvell’s verse, 38 in a poem
commending the magnum opus of England’s most notorious anti-monarchist is
a little surprising; and we might be permitted to regard this example of the
Marvellian “rebound” in operation for possibly the last time as also more than a
hint of Marvell’s deepest loyalties in the Restoration. The phrase from “On Mr.
Milton’s Paradise Lost” reads: “That Majesty which through thy Work doth
Reign/Draws the Devout, deterring the Profane.” What adds to the line’s
peculiar resonance is the fact that Milton’s majesty is seen as a feature of his
work: that it is said to permeate “thy Work,” an honorific connection that might
seem to be merely conventional praise except for two reasons. At least since the
publication of Donne’s Poems in 1633, commendatory verse had been associated
with party politics, especially royalist politics in the Civil War, as evidenced in
the many partisan poems accompanying the separate publications of the works
of both William Cartwright (1651) and Beaumont and Fletcher (1647). And in
yoking together “Majesty” with “Work,” Marvell is also uniting what in politics
had belonged to divided planes of reality: the king associated with the former by
virtue of inherited title or “ancient rights” (and visible at least as a metaphor for
kingly behavior in the Horatian Ode), and “indefatigable,” industrious Cromwell
with the latter.
We can in part locate Marvell’s admiration for Milton by simply observing
the place of this phrase in his poetry and in the poetry of the seventeenth
century more generally. But what makes the poem seem more than a trick of
oppositional politics at this point has to do with something else. If “On Mr.
Milton’s Paradise Lost” represents the most sustained, intelligent reading in verse
of a single literary work in the seventeenth century, it is so in part because it is
the closest thing we have to a “liberal” or non-conformist response to a literary
text in the period: what Catherine Belsey would describe as the emerging
humanist subject present in the act of reading. If the poem is a product of a
particular historical period when Marvell was defending the rights of the
individual conscience against ecclesiastical authority in The Rehearsal
Transposed, it seems only “natural,” too, that the poem came of age again in the
era of New Criticism and that it continues to attract attention into the present.
Everything—including politics—hinges on individual judgment and taste; on