ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
thinking and rethinking; on Marvell as a tabula, rasa filling his mind with Milton
and the matter of his great poem:
When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown’d, Gods Reconcil’d Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,
(So Sampson groap’d the Temples Posts in spight)
The World o’rewhelming to revenge his Sight.
Marvell’s authority to issue judgments and bestow praise, or rather,
commendation on the poem, does not result from the poem’s adherence to
existing rules or previous examples. (In Dryden’s prefatory letter affixed to
“Annus Mirabilis,” Marvell had a full instance of just this kind of appeal to
authority.) Authority is grounded, instead, and paradoxically, on the speaker’s
capacity for reflection; indeed, for reflecting on the act of reflection and
recognizing changing responses as part of the process of reading:
Yet as I read, soon growing less severe,
I lik’d his Project, the success did fear;
Through that wide Field how he his way should find
O’re which lame Faith leads Understanding blind;
Lest he perplext the things he would explain,
And what was easie he should render vain.
Or if a Work so infinite he spann’d,
Jealous I was that some less skilful hand
(Such as disquiet alwayes what is well,
And by ill imitating would excell)
Might hence presume the whole Creations day
To change in Scenes, and show it in a Play.
To identify the turns and counterturns in Marvell’s response is not to devalue
the many instances of respectful emulation in this poem: the assumption on
Marvell’s part of “a formal Miltonic syntax,” as Rosalie Colie has emphasized;
the marked allusion to Samson; the acute redeployment of resonant Miltonic
phrases or words (like “surmise” or “transported”). 39 As Marvell wrote in a letter
to Cromwell about his ward: “Emulation…is the spur to virtue,” and “modesty
…is the bridle to Vice.” 40 Here lies Marvell’s genteel disdain for those
presumptuously seeking, as we might say today, to make a movie out of Paradise
Lost, or more blasphemously, to “show it in a Play,” Marvell’s disdain now
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