ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Him, valianst men, and fairest Nymphs approve,
His Booke in them finds Judgement, with you Love.
The poem on Paradise Lost, by contrast, is written with a Cavalier’s respect for
form, as exemplified in the concluding, urbane apology for using rhyme:
Well mightst thou scorn thy Readers to allure
With tinkling Rhime, of thy own Sense secure;
While the Town-Bays writes all the while and spells,
And like a Pack-Horse tires without his Bells.
Their Fancies like our bushy Points appear,
The Poets tag them; we for fashion wear.
I too transported by the Mode offend,
And while I meant to Praise thee, must Commend.
Thy verse created like thy Theme sublime,
In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not Rhime.
But Marvell’s attention to form here only emphasizes the spuriousness of always
assuming an easy identity between political beliefs and artistic expression. By the
end of the poem, rhyme is about the only thing that separates Marvell from
Milton, so thoroughly has Marvell become Milton’s reader, even the kind of
uncloistered, conscientious reader Milton had once imagined all England
becoming in the early days of the Revolution in Areopagitica: judicious,
independent, individual. 41
So individual is Marvell in his judgment, in fact, that rhyme can have a
marked place in his poem: as a means of honoring Milton, as a way of signaling
difference, as a method of identifying a special bond. Praise is fine; it’s what the
Irish are made to say about Cromwell in the Horatian Ode. But to commend,
from the Latin “commendare,” is a different matter; at once more formal and
more intimate, it means to entrust, to commit to someone’s charge (Oxford
English Dictionary, first usage). It was the kind of thing Marvell had done in
asking Milton to recommend him for the post of Assistant Latin Secretary under
Cromwell; the kind of thing required of Milton when Marvell intervened at the
beginning of the Restoration and helped to save him from a possible hanging. 42
As Aubrey said of Marvell, “he would not play the goodfellow in any man’s
company in whose hands he would not trust his life.” 43 Rhyme matters for
Marvell, not for reasons of technical display—Herbert has him beaten hands
down—but as a self-defining impulse: because he understood better than any
poet in English that it was possible to be original on the rebound.
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