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Title: Andrew Marvell
Author: Sackville-West, Vita [Victoria Mary] (1892-1962)
Date of first publication: 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Faber & Faber, 1929
   [The Poets on the Poets -- No. 1]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 13 May 2013
Date last updated: 13 May 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1073

This ebook was produced by Al Haines






THE POETS ON THE POETS--NO. 1

*

ANDREW MARVELL

_by_

V. SACKVILLE-WEST





  ANDREW MARVELL

  BY

  V. SACKVILLE-WEST



  LONDON
  FABER & FABER LIMITED
  24 RUSSELL SQUARE




  FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIX
  BY FABER & FABER LIMITED
  24 RUSSELL SQUARE LONDON W.C.1
  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
  AT THE CHISWICK PRESS
  20 & 21 TOOKS COURT LONDON E.C.4
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




  He saw the partridge drum in the woods,
  He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
  He found the tawny thrushes' broods,
  And the shy hawk did wait for him.
  What others did at distance hear
  And guessed within the thicket's gloom,
  Was showed to this philosopher,
  And at his bidding seemed to come.

  EMERSON, _Wood-notes_.




ANDREW MARVELL



I

'Look out here', said the old lady at Highgate to Mrs. Hall in 1850;
'here's a view!  They say this was Andrew Marvell's writing closet when
he wrote _sense_; but when he wrote _poetry_ he used to sit below in
his garden.'

The subject of this essay is the Andrew Marvell who wrote poetry; the
political and theological aspects of his life, and the expression which
they found in his satires, his pamphlets, and his letters, will
scarcely be touched upon at all.  I offer no excuse for this omission.
It is purely as a poet that I would consider him; as the poet who wrote
_To his Coy Mistress_, _The Garden_, _Bermudas_, _Appleton House_, _The
Nymph complaining for the death of her fawn_, the _Mower_ poems, and
the _Horatian Ode_.  Most of these poems were written before Marvell
had passed the age of thirty, but it would be a mistake to lay too much
stress upon his comparative youthfulness; to endeavour to explain the
native freshness of his mind by the fact that all his purely lyrical
work was done before middle age; or to lament the transmutation of the
poet into the Secretary for Foreign Tongues and Member of Parliament.
Marvell, as I understand him, was no Keats or Shelley, moving from
strength to strength, and untimely lopped; he was a man with a genuine
but shallow vein of inspiration, out of which he had extracted the
maximum yield of riches before he turned to the more mundane activities
which satisfied the other side of his temperament.  Here is no wastage
to deplore.  Marvell had done his best, before he set aside the muse of
poetry and devoted his talents to the service of his country.




II

It may be convenient to give, as briefly as possible, the salient facts
of Marvell's life.  He was born on Easter Eve, 31st March 1621, at
Winestead in Holderness, Yorkshire, the fourth child and first son of
Andrew Marvell, rector of the parish, and Anne Pease his wife.  The
Marvells were not Yorkshire people.  Although it is not possible to
establish any certain connection between the Reverend Andrew and the
Marvells of Shepreth and Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, it would appear,
on the testimony of Thomas Fuller (_Worthies of England_) that the
future divine was born at Meldreth in about 1586, possibly even in the
'ancient manor-house of the usual Elizabethan woodwork', known as The
Marvells.  The Reverend Andrew is described as a man of piety and
learning, facetious in his discourse yet grave in his carriage; a
conformist to the established rites of the Church of England, though
none of the most over-running or eager in them.  A good and sober man,
evidently, and one well worthy of the appointment, which fell to him in
1624, of head master and lecturer to the Grammar School at Hull.  To
Hull, therefore, Andrew Marvell the younger was removed at the age of
three, where he probably, and most suitably, as the future poet of
gardens, had the run of the 'great garden' attached to the school,
celebrated for its fruit and flowers.  Aspersions were later cast by
Marvell's enemies on the company he had kept during his boyhood.  Not
content with describing him as the 'hunger-starved whelp of a country
vicar', Bishop Parker goes on to suggest that young Marvell learnt from
the boatswains and cabin-boys those rude and incivil expressions which
he never afterwards forgot.  A generous deduction ought perhaps to be
made, however, from the accuracy of accusations launched in
controversy.  Marvell himself leaves a more pertinent and trustworthy
comment on the education that he received at Hull, 'as I remember', he
says, 'this scanning of verses was a liberal art that we learned at
Grammar School'.

Firmly grounded in his Latin grammar, he was sent with a scholarship to
Cambridge, and matriculated as a sizar at Trinity in December 1633.
Some authorities dispute this date, on the plea that Marvell was but
twelve years old at the time, but in this brief biography the arguments
are of small importance; and we may at all events record with certainty
that his name was registered as a Scholar in April 1638, and that he
took his degree as a Bachelor of Arts in 1639 at the age of eighteen.
A small and slightly mysterious incident arises to punctuate the
obscurity of his undergraduate years.  Tradition relates that Marvell,
towards the beginning of his Cambridge career, came under the influence
of the Jesuits and was induced by them to forsake the university and
escape to London, whither he was pursued by his father--whose
indignation, as an Orthodox minister, may be imagined though it is not
recorded;--run to earth in the shop of a bookseller; and induced to
return to Trinity.  This story may or may not be true, though some
corroborative evidence has recently been produced to sustain it; the
touch about the bookseller's shop may perhaps be discredited, as too
suitably picturesque in the life of a youthful poet; the only point of
interest about the whole incident is the suggestion that Marvell, who
goes down to history as a Puritan, should once in his impressionable
years have flirted with the idea of Catholicism.

But it is not only as a renegade that Marvell figures while at
Cambridge.  In 1637 appeared in the _Musa Cantabrigiensis_, a
collection of Greek and Latin verses celebrating the birth of the
Princess Anne, that short-lived scion of royalty who expired three
years later with the prayer that God would give her light; and amongst
the contributors are found the names of Richard Crashaw, Abraham
Cowley, Edward King--himself to be immortalized that same year in
_Lycidas_--and Andrew Marvell.  After this emergence, we can trace
Marvell's life by his registration as a Scholar, and by two domestic
sorrows which now befell him: the death of his mother in 1638, and the
death of his father in 1640.  'This year, 1640', says the _History of
Hull_, 'the Rev. Mr. Andrew Marvell, sailing over the Humber in company
with Madame Skinner of Thornton College and a young beautiful couple
who were going to be wedded; a speedy Fate prevented the designed happy
union through a violent storm which overset the boat and put a period
to all their lives, nor were there any remains of them or the vessel
ever after found, though earnestly sought for on distant shores'.
Whether the Rev. Andrew, overcome by a presentiment, really exclaimed
'Ho for Heaven!' and threw his staff ashore as he embarked, is not
established; nor is it established, though tradition relates it, that
the mother of Madame Skinner, adopting the younger Andrew as a son,
enabled him to spend the four ensuing years in Continental travel.  It
is difficult otherwise to explain where he obtained the funds necessary
for his journey, unless, indeed, he accompanied some young gentleman in
the quality of tutor, a practice very common in his day.  For four
years Marvell wandered through Holland, France, Switzerland, Spain, and
Italy, learning, as Milton was to write later in a letter of
recommendation, the Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish languages, but
leaving very little record of his experiences.  In 1645 he turns up in
Rome, where he meets Richard Flecknoe, an emaciated Catholic priest who
held the opinion that England was no place for a man of culture, and
who spent his time abroad, scribbling verses and making no secret of
his miserable poverty.  Marvell, less from kind-heartedness than from a
desire to stop the flow of verse which Flecknoe insisted on reading
aloud, asked him to dinner,

  Happy at once to make him Protestant
  And silent.  Nothing now dinner stayed
  But till he had himself a body made.
  I mean till he were drest; for else so thin
  He stands, as if he only fed had been
  With consecrated wafers; and the Host
  Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast.
  This Basso Rilievo of a man,
  Who as a camel tall, yet easily can
  The needle's eye thread without any stitch....
  But were he not in this black habit deck't,
  This half-transparent man would soon reflect
  Each colour that he past by; and be seen
  As the chameleon, yellow, blue, or green.

Here, then, we have a definite, though unkindly, record of Marvell from
his own pen at one point in his wanderings, visiting the spindle-shanks
Flecknoe at the sign of the Pelican in Rome.  Did he also meet Milton
in Rome?  It has been suggested, but no evidence is forthcoming to
support the suggestion.  It is probably nothing more than a romantic
legend--and, at best, I submit, less romantic and less moving than the
more likely theory that Milton and Marvell did not meet until Milton
had become blind, so that Milton never beheld the features of his
friend.

By 1646 Marvell was back in England, though his occupation from 1646 to
1650 remains obscure.  He was, however, certainly writing poetry.  In
1649, in company with thirteen other poets, he introduced the first
edition of Lovelace's _Lucasta_, in verses which although conventional
are not contemptible; and in the same year, again associated with other
poets--thirty-three of them this time, including Herrick, Denham, and
the youthful Dryden--he published his lines _Upon the Death of the Lord
Hastings_.  In the elegy upon Lord Hastings we find him speaking for
the first time with his own poetic accent.  The occasion was a
conventional one--though Lord Hastings, it appears, was no conventional
subject--nevertheless, Marvell made his true voice ring here and there,
in three or four lines.  'Go', he says,

  Go, stand betwixt the morning and the flowers,

--a truly Marvellian conceit, which would not seem out of place in any
of the later poems--and a little further on he invokes 'drooping
Hymeneus',

  Who for sad purple tears his saffron coat,
  And trails his torches through the starry hall
  Reversed, at his darling's funeral.




III

So we arrive at the year 1650, when Marvell entered Lord Fairfax's
household at Nunappleton House in the Ainstey of York, as tutor to his
daughter Mary.  Marvell was now twenty-nine, a man with travel and
experience behind him, a mature man, standing in the midst of his
period of poetic expression.  Into the next few years he was to crowd
many of the poems which make us remember his name.  It has usually been
assumed that the majority of his lyrical poems were written while at
Appleton House, and it is of course impossible to assign definite dates
to those poems where no internal evidence suggests the chronological
sequence; there is, for instance, no absolute evidence to prove that
Marvell did not wander about Italy with the manuscript of _To his Coy
Mistress_ in his pocket; nevertheless I shall presently attempt to show
some good reason for believing that not only the _Coy Mistress_, the
peak of Marvell's poetic achievement, but also _Bermudas_ and even _The
Garden_ were written some years after he had left Lord Fairfax's
service, and consequently some years later than the rest of his lyrical
poetry.  However this may be, it is certain that much of his best work
was done at Appleton House, and, more important than the question of a
few years, certain that his experience at Appleton House provided him
with a store of memories on which to draw.  Appleton House is therefore
directly responsible for much, whether Marvell's lines were actually
penned within its precincts or not.

Two strange reflections here suggest themselves.  The first, that
Marvell should never have published any of these poems.  Did he not
know how good they were?  The second--which appears almost to grow out
of the first--that so true a poet should have abandoned the writing of
poetry and turned, as the old lady said, to writing sense instead.
From first to last, it was certainly a cavalier way of treating so
pretty a muse.  Marvell's muse, indeed, if her spirit survives, has
much to complain of.  Not only did Marvell himself behave towards her
with the utmost ingratitude and nonchalance, but posterity for well
over a century did very little better.  Dr. Johnson does not mention so
much as Marvell's name.  We must travel down the years till we reach
Coleridge's Mr. Bowles before we find any reasonable appreciation, and
even then it is in a few cautious phrases that Marvell is contrasted
with Pope; he 'abounds with conceits and false thoughts', though he
'observes little circumstances of rural nature with the eye and feeling
of a true poet'; so says Mr. Bowles, and quotes the 'hatching
throstle's shining eye' as a 'circumstance new, highly poetical, which
could only have been described by a real lover of nature and a witness
of her beauties in her most solitary retirements'.  Marvell's own
indifference towards his muse is, however, even more surprising than
the indifference which melted only with the beginning of the nineteenth
century, when Campbell, Hazlitt, and Lamb carried on the campaign begun
by Bowles.

Rash as assumptions are in writing biography, it is safe to assume that
the atmosphere of Nunappleton House was congenial to Marvell.  The
poems which he wrote there are the fruits of a contented mind.

  How could such sweet and wholesome hours
  Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?

In Lord Fairfax himself, but recently retired from an active command,
he had a host who appreciated literature and the arts; Lady Fairfax was
a woman of character, rough, energetic, and kindly; the task of
teaching languages to Mary Fairfax, aged twelve, a plain but amiable
child, cannot have been an irksome one.  Marvell, when not occupied
with his pupil or engaged in conversation with his employers, doubtless
had a great deal of time to himself.  The park, the garden, the river
Wharfe, the water-meadows, the ruins of the old Nunnery, the woods and
their inhabitants, all lay open to this witness of Nature's beauties in
her most solitary retirements, nor did he fail to make the most of his
opportunity.  The quiet country existence of Nunappleton released in
him the tastes which he could most happily express, and the two years
which he spent there were, poetically, the most fruitful of his life.

Having thus traced Marvell's career as far as Nunappleton, I must hurry
over the remaining biographical facts, for the poet is about to become
swamped by the politician and satirist, with whom my present purpose
has no concern.  On leaving Lord Fairfax's service, Marvell obtained
from Milton, then Secretary for Foreign Tongues, a letter of
recommendation to Lord Bradshaw, but although Milton wrote in warm
terms of his friend no appointment was immediately forthcoming.
Meanwhile Marvell went to Eton as tutor to Cromwell's ward, a young Mr.
William Button, but in 1657 the coveted appointment was bestowed upon
him, and at a salary of 200 a year he became the associate of Milton
and Dryden in the Latin Secretaryship, and was allotted six yards of
mourning to wear at Cromwell's funeral.  He was now thoroughly involved
in public affairs, which were to occupy him till the end of his life.
A flood of political satire poured from his pen, together with
panegyrics to Cromwell, songs written in honour of Mary Cromwell's
marriage, and finally a poem on the death of the Lord Protector.  After
January of 1659 there was no looking back: Marvell was elected to the
House of Commons as member for Hull.

This seat he held until his death in 1678, with occasional absences,
once in Holland and once in Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, when he
accompanied Lord Carlisle on a mission to the rulers of those
countries.  Space forbids any account of this journey, which, indeed,
has nothing but a picturesque interest, and affected Marvell neither as
a poet nor as a politician.  Equally, I must pass in silence over the
theological controversies with Bishop Parker which brought Marvell into
considerable notoriety.  Nor can I enter into the old argument about
his political convictions, as to whether he ran with the hare and
hunted with the hounds--as to whether he was or was not, in fact, a
turncoat.  Personally, my impression is that he was a sensible man, who
could appreciate the opportune virtues of Cromwell and yet was
prepared, Cromwell being dead, to welcome the Restoration.  On the
Civil War itself he expressed himself in measured and unequivocal
language:

'Whether it be a war of religion or of liberty it is not worth the
labour to enquire.  Whichsoever was at the top, the other was at the
bottom; but upon considering all, I think the cause was too good to
have been fought for.  Men ought to have trusted God; they ought and
might have trusted the King with that whole matter.  The arms of the
Church are prayers and tears; the arms of the subject are patience and
petition.  The King himself being of so accurate and piercing a
judgment, would soon have felt where it stuck.  For men may spare their
pains where Nature is at work, and the world will not go faster for our
driving.  Even as his present Majesty's happy Restoration did itself,
so all things else happen in their best and proper time, without any
need of officiousness'.

But these discussions and opinions are irrelevant to Marvell the poet.
What is more relevant to Marvell the poet--recording merely that he
died suddenly in August 1678, some said by poison, some, more credibly,
of apoplexy or of a tertian fever--is to enquire, what kind of man was
he in his private life? what were his tastes? what was his condition?
was he a lonely man, or one much surrounded by friends? did he spend
his time in the town or country? what, in fact, was the difference
between the man who wrote poetry and the man who wrote sense?  We know,
all things considered, a great deal about Andrew Marvell; a great many
facts.  He was a member of Parliament, he played his part in public
life.  One or two legends survive about him: that he proposed to write
the life of Milton, and that Cromwell proposed to make him
superintendent of the gardens at Hampton Court.  We possess a fat
volume filled with his correspondence.  But of 'the man himself', as
biographers like to call it, we know very little.  His letters are
remarkably impersonal.  The majority of them are addressed to the Mayor
and Corporation of Hull; and as for Mr. William Skinner, he had not the
foresight to preserve any of Marvell's letters, but 'gave them to the
pastry-maid to put under pie-bottoms'.  We do not even know for certain
whether he was married or not.  True, his poems, after his death, were
edited as 'the exact copies of my late dear husband, under his own
handwriting, being found since his death among his other papers', by a
lady calling herself Mary Marvell, but it is quite possible that Mary
Marvell presented herself as a widow before ever she had been a wife,
or existed only in the shrewd publisher's imagination.  In the whole of
Marvell's own correspondence, as in all contemporary writings
concerning him, there is no mention whatsoever of a wife; on the
contrary, such allusions as were made to his private life, pointed to
quite different conclusions.  Even in friendship he appears to have
been a man of solitary disposition.  He himself gives us a brief but
significant indication:

  Two Paradises 'twere in one
  To live in Paradise alone,

and the invaluable Aubrey also comes to our help.  'He was in his
conversation very modest', he says, 'and of very few words.  James
Harrington (author of _Oceana_) was his intimate friend; J. Pell, D.D.
was one of his acquaintances.  He had not a general acquaintance'.  Nor
was he, it appears, a sociable man.  'Though he loved wine', says
Aubrey, 'he never would drink hard in company, and was wont to say that
he would not play the good fellow in any man's company in whose hands
he would not trust his life.  He kept bottles of wine at his lodgings,
and many times he would drink liberally by himself, and to refresh his
spirit and to exalt his muse'.

He was poor, he was retiring; he had a cottage at Highgate to which he
would betake himself 'to enjoy the spring and my privacy'; that he
loved nature is sufficiently apparent from his poems.  Whether he was a
man who sacrificed his personal tastes to his patriotism and his public
life, or a man to whom public affairs were the dominant interest, with
poetry and nature as youthful, secondary strings, is a question which
can never be answered, since he is not here himself to answer it, and
probably could not answer it if he were.  Such questions are not
answerable in the legal exactions of yes and no.  The apparent facts of
man's life are rarely absolute, even to himself; he draws the strokes,
one by one, and is surprised at the final design of the picture.  What
hope is there, then, for the reconstruction of the biographer? it is no
reconstruction that he can hope for, but merely interpretation--a
rather more well-intentioned form of fiction.  Marvell's personal
appearance, at least, tallies well with what we should expect of him:
'of a middling stature, pretty strong-set, roundish faced, cherry
cheeked, hazel eye, brown hair', is a satisfactory image of the tutor
who watched the hatching throstle and who concentrated into the space
of a few years, before he took to more serious matters, a brief
outburst of poetry which is remembered although the conscientious
letters to the electors of Hull are forgotten.  To Marvell the satirist
and member of Parliament, Marvell the poet must have seemed almost a
different man.  Was it, indeed, himself of whom he had written?--

  Thus I, easy philosopher,
  Among the birds and trees confer;
  And little now, to make me, wants
  Or of the fowls, or of the plants.
  Give me but wings as they, and I
  Straight floating on the air shall fly;
  Or turn me but, and you shall see
  I was but an inverted tree.

  Already I begin to call
  In their most learned original;
  And where I language want, my signs
  The bird upon the bough divines;
  And more attentive there doth sit
  Than if she were with lime-twigs knit.
  No leaf does tremble in the wind
  Which I returning cannot find.

  Out of these scattered Sibyl's leaves
  Strange prophecies my fancy weaves,
  And in one history consumes,
  Like Mexique paintings, all the plumes.
  What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said
  I in this light mosaic read.
  Thrice happy he, who, not mistook,
  Hath read in nature's mystic book.

  And see how Chance's better wit
  Could with a mask my studies hit!
  The oak-leaves me embroider all,
  Between which caterpillars crawl,
  And ivy, with familiar trails,
  Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales.
  Under this antick cope I move
  Like some great prelate of the grove....

  Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
  Curl me about, ye gadding vines,
  And oh so close your circles lace
  That I may never leave this place.
  But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
  Ere I your silken bondage break,
  Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
  And courteous briars nail me through.

Was it, indeed, he who had translated thus from Seneca?--

  Climb at court for me that will
  Tottering favour's pinnacle;
  All I seek is to lie still.
  Settled in some secret nest
  In calm leisure let me rest;
  And far off the public stage
  Pass away my silent age.
  Thus when without noise, unknown,
  I have lived out all my span,
  I shall die, without a groan,
  An old honest countryman.
  Who exposed to other's eyes
  Into his own heart ne'er prys,
  Death to him's a strange surprise.




IV

Let us, then, forget the member for Hull and return to the young tutor
at Nunappleton House.  The spring of poetry bubbled pure and clear, but
two separate elements become immediately apparent.  Nature was
Marvell's direct inspirer, but what of John Donne and the fashion of
the day?  It was not to be expected that Marvell should go free of
conceits and 'wit', or that he should resist the temptation of screwing
his mind round into the prevailing contortions in the pursuit of some
over-complicated and over-subtle conception of the universe or of his
own consciousness.  Thus a contradiction tore him asunder from the
start.  Yet this contradiction was perhaps not as violent as would at
first sight appear.  So strong, so instinctive, is the habit of mind of
one's own age, that the conceits of the metaphysical poets--to us
frequently so tortured and so extravagant--to them formed an intrinsic
part of the process of poetic expression.  Their sensibility and the
garment of words and images which clothed it were indivisible.

  'If my busy imagination',

wrote Cowley,

  'Do not thee in all things fashion,
  So, that all fair species be
  Hieroglyphic marks of thee....'

addressing to his mistress these lines which he might as pertinently
have addressed to his muse.  The busy imagination must be fashioning
all things to its own uses; 'forcing some odd similitude;' discovering,
as Dr. Johnson said, 'a kind of discordia concors ... occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike'.  It was only when the joint
processes of conception (inspiration) and expression became perfectly
fused that the resulting poem attained the finality of a work of art.
As Donne wrote--if for the word religion we may substitute the word
poetry:

  Nor may we hope to sodder still and knit
  These two, and dare to break them; nor must wit
  Be colleague to religion, but be it.

Nothing short of that perfect fusion could redeem poetic wit from
absurdity, and transform it into a unity which, to any taste and in any
age, should be completely satisfying.  Unfortunately, this system of
mental jugglery and acrobatics was an exceedingly difficult and
ticklish game to practice, and even in the most expert hands was apt to
bring the performer and his apparatus clattering to the ground.  Donne
himself, the great master and apostle of the fashion, was capable of
writing such lines as these, comparing a roving man and his
stay-at-home wife to a pair of compasses:

  If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin-compasses are two;
  Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show
  To move, but doth, if th' other do.

  And though it in the centre sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
  It leans, and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as that comes home.

And if Donne could write thus, what became of the preposterous,
stretched analogy in the hands of a lesser man?

    Upwards thou dost weep,
  Heaven's bosom drinks the gentle stream.
    Where the milky rivers creep,
    Thine floats above, _and is the cream_.

It is cheap, and easy, to multiply such instances; it is easy to say
that the trick was caught from Donne, and that Donne himself was but
'the final result of the exaggerated importance attached by the
schoolmen to the study of logic'.  Such criticism is as shallow as it
is pedantic.  The use of metaphor is part of the very nature of poetry,
and if we are to seek for some explanation of the distended and
pot-bellied proportions which it sometimes acquired in the hands of the
metaphysical poets, we shall do better to look for it in the natural
development from the Elizabethan imagination.  When Shakespeare says,

  This my hand will rather
  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
  Making the green one red,

he uses an image quite as violent and, rationally, as improbable as any
we could wish to find, yet the effect is not grotesque: it is terrible
and just, because the image is perfectly matched with the weight of the
emotion it reveals.  The perfect fusion has been achieved.  But
obviously such an example might develop along dangerous lines.  The
metaphysical poets were intoxicated--if one may apply so excitable a
word to writers so severely and deliberately intellectual--by the
potentialities of metaphor.  They saw in it an opportunity for
expressing their intimations of the unknown and the dimly suspected
Absolute in terms of the known concrete, whether those intimations
related to philosophic, mystical, or intellectual experience, to
religion, or to love.  They were 'struck with these great concurrences
of things'; they were persuaded that,

    Below the bottom of the great abyss
  There where one centre reconciles all things,
  The World's profound heart pants,

and no doubt they believed that if they kept to the task with
sufficient determination, they would succeed in catching the world's
profound heart in the net of their words.

  Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
  Legato con amore in un volume,
  Ci che per l'universo si squaderna;

  Sustanzia ed accidenti, e lor costume,
  Quasi conflati insieme per tal modo
  Che ci ch'io dico e un semplice lume.

It is clear enough from their constant allusions to their own poetic
method that they were highly self-conscious and very well aware of the
aim they were pursuing.  They were no nave or artless singers, yet
apparently they were incapable of seeing the difference between Donne's
image of the compasses, and so perfect and magnificent a symbol as,
say, Vaughan's vision of the world:

  I saw Eternity the other night,
  Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
    All calm, as it was bright,
  And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
    Driv'n by the spheres
  Like a vast shadow mov'd, in which the world
    And all her train were hurl'd;
  The doting lover in his quaintest strain
    Did there complain,
  Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
    Wit's sour delights....

Their very lack of self-criticism is in itself an earnest of their good
faith; of that sincerity, of that truth in untruth, which made their
symbolism so inevitable a part of their thought; and here, again, the
contradiction is not so strange as it might seem, for the faculty of
self-criticism has never been the strong point of poets.

Let us now see how Marvell was affected by the fashion for wit and
metaphor; in what way he differed from, and in what way he resembled,
his contemporaries.




V

We will take the differences first.  Temperamentally, Marvell was open
to _direct_ inspiration, a statement which is not modified by the
indisputable fact that the current fashion did frequently trick out his
muse with some of her ribbons and furbelows.  The source of his direct
inspiration was nature; orderly, detailed nature; nature as he saw it
in England--though, to be sure, the exotic had a charm for him, for
decorative purposes.  But that is by the way.  At Nunappleton he was
living in an English house, surrounded by an English garden, all
typical of their kind, and all suited to release precisely the
sentiments that best accorded with his natural taste.  At these, at any
rate, he could look straight with eyes unaltered by any fashionable
spectacles:

  Thrice happy he who, not mistook,
  Hath read in Nature's mystic book!

Much stress has been laid by critics upon this faculty of Marvell's;
this faculty of direct vision uninfluenced by contemporary literary
taste.  'Their [the Nunappleton poems] isolated character is hardly
sufficiently recognized ... they have no relation to anything else in
their own age;' this quotation from Sir Edmund Gosse may serve as an
instance.  I cannot wholly agree that such directness was peculiar to
Marvell, in his own age.  We have only to think of Herbert, whose lines

  I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,
    For then I sure should grow
  To fruit or shade; at least some bird would trust
  Her household to me, and I should be just,

recall Marvell's own

  Turn me but, and you shall see
  I was but an inverted tree,

or Cowley's

  Oh Fountains, when in you shall I
  Myself, eased of unpeaceful thoughts, espy?
  Oh Fields, oh woods, when, when shall I be made
  The happy tenant of your shade?

to see that such flashes of personal intimacy and the desire for
identification with nature were common to English poets in Marvell's
age as in nearly every other.  But here is the difference: to Marvell,
in the brief years of his poetic creation, the mood was constant.  It
was no mere occasional flash.  Conceits, when they occurred, were an
ornament--or shall I say a disfigurement?--rather than an integral
part; his real mood, in these nature poems, was the mood of seeing, and
feeling; the mysticism, which arose as their accompaniment was no
conceit, but an inevitable consequence, familiar to everyone who has
ever entered into a moment of communion with nature; and, as such,
expressed by him in a manner readily distinguishable from the cerebral
exertions of his colleagues.  There were, in fact, two aspects of
Marvell's closeness to nature.  The one was the actual gift of
observation--an estimable but still a minor gift; the other was that
sense of man's eventual harmony with nature, which for want of a better
word we must call mysticism in this connection.  Critical remarks, as
Dr. Johnson justly observed, are not easily understood without
examples.  Fortunately, examples may be picked off Marvell's pages as
readily as apples off a tree.  To illustrate his power of observation,
I will quote neither the hatching throstle, nor the woodpecker that

  tinkling with his beak
  Does find the hollow oak to speak,

nor the hamstring'd frogs, nor the low-roofed tortoises, but rather the
mower Damon,

        ... known
  Through all the meadows I have mown.
  On me the morn her dew distills
  Before her darling daffodils,

which is of a lyrical directness that Wordsworth might have envied; and
for his sense of identification with nature let us take this:

  Here at the fountain's sliding foot
  Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
  Casting the body's vest aside
  My soul into the boughs does glide:
  There like a bird it sits, and sings,
  Then whets and combs its silver wings,
  And, till prepared for longer flight,
  Waves in its plumes the various light.

By no perversity of judgment can this exquisite image be called a
conceit.  It is structural, not ornamental.  If it recalls anything at
all, it recalls _Il Penseroso_:

  And let some strange mysterious dream
  Wave at his wings in airy stream,

and if any poet by his single example could have reversed the habits of
the school of wit, that poet would certainly have been Milton.

But the principal clue to Marvell's nature-mysticism lies, I think, in
the obsession that green had for him.  Most commentators on Marvell
have remarked upon his frequent use of the word, but none except
perhaps M. Legouis has laid quite sufficient stress upon its
significance in his vocabulary.  He used it in and out of season, and
moreover he supplemented it by constant references to shade and shadow,
which were all part of the same line of thought.  Marvell was highly
sensitive to colour--an argument which could be substantiated by
numerous instances;--all variations of light and shade were to him a
perpetual delight; but of all colours it was green that enchanted him
most; the world of his mind was a glaucous world, as though he lived in
a coppice, stippled with sunlight and alive with moving shadows:

  Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun.

Clearly, green was to him

  The mystery, the sign you must not touch,
  For 'tis my outward soul;

the cipher of some significance that he was forever trying to capture.
With the mysterious author of _King Edward III_ he might have exclaimed:

  Since green our thoughts, green be the conventicle
  Where we will ease us by disburdening 'em,

and throughout his poems he pursues the final, elusive epitome.
Sometimes he contents himself with the merely descriptive adjective,

  So architects do square and hew
  Green trees that in the forest grew;

sometimes he uses it in a more general sense:

  No white nor red was ever seen
  So amorous as this lovely green;

sometimes he mixes it with his other pre-occupation, as in

  Sorted by pairs they still are seen
  By fountains cool, and shadows green,

a line in which he is getting a step closer to what he really wants to
say; and mixes it again, though the word green does not actually occur,
in the verse already quoted,

  'Here at the fountain's sliding foot', etc.,

which is, in fact, if carefully analysed, nothing less than a study in
green and silver.  He gets close again when he

  hangs in shades the orange bright,
  Like golden lamps in a green night,

and closer still in _The Mower's Song_:

  My mind was once the true survey
  Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
  And in the greenness of the grass
  Did see its hopes as in a glass,

and again in the same poem:

  And thus, ye meadows, which have been
  Companions of my thought more green,
  Shall now the heraldry become
  With which I shall adorn my tomb.

Still he has not quite summed it up; still he has not crept right into
the heart of

  il pian silenzio verde.

In the woods of Nunappleton he tries to find it:

  But I, retiring from the flood,
  Take sanctuary in the wood;
  And, while it lasts, myself imbark
  In this yet green, yet growing ark,

where

  Dark all without it knits; within
  It opens passable and thin....
  The arching boughs unite between
  The columns of the temple green,

but the complete identification comes as a sudden, triumphant cry:

  Annihilating all that's made
  To a green thought in a green shade.




VI

It was not in vain that Marvell had chased his cipher through poem
after poem, not in vain that he had called his love a 'vegetable love',
if at a given moment he was to throw the net of language so finally
over the illusion.  With Apollo he had hunted Daphne, and with Pan had
sped after Syrinx, that he might at last clasp a tree in his arms.  So
long as he followed what I have called his direct inspiration, so long
as he admitted only the mystical-metaphorical interpretations of that
inspiration he was on safe ground.  It was when he entered into
competition with his colleagues that he went wrong, and in no poem is
the difference between his two manners so well exemplified as in
_Appleton House_, opening as it does with a string of grotesque
exaggerations which must be endured before the poem flows out into the
simple and splendid verses that rank with Marvell at his best.  It is
deplorable that the poet who could write verses LXV to LXXIV and LXXVII
and LXXXI should also have written, in the same poem, such absurdity as:

  Yet thus the laden house does sweat,
  And scarce endures the Master great;
  But where he comes, the swelling hall
  Stirs, and the square grows spherical,
  More by his magnitude distrest
  Than he is by its straitness prest.

This is in the worst, most inflated style of the metaphysicians, and
cannot be excused even by saying that the language of compliment was
always notoriously exaggerated.  But before considering the Marvell who
shared the faults of his day, it is as well to remember also the
Marvell of a middle manner; the Marvell who wrote, for instance, _The
Nymph complaining for the death of her fawn_.  Here is a poem whose
inspiration cannot be said to be personal or wholly direct; it is,
moreover, a poem full of conceits; yet the effect is not one of
straining or insincerity, but rather of a graceful and deliberate
artificiality, underlaid by some genuine compassion--whether for the
nymph or for her fawn matters not.

  For it was full of sport; and light
  Of foot and heart; and did invite
  Me to its game; it seemed to bless
  Itself in me.  How could I less
  Than love it?  Oh, I cannot be
  Unkind, t'a beast that loveth me.

Then comes the description, full of grace, yet not sentimental--Marvell
was never sentimental:

  I have a garden of my own,
  But so with roses overgrown
  And lilies, that you would it guess
  To be a little wilderness.
  And all the spring time of the year
  It only loved to be there.
  Among the beds of lilies, I
  Have sought it oft, where it should lie;
  Yet could not, till itself would rise,
  Find it, although before mine eyes.
  For, in the flaxen lilies' shade,
  It like a bank of lilies laid.

and then the hyperbole, which is a triumph of nice balancing between
the admissible and the extravagant:

  Upon the roses it would feed
  Until its lips ev'n seemed to bleed;
  And then to me 'twould boldly trip
  And print those roses on my lip.
  But all its chief delight was still
  On roses thus itself to fill,
  And its pure virgin limbs to fold
  In whitest sheets of lilies cold.
  Had it lived long, it would have been
  Lilies without, roses within.

This is neither the true country poet nor yet the poet of the true
school of wit, but a pastoral poet uniting the rural and the courtly
styles.  _The picture of little T.C. in a prospect of flowers_ may come
in the same category, _Damon the Mower_, _The Mower's Song_, and
_Ametas and Thestylis making hayropes_, and so likewise may occasional
verses strewn throughout the poems, as for example this strophe from
_The Gallery_:

        ... thou'rt drawn
  Like to Aurora in the dawn,
  When in the east she slumb'ring lies
  And stretches out her milky thighs;
  While all the morning quire does sing,
  And manna falls, and roses spring;
  And, at thy feet, the wooing doves
  Sit perfecting their harmless loves.


This aspect of Marvell has been strangely overlooked; he has received
his full meed of recognition as a nature poet, and his full meed of
disapprobation as the poet who had submitted, all too readily, to the
influence of Donne; but this half-way house, this amalgam of the
natural and artificial, has never been given sufficient prominence.
His very choice of the Mower as the central figure in no less than four
poems illustrates his sense of the decorative value of rustic
employments.  Marvell's Mower simply takes the place of the traditional
shepherd.  It was Marvell who discovered the scythesman as an ornament
to poetry, and who for _bergerie_ substituted _faucherie_.  This
discovery is all the more remarkable when we consider that Theocritus
makes of his Reapers but a pretext to talk of love, and that Virgil
alludes but very briefly to the reaper in the _Eclogues_, and in the
_Georgics_ mentions him not at all.  Moreover, both the Greek and the
Roman poet thought of the reaper of corn, whereas Marvell's mower--it
is scarcely surprising--is the mower of grass.  Another interesting
point arises in connection with the Mower poems: Marvell had some
appreciation of uncultivated nature, which was not at all proper to the
seventeenth century.  True, his usual taste was for the mild and
orderly aspects of garden-craft, and rugged nature was a thing unknown
to him; nevertheless, he gives some indications of an appetite for
something a little less sleek, a little less demure.  In _Appleton
House_ he had allowed this sentiment to escape him:

  ... Nature here hath been so free
  As if she said, 'Leave this to me.'
  Art would more neatly have defaced
  What she had laid so sweetly waste,

and in _The Mower against gardens_ he writes a complete poem in
condemnation of a pleasant artificiality:

  'Tis all enforced: the fountain and the grot,
  While the sweet fields do lie forgot,
  Where willing Nature does to all dispense
  A wild and fragrant innocence.

Obviously, this is no foreshadowing of the romantic poets; Capability
Brown would doubtless have been more to Marvell's taste than Helvellyn;
but the hint is worth noting, in conjunction with his constant desire
to identify himself with nature in the shape of trees and birds and
woods.

'The Gods themselves', he wrote, 'the gods themselves with us do dwell.'




VII

It is necessary, however, to turn to that other Marvell--the Marvell
who had read too much of Donne, and who exercised his wit either upon
ethical questions, or upon love, or even upon religion.  It is not to
be denied that this Marvell suffered from the faults of his
contemporaries.  He was capable of writing such preposterous rubbish as
the notorious

  Upon the rock his Mother drave,
  And there she split against the stone
  In a Caesarian section;

he took pleasure in the metaphors drawn from cosmography or geometry
which were so fruitful a source of disaster, and, like all his fellows,
sometimes he managed them successfully and sometimes he came to grief.
Sometimes, again, the question of his success or failure is debatable,
and must be resolved by personal taste.  What are we to say, for
example, of these two verses:

  Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
  And Earth some new convulsion tear,
  And us, to join, the World should all
  Be cramped into a planisphere.

  As lines so loves oblique may well
  Themselves in every angle greet
  But ours so truly parallel,
  Though infinite can never meet?

or of this, where the beauty of the first two lines almost redeems the
extravagance of the two following:

  How wide they dream!  The Indian slaves
  That sink for pearl through seas profound,
  Would find her tears yet deeper waves
  And not of one the bottom sound?


If we except _Appleton House_, it is, generally speaking, noticeable
that Marvell's use of injudicious conceits occurs most frequently in
poems which we may presume him to have written round a deliberate
thesis--such poems as _Eyes and Tears_, _The Match_, and _Upon the Hill
and Grove at Billborow_.  There are other poems which I am reluctant to
include.  Is _On a drop of dew_ to be condemned? or _The Coronet_? or
_The Gallery_? or _The Fair Singer_? or the _Definition of Love_,
characteristic of the metaphysical school though it is, with its
splendid opening?--

  My love is of a birth as rare
  As 'tis for object strange and high:
  It was begotten of Despair
  Upon Impossibility.

Surely not.  Conscientiously though one may search through the pages of
Marvell's lyrics, the worst offences are not to be found in him.  It is
impossible to imagine Marvell writing such a set of verses as
Cleveland's _Fuscara_.  Moreover, the true poet bursts out in the most
unexpected places, as:

  Near this, a fountain's liquid bell
  Tinkles within the concave shell.
  Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
  Or slake its drought?

or--the shallower but still charming Marvell:

  Through every garden, every mead,
  I gather flowers; (my fruits are only flowers,)

or, most unexpected of all, the 'old honest countryman', the
garden-poet, suddenly interposing himself in the midst of an Horatian
ode upon Cromwell:

  So when the falcon high
    Falls heavy from the sky,
  She, having killed, no more does search,
    But on the next green bough to perch.

The poet in Marvell died hard, whether he tried to stifle that poet
under the weight of fashion or under an absorption in public affairs.
And this mention brings me to yet another aspect of Marvell, which must
not be forgotten.

We have considered him as a nature-poet, as a pastoral poet, and as a
poet of the school of wit; to consider him as a satirist lies outside
the scheme of this essay, but there is a group of poems which straddles
across the frontier between lyricism and politics.  This group includes
the _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland_, _The First
Anniversary of the government under O. C._, and _The Poem upon the
death of O. C_.  The Horatian ode is almost too well known to admit of
quotation, but it throws so revealing a light upon Marvell's eminently
reasonable and impartial attitude about public events that a few
excerpts may be allowed.  I have already quoted a passage from the
_Rehearsal Transprosed_ in defence of Marvell's alleged political
inconsistency; the Horatian ode will bear out the opinions expressed
therein, not so much in the famous lines upon the execution of Charles
I,

  He nothing common did or mean
  Upon that memorable scene:
    But with his keener eye
    The axe's edge did try,
  Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
  To vindicate his helpless right,
    But bow'd his comely head
    Down, as upon a bed,

as in these four significant lines:

  Though Justice against Fate complain,
  And plead the ancient rights in vain:
    But these do hold or break
    As men are strong or weak,

a fatalistic creed which foreshadows his later words: 'Men may spare
their pains where Nature is at work, and the world will not go faster
for our driving'.  The time was ripe for Cromwell, and, though Marvell
did not approve of civil war, and thought on the whole that men 'ought
to have trusted the King', he recognized that according to the laws of
nature the weak man must be broken by the strong,

  For to be Cromwell was a greater thing
  Then aught below or yet above a King.

But what has he to say of Cromwell himself? since our concern here is
less with Marvell's political convictions than with his vision as a man
and a poet.  The poem upon the death of Cromwell opens with an account
of Cromwell's affection for his daughter and grief at her death, all in
conventional strain; but the poet in Marvell, as has been said, was
liable to burst the conventional fetters:

  'All, all is gone,'

he exclaims suddenly,

  'All, all is gone of ours or his delight
  In horses fierce, wild deer, or armour bright,'

and from convention the poem swings to actual experience and
interpretation:

  I saw him dead.  A leaden slumber lies
  And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes.
  Those gentle rays under the lids were fled
  Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed;
  That port which so majestic was and strong,
  Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along,
  All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan,
  How much another thing, no more that man?
  Oh, human glory, vain; oh, death, oh, wings,
  Oh, worthless world; oh transitory things! ...

Saw Marvell Cromwell dead? saw Milton Marvell ever?  Poetry is a
cynically lying jade, and her evidence is of no account.




VIII

The record which Marvell has left of his own views on literature is
extremely scanty.  In a letter to Lord Wharton he criticizes the
English translation of a Latin poem: 'The Latin hath several excellent
heights, but the English translation is not so good, and both of them
strain for wit and conceit more than becomes the gravity of the author
or the sadness of the subject'.  This extract, slight as it is, has a
certain interest both in showing Marvell's attitude towards wit and
conceit, and in its allusion to translation, when we remember that
Marvell himself--a Greek and Latin scholar--composed Latin versions of
his own poems _On a drop of dew_ and _The Garden_.  Another and more
specific allusion to translation occurs in the lines to Dr. Witty:

  Some in this task
  Take off the cypress veil, but leave a mask,
  Changing the Latin, but do more obscure
  That sense in English which was bright and pure.
  So of translators they are authors grown,
  For ill translators make the book their own.
  Others do strive with words and forced phrase
  To add such lustre, and so many rays,
  That but to make the vessel shining, they
  Much of the precious metal rub away.
  He is translation's thief that addeth more,
  As much as he that taketh from the store
  Of the first author.  Here he maketh blots
  That mends; and added beauties are but spots...
  And (if I judgment have) I censure right:
  For something guides my hand that I must write,

nor must the lines on _Paradise Lost_ be forgotten:

  Well might'st thou scorn thy readers to allure
  With tinkling rhyme, 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 rhyme.

but with these few quotations the entire stock of Marvell's literary
criticism is exhausted.




IX

Once at least in his career as a poet Marvell achieved the perfect
marriage between conception and expression in a poem which owes nothing
to his own particular source of inspiration by nature; nothing to his
sense of the pastoral; nothing to stirring events; but, curiously
enough, much to the school of Donne.  In _To his Coy Mistress_, Donne
and the school of wit together are superbly justified.  _To his Coy
Mistress_ is the supreme example of the metaphysical method of packing
image upon image, and of suddenly relating them to the problems of
human existence.  It combines all the jugglery of 'wit', and all the
grisly melancholy of Donne.  _To his Coy Mistress_ is unique in
Marvell's work.  Whether it was written under the stress of an actual
exasperation, or whether the theme (though eternal), was in fact
imaginary, is irrelevant; all that concerns us is the complete success
of the poem as a whole.  Although the analysis of poetry is often but a
dry and unpleasing occupation, the analysis of the _Coy Mistress_
really does yield some results; and if the writing of poetry could be
learnt by such methods, the _Coy Mistress_ is pre-eminently one of the
poems from which we best could learn it.  The urgency of passion is its
theme, expounded in language which moves from an apparently extravagant
frivolity to an intense and menacing seriousness; then swings back to
the human plea again, still decoratively presented, but sobered now and
dignified by the reflections on mortality which have intervened.  It
is, in fact, as nicely constructed as a geometrical problem in two
propositions and a solution.  'Had we the whole of time before us, we
might dally ingeniously and with grace; but life is short, and the
grave will divide us eternally; therefore let us make the most of the
moment while we can'.  The three sections are unequally divided: twenty
lines to the first, twelve to the second, fourteen to the third;
forty-six short lines into which are crowded, but without any jostling
or confusion, the maximum number of ideas and images.  So many things
have seldom been said in so few words; yet the effect is of great
luxuriance rather than of economy or compression.  The perfection of
the phrasing can only be realized if we try to paraphrase the poem and
discover the impossibility of substituting other words for Marvell's.
The whole poem is as tight and hard as a knot; yet as spilling and
voluptuous as a horn of plenty.

Equally repaying are the minor technical details of the poem--which,
indeed, as a study is inexhaustible.  The octosyllabic line in
Marvell's hands became a medium of the utmost elasticity; it was his
favourite metre, and he employs it in nearly three-quarters of his
total lyrical output.  In the _Coy Mistress_ he makes particularly
effective use of enjambment (noticeably absent in both _Bermudas_ and
_The Garden_),

  Thou by the Indian Ganges side
  Should'st rubies find; I by the tide
  Of Humber would complain.  I would
  Love you ten years before the Flood,

and

  Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
  My echoing song;

are the most drastic instances, but there are at least four other
couplets which would serve almost equally well for illustration.  This,
combined with the large proportion of short syllables, explains the
effect of rapidity produced by the poem, so admirably adapted to the
impatience of the theme.  The actual vocabulary plays an important part
in the suggestion of subtlety and richness, which might well have been
lost in the racing speed that drives the lines along.  It is scarcely
necessary to pick out the unusual words; they speak for themselves; or
to argue such points as the mysterious 'lew'; nor, possibly, would
English readers appreciate the insistence of a French critic upon the
brutally concrete significance of the lines

  ... then worms shall try
  That long-preserved virginity,
  And your quaint honour turn to dust,

a significance which, as he rightly observes, would be 'characteristic
of the taste of Donne and his school', supporting his argument by a
reference to the definition of the words 'quaint' and 'honour' in the
New English Dictionary.  Attention may, however, be drawn to the
several verbal surprises which supplement the main device of 'surprise'
occurring half-way through the poem:

  But at my back I always hear
  Time's winged chariot hurrying near....

These verbal surprises are principally based, of course, upon the rich
poetic resource of startling but felicitous association:
Ganges--rubies; tide--Humber; vegetable--Love and Empire;
deserts--Eternity; strength--sweetness; but Marvell makes use also of
telling antithesis:

  Let us...
  Rather at once our time devour
  Than languish in his slow-chapt power, ...
  And tear our pleasures with rough strife
  Through the iron gates of life,

--though, to be sure, Tennyson used to say he wished Marvell had
written 'grates' instead of 'gates'.

The use of the consonant V, which occurs no less than seventeen times
in the forty-six lines, reinforced by the companion F, is also worth
noting.  It is not pushing analysis too far to suggest that this use of
V is largely responsible for the harmony of

  My vegetable love should grow
  Vaster than empires, and more slow,

and that the alliance of V and F is important in

  The grave's a fine and private place,

which both in euphony and sentiment recalls Cowley's

  After death I nothing crave.
  Let me alive my pleasure have,
  All are Stoicks in the grave.

This, indeed, is not the only line which suggests a resemblance between
the two poets, but on which side the debt lay is harder to determine.
(The notion of a debt must, I think, be accepted, since a double
coincidence would be out of the question, nor must we further
complicate it by dwelling upon Herrick's

  For I know, in the tombs
  There's no carousing.)

The second line to which I refer is, of course,

  Deserts of vast eternity,

which carries the mind at once to _The Mistress_,

  And all beyond is vast eternity,

Now, _The Mistress_ had appeared in 1647; it would therefore have been
quite possible for Marvell to have read it before composing his own
poem; moreover, other resemblances to Cowley occur in his _Dialogue
between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure_, the _Definition of
Love_, _Mourning_, _The Garden_, and _The Match_, which, taken all
together, confirm the idea that Marvell was familiar with Cowley's
early work.  On the other hand Cowley's lines about the grave appear in
his _Anacreontiques_, which were not published until they were included
in his _Miscellanies_ in 1656.  What are we therefore to assume?  We
are almost forced to conclude that Marvell was the borrower in both
cases, since it is highly improbable that Cowley could have seen the
_Coy Mistress_ in manuscript and stolen 'vast eternity' for his own
poem; Cowley, from 1646 to 1656, was living on the Continent in the
service of the exiled queen, where Marvell's manuscript would not have
been likely to come his way; and any printed edition of Marvell's work
is entirely out of the question, since this was not published until
fourteen years after Cowley's death.  This conclusion, that Marvell was
the borrower not only of 'vast eternity' but also of the reflection
about the grave, postulates that the _Coy Mistress_ was not written
until after 1656 (the date of publication of the _Anacreontiques_).
considerably later than the rest of his lyric poetry.

The question is, therefore, interesting in so far as it introduces the
possibility that Marvell's years of lyrical productiveness were not, in
fact, as has usually been supposed, limited to the pre-Appleton House
and Appleton House period, a possibility which is borne out by a
consideration of _Bermudas_.  In 1653, after leaving Lord Fairfax's
service, Marvell, having failed to obtain the post of Milton's
assistant, went as tutor to William Dutton at Eton where pupil and
master lived together in the house of John Oxenbridge.  This John
Oxenbridge had twice visited the Bermudas, and it is legitimate to
suppose that his accounts of those remote islands, no less than an
acquaintance with Waller's recently published _Battle of the Summer
Islands_, prompted Marvell to the composition of his poem.  Clearly,
Marvell, like most poets, was not particular as to the flint which
struck sparks from his tinder.  John Oxenbridge, Waller, Plutarch, and
Captain John Smith in his _General History of Virginia_, all
contributed their quota to _Bermudas_.  From Waller, indeed, he
borrowed shamelessly, but his alchemy produced a very different ore
from Waller's

  ...happy island where huge lemons grow,
  And orange-trees, which golden fruit do bear,
  Th' Hesperian garden boasts of none so fair;
  Where shining pearl, and coral, many a pound,
  On the rich shore, of ambergris is found.
  The lofty cedar, which to heaven aspires,
  The prince of trees, is fuel for their fires!...
  With candy'd plantains and the juicy pine
  On choicest melons and sweet grapes they dine.

Waller's poem, which indeed is mock-heroic, restricts itself to mere
description; Marvell's is nothing less than the small epic of the
Puritan emigration, and beneath the descriptive passages glows a
fervour which is rarely met with in his graceful pages.  But this is
not the point I wish to make.  I am attempting now to establish some
chronology for Marvell's lyrical work; and if we are to accept the
assumption that _Bermudas_ was written at Eton, that is to say between
1653 and 1657, what are we to say of _The Garden_?  At first sight it
would appear reasonable to suppose that _The Garden_ was written in the
leisure of the days at Appleton House, and to this period in Marvell's
life it has usually been ascribed; but, without wishing to press the
point too far, it is undeniable that certain resemblances exist between
_Bermudas_ and _The Garden_, which at least indicate that the two poems
have some bearing upon one another.  Consider these parallel passages,
the first from Bermudas, the second from _The Garden_:

  He makes the figs our mouths to meet
  And throws the melons at our feet,
  But apples plants of such a price
  No tree could ever bear them twice,

And,

  What wondrous life in this I lead!
  Ripe apples drop about my head;
  The luscious clusters of the vine
  Upon my mouth do crush their wine....
  Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
  Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Was _The Garden_ then written subsequent to Bermudas?  or, in writing
_Bermudas_, was Marvell merely borrowing from himself?--the most
honourable form of plagiarism.  The question, at best, is but one of a
literary curiosity.




X

What, then, when all has been said, is our eventual estimate of
Marvell?  That depends largely upon the degree of exorbitance with
which we approach a poet, forgetful perhaps of the slender quantity of
lines upon which many a lasting reputation has been built.  We need
look no further than Lovelace and Waller, among Marvell's own
contemporaries, for proof.  Poets vary, but most are more prolific than
they should be; less fastidious than they might be, that is to say, in
the chosen residue of their work that they expose to the judgment of
the world.  (Yet fecundity in itself is often a measure of a poet's
greatness, provided the quality maintain a sufficient, even though
intermittent, standard; and no poet, as experience proves, can be
expected to act as his own editor.  Wordsworth and Tennyson, not to
mention Swinburne, were their own worst enemies.)  Time and posterity,
fortunately, act as sieves, and in the end it is often for a few pages
of print, at most, that a poet is remembered; a few moments distilled
out of all the years of his life.  If, therefore, we are to remember
Marvell by his best, we shall be obliged to place him high, as the
author of at least one superlatively excellent poem--_To his Coy
Mistress_--and as the author of _The Garden_, _Bermudas_, _The Horatian
Ode_, part of _Appleton House_, _The Nymph complaining_, and the
translation from Seneca.  It is unreasonable to demand more of any
minor poet.

The word minor has slipped in, and must be allowed to stand.  Marvell
seldom strikes the more resonant chord.  He strikes it once, and with
firm fingers, in the centre panel of the _Coy Mistress_; he strikes it
again, in the passage I have quoted from the poem on the death of
Cromwell; and in his pursuit of the cipher represented by _green_ he
strikes it repeatedly, or at any rate evokes it; for the rest, we must
concede that Marvell, poetically charming, is spiritually somewhat
shallow.  This comment is not intended to suggest that poetry should be
concerned with moral reflections; far from it, Heaven forbid!
nevertheless, some implication must be latent, before poetry can aspire
to be considered as anything approaching major poetry; and such
implication, in Marvell, is frankly lacking.  Even to look for it, is
attempting to gather grapes off thistles.  The _Coy Mistress_ is
largely to blame; she is the cavern which makes the student of Marvell
try again and again hopefully for echoes.  But where are the echoes to
be found? in Marvell's nature-mysticism alone lies some connection.
The solitude of the grave and the solitude of the forest are separated
by no very great distance, and Marvell, though not often perplexed by
the problems of mortality, was very constantly preoccupied with the
desire for human union with nature--even though that union was to be
his own, and the desire never extended itself in any general sense.
This is the utmost that we can say.  Marvell had his limitations.  The
vein of his finer inspiration was a genuine one, but we require
something further before we can attribute greatness to a poet.  The
_Coy Mistress_ alone in Marvell's work deserves the word.

His skill was considerable, and it was to something in his temperament
rather than to any default in his art that his comparative failure was
due.  By temperament a man with a love of solitude, the streak of
philosophic loneliness in him was rapidly buried under his interest in
worldly affairs, and the elements of mysticism in him were counteracted
by a certain robust virility which drove him to occupations more active
than the delights of a life of contemplation.  His highest plot was not
really to plant the bergamot, though at moments he liked to think so.
This virility is everywhere apparent in his poems, not only in the _Coy
Mistress_, but in the healthy sensuality of his love for colour,
scents, music: a professed Puritan, he was consistent neither in his
politics nor in his personal tastes.  His was a dual nature, and the
gentler side went undermost.  There is, of course, no intrinsic reason
why such virility of nature should be damaging to a poet--the _Coy
Mistress_ is a proof to the contrary--no reason why an energetic public
life should not run parallel with a private life of poetic production;
but at the same time it must, I think, be admitted that in the hale
sanity of Marvell's mind very little room could be found for those
underlying doubts and perplexities which are implicit in all poetry of
the noblest order.  The very peg upon which he hung his
imagination--for it does, when all is said and done, deserve the name
of imagination as opposed to the minor dignity of fancy--the very peg
upon which he hung his imagination in itself gives proof of a tame,
somewhat smug, material outlook.  Order, safety, gardens; the simple
pleasures and beauties of the cultivated English country-side; the
leisure of the cultured mind--for it must always be remembered that
Marvell was a man with a classical education behind him--the treat of a
sophisticated solitude; such were the ingredients which went to the
making of Marvell as a poet.  His was no uneasy soul.

Consequently it is probably a mistake even to discuss the possibility
of Marvell's admission to the higher plane.  We should do better to
accept him as the poet of the happy garden-state, the painter of
country delights, a miniaturist of the foreground with some suggestion
of indistinct, green, and significant background to redeem him from the
superficiality of the mere observer and recorder.  That coy and
tantalizing mistress is again to blame: she, woman or myth, made
Marvell strike a note such as he never really hit before or since.
She, and not Cromwell, not Hull, not Bishop Parker, is the real enemy
of Marvell for posterity.  She it is who makes us covetously demand
from Marvell more than he was ever temperamentally fitted to give.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

'The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell', edited by H. M. Margoliouth.

'Andr Marvell', by Pierre Legouis.

'Andrew Marvell', by Augustine Birrell.  (English Men of Letters
Series.)

'Andrew Marvell': Tercentenary tributes, edited by W. H. Bagguley,
Oxford University Press.




  CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
  TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.






[End of Andrew Marvell, by V. Sackville-West]
