A Garden and a Coy Mistress: Andrew Marvell

Which is better: the life of ascetic contemplation or one of passionate sensuality?  Let's see what the last great poet of the Stuart era, Andrew Marvell, has to say about that.

Transcript

Welcome back, everyone, to the Classic English Literature Podcast, a little silver lining in the Interweb’s grey cloud.  Before we give rhyme its reason today, I need to thank a great friend of the show from Ottawa, Joerg, who has graciously donated the readies to cover this month’s rent on the website.  Thanks very much, man, for keeping the red light lit!

On today’s show, we sort of end a particular era in English poetry.  Today’s writer was certainly a man of his times: a disciple of Ben Jonson’s wit, an admirer of John Donne’s metaphysics, a friend and defender of John Milton.  He’s sometimes grouped with the Cavalier poets, but he was cannily ambiguous about his beliefs during the Civil Wars (in fact, he was out of town at the time, and missed the whole brouhaha).  The man has left little grain for biographers to glean; he was everywhere and nowhere, a somewhat public figure but a private man, and a writer whose deft deployment of literary disguises and personae gives little hint of the man behind the verse.

And his death casts no light upon the manner of his life.  It does, however, provide an admirable treatment for a saucy screenplay.  

On the night of August 16, 1678, Andrew Marvell died suddenly in a rented house in Great Russell Street, Westminster. The official cause? Fever brought on by vivax malaria, a common enough disease at the time, but treatable with a lovely gin-and-tonic. The whispered alternative? Poison.

But why?  Political intrigue?  Scandal?  By whom?  Nefarious Jesuits?  His landlady? An accidental overdose?

Enter one Mary Marvell, nee Palmer, a woman no one in Marvell’s circle had ever heard of before— his landlady, who suddenly declared herself his widow.  She claimed the 500 pounds (some say 1000) deposited in the poet’s name at a local bank (or goldsmith’s).  In the first edition of Marvell’s poems, published in 1681, the following note appears, which some say seems designed to bolster her assertion:

all these poems, as also the other things in this book contained, are printed according to the exact copies of my late dear Husband, under his own handwriting, being found since his death among his other papers, witness my Hand this 15th day October 1680. Mary Marvell.

Mary claimed to have wed Andrew in 1667, a claim not easily disproved as the church register had gone missing.  Was this woman really the widow of literary man of mystery Andrew Marvell?  We may never know.  But Mary stopped using the poet’s name in 1684, after she lost her bid for the money.

What is it about Marvell’s career that might lend itself to such potboiler conspiracy?  Well, all that privacy, I imagine, all that keeping the public at a distance.  He may have flirted with Catholicism as a student, but as a well-known satirist, he attacked the Jesuits. His writing was also politically equivocal – he wrote in support of both the royalist and parliamentary causes during the wars, including a poem we mentioned back in the Civil Wars episode which kinda sorta praises Cromwell.  The voices in his poetry are difficult to pin down – are they passionate, ironic, sinister?  I don’t think people are much different now that we were 350 years ago: a celebrity or public figure who is not forthcoming about their private life will inevitably become tabloid fodder, the subject of wild speculation and apocryphal invention.  The public, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

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After that death, though, Marvell rather faded from the literary limelight.  Indeed,  I’ve probably created the impression that he was a famous poet in his own time, but that has been somewhat misleading.  He would have been recognized more as a social and political writer, an advocate for individual liberty and toleration, than as a versifier.  Not until the poet and critic T.S. Eliot revived interest in poets like Donne and Marvell did he once again take his place among the prominent writers of the 17th century.

I wonder, in fact, if that’s the way Marvell would have wanted it.  One of his most well-known lyrics, called “The Garden,” is quite abstemious about the pursuit of fame, about worldly ambition in general.  The poem is, in fact, an apostrophe to the personification of Quiet, a meditation on retreat from the world and the bliss of solitude.  Here is the opening stanza:

How vainly men themselves amaze

To win the palm, the oak, or bays,

And their uncessant labours see

Crown’d from some single herb or tree,

Whose short and narrow verged shade

Does prudently their toils upbraid;

While all flow’rs and all trees do close

To weave the garlands of repose.

One immediately senses a jauntiness to the rhythm.  I love Marvell’s use of octosyllabic lines because he is able to make them dance.  Too often, four beat lines get too sing-songy, but Marvell always manages to make them interesting – they seem to wink on the sly.

This stanza is jam-packed with puns and paradox – also quite characteristic of Marvell’s style.  The speaker muses on the foolishness of worldly ambition, the vanity of pursuing military, political, or poetic prominence (that’s what the palm, oak, and bays symbolize).  But this perhaps quotidian observation is made pregnantly witty by its diction.  The use of “vainly” exploits both senses of the word: with arrogance and futilely.  So men insolently and fruitlessly pursue fame: Marvell supplies two comments for the price of one.  And does so again with line 1’s final word: amaze.  Here, it means both to bewilder – like, to blow one’s mind – and to go mad – like, literally blowing one’s mind.  Confusion and insanity are the fruits of ambition.

There follows a line of mildly humorous, I don’t know - is bathos the word I mean?  Or just some undercutting practicality.  The speaker says that single leaves of palm or oak or laurel don’t even provide much shade!  Indeed, all the plants gathered here in a garden mock the pretensions of humanity as they “weave garlands of solitude.”

Right, so here we are now, away from the world and its hurly burly.  Marvell writes: “Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear!”  So Quiet and Innocence are personified as at least dwellers in, perhaps caretakers of, this garden of solitude, compared to which, “Society is all but rude.”  

Given Marvell’s Puritan sympathies and the hegemony of Judeo-Christian culture, one may assume that Marvell here reconstructs an Earthly Paradise, a Garden of Eden.  Historically, Marvell depicts the grounds of Nun Appleton Hall, an abbey residence of the Lord Fairfax (and the subject of another Marvell poem, “Upon Appleton House,” which is a rather significant country house poem, like the ones we covered in episode 73.  Drop by and leave your card if you’ve not yet visited that show.

Marvell provides some of the chaste innocence one might presume of Eden.  In stanza 3, the speaker rejects sexual love, physical passion, elevating the green beauties of the garden over the fleeting blushes and pale complexion of the lover: “How far these beauties hers exceed!”  But this is almost a “born-again” virginity – a retreat from the physical senses rather than an innocence of them.  He writes: “When we have run our passion’s heat, / Love hither makes his best retreat.”

But then, in the following stanza, Marvell spirals into the most voluptuous imagery in the whole poem:

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

The sensuality of the garden replaces the sensuality of the female body.  In this garden, the apple is no forbidden fruit – in fact, the fruits themselves yearn to be consumed: the nectarine carries distinct echoes of nectar – the drink of the gods conferring immortality.  I love that the peach is curious – what about, I wonder?  There’s a sense of giddy pleasure here, and it certainly seems like pleasure – in this garden – is a virtue.

So perhaps we’re dealing with not only an Eden allusion, because that falters as the poem proceeds, but also with an Epicurean one.  Epicurus, the Greek philosopher, erected a school and at its center was a garden, which became a dominant symbol of Epicurean philosophy.  Which was that people should seek lives of tranquility, free from fear and pain.  We often think of Epicureanism now as a synonym for reckless hedonism, but while Epicurus did maintain that pleasure was virtuous, indulgence was a vice insofar as indigestion, hangovers, and STDs are not pleasant at all.  The philosophy was one of detachment.  The school’s garden, just outside of Athens on the road to the Academy, was enclosed by a large wall to provide a refuge for the philosopher and his friends, and emphasized this foundational principle.  And so Marvell’s line that “Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, / Withdraws into its happiness” makes a sense that would feel incongruous with our typical connotations of Eden.

That stanza concludes with a rather curious, peach-like, line.  He says the mind transcends created worlds and imagines new ones, “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.”  Well, what does that mean?  The material world is illusory and only minds exist?  Or mind is the highest existence?  Perhaps we have a reference to Platonism or an oblique connection to Hinduism or Buddhism.  Maybe Marvell anticipates Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism.  Sounds like Satan’s “the mind is its own place” from Milton’s Paradise Lost.  And its green – the thought and the shade.  Fecundity, renewal, hope – the mind in its place among Nature.

Though, of course, a garden is a sort of cultivated Nature, right?  It’s a symbiosis between Nature and human – an ordered chaos, paradoxically.  That sensuousness of the falling apples and spilling wine arranged in such a way as to provide eudaimonia – the happy existence.

Marvell returns to the Eden allusion in the penultimate stanza, but there’s a sense of regret or loss.  And no for what you’d think – not because of the banishment after the fall.  Marvell’s speaker laments the fact that Eve was even created, maybe that the beasts of the earth were created.  He thinks it a mistake to have deprived Adam of his solitude:

Such was that happy garden-state,

While man there walk’d without a mate;

After a place so pure and sweet,

What other help could yet be meet!

That last line I quoted includes another of Marvell’s puns, this time on the idea of Eve as the “help-meet” as she is projected in Genesis.  By the way, we now generally think of this as a “help-mate” just through centuries of mispronunciation and misunderstanding – that is, a companion or servant who helps you out.  But it’s “help-meet,” and “meet” here is not a verb, as many suppose (that explains the corruption to help-mate: a help-meet, supposedly, is someone who helps you meet your goals).  But that’s kind of incorrect.  “Meet” is an adjective, as both the King James Bible and Marvell use it, and it means something like “suitable” or “appropriate.”  A help-meet, then, is an effective assistant or companion.

But that’s kind of by-the-by.  For our purposes, I just wanted to point out the pun.  The only companion Marvell’s speaker desires is the garden itself.  Not only does he reject the lover in stanza three, he resents any companion at all by this point.  How much of this is asceticism and how much may be misogyny is an open question.  

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The portrayal or position of the female is even more troublesome in what is probably Marvell’s most anthologized lyric, called “To His Coy Mistress.”  This poem shows up in almost every Brit lit survey course.  No doubt many of you studied it in high school or college or both.  

The poem is an address to a reluctant would-be lover, firmly in both the pastoral eclogue tradition of Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and the carpe diem tradition of Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins,” which we covered in previous episodes.  Again, Marvell deploys a jaunty octosyllabic line in rhymed couplets.  Interestingly, he constructs his seductive argument as a syllogism.

Have I mentioned syllogisms before on the show?  It’s the basic form of a deductive argument.  Three parts: major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.  The example in just about every intro to philosophy textbook is as follows:

Major premise: All men are mortal.

Minor premise: Socrates is a man.

Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

You can also think of it, a bit, as an “if-then-therefore” argument, and that’s the way Marvell’s swain makes his case to the hard-to-get nymph.  He begins with a conditional statement:

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

If we had all the time in the world, he says, your wilful modesty would not be so . . . well, he says criminal.  Seems a bit hyperbolic, but whatever.  He’s probably feeling quite frustrated and anxious, and thus prone to reckless comparison.  He then says that with that time, she could wander as far as the Ganges River, sacred to Hinduism, while he could write love songs by the Humber River.  He could have loved her before Noah’s Flood, and she could have resisted until the end of days (when, according to Christian myth, Jews would convert).

Then things get a bit sexy-silly.  I don’t think you have to be Freud to unpack “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow.”  A cucumber, maybe.  An eggplant.  Then, the speaker offers what’s called a blazon – a catalogue of the mistress’ physical charms:

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

Oh, my God!  I love how the list crescendos, from a mere century looking at her forehead, to four hundred adoring her jumblies, and then he just loses it: thirty-thousand altogether!  As I said, frustrated and anxious.  Worth noting that, only at the end, does he approach any emotional territory, any recognition of her value as a woman: the last age will show her heart.

So that’s what we get in this hypothetical, lush, garden-like eternity: flowing rivers, fecund vegetables, rubies.  Paradise.  If we had all the time in the world.

Ah! But we don’t, for 

at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

One of the most famous images thrown up by the English poetic canon: Time’s chariot bearing down on the lovers.  In this, the “minor premise” stanza, eternity is no longer a teeming paradise.  No, now it is a desert: barren and waste, emphasized by the slant rhyming “eternity.”  And so will be her beauty, for in the temporal world, the mistress must age, decline, and die.  The love songs he would have composed by Humber-side come to nought: “Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song.”  The vault, of course, is her grave, where we get, for my money, one of the vilest images ever thrown up by the English poetic canon: 

then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust.

If you need that glossed, let’s see.  Family show, you know.  Umm . . . he’s saying that if you don’t give it to me, then the worms are gonna get it.  The breaking of the decomposing hymen again emphasized by the slant rhyme between “try” and “virginity.”  The mistress’ “quaint honor” is another vulgar pun.  Quaint may mean unusual or old-fashioned, in reference to her modesty.  But quaint is also a term for the pudendum or vulva – we have a variant of that use beginning with a “C” to this day.  

So the tone has gotten rather dark.  For a seduction poem, it’s a peculiar strategy.  Nothing gets the ladies hot like reminding them of their death.  This guy is a playa.

And then he swoops in with the conclusion to his argument: if we had all the time in the world, but we don’t, so . . . let’s get it on.  There is an frenetic urgency to this: the word “now” opens the stanza, and is repeated twice more:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew . . . .

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour.

Notice anything weird in that excerpt?  Any simile stand out to you as inapropos?  Think about this: think about the most romantic day of your life, or imagine it.  Maybe a wedding.  Beautiful flowers, elegant gowns, chiming bells, chamber music – someone releases birds over this amorous idyll.  What do you imagine fluttering toward the gold-fretted heavens?

Doves.  You see doves.  Not, as Marvell writes, “amorous birds of prey.”  What?  Their lovemaking should be like kestrels, harriers, osprey, and falcons?  Hawks?  And note the verb “devour” – that might have been passionate and sexy if it weren’t for the bloody-beaked predators already invoked.  Now it just seems like evisceration.

Oh, and our charming swain doesn’t stop there!  There’s what I always felt an awkward couplet next: “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball.”  It’s quite odd: the rhythm’s really weird – doesn’t scan too neatly and to make the rhyme of the first line “and all” feels bizarre.  It emphasizes totality, total commitment, but clunks rhythmically.  Insofar as the couplet’s an exhortation to concentrate the lovers’ passion and energy and carpe the diem, fine.  But I don’t know why that particular image.  Lionel Trilling, a monumental force in literary criticism, indeed, one of its architects as a discipline, could have dislocated his shoulder reaching for this explanation of the line:

The figure may possibly have its source in the scarab or beetle by which the Egyptians symbolized Horus, their god of the sun.  It is characteristic of the scarab that it makes a ball of dung in which it lays its eggs; this ball appears in the innumerable representations of the scarab that the Egyptians made.  It was thought of as the sun that the god propelled before him.

Umm, just . . . no.  Well, maybe.  Put a pin in that for a second.  ‘Cause the next two lines are as romantic as the amorous birds of prey: “And tear our pleasures with rough strife / 

Through the iron gates of life.”  Tear?  Tear?!  What kind of verb is that in a love poem?  And what are the “iron gates of life”?  Well, I think you know.  But stodgy old Trilling once again feels a need to mystify the gobsmackingly obvious.  First, he points out that Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson believed the line should read “iron grates.”  Beyond me how that clarifies anything.  Trilling then argues that contemporary readers would see in these lines an allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid: “the two gates of Hades . . . one of ivory through which the false dreams come, the other of horn through which come the true dreams.  That the iron gates cannot easily be visualized in relation to the pleasures will suggest that the force of a metaphor does not depend on its visual explicitness.”

Oh, come on.  It’s a vagina, isn’t it?  The gates of life are a vagina, and they’re iron because the speaker can’t get past them.  Jeez!  I can sense Trilling blushing, even now, in his own marble vault.

The poem’s final lines unstick the pin we stuck in the dung beetle sun god interpretation a moment ago.  Marvell concludes: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / 

Stand still, yet we will make him run.”  And here again, the rhythm of the closing couplet gets a bit wonky – there’s a trochee in there, and a spondee, I reckon.  Feels a bit stumbling, hustled. The carpe diem / let’s get it on exhortation makes use of an allusion to the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua beseeches Yahweh to make the sun stand still so that there’s enough daylight to finish slaughtering Israel’s enemies.  Maybe the dung beetle sun god thing isn’t entirely a critic’s hallucination.  But I think it probably is.

Still and all, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is a rather startling love poem, poem of seduction.  From the hypothetical Edenic eternity to the deserts and physical corruption of stanza two and finally to the consummation of the concluding stanza which sounds to me almost like rape, with its images of predatory birds, tearing, devouring, strife, and Biblical slaughter.  I hardly imagine the coy mistress giggling shyly behind her frilly handkerchief, batting her eyes, and scampering off to her bedchamber, pausing only a moment to cast a “come hither” look at the tumescent swain.  If I were her, I’d be very uncomfortable.  Perhaps even frightened.

And I think that’s Marvell’s point.  She should be, because “carpe-diem-come-live-with-me-and-be-my-love-gather-rosebuds-while-ye-may” poems, if pushed to their extreme limits, are kind of rapey, at least quite creepy.  Marvell mocks the conventions of such poems, much as Shakespeare mocked the Petrarchan cliches in his “Sonnet 130.”  Or, at least, Marvell’s poem does the mocking.  As I said at the top of the episode, it’s very difficult to glimpse Marvell the man through the personae of his poems.  But I think that’s not at all a bad thing – I think it makes it easier to treat the poem as poem without the baggage of biography muddying up the analysis.  

But I do wonder what ol’ Mary Palmer thought of the coy mistress . . . . 

All right, that’s our show for today.  Hope it went down like velvet.  I’d love it if you’d take a moment to give the show a 5 star rating on your podcast platform – it really helps to grow the show’s audience.  Send me a text with your thoughts, hit the support the show button, tell all your friends about the sterling work done here at the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.  Till then, good luck, everybody!