Andrew Marvell

Loss and aspiration, home and homeland in Miscellaneous Poems

A. D. Cousins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317181200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This monograph studies how, across the Folio of 1681, Marvell's poems engage not merely with different kinds of loss and aspiration, but with experiences of both that were, in mid-seventeenth-century England, disturbingly new and unfamiliar. It particularly examines Marvell's preoccupation with the search for home, and with redefining the homeland, in times of civil upheaval. In doing so it traces his progression from being a poet who plays sophisticatedly with received myth to being one who is a national mythmaker in rivalry with his poetic contemporaries such as Waller and Davenant. Although focusing primarily on poems in the Folio of 1681, this book considers those poems in relation to others from the Marvell canon, including the Latin poems and the satires from the reign of Charles II. It closely considers them as well in relation to verse by poets from the classical past and the European, especially English, present.

1
The Mower Poems

My point of departure is Marvell’s fondness for pastoral, a mode that appears in many guises across his Miscellaneous Poems. ¹ In particular, I want to take the Mower poems as illustrating how he uses the pastoral mode to express personal aspiration through the intricate lyrics of aspiration and loss voiced by his rustic personae: how his authorial ambition shapes their songs of love sought and lost, displacement, and loss of home. There displaying that gift for the unexpected with which he invariably reinvents or repositions the conventional and the commonplace, Marvell both acknowledges his kinship to other poets in the pastoral tradition and seeks to accentuate his distinctiveness among them. As I shall argue in what follows, he presents himself as a connoisseur, discriminating not least in his deployment of myth, who at once critiques and transforms a literary tradition self-reflexive from its very beginnings and increasingly so in the course of its long history.

The pastoral tradition as recognized by the poets of the English Renaissance, and to which many of them contributed, centres on conflict rather than on the idyllic. So they were well aware—and modern scholarship has to varying degrees acknowledged or occasionally denied. ² Pastoral verse from Theocritus’s times to their own portrays the clash of worldviews, of political (and, latterly, ecclesiological) systems, of political rivals. It dwells on desire’s fierce disruption of the everyday, sexual rivalry’s fissuring of community, and competitive creativities. It is less about celebrating or searching for otium than it is concerned with the discords that, one way or another, make ease so desirable and precious—the discords of which negotium may be symptomatic, but which certainly are linked to spirals of aspiration and loss. In his A Defence of Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney reflects:

Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Meliboeus’ mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords and ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest; sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the whole considerations of wrongdoing and patience; sometimes show that contentions for trifles can get but a trifling victory: where perchance a man may see that even Alexander and Darius, when they strave who should be cock of this world’s dunghill, the benefit they got was that the afterlivers may say,

Haec memini et victum frustra contendere Thyrsin:
ex illo Corydon, Corydon est tempore nobis. ³

Writing in defence of pastoral as the lowest of the kinds on the Virgilian rota—hence, of course, his allusions to Virgil’s first Eclogue by way of Meliboeus, Tityrus, and ‘the poor pipe’ (Meliboeus’s ‘tenui … avena’ wittily revisited)—Sidney identifies its value in terms of its widely ranging engagement with conflict. ⁴ He evokes conflicts communal and personal: the political, ethical, or less important conflicts, the interplay of desire and dream and dispossession, with which the pastoral mode engages and that give point to its praise of the benefits flowing from virtuous government. Avoiding direct mention of the erotic, an obtrusive reticence, he ends with the last lines of Eclogue 7 (69–70), using artistic rivalry as a means of troping the insignificance of imperial ambition and struggle.

Sidney begins his defence of pastoral with revisionary allusion to Eclogue 1 and concludes it with ironic quotation from Eclogue 7. His implication is clear. Discussion of pastoral starts with Virgil and is framed by Virgil. Moreover he indicates at the same time, and especially through his closing quotation from the Roman poet, that to write pastoral is necessarily to confront Virgilian precedent and authority. Behind the exchanges of song and singing competitions of the mode’s personae lies unavoidable contention with Virgil (who was himself contending with Theocritus) and, therefore, also with one’s predecessors in the tradition generally. ⁵ It is a given that imitation (imitatio) is emulation (aemulatio), that there will be authorial ambition and the possibility of its failure. ⁶ Thus if pastoral concerns itself with conflict, among those conflicts—in fact, beyond them—is always and has always been a paragone. As Gallus emulously says in the fourth of Petrarch’s eclogues, with metonymic reference to Tyrrhenus’s having been given a lyre: ‘Let it be granted, Tyrrhenus, the fever of emulation,/Spurring our spirits onward, is not a bad kind of envy’ (38–9). ⁷ Tyrrhenus is conventionally viewed as representing Petrarch himself, and so the lyre bestowed on the former signifies both the divine gift of poetry to and inheritance of poetic tradition by the latter. ⁸ In Petrarch’s eclogue, the gift of poetic creativity may be used to express, but primarily engenders, competition. Sidney’s defence of pastoral and Petrarch’s practice of it differently but unmistakably associate the mode with authorial rivalry.

It is by focusing on the authorial rivalry embedded in pastoral that I seek to isolate what distinguishes Marvell’s Mower poems within the pastoral tradition as known to the English Renaissance. The four poems evidently form a suite amidst Marvell’s recurring and various essays in pastoral across the Folio of 1681. Their doing so makes them unique within that first gathering of his verse; it is, however, only the most obvious aspect of their combined and complex singularity. Scholarship on the Mower poems has sometimes suggested that they form not merely a suite but a sequence—that they share one persona, Damon the Mower, whose developing characterization unifies them. ⁹ Scholarship has likewise viewed the poems as undoubtedly associated, since all have a mower persona and several have preoccupations in common (the comprehensively disruptive power of sexual desire, for instance), yet not as episodes in the cohesive fashioning of a characterization. ¹⁰ Here I suggest that Marvell juxtaposes versions of a mower-persona in order to juxtapose the radically incommensurable or diverse discourses that, for him, now comprise or impinge upon the pastoral tradition. ¹¹ Displaying virtù in the virtuosity of his play with pastoral motifs and hence in the strength with which he reinvents what he has inherited from his predecessors, he engages with the pastoral tradition and its interwoven mythic lore by way of authorial rivalry refigured as connoisseurship. The result is a suite of poems that explores the heterogeneity and divergences of pastoral in a late-Renaissance world, affirming almost nothing while elegantly and provocatively bringing almost all into question. In presenting anew the aspiration and loss inherent to the conflict that shapes pastoral—especially its recurrent concern with displacement and loss of home—the Mower poems most powerfully express the aspirations of Marvell himself.

Inscription, Reflection, Renewal

To begin illumination of Marvell’s agonistic connoisseurship in the Mower poems, and thus of how they relate to their antecedents, I shall consider three motifs familiar in pastoral verse. First and simplest is the motif of inscription: the inscribing of a name or message in the bark of a tree. Second and more complicated is that of reflection: a rustic lover’s Narcissus-like perusal of himself in a reflective surface. Final and broadest in scope is that of renewal: a pastoral persona’s celebration of renovatio—whether that be political, cultural, spiritual, ecclesiological, or even all of those. Each of the motifs connects significantly with Marvell. The first occurs in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough, The Garden and Hortus, indicating concisely how Marvell engages with the pastoral tradition. The last pair occurs in the Mower poems and leads directly to an understanding of his distinctive achievement in them.

In pastoral verse, inscription is of course the fashioning of a record, and commemorates the desire to possess, possession, anguished dispossession, artistic creation, foretelling, and much else. Theocritus’s Idyll 18, a marriage song for Helen of Troy, although not itself a pastoral poem nevertheless belongs to a collection viewed as pastoral in Tudor and Stuart England. According to the poem’s speaker, the girls singing the marriage song promise Helen that they will ritually mark out a plane-tree as hers, carving in its bark while they do so: ‘Respect me; I am Helen’s tree.’ ¹² Virgil’s Mopsus, in Eclogue 5, says to Menalcas: ‘No, I will try these verses, which the other day I carved on the green beech-bark and set to music, marking words and tune in turn’ (13–15). In Eclogue 10, Gallus is reported as saying: ‘Well I know that in the woods, amid wild beasts’ dens, it is better to suffer and carve my love on the young trees. They will grow, and you, my love, will grow with them’ (52–4). ¹³ The first of the eclogues in Calpurnius Siculus’s Bucolica has Corydon and Ornytus discover a prophecy, carved by Faunus in a beech-tree, which foretells the return of the Golden Age—and echoes Virgil’s fourth eclogue, just as the choice of tree recalls his fifth. A less ambitious use of the motif by Calpurnius occurs in Eclogue 3, where Iollas kindly offers to inscribe Lycidas’s love song in the bark of a cherry-tree, then excise the bark and present it to his friend’s beloved. (Later in that poem, Lycidas threatens to carve a denunciation of his beloved into an oak-tree. ¹⁴) In Nemesianus’s opening eclogue, which also recalls Virgil’s fifth, Timetas says that he has already carved a song in the bark of a cherry-tree. ¹⁵ The inscription motif becomes, then, an imagined act of commemoration through which the post-Virgilian poet writes himself into—commemorates his belonging to—what becomes the pastoral tradition. Playfully the motif signals imitation and emulation, deference and rivalry. It is an economical gesture of both kinship and independence.

So it certainly was for Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Sannazaro, who were among the most influential writers of pastoral in the European Renaissance; and, through the motif, Andrew Marvell at once gestured toward tradition and indicated a wish to query it. Petrarch’s eighth eclogue allegorizes his break from a patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. At one point the cardinal, masked as Ganymede, asks Petrarch, who is in the transparent disguise of Amyclas: ‘Whom will you find, hapless one, to hear your song with approval?/Who will inscribe your verses on the light and delicate laurel?’ (93–4). ¹⁶ Petrarch uses the inscription motif at once to affirm his kinship with pastoral tradition and to have even his erstwhile patron acknowledge his uniqueness as the poet devoted to Laura. And while Boccaccio uses the motif to link his eclogues with those of Virgil—for example, 2:140–4 by the former nods in the direction of both 5:13–5 and 10:52–4 by the latter—he likewise recreates it in emulation rather than solely in imitation. He innovatively coordinates the motif across his fifth and sixth eclogues when portraying Louis of Taranto as a culture hero. ¹⁷ Equally remarkable is Sannazaro’s play with the inscription motif. He uses it several times in his Arcadia, repeatedly in the twelfth eclogue. There, Barcinio relates these words of Meliseus: ‘I wrote my verses upon the pomegranate trees/and straightway they became sorbs and arbute-berries;/so monstrous and unparalleled are my fates’. ¹⁸ According to Meliseus, his ill-starred verses metamorphosed the very trees upon which they were carved, testifying to the unique power of the creativity inspired by loss of his beloved. Sannazaro transforms the motif from having a primarily static and memorial role into becoming an agent of transformation. He gives, that is to say, the Theocritean and Virgilian motif an Ovidian inflection. ¹⁹ In Marvell’s hands, as I have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Mower Poems
• 2 Lovers, Gardens, Paradise: The Nymph and the Coy Mistress
• 3 Lovers, Gardens, Paradise: Bermudas and The Garden
• 4 The Religious Verse
• 5 The Royalist Poems and An Horatian Ode
• 6 Home and Homeland in Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index