Marvell used two things repeatedly in his poetry. One is gardens and flowers, and the other is the less concrete spiritual things, like the soul, the body, the mind, life, and death. Marvell upon first reading seemed to have been rather fascinated by death. He is known as a metaphysical poet, and that list of items certainly fits. The metaphysical poets were called that because they wrote about these dualities, especially the intangibles versus the tangible symbols or connections. “It is primarily concerned with problems deriving from or akin to the ancient problem of the One and the Many, body and soul, mind and body, transience and permanence, mortality and immortality, unity-induality.” (Press 14) Metaphysical poetry should have a certain tension under this duality. Marvell,s poetry does this and the duality is often represented in the title.
Marvel wrote many poems about the garden and contrasted the beauty he saw there with the radiance and brilliance of God and the spiritual world. Even his love poems had a spiritual side, though he, admittedly suffered from a weakness of the flesh. He used this to contrast his human weakness and unworthiness to the might and rightness of God.
“WHEN for the thorns with which I long, too long,
With many a piercing wound,
My Saviour’s head has crowned,
I seek with garlands to redress that wrong,—…..
That they, while thou on both their spoils dost tread,
May crown Thy feet, that could not crown Thy head”
In Coronet, which has the alternative meaning of “crown”, Marvell says that he sought to create a crown of flowers to replace the crown of thorns, but found that his crown was not worthy of the Savior’s head, since he has been touched by the serpent in that he would presume to be worthy to do any such thing, (“Thinking (so I my self deceive)/So rich a chaplet thence to weave/As never yet the King of Glory wore”)so he prays that, since He has defeated the serpent, might accept these garlands as fit for His feet. Marvell’s poetry often sounds a bit arrogant in places, but the humility here makes this poem shine. It is a poem of thanksgiving that Marvell, in his human weakness was ensnared by thoughts of fame and interest, was still saved by the grace of God. The poem contrasts the beauty which may be found in a garden with that of God and reminds himself that pride and presumption that one is even worthy to worship God is sinful. Perfect humility is what he seeks, but he believes that this is unattainable by man, because he will always be fined the snake coiling round the flower blossoms.
In the Bermudas, Marvell strikes a balance between earthly triumph in the accomplishment of the risky journey to Bermuda and the praise that should be sung that those explorers survived the journey. He contrasted the two islands when he called the Bermudas “Unto an isle so long unknown.
And yet far kinder than our own”. It was almost as if he were suggesting that difference as the difference between this world and Eden. He mentions apple trees bearing “apples of such price (the loss of innocence)/ no tree could ever bear them twice.” This is a definite reference to Eden since he is referring to the cost of eating the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. To anyone living in the British Isles, Bermuda would, indeed, have seemed like paradise.
In this poem, Marvell makes profuse use of fruit and flowers, as was his habit. It might seem, after reading a number of his poems, that Marvell loved three things so strongly that they figured often in his poetry: women, plants, and God. The first two would appeal to the senses, and God would appeal to the spirit. These then could delineate the field for Marvell. Women would be God’s greatest creation, but she would bring with her the possibility of sin, temptation. God would be the sublime perfection for spiritual love, untouchable and without sin or any possibility of sin. Between the two would be the perfect innocent creations of God: flowers and animals. A few animals were, indeed, used in his poems, for example, the innocent faun of the nymph which was killed by thoughtless soldiers. However, many of Marvell’s poems featured flowers, trees, and fruit. All of these would mediate or balance between the extremes of the flesh and the spirit. These would be symbols of God’s innocent creations, those living things which were incapable of sin. So the duality is there, two extremes, each compared to the other, but both held up against the beauty of nature, which is neither good, nor evil, neither sinful nor sublime.
In one of the love poems, To His Coy Mistress, Marvel begins with a statement that points directly to his Puritan interpretation of Revelations. “Had we but World enough, and Time, /Hit coyness Lady were no crime. /And you should if you please /refuse Till the Conversion of the Jews.” Their interpretation of the bible was that the Jews would be converted just before the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arrive. It seems a little exaggerated that Marvel would tell his mistress that she should refuse that long, until we proceed through the poem and discover that he also tells he that her beauty will fade, “Thy beauty shall no more be found,” and her honor will turn to dust and his lust to ashes, “And your quaint honour turn to dust,/ And into ashes all my lust.” So we have here the contrast of earthly love and beauty with spiritual love.
It is interesting to note the difference in the culture of Marvell and ours since his poetry was not considered elitist or conceited. Poetry was supposed to be above ordinary speech. The flowery and erudite speech was expected of a poet. “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.” (Sackville-West 27)
Just as the novels of the time were expected to have slow expository development, since they were used as primary entertainment, poetry was expected to enlighten and lift the spirit. Thus the metaphysical poets wrote of lofty subjects even when they also wrote about ordinary life. “But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity.” They sought the sublime in worldly things. This is where we get the contrast of opposites, especially of the concrete versus the intangible. Even their imagery was superlative, even when discussing ordinary objects. With Marvel, he habitually balanced earthly beauty, women, flowers, and animals with heavenly beauty, soul, immortality, divinity, and salvation.
Marvell, like other poets, had only the world around him to use in his poetry, since intangibles don’t make good poetry. Metaphor is created using concrete images to represent the intangible ideas that the poet wishes to communicate. Without the concrete imagery, the poetry becomes a prayer or some other expression of pure emotion, and it violates the prime rule of the writer’s art: show, don’t tell. “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.” (Sackville-West 51) We do not hear Marvell say directly that this courtship is a waste of time. He simply points out the finite character of life and that after a death we will no longer be connected to these sensual bodies. He speaks of worms and ashes and the dust of the grave. He numbers all her lovely body parts that he would spend eons admiring and praising if he could court her properly, “Had we but world enough, and time.”
The subjects of much of Marvell’s poetry dealt with his struggle to be a good Puritan Christian and to save his immortal soul by behaving in the manner prescribed by the church of his day and his very sensuous nature and his healthy sexuality, which tempted him constantly. He often compared the beauty of earthly things to the believed beauty of heavenly spiritual things, possibly to balance them. He saw in earthly love a metaphor for heavenly divine love, even though he was not certain that he was capable of raising earthly love to this level. He believed that God made us capable of spiritual love, but the t the flesh and the devil made this very difficult. Much of his poetry deals with this struggle between sensuality and spirituality.
The titles of many speak for themselves: “A Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure”, “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body.” In the first of these, the conflict is between a militantly Puritan soul, conscious of its mission, its calling, its arduous pilgrimage to heaven, on the one hand, and the distracting and illusory pleasures of the senses and idleness on the other. (Hill 345)
Marvell saw the body as a hindrance to salvation, as is very apparent in: “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body.” A Soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains/ Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;” However, he also saw the soul, or the need to save it, as a constant encumbrance to the body: “O, who shall me deliver whole,/ From bonds of this tyrannic soul ?” A very telling section of this poem is when his soul complains that it must endure illness and cure, and instead of being blissfully set free by death, it must be “shipwrecked into health again.” The soul would be free and saved if not for the body. It is the body that is blamed for the weakness of faith.
However, in the last verse, we see Marvell’s true concern, that the emotions he feels, which are part of the soul, compel him to sin. In this poem, we see that Marvell considers the duality of soul and body to be responsible for all sin. The body without the soul, wherein lies intellect, spirit, emotion, and mind, the identity if you wish, would be as incapable of sin as any innocent animal. Soul, without the natural functions of the body and the solidity of its structure, would also be incapable of sin, since sin requires that we do something. Even impure thoughts would be impossible without the body since it is the body that leads us to temptation. The soul is not capable of carnal activity, nor is the body capable of transfiguration. In simple words, the soul cannot desire or indulge in impure sex without the body, and the body would not know that sex could even be impure without the soul. This sort of tension seems to permeate all of Marvel’s poetry on other than political subjects.
To me, the most interesting poem is, “The Mower’s Song,” because it is a puzzle. He says what Juliana does to him and his thoughts on what he does to the grass. What an image! He would have been using a scythe to cut the grass, and it would likely have been very sharp, hence the term “mower”. He did not simply cut the grass, he mowed it down with a large curved blade, which he swung side to side, cutting great swaths with each movement. So he said Juliana did to his thought and him. I have to say that this woman must have been a dazzling beauty and that Marvell saw her almost as a goddess. He tells us that the grass was luxuriant and had flowers throughout the lawn until he cut it and that Juliana does this to him and his thoughts. Marvel then says that he is trodden underfoot and the grassy meadow ignores this, so he will get his revenge with his scythe by cutting it all to ruin. He will cut it all to adorn his tomb, for he will surely die since Juliana does to him what he does to the grass. This is pure imagery, and powerful. We can see Juliana appear while he is mowing and then he starts mowing the grass with ferocity to distract himself. There is nothing metaphysical about this poem at all as far as I can see, but we do have his habitual image of nature in the meadow of rich grass.
Marvel’s poem “The Garden” is perhaps the most prominent example of both of the habitual contents I listed in the beginning: gardens and flowers versus soul, body, and mind. He begins with how men use plants, especially herbs and garlands as prizes and crowns, especially as rewards for sport and heroism. Then he says that he seeks quiet and innocence in the garden and personifies these as sisters.
One odd couplet is this, “Fair trees! wheresoe’er your barks I wound/ No name shall but your own be found.” One must guess that he will not wound the trees, since he cannot know their names, since they are also personified.
He then talks about hose the mythical god sought the bay laurel or the reed, to use for more banal things than pure enjoyment. Marvell seems to be expressing pure ecstasy until ha falls, “Annihilating all that’s made/ To a green thought in a green shade.” He continues until he seems to step outside himself, enjoying a spiritual nirvana, “Casting the body’s vest aside, /My soul into the boughs does glide.” We finally see his point in the next verse, that man was innocent and without sin when he was alone in the garden.
In all of these poems mentioned, except possibly, the mower’s song, we see both natures in flowers, trees, fruits, and vegetables with spirituality and the innocence Marvell felt would never be his. He contrasted carnal needs with spiritual desires and mediated and balanced them with innocent nature which had neither sin nor immortal soul, but were pure and beautiful creations of God.
References
Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958. Questia. Web.
Press, John. Andrew Marvell. London: Longmans, Green, 1958. Questia. Web.
Sackville-West, V. Andrew Marvell. London: Faber & Faber, 1929. Questia. Web.
Marvell, Andrew, 2008, The Works of Andrew Marvell, The Garden, The Mower’s Song, To His Coy Mistress, A Dialouge Between The Soul And Body, The Coronet, Bermudas, Web.