If, in 1658, you had been a spectator of the funeral procession of Oliver Cromwell— strictly speaking a memorial procession, the body having been buried two months previously—you could have seen, in the space of a few seconds, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden walking past. Has any English monarch had such a distinguished train of mourners as this republican? Milton, the eldest of the trio, was born in 1608, and Dryden, the youngest, did not die until 1700: you would have been looking, all unknowingly, at English poetry in the seventeenth century. Milton had brought out his first collected volume in 1645, and Dryden was just about to make his debut with an elegy on Cromwell. As usual, Marvell (1621–1678) was the dark horse; his collected poems appeared only posthumously, in 1681, and were little known until 1921 when T. S. Eliot wrote an essay marking what he called, in a characteristically deadpan phrase, “the tercentenary of the former member [i.e., Member of Parliament] for Hull.” Marvell scholarship has proceeded apace, in contrast to Marvell biography; Nicholas Murray’s is the first full-length life since that of Pierre Legouis in 1928.[1] The delay is not surprising, for Marvell is not an immediately rewarding subject. He has a habit of disappearing from the record at vital moments, and of keeping silent when he does turn up. He was, wrote John Aubrey, “very modest, and of few words. He had not a general acquaintance.” Personally isolated, he is also poetically inscrutable; there are few poets whose tone of voice is harder to catch.
The son of a Puritan Anglican clergyman, he passed from Grammar School to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve. His mother died when he was seventeen, and two years later he lost his father in a drowning accident. There is no evidence that he ever married, although his housekeeper claimed after his death that she had secretly been his wife, a claim which William Empson, in his Using Biography, is the only critic of stature to accept. We have no picturesque anecdotes of Marvell’s childhood and youth, only calumnies by his later enemies. Better attested is the tradition that he was briefly recruited by the Jesuits while an undergraduate, a startling possibility given his lifelong hostility to Catholicism, which found its ugliest expression in An Account of the Growth of Popery (1677); perhaps this was a similar experience to that of more modern Cambridge intellectuals who have spent years trying to live down their adolescent flirtations with the Communist Party.
Marvell left Cambridge in 1641 and, apart from a brief appearance in London the following year, disappears—traveling abroad learning languages, scholars agree, though whether on the Grand Tour or as a tutor is disputed—until 1647, thus conveniently absenting himself during the crucial events of the Civil War. On his return he moved in royalist circles and penned some slight Cavalier lyrics; from 1650 to 1657 he tutored the children of staunchly Cromwellian families; in 1657, with his appointment as Milton’s assistant in the equivalent of the modern cabinet office, he moved into the heart of the republican government. Yet at the Restoration he not only escaped severe punishment (unlike Milton, who was temporarily imprisoned and was lucky not to be executed) but, within three years, was sufficiently in the royal favor to be sent on an important diplomatic mission to Moscow, Sweden, and Denmark—an eighteen-month journey about which he characteristically said absolutely nothing and for which Mr. Murray has to rely on the record of one of his companions. From 1659 until his death he sat as Hull’s MP in a succession of parliaments.
All this might be, and has been, interpreted as the career of a political turncoat, ready to sacrifice principle to survival. Mr. Murray, however, has a subtler and more satisfying explanation, which harks back to Eliot’s essay and illuminates the art as well as the life. Eliot admires in Marvell’s best poems “an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones,” which confer upon them classic status. Mr. Murray elaborates: “His hesitations, his attentions to nuance, his willingness to reflect both sides, his holding of the line for contemplation, may have been not an evasion but a gesture of aesthetic responsibility”—and of political responsibility too, for although he “accepted as a fait accompli the restoration of constitutional monarchy he remained a member of the opposition to the court party,” particularly during the 1670s when he felt uneasy about the rising influence of Catholicism (the king’s brother had become a convert in 1669) and weary of Charles II’s incessant demands for money. The vicious mock speech, purportedly by the king to the House of Commons, which Marvell wrote anonymously in 1675 and arranged to be placed on the Commons benches as MPs arrived for debate, is not the work of a toady. “The nation hates you already for giving me so much,” the king is made to say, “and I’ll hate you too, if you do not give me more. So that if you stick not to me, you must not have a friend in England.”
This brings us at last to the writings. Marvell wrote only a small number of poems, of which a still smaller number are widely known. They are difficult to date with precision, but there seems to be a broad division between the lyrics, which belong largely to before or during the Civil War, and the satires, which are post-Restoration. Try as he may, Mr. Murray cannot make us warm to the latter. Topical poetry rarely wears well, and the lyrics’ miraculous union of airiness and weight has thickened and coarsened in the satiric couplets, which are all too prophetic of Dryden: the court is giving way to the metropolis, with its tiresome smugness and its would-be worldly wisdom which is actually very small-minded.
Marvell’s prose works, too, are often satirical or polemical and are difficult to read with pleasure, while his letters, of which a surprisingly large quantity survives, are distinctly unexciting. Many were written in connection with his parliamentary duties, and he lived in stirring times, but was the last man to wax eloquent; indeed, he never once bothers to tell his constituents that he has spoken in debate, and only once canvasses their opinion on an issue of the day. One has some sympathy with the eighteenth-century citizen of Hull, William Skinner, who owned a number of the letters but “gave them to the pastry-maid to put under pie-bottoms.” Marvell’s achievement must largely rest upon the lyrics and the “Horatian Ode.” True, his poems, as Mr. Murray says, “are almost never a naked utterance or blurt of feeling,” but they stem, as Eliot pointed out, from a tradition of Latin and English neoclassical poetry whose finest representative in the previous generation had been Jonson. They are cool but not cold; their business is to weigh, to evaluate and to understand, not to rhapsodize. In “Upon Appleton House,” he refers to the “holy mathematics” of architecture, and whilst Mr. Murray is right to suspect that Hobbesian materialism might have had little attraction for him, Marvell’s neoplatonism is not mystical after the manner of Traherne or Vaughan, but has a strain of austere rationalism running through it.
Philip Larkin, the only other poet Hull can boast, wrote of the combination of “hallucinatory images” and “sudden sincerities” in Marvell’s work. This evokes his best-known poems such as “To his Coy Mistress” or “The Garden,” but it also occurs in poems to which Mr. Murray gives little or no attention. He omits, for instance, “The Definition of Love,” which develops metaphors drawn from logic and geometry to the following heart-rending conclusion:
It is vain to seek to identify a mistress in that “us”; the pronoun is universal. We are all in this tragic predicament, our desires frustrated by destiny.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
Or take another example, from “The Mower Against Gardens,” one of a sequence of four poems using the figure of a mower, which rank among Marvell’s finest. A garden, the poem says, is a bastard creation, its “forbidden mixtures” the result of human meddling with natural simplicity. (Mr. Murray relevantly refers to the nature/nurture debate in The Winter’s Tale.) After a succession of conceits—flowers of artificial color like women with too much make-up, stoneless cherries, the eunuchs in the harem—the poem suddenly drops its tone of clever mockery:
The mouth lingers caressingly over the second line. In the lament for the lost innocence of the open meadow there is something almost unbearably poignant, yet it swells out from the poem rather than being imposed upon it.
’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.
There is more ominous imagery later in the sequence: the central figure in “Damon the Mower,” gashing himself on his own scythe, binds up the wound with herbs, reflecting that a cure for the wounds from his mistress’s eyes is not so easily come by, or so welcome when it comes: “For, Death, thou art a mower too.”
That particular mower cut Marvell down on 16 August 1678. He contracted a malarial infection en route from Hull to London, and the bungling of the doctor who was called in to treat him seems to have hastened his end. It was darkly assumed that he had been poisoned by the Jesuits. The church in which he was buried—St. Giles-in-the-Fields: Damon would have approved—was rebuilt in the eighteenth century, so his precise resting place is lost. A memorial tablet, dating from 1764, praises his conjunction of “peculiar graces of wit and learning” and “strength of judgement” and sums him up as “a strenuous asserter of the constitution, laws and liberties of England.” His pleas for political and religious tolerance (except for Catholics) made him a hero of English liberalism in succeeding centuries when his literary reputation languished.
Mr. Murray concludes that “Marvell’s is not a poetry of personality.” No, indeed; it rests upon much more solid foundations. One is tempted to quote Eliot again: “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Marvell’s voice is audible, though it is overlaid by the voices of many other poets whom he quotes, parodies, alludes to, or imitates: you have to listen hard. Nor must you expect intimacy; neither his temperament nor his religious beliefs inclined him to the confessional.
Notes
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Paul Dean is Head of English at Summer Fields School, Oxford
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 18 June 2000, on page 78
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