Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell

Diane Kelsey McColley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754660484
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351910637
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.

Chapter 1
Perceiving Habitats

Marvell and the Language of
Sensuous Reciprocity

Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House is a good starting place because it is, for a start, about a place; because it carries ecological and political concerns we still share; because it gathers and transforms traditional topics or “places” of poetic invention—metaphorical, allegorical, emblematic, and typological, the latter largely from the Book of Genesis; because it weaves these together with observation of the actual place and its inhabitants; and because Marvell’s playful language is serious, lightsome, resonant, witty, unsettling, and ever fresh. In this chapter, I offer a close reading of a poem that unsettles and richly reseeds language to enable new perceptions, and through the multiplicity of its connections invites the reader’s mind to engage in ways of thinking and perceiving that are less linear than radial and resemble habitats and watersheds more than roads and rooms.

In the seventeenth century, thanks in part to the development of the lens, representations of nature changed. Astronomers recognized that the heavenly bodies are material things, and micrographers described the minute perfections of insects and plants; visual artists, preceded by such lovingly meticulous ones as Albrecht Dürer and Joris Hoefnagel,¹ grew increasingly exact; poets became more attentive to the actual lives of plants and animals, and some expressed a desire—impelled in England by deforestation, mining, the engineering of waterways and wetlands, and the ruination of fields, woods, and men by the Civil Wars—to restore the land after the patterns of Vergil’s Georgics and the Garden of Eden.

At the same time, the glimmerings of a sense of habitat began to dawn, partly in response to global exploration. Samuel Purchas in 1614 explains the distribution of animals: “God hath appointed to every Creature his peculiar nature, and a natural instinct, to live in places most agreeing to his nature.”² Poets began to see what John Ray called the Terraqueous Globe³ as the living household of living things, providing not only sustenance but wisdom and enjoyment gained from their inherent qualities.

Andrew Marvell and John Milton were, in part, poets of habitat. Their poems harbor a rich variety and activity of other kinds of lives. John Rodman speaks of ecological consciousness as including “a style of coinhabitation that involves the knowledgeable, respectful, and restrained use of nature” and the conception that “one ought not to treat with disrespect or use as a mere means anything that has a telos or end of its own.”⁴ All living things need nourishment; the ethical question is how human beings can protect the valuable achievements of human culture while letting or helping the rest of nature unfold towards its own telos. This chapter concerns Andrew Marvell’s contribution to the perception and language of an unfolding world. In Upon Appleton House, written in the wake of the civil wars, Marvell, who shunned dogmatic ideas and cannot be pinned down to a static political position, presents the good government of an estate he hyperbolizes as “paradise’s only map,” offering a balance of order and freedom for the land and the body politic and a model for the reparation of a postlapsarian natural world.

Georgic poetry is traditionally about cultivation, language, and ethics, with Vergil’s Georgics as its model. The georgic ideal developed in seventeenth-century Britain as a moral and spiritual as well as an agricultural revival.⁵ Marvell went further than most in perceiving the non-human occupants of a cultivated habitat as deserving to live for their own sakes and offering abundant perceptual experience that enlarges the human continuum of body, mind, and spirit. In Upon Appleton House, as in Paradise Lost, the Edenic model incorporates the georgic. Both concern the preservation of nature and the work of restoring the shattered land, in which part of the poet’s work is awakening and reintegrating human perceptions. Marvell makes the estates of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who had led the victorious parliamentary army in the war that resulted in the temporary abolition of the monarchy, a republic of animate nature. Milton, supporter of civil and religious liberty, depicts God’s garden, epitome of nature, as the domain of a human race whose calling was to dress and keep its pristine abundance—to care for and preserve it according to its nature, a vocation practiced in Paradise Lost as in no other version of the Genesis story, and practiced well but not for long.

Both Milton and Marvell recognized that not only do we perceive habitats and their inhabitants; other species perceive and respond to us. Like current poets such as Pattiann Rogers, W.S. Merwin, and Wendell Berry, they represent the earth as an oikos, a house for all species. Their poems create, through multiple connections, an ecological way of thinking. For both, habitat includes and is temperately managed by human beings, minimally in Milton’s pristine Eden and at several levels at Marvell’s Nunappleton, ranging from complete control to nearly wild freedom. Both use to some extent the language of vitalism, which John Rogers defines as “in its tamest manifestation the inseparability of body and soul and, in its boldest, the infusion of all material substance with the power of reason and self-motion.”⁶ Both resist the doctrine that nature is made only for human use and teach temperance in the uses we make of it apart from the nurturing of perception and understanding.

Other poets, such as Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller, produced poems with more managerial attitudes. It would be tempting but wrong to divide these viewpoints politically between royalists, like Cowley and Waller, and supporters of Parliament, like Milton and Marvell, who became Milton’s assistant in the office of Secretary of Foreign Tongues for the Commonwealth government. Some poets allegiant to the monarchy, notably Henry Vaughan and Margaret Cavendish, were animists. John Evelyn, an early hero of conservation, devoted to the royal cause and a member of the Royal Society, wrote the first tract on air pollution and a comprehensive manual of reforestation and suggested numerous measures that current conservationists support.

The topological or estate poem, also called the country house poem, brings together considerations of power, politics, social control, and land management.⁷ The purpose of this genre is usually to express the values of a family and a society. For Ben Jonson, writer of court masques and courtly poems, Penshurst, the country seat of Sir Robert Sidney, sets forth the orderly hierarchical views of its line of possessors, from which Sir Philip Sidney sprang. To Penshurst compliments a well-ordered family and society, affirms man’s dominion over nature by beginning and ending with hunting scenes (one of the hunters to whom the house is hospitable being the king), and describes ordered rows of fruitful trees, well-fed and well-trained servants, and carp and pheasant eager to be eaten. For Aemilia Lanyer, contrarily, the manor of Cookeham expresses the grief of friendship lost because of hierarchically stratified social relations, with nature rather than architecture or practices of cultivation carrying most of the expression.

In Upon Appleton House, Marvell expresses the values of an oikos, not as a symbolic backdrop or a model of hospitable wealth but as the place itself, interacting with a human mind to show how nature and perception affect each other. Like To Penshurst, Upon Appleton House is about wise cultivation, but it counts the cost—the bird accidentally killed by the stroke of a scythe is not eager to be trussed up and roasted—and it tempers human mastery over nature, both by drawing attention to creatures not under human control and by repairing for contemplative repose not to the ordered grove but to the old-growth woods. The estate, in the poem at least, fits into nature unarrogantly, like animals’ dens and nests and like the “sober frame” of the house itself.

Marvell is presumed to have written Upon Appleton House during his residence as tutor to Mary Fairfax at Nunappleton in the early 1650’s, while the spiritual use of a garden or woodland was still a respectable topic in scientific circles such as Samuel Hartlib’s,⁸ but joined with exact observation of nature. With the help of a microscope, Sir Thomas Pope Blount could still say in 1693 that “every flower of the field, every fiber of a plant, every particle of an insect, carries with it the impress of its maker.” But this impress was not stamped on Nature’s Book as a license to read as we choose, “For the works of God are not like the compositions of fancy . . . that will not bear a clear light or strict scrutiny; but their exactness receives advantage from the severest inspection.”⁹

Marvell’s composition of fancy does bear scrutiny. He represents a natural world filled with other beings to be responded to on their own terms and takes a fresh look at nature not only as pictorial and metaphorical, though he retains those modes, but as organic and processive. He does so, as Asheley Griffiths has shown,¹⁰ with accurate observation of the actual flora and fauna of Yorkshire. Although he shares with georgic revivalists such as Hartlib, John Evelyn, and John Beale an interest in describing an agricultural Eden, he also regards the natural world as the habitat of diverse creatures who are valuable not only as commodities and sources of spiritual wisdom, but also in themselves and their activations of the mind. While I agree with Alastair Fowler that estate poems are “rich tissues of . . . emblems,” in the case of this one I find more “common interest between man and animals” than most such poems allow.¹¹

These perceptions need a flexible and polysemous language in which, like the house at Nunappleton, “Things greater are in less contained” (l.44). In contrast to John Wilkins, who invented a categorical language of single significations,¹² Marvell sought a kind of multiply connective language that is “ecological” rather than “economical”—though its riches are highly compressed. John Beale wrote to Samuel Hartlib in 1659, treating spiritual experience with an openness of mind toward phenomena that was to become the earmark of scientific truth for the Royal Society, of “those strang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Note on Editions and Orthography
• Preface
• 1 Perceiving Habitats
• 2 Earth, Mining, Monotheism, and Mountain Theology
• 3 Air, Water, Woods
• 4 Hylozoic Poetry
• 5 Zoic Poetry
• 6 Animal Ethics and Radical Justice
• 7 Milton’s Prophetic Epics
• 8 Plates
• Bibliography
• Index