Andrew Marvell
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Andrew Marvell

Thomas Healy

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eBook - ePub

Andrew Marvell

Thomas Healy

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Andrew Marvell brings together ten recent and critically informed essays by leading scholars on one of the most challenging and important seventeenth-century poets. The essays examine Marvell's poems, from lyrics, such as 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', to celebrations of Cromwell and Republican Civil War culture and his biting Restoration satires. Representing the most significant critical trends in Marvell criticism over the last twenty years, the essays and the authoritative editorial work provide an excellent introduction to Marvell's work. Students of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, English Civil War writing, and seventeenth-century social and cultural history will find this collection a useful guide to helping them appreciate and understand Marvell's poetry.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781134960217
Edition
1

1
The Poet’s Time
*

WARREN L. CHERNAIK
* Reprinted from WARREN L. CHERNAIK, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 141–50.
This extract from Warren Chernaik’s seminal study of Marvell focuses on ideas of Christian liberty. For Chernaik, to understand Marvell requires confronting the vexed question of human freedom within the context of a seventeenth-century Protestantism which emphasised the fallen nature of mankind as a result of Adam’s original sin. This sense of loss informs all aspects of Marvell’s consideration of human affairs, whether personal or public. But it does not bring about despair; rather a type of exhilaration: the possibility of educating ourselves so that we can confront and, to an extent, repair the consequences of our original transgression. Marvell is perceived as a passionate advocate of humanity’s liberty, refusing to accept – as many during his era did – that the fate of each individual is predestined within the divine scheme of things. This leads Chernaik to view Marvell as a type of proto-Romantic, believing in the power of the imagination, notably developed in poetry, as means of human empowerment. Crucially, Chernaik’s book sees Marvell’s prose and poetry as addressing the same concerns, linked to philosophical, theological and political issues which are closely integrated.
Though the context in each case is secular, the terms in Marvell’s evocations of the ideal government are openly or implicitly theological. In describing the British limited monarch as ‘the onely Intelligent Ruler over a Rational People’ (Growth of Popery, p. 4) and claiming of the British constitution that ‘there is nothing that comes nearer in Government to the Divine Perfection’ (p. 5), Marvell is suggesting that, though man’s state is fallen, it may be possible to ‘repair the ruins of our first parents’.1 In the perspective of Marvell’s Christian irony, man remains a rational being even in his fallen state, for all the proofs he constantly gives of his irrationality. Like Milton, Marvell reminds us of the ‘Divine Perfection’ man threw away at his first fall to warn us of the folly of throwing it away once again. The sad likelihood that man will make a desert out of a peaceful and flourishing landscape, where ‘the whole Land at whatsoever season of the year does yield him a plentiful Harvest’ (Growth of Popery, p. 4), that like Eve and Satan he will succumb to the temptation of greater power and dissatisfaction with what he has, does not negate a poet’s responsibility to provide a ‘warning voice’ (Paradise Lost, IV, 1). In his satires and political writings, Marvell is a realist in recognizing the brutal cynicism with which men in power feed their insatiable wills and an idealist in urging alternative standards of conduct, in insisting that it is not yet too late.
Marvell’s characteristic ironic tone reflects an awareness that, however much we may regret it, the world is fallen and that we must therefore chasten our expectations. The morality implicit in much of Marvell is that of the education of Adam and Eve in the last books of Paradise Lost: though we may be tempted to ‘give ear to proud and curious Spirits’ (Rehearsal Transpros’d, II, 231), to fall prey either to ‘a vast opinion of [our] own sufficiency’ (I, 15) or to despair, ultimately we must learn ‘to be content with such bodies, and to inhabit such an Earth as it has pleased God to allot us’ (II, 231). Underlying both the outward-looking, militant irony of Marvell’s satires and the impersonal, detached, freely proliferating ironic wit which is Marvell’s signature in his lyrics is a further form of irony turned inward, Christian wit. Man’s lot, with the body and soul uneasily coexisting as irreconcilable and inseparable enemies, is itself ironic. His ‘vain Head, and double Heart’ (‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’, l. 10) assure both that his unresolved paradoxes will cause him pain and that he will be incapable of finding any solution or relief. Man, as Marvell sees him, is doomed to feel the anguish of parallel lines, wracked by a yearning to ‘joyn’, yet helplessly extending side by side into infinity (‘The Definition of Love’, l. 23).
Yet, as a final twist of irony, in man’s weakness and frustration lies his strength. It is his consciousness, his capacity for feeling guilt, pain, and loss, his unique though sometimes unwelcome gift of retrospective awareness, the weight of conscience which he cannot, even if he wished to do so, ‘atturn and indenture’ over to others (Short Historical Essay, p. 21), that enables man to find a path to freedom. It is by the ‘Opposition of the Stars’ (‘The Definition of Love’, l. 32) that love is defined: ‘Magnanimous Despair’ (l. 5) enables the lovers of ‘The Definition of Love’ to attain a perfection denied ordinary lovers, whose ‘Tinsel’ (l. 8) joys soon fade. The couple of ‘The Definition of Love’ have been initiated into experience, unlike the happy innocents ‘with whom the Infant Love yet playes’, described in stanza 1 of ‘The Unfortunate Lover’, who imagine themselves secure in a vegetative pastoral contentment, unaware of their inability ‘to make impression upon Time’ (l. 8). Gifted with consciousness, the post-lapsarian lovers of ‘The Definition of Love’ are able to defy the Tyrannick pow’r’ (l. 16) of fate, which in separating them can only intensify their love. In ‘The Unfortunate Lover’, the pains and frustrations of love in the fallen realm are emphasized, rather than any possible transcendance, yet here too the lover gains a form of apotheosis in resisting the forces of envious fate, ‘cuffing the Thunder’ (l. 50) and dying in music. Here perhaps it is the confrontation of pain which gives man his identity.
Neither earthly tyrant nor outer necessity, Marvell argues, has the absolute power their partisans claim. A belief in an essential human freedom which no outward force can touch is central to Marvell’s thought, as to Milton’s. In his verse and prose satires, as in such poems as An Horatian Ode, ‘The Definition of Love’, ‘To his Coy Mistress’, and Upon Appleton House, Marvell consistently emphasizes the role of free choice in a providentially ordered universe. The conception of an iron necessity which rendered all human action futile and made all talk of moral choice superfluous, a necessity ‘that was pre-eternal to all things, and exercised dominion not only over all humane things, but over Jupiter himself and the rest of the Deities and drove the great Iron nail thorough the Axel-tree of Nature’, was antipathetic to him. The doctrine of a ‘Universal Dictatorship of Necessity over God and Man’, so attractive to predestinarians and apologists for earthly rulers (‘I have some suspicion’, he writes of Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, ‘that you would have men understand it of your self, and that you are that Necessity’), in Marvell’s view robs the universe of any meaning and simply deifies power (II, p. 230). Marvell rejected Hobbist reason of state as he rejected Calvinist predestination: to him, man is a reasonable creature and therefore free. No form of outward necessity can negate man’s responsibility to choose between right and wrong, to determine, with the aid of his conscience, ‘Humane Reason guided by the Scripture’ (II, p. 243), how to behave in his daily life. The soul is given an ‘immortal Shield’, and must ‘learn’ to bear its weight (‘Resolved Soul’, ll. 1–2). Neither truth nor morality, as Milton says in Areopagitica, can flourish in a climate of prescription, ‘unexercis’d and unbreath’d’ (CPW, II, 515); through exercise, through exposure to experience, the resolved soul learns to discriminate.
Like Milton, Marvell consistently sought to reconcile a belief in a divine providence (in Milton’s definition, ‘that by which God the father views and preserves all created things and governs them with supreme wisdom and holiness, according to the conditions of his decree’) with a belief that man was a free agent responsible for his own acts.2 In their emphasis on man’s freedom, Marvell, Milton, and the Puritan libertarians directly or by implication challenged the orthodox Calvinist belief in predestination. Because their view of morality stressed the role of free choice and man’s endowment of rationality in this way, rejecting any form of determinism as they rejected earthly authority, the libertarians frequently came under attack by guardians of Calvinist doctrinal purity. The last of Marvell’s prose works, Remarks upon a late Disingenuous Discourse (1678), is a defence of the dissenting clergyman John Howe against attacks by more orthodox Calvinists for upholding the doctrine of free will against rigid predestination. Though the circumstances of the 1670s, when the Puritans had long been out of power and Calvinist theology was no longer dominant in England, differed greatly from the prevailing climate of opinion in the Commonwealth and Protectorate years, nevertheless Marvell’s position in Remarks is closely akin to that of such libertarian radicals of the 1640s as John Goodwin and to Milton in De Doctrina Christiana, as well as in Paradise Lost. Like Milton, Marvell is careful to distinguish between God’s prescience or omniscience and any form of necessitarianism, arguing that God’s foreknowledge of events in no way implies a predestination that limits man’s ability to choose freely among alternatives. In Remarks, Marvell repeatedly draws the distinction between ‘a thing so plainly reveal’d in the Word of God as his Prescience is, and so agreeable to all rational apprehension, and a Notion so altogether unrevealed as this universal Predetermination yet appears, and so contrary if not to the whole scope and design of Divine Revelation, yet to all common understanding and genuine sense of right Reason’ (pp. 76–7).3 To the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, Marvell and the libertarians opposed the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith: though they by no means make man’s redemption depend on man alone, unaided by God’s grace, they reject the view of man as the purely passive object of God’s decrees. Sinners, in Milton’s and Marvell’s view, are responsible for their own sins: ‘as to Evil’, Marvell writes, citing biblical proof-texts, ‘that also of St. James, is sufficient conviction, cap. I. V. 13, 14. Let no man say, when he is tempted, I was tempted by God; God cannot be tempted with Evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn aside by his own lusts and enticed.’ To deny man the freedom to use his God-given reason to choose an appropriate course of action, Marvell argues, is to make God the author of sin:
But how much doth It reflect upon God and that Religious sense which we ought to cherish of him 
 when it makes God to have determined Innocent Adam’s Will to the choice of eating the fruit that was forbidden him? 
 To Illustrate (as it pretends) so black a thing, it parallels God’s moving him to that Act rather than to another, with a Writing-Master’s directing his Scholars hand. If the Cause be not to be defended upon better terms than so, what Christian but would rather wish he had never known Writing-Master, than to subscribe such an Opinion; and that God should make an innocent Creature in this manner to do a forbidden Act, for which so dreadful a vengeance was to insue upon him and his posterity? (Remarks, pp. 4–5, 125–6)
Such works as The Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Growth of Popery, and Last Instructions, like Remarks, are grounded in a conception of freedom and experience which can be described as libertarian or non-Calvinist Puritan. A similar view is implicit in many of Marvell’s lyrics, which tend either to be aids to the embattled soul (Marvell at his most Miltonic, as in ‘A Dialogue, between The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure’) or, more often, reflections on, or definitions of, the human condition. Education into experience is his recurrent theme, and experience, as with Vaughan and the romantic poets, is normally defined in terms of loss. The central irony of human existence is man’s fallen, alienated state in which he longs after a recovered wholeness ‘beyond a Mortal’s share’ (‘The Garden’, l. 61). The realm of freedom and unchanging truth in Marvell’s poems is often explicitly Christian: the unenlightened and puzzled mower and the weeping nymph, introduced to a reality of unrelieved pain so out of consonance with anything they had previously known, the imperious infant T. C. as yet protected from any such knowledge, the coy mistress who wishes to deny its existence, are distinguished from the converted shepherd in ‘Clorinda and Damon’ or the resolved soul, both of whom recognize that Where the Creator’s skill is priz’d, / The rest is all but Earth disguis’d’ (‘Resolved Soul’, ll. 35–6). Yet if Marvell’s moral universe is Miltonic, there is a fundamental difference in attitude between the two poets. The acute pain of the nymph, her sense that the rules have changed, that a universe hitherto comprehensible has suddenly been deprived of harmony and meaning (‘It cannot dye so. Heavens King / Keeps register of every thing’, ‘The Nymph complaining’, ll. 13–14) has its Miltonic parallels, but no answer is even implied to the nymph’s agonized questions. It is striking how often Marvell’s poems are left unresolved: ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun’ is like a version of Paradise Lost en...

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