50-) English Literature

50-) English Literature 

Andrew Marvell 

Andrew Marvell (/ˈmɑːrvəl, mɑːrˈvɛl/;(born March 31, 1621, Winestead, Yorkshire, England—died August 18, 1678, London), was an English metaphysical poet, whose political reputation overshadowed that of his poetry until the 20th century. He is now considered to be one of the best Metaphysical poets. He was a satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the love-song "To His Coy Mistress", to evocations of an aristocratic country house and garden in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden", the political address "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland", and the later personal and political satires "Flecknoe" and "The Character of Holland".

Andrew Marvell is surely the single most compelling embodiment of the change that came over English society and letters in the course of the 17th century. In an era that makes a better claim than most upon the familiar term transitional, Marvell wrote a varied array of exquisite lyrics that blend Cavalier grace with Metaphysical wit and complexity. He first turned into a panegyrist for the Lord Protector and his regime and then into an increasingly bitter satirist and polemicist, attacking the royal court and the established church in both prose and verse. It is as if the most delicate and elusive of butterflies somehow metamorphosed into a caterpillar.

To be sure, the judgment of Marvell’s contemporaries and the next few generations would not have been such. The style of the lyrics that have been so prized in the 20th century was already out of fashion by the time of his death, but he was a pioneer in the kind of political verse satire that would be perfected by his younger contemporary John Dryden and in the next generation by Alexander Pope (both writing for the other side)—even as his satirical prose anticipated the achievement of Jonathan Swift in that vein. Marvell’s satires won him a reputation in his own day and preserved his memory beyond the 18th century as a patriotic political writer—a clever and courageous enemy of court corruption and a defender of religious and political liberty and the rights of Parliament. It was only in the 19th century that his lyrical poems began to attract serious attention, and it was not until T.S. Eliot’s classic essay (first published in March 1921), marking the tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, that Marvell attained recognition as one of the major lyric poets of his age.

In recent years postmodernist theory has once again focused on Marvell as a political writer, but with as much attention to the politics of the lyric poems as to the overtly partisan satires. Doubtless what sustains critical interest in Marvell and accommodates the enormous quantity of interpretive commentary attracted by his work is the extraordinary range and ambiguity of theme and tone among a comparatively small number of poems. Equally uncertain are the nature and timing of his personal involvement and his commitments in the great national events that occurred during his lifetime. Nevertheless, despite the equivocal status of many of the details of Marvell’s life and career, the overall direction is clear enough: he is a fitting symbol for England’s transformation in the 17th century from what was still largely a medieval, Christian culture into a modern, secular society. In his subtle, ironic, and sometimes mysterious lyrics, apparently written just at the middle of the century, we have one of our finest records of an acute, sensitive mind confronting the myriad implications of that transformation.

Early life

Marvell was born in Winestead, East Riding of Yorkshire on 31 March 1621. He was the son of a Church of England clergyman also named Andrew Marvell (often termed Marvell Senior). The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. Aged 13, Marvell attended Trinity College, Cambridge and eventually received a BA degree. A portrait of Marvell, attributed to Godfrey Kneller, hangs in Trinity College's collection.

The son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell and Anne Pease Marvell, Andrew Marvell spent his boyhood in the Yorkshire town of Hull, where his father, a clergyman of Calvinist inclination, was appointed lecturer at Holy Trinity Church and master of the Charterhouse when the poet was three years old. His father was, Marvell wrote years later in The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part (1673), “a Conformist to the established Rites of the Church of England, though I confess none of the most over-running or eager in them.” Not surprisingly then, at the age of twelve in 1633, Marvell was sent up to Trinity College, Cambridge. This was the very year that William Laud became archbishop of Canterbury. If not such a stronghold of Puritanism as Emmanuel College (alma mater of Marvell’s father), Trinity was characterized by a moderation that contrasted sharply with a college such as Peterhouse (Richard Crashaw‘s college), which ardently embraced the Arminianism and ritualism of the Laudian program. Indeed, the liberal, rationalistic tenor of Marvell’s religious utterances in later life may owe something to the influence of Benjamin Whichcote, who in 1636 as lecturer at Trinity Church began to lay the foundation for the latitudinarian strain that was so important in the Church of England after the Restoration. Such tenuous evidence as exists, however, does not suggest Puritan enthusiasm on the part of the youthful poet. The story that Marvell, converted by Jesuits, ran away from Cambridge and was persuaded to return by his father, who found him in a London bookshop, has never been properly verified (although embarrassment over such a youthful indiscretion might go far to explain the virulent anti-Catholicism of his later years). More provocative is the lack of any evidence that he participated in the English Civil War, which broke out a few months after his twenty-first birthday, and the Royalist tone of his poems before 1650.

Marvell was educated at Hull grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge, taking a B.A. in 1639. His father’s death in 1641 may have ended Marvell’s promising academic career. He was abroad for at least five years (1642–46), presumably as a tutor. In 1651–52 he was tutor to Mary, daughter of Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentary general, at Nun Appleton, Yorkshire, during which time he probably wrote his notable poems “Upon Appleton House” and “The Garden” as well as his series of Mower poems.

Although earlier opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth government, he wrote “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650), and from 1653 to 1657 he was a tutor to Cromwell’s ward William Dutton. In 1657 he became assistant to John Milton as Latin secretary in the foreign office. “The First Anniversary” (1655) and “On the Death of O.C.” (1659) showed his continued and growing admiration for Cromwell. In 1659 he was elected member of Parliament for Hull, an office he held until his death, serving skillfully and effectively.

After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Marvell turned to political verse satires—the most notable was The Last Instructions to a Painter, against Lord Clarendon, Charles’s lord chancellor—and prose political satire, notably The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–73). Marvell is also said to have interceded on behalf of Milton to have him freed from prison in 1660. He wrote a commendatory poem for the second edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. His political writings favoured the toleration of religious dissent and attacked the abuse of monarchical power.

From the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell probably travelled in continental Europe. He may well have served as a tutor for an aristocrat on the Grand Tour, but the facts are not clear on this point. While England was embroiled in the civil war, Marvell seems to have remained on the continent until 1647. During his visit to Rome in 1645, he probably met; the Villiers brothers, Lord Francis and the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, as well as Richard Flecknoe. He later wrote a satirical poem about Flecknoe.[4] His travel route is unclear, except that Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages, including French, Italian and Spanish.

First poems and Marvell's time at Nun Appleton

Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I's execution on 30 January 1649. His "Horatian Ode", a political poem dated to 1650, responds with sadness to the regicide, despite the overall praise towards Oliver Cromwell's return from Ireland.

Circa 1650–52, Marvell served as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who had recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary army to Cromwell. During this period, Marvell lived at Nun Appleton Hall, near York, where he continued to write poetry. One poem, "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax", uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax's and Marvell's own social situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known poem he wrote at this time is "To His Coy Mistress".

Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin secretary

During the period of increasing tensions leading up to the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652, Marvell wrote the satirical "Character of Holland". It repeated the contemporary stereotype of the Dutch as "drunken and profane": "This indigested vomit of the Sea,/ Fell to the Dutch by Just Propriety."

He became a tutor to Cromwell's ward, William Dutton, in 1653, and moved to live with his pupil at John Oxenbridge's house in Eton. Oxenbridge previously made two trips to Bermuda, this most-likely inspired Marvell to write his poem Bermudas. He also wrote several poems praising Cromwell, who was Lord Protector of England at that point. In 1656 Marvell and Dutton travelled to France, to visit the Protestant Academy of Saumur.

In 1657, Marvell joined Milton (who was now blind) in service as Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council of State at a salary of £200 a year. This was enough for decent financial security. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard. In 1659 Marvell was elected Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull in the Third Protectorate Parliament. He was paid a rate of 6 shillings, 8 pence per day during sittings of parliament, a financial support derived from the contributions of his constituency. He was re-elected MP for Hull in 1660 for the Convention Parliament.

After the Restoration

The monarchy was restored in England in 1660 by returning of Charles II to his own empire. Marvell avoided punishment for his own co-operation with Cromwell and republicanism more broadly. Furthermore, he helped to convince the King not to execute John Milton for his anti-monarchical writings and revolutionary activities. The closeness of the relationship between the two former colleagues is indicated by the fact that Marvell contributed an eloquent prefatory poem, entitled "On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost", to the second edition of Milton's epic Paradise Lost. According to a biographer: "Skilled in the arts of self-preservation, he was not a toady."

In 1661 Marvell was re-elected MP for Hull in the Cavalier Parliament. He eventually came to write several long and bitterly satirical verses against the corruption of the court. This work was mostly circulated in less public manuscript form, however some was anonymously published in print. The verses were too politically sensitive and too dangerous to be published under his name until well after the writer's death. Marvell took up opposition to the 'court party', and satirised them as his main target. In his longest verse of satire, Last Instructions to a Painter, written in 1667, Marvell responded to the political corruption that had contributed to English failures during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The poem was only published in print after the Revolution of 1688–9. The poem instructs an imaginary painter on how to portray the state without a proper navy to defend them. The state is led by men without intelligence or courage, a corrupt and dissolute court, and dishonest officials. Of another such satire, Samuel Pepys, himself a government official, commented in his diary, "Here I met with a fourth Advice to a Painter upon the coming in of the Dutch and the End of the War, that made my heart ake to read, it being too sharp and so true."

From 1659 until his death in 1678, Marvell served as London agent for the Hull Trinity House shipmasters' guild.[citation needed] He went on two missions to the continent; one to the Dutch Republic, and the other encompassing Russia, Sweden, and Denmark.[citation needed] He spent some time living in a cottage on Highgate Hill in north London. His stay there is now recorded by a bronze plaque that bears the following inscription:

Four feet below this spot is the stone step, formerly the entrance to the cottage in which lived Andrew Marvell, poet, wit, and satirist; colleague with John Milton in the foreign or Latin secretaryship during the Commonwealth; and for about twenty years M.P. for Hull. Born at Winestead, Yorkshire, 31st March, 1621, died in London, 18th August, 1678, and buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. This memorial is placed here by the London County Council, December, 1898.

A floral sundial in the nearby Lauderdale House bears an inscription quoting lines from his poem "The Garden". Andrew Marvell died suddenly in 1678, while attending a popular meeting of his old constituents at Hull. His health had been remarkably good; and some people theorised of his poisoning by his political or clerical enemies. This is unproven. Marvell was buried in the church of St Giles in the Fields in central London. His monument, erected by a very grateful constituency, bears the following inscription:

Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq., a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any. But a Tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is Marble necessary to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this generation, and will be always legible in his inimitable writings, nevertheless. He having served twenty years successfully in Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence he was deputed to that Assembly, lamenting in his death the public loss, have erected this Monument of their Grief and their Gratitude, 1688.

Prose works

Marvell also wrote anonymous prose satires: criticizing the monarchy and Roman Catholicism, defending Puritan dissenters, and denouncing censorship.

The Rehearsal Transpros'd, an attack on Samuel Parker, was published in two parts in 1672 and 1673.

Mr. Smirke; or The Divine in Mode, (1676) criticised Church of England intolerance, and was published together with a "Short Historical Essay, concerning General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in matters of Religion."

Marvell's pamphlet An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, published in late 1677, alleged that: "There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery". John Kenyon described it as "one of the most influential pamphlets of the decade" and G. M. Trevelyan called it: "A fine pamphlet, which throws light on causes provocative of the formation of the Whig party".

A 1678 work published anonymously ("by a Protestant") in defense of John Howe against the attack of his fellow-dissenter, the severe Calvinist Thomas Danson, is also probably by Marvell. Its full title is Remarks upon a late disingenuous discourse, writ by one T.D. under the pretence de causa Dei, and of answering Mr. John Howe's letter and postscript of God's prescience, &c., affirming, as the Protestant doctrine, that God doth by efficacious influence universally move and determine men to all their actions, even to those that are most wicked.

Views

Although Marvell became a Parliamentarian and was opposed to episcopacy, he was not a Puritan. Later in life especially, he seems to have been a conforming Anglican. Marvell positively identifies himself as "a Protestant" in pamphlets. He had flirted briefly with Catholicism as a youth, and was described in his thirties (on the Saumur visit) as "a notable English Italo-Machiavellian".

His strong Biblical influence is clear in poems such as "The Garden", the "Coronet" and "The Bermudas".

Vincent Palmieri noted that Marvell is sometimes known as the "British Aristides" for his incorruptible integrity in life and poverty at death. Many of his poems were not published until 1681, three years after his death, from a collection owned by Mary Palmer, his housekeeper. After Marvell's death she laid dubious claim to having been his wife, from the time of a secret marriage in 1667.

Marvell’s earliest surviving verses lead to no conclusions about his religion and politics as a student. In 1637 two pieces of his, one in Latin and one in Greek, were published in a collection of verses by Cambridge poets in honor of the birth of a fifth child to Charles I. Other contributors were as diverse as Richard Crashaw, who would later be a Catholic priest, and Edward King, whose death by drowning that same year was the occasion for John Milton’s Lycidas (1638). Marvell’s Latin poem, “Ad Regem Carolum Parodia,” is a “parody” in the sense that it is a close imitation—in meter, structure, and language—of Horace, Odes I.2. While the Roman poet hails Caesar Augustus as a savior of the state in the wake of violent weather and the flooding of the Tiber, Marvell celebrates the fertility of the reigning sovereign and his queen on the heels of the plague that struck Cambridge at the end of 1636. Marvell’s contribution in Greek asserts that the birth of the king’s fifth child had redeemed the number five, of ill omen since attempts had been made on the life of James I on August 5, 1600 and November 5, 1605. It would be easy enough to condemn the poem’s frigid ingenuity but for a reluctance to be harsh with the work of a 16-year-old capable of writing Latin and Greek verse.

If little can be made of these student exercises, the poems written in the 1640s that imply a close association between Marvell and certain Royalists furnish intriguing (if meager) grounds for speculation. The mystery is further complicated by a lack of evidence regarding Marvell’s whereabouts and activities during most of the decade. In 1639 he earned his BA and stayed on at the university, evidently to pursue a MA degree. In 1641, however, his father drowned in “the Tide of Humber”—the estuary at Hull made famous by “To his Coy Mistress.” Shortly afterward Marvell left Cambridge, and there is plausible speculation that he might have worked for a time in the shipping business of his well-to-do brother-in-law, Edmund Popple. It is known that sometime during the 1640s Marvell undertook an extended tour of the Continent. In a letter of February 21, 1653 recommending Marvell for a place in his own department in Oliver Cromwell’s government, Milton credits Marvell with four years’ travel in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, where he acquired the languages of all four countries. Regrettably Milton casts no light upon the motives and circumstances of this journey. Modern scholarship has generally assumed that Marvell served as the companion/tutor of a wealthy and perhaps noble youth, but all the candidates brought forward for this role have been eliminated by one consideration or another. Some have suggested that Marvell was merely avoiding the war, others that he was some kind of government agent. Although the explanation that he was a tutor seems most plausible, there is no certainty about what he was doing.

Whatever the purpose of his travel, its lasting effects turn up at various points in Marvell’s writings. The burlesque “Character of Holland” (1665), for example, draws on reminiscences of the dikes of the Netherlands: “How did they rivet, with Gigantick Piles, / Thorough the Center their new-catched Miles.” “Upon Appleton House” describes a drained meadow by evoking a Spanish arena “Ere the Bulls enter at Madril,” and a letter “To a Friend in Persia” recalls fencing lessons in Spain (August 9, 1671). The circumstantial detail of “Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome,” a satire very much in the manner of John Donne’s efforts in that genre, suggests that Marvell actually met the victim of his poem in Rome when Richard Flecknoe was there in 1645-1647. Flecknoe is, of course, the man immortalized as Thomas Shadwell’s predecessor as king of dullness in John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682). Marvell mercilessly ridicules both the poverty of Flecknoe’s wit and his literal poverty and consequent leanness. The jokes at the expense of Catholic doctrine seem almost incidental to the abuse of Flecknoe’s undernourished penury:

Nothing now Dinner stay’d

But till he had himself a Body made.

I mean till he were drest: for else so thin

He stands, as if he only fed had been

With consecrated Wafers: and the Host

Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast.

Doubtless these lines play irreverently with the Thomist teaching that the Body and Blood of Christ are both totally contained under each of the eucharistic species, as well as with accounts of the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, who is said to have subsisted for several years with no other nourishment than daily Communion. But the real object of this quasi-Scholastic wit (again, much in the style of Donne) is the absurdity of Flecknoe, and it lacks the virulent loathing that characterizes Marvell’s attack on the doctrine of Transubstantiation years later in An Account of the Growth of Popery (1677). His mockery of the narrowness of Flecknoe’s room makes a similar joke with the doctrine of the Trinity, which was accepted by virtually all Protestants at the time:

there can no Body pass

Except by penetration hither, where

Two make a crowd, nor can three Person here

Consist but in one substance.

While the jocular anti-Catholicism of “Fleck-no” hardly implies militant Puritanism, by placing Marvell in Rome between 1645 and 1647, it raises the possibility that he met Lord Francis Villiers, who was also in Rome in 1645 and 1646. This would strengthen the case for Marvell’s authorship of “An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers” and bring to three the number of Royalist poems that he wrote. Two poems published in 1649, Richard Lovelace and “Upon the death of Lord Hastings,” are both indisputably by Marvell and indisputably Royalist in sentiment. It is not simply that both poems celebrate known adherents of the king’s failed cause, but that they do so with pungent references to the triumphant side in the Civil War. The death of Henry, Lord Hastings, in 1649 at the age of 19 may have resulted immediately from smallpox, but the ultimate source of his fate is that “the Democratick Stars did rise, / And all that Worth from hence did Ostracize.” The poem to Lovelace is one of the commendatory pieces in the first edition of Lucasta (1649). Marvell observes how “Our Civill Wars have lost the Civicke crowne” and refers with explicit scorn to the difficulty encountered in acquiring a printing license for the volume:

The barbed Censurers begin to looke

Like the grim consistory on thy Booke;

And on each line cast a reforming eye,

Severer then the yong Presbytery.

In subsequent lines Marvell refers to Lovelace’s legal difficulties with Parliament, especially his imprisonment for presenting the Kentish petition requesting control of the militia and the use of the Book of Common Prayer.”