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10. “How coy a Figure”

Marvelry

STEPHEN YENSER

BECAUSE I SENSE THAT THIS meditation might now and again veer intorarefaction, I want to stress its roots in the mundane. The quotidian, which is my turf. Although I now live near and sometimes walk acrossthe intersection of Hollywood and Vine, many years ago, like a lot of Angelenos, I grew up in Kansas, enamored of Lost Horizon and The Wizard of Oz and other flights of fancy, and aspired to writing up differentclimes myself. But plus c

¸a change, and after all these decades and all thesemiles, I'm still plodding on, midwestern pedestrian as ever, even if this is Shangri-L.A., the City of Angles, El Lay itself. If this is where the Great Plains meet the Great Fancies, to adapt a phrase from James Merrill, Ihave evidently been cast as one of the former. It' not my role to inventother worlds after all. Still, there is one film script I can imagine imagining, and it would be based on the life of Andrew Marvell. Although hisown origins were common, his doings were charmed, his travels and tasteswere broad, his lyrics are wizard, and he would have understood themercurial, cinematographic ethos of the later twentieth century in the United States better than most of his contemporaries, or indeed mine—orso I think, even though our knowledge of him is as thin in substance asit is thick in mundane fact (which combination itself is of course alluringto the faltering fabulist). I'll make my pitch brief.

After his mother's early death and the quick remarriage of his father, an Anglican minister, when Andrew was seventeen years old and perhaps

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especially vulnerable regarding issues of authority, Marvell fell under thesway of the cult of his day and left his home in Cambridge to join a Catholic guru in London, whence he was enticed back or abducted bydeprogrammers working for his father. The senior Andrew Marvelldrowned a couple of years later in strange circumstances and in the company of a woman not his second wife. His father' death seems to haveprecipitated or permitted Marvell' final departure from Cambridge for London, where he lived until he was twenty-one, at which age he decamped for the Continent, where he perhaps initiated an intermittentcareer as a spy or a double agent. The precise nature of his relationshipto the Dutch government in the 1640s, and again in 1662–63, when hereturned to that country for several months, and yet again in 1674, whenhe surreptitiously represented Dutch interests in England (“Mr. Thomas” was his cryptonym), is forever obscured. Much that we can gather abouthim, however, comports with the romantic hypothesis of espionage—andleaves room for a certain reconstruction in the film script. Mostly abroadfrom 1643 through 1647, he learned fencing as avidly as he acquired foreign languages, even as he steered clear of commitment to either sideduring the Civil War back home. Writing about those years some threedecades later in the course of urging religious tolerance in England, heoffered an apologia whose rhetoric might have been the envy of somerecent prominent American draft dodgers, as well as the citizens of Shangri-La. “Whether it be a war of religion or of liberty,” he asserted, “is notworth the labour to inquire. Whichsoever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but upon considering all, I think the cause was too goodto have been fought for.” Indeed, “men may spare their pains where natureis at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving,” since “allthings happen in their best and proper time, without any need of ourofficiousness.”^[1] Those are observations worthy of a doubting “Thomas.”

In August of 1678, having served two decades as a member of Parliament from Hull, he—whoever else he really was—slipped away at age fifty-seven. In October 1680 his Miscellaneous Poems were published witha brief testimonial to their authenticity, authored, ironically, by one Mary Marvell, neée Mary Palmer, who claimed Andrew as her “late dear Husband” and who was, although demonstrably his landlady and friend, evidently not his wife. The boundaries of their relationship will never bedefined, and—in spite of his poems' many declarations—we know nothing about other possible manifestations of the poet' libido. He seems tohave conducted his public life with discretion and his private life in secrecy. Such a summary would square with John Aubrey' tantalizing account

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of him in his Brief Lives:“He was in his conversation very modest,” Aubrey testifies, “and of very few words: and though he loved wine hewould never drinke harde in company.” At the same time, Aubrey somehow knows, he “kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times hewould drinke liberally by himself to refresh his spirits, and exalt hismuse.”^[2] This sentence might remind the reader in a Marvellian mood, orthe reader whose own cup runneth over, of the “green pastures” and “stillwaters” that restore the singer who is so delicately echoed at the end ofthe fifth stanza in “The Garden.”

That still waters run deep is to the point. Whether moderate drinkeror functioning alcoholic; whether husband or lover or sexual abstinent;whether skeptic, latitudinarian, temporizer, tergiversator, precocious pacifist, or simply ambivalent soul—he could write poems in warm supportof royalist friends, then celebrate a regicide' return in an ode that includeda paean to the dead king, then pen an elegy to the regicide, and thenendear himself to the restored monarchy and serve in Parliament until hisdeath. Born on Easter Eve, named as his father was named, he alwaysresurrected himself in some new form. Indeed, for centuries known chieflyif hardly credibly as a satirist and politician, he is now regarded as a lyricpoet par excellence—in Hugh Kenner' uneasy and suitably slippery assessment, “the greatest minor poet in the English language.”^[3]

His poetic oeuvre is remarkably “small” (especially if we exclude thesatirical and most of the political poems), but it is small as those of Mallarmeé and Elizabeth Bishop are small: densely elegant in inverse proportion to length. A writer of what the late Robert M. Adams called hard, beautiful poems, although resident nearer the more amenable Bishop thanthe recalcitrant Mallarmeé, he values conciseness equally with complexity, shuns simplification yet strives for accessibility, loves puzzles but neverabandons the sensuous world. In my favorite summation of “To His Coy Mistress,” Victoria Sackville-West writes that “the whole poem is as tightand hard as a knot; yet as spilling and voluptuous as a horn of plenty.”^[4] She might as well have been epitomizing Marvell' lyrical mode. He is inboth senses of the word a sensible poet—a doubly sensible poet yet notwithout his mystical tinge. When Robert Frost averred that he loathedobscurity yet loved dark sayings, he could have been thinking of thefamous couplet in which Marvell alludes to the twenty-third Psalm in thecourse of eulogizing the contemplative mind, capable of “Annihilating allthat' made, / To a green Thought in a green Shade.”^[5] In that verdant, fertile retreat, where all is fungible and fugacious, mercurial Marvell is themaster of mutability and metamorphosis.

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“The Garden,” the source of the famous couplet, is like all instances ofits species an imperfect poem, to be sure. (Valeéry articulated the law: alyric is never finished, just left behind.) After a strong first stanza, threeworkmanlike stanzas intervene before we come to the poem' superb second half. Like most good poems, “The Garden” probably didn't knowwhere it was going until it got there—and by then, evidently, there was no way to bring earlier stanzas quite up to the quality of the closing ones. Stanza 2 treads water as it conventionally opposes the natural world withthe social world. Its only memorable lines are its last couplet, “Society isall but rude, / To this delicious Solitude,” in which rude means ironicallyboth “rustic” or “unpolished” and “vulgar” or “discourteous.” Stanza 3spends most of its eight lines somehow contrasting the beauty of womenwhose lovers have been selfish enough to cut their names into the garden'trees with the garden' loveliness and then concludes, dismayingly, withthe speaker' vow to carve the trees' own names into their bark. Stanza 4not only manhandles the Daphne and Syrinx myths—which myths, thepoet scandalously claims, demonstrate how even Apollo and Pan werehappier with their suddenly floral love objects than they would have beenwith the original nymphs—but also seems casually placed. Wouldn'tstanza 4 fit better into the retreat sequence—poet from society, self fromlovers, mind from body, soul from self—if it came second or third?

In any event stanza 4, with its metamorphoses, heightens the sexualmotif and thus foreshadows stanza 5, where the speaker' solitariness intercepts startlingly the poem' most sensuous language. Far from a retreatfrom “Passions heat,” this stanza represents a fierce if autoerotic sublimation of it. Rather than a return to prelapsarian existence, this stanzasuggests a repetition of the fall, from apple through sex, with Nature thistime the irresistible temptress:

	What wond'rous Life is this I lead!
	Ripe Apples drop about my head;
	The Luscious Clusters of the Vine
	Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine;
	The Nectaren, and curious Peach,
	Into my hands themselves do reach;
	Stumbling on Melons, as I pass,
	Insnar'd with Flow'rs, I fall on Grass.

Having thus charmingly disposed of the apparently exhausted body, Marvell can follow the mind' subsequent withdrawal into itself, an environshe magically manages to compare at once to an ocean and to the bower:

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	Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
	Withdraws into its happiness:
	The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
	Does streight its own resemblance find;
	Yet it creates, transcending these,
	Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
	Annihilating all that' made
	To a green Thought in a green Shade.

Although the idea that everything on earth has a corresponding type inthe ocean (horse and seahorse, and so forth) is just entertaining nonsense, that fact does not affect the claim about the mind, in which indeed everything, on land or in the ocean, including the mind itself, can be comparedto something else. But Marvell' concept of the mind, he insists, is of notjust an incubator of metaphors but also a generator of “Far other Worlds, and other Seas.” If analogy were still an option, the comparison implicitwould be to God, especially since the mind' power entails a destructiveforce capable of “Annihilating all that' made / To a green Thought in agreen Shade.” I take this couplet to mean that the contemplative mindcan extinguish all material things and can plunge into thought itself, where instead of light and dark we find shades and instead of entitiesinsubstantial processes. This is the place or rather the very medium ofmetamorphosis, beside which myths about its power—like those in Ovid—might seem allegorical and reductive. So perhaps that contrastjustifies in retrospect the rather wooden fourth stanza.

The metamorphosis then effected in stanza 7 works in counterpoint, as the soul—anima as distinct from the preceding mens—also departsfrom the body but, unlike the mind, takes a form “like [that of] a bird” that glides into a garden tree, where it preens “its silver Wings” in preparation for a “longer flight,” presumably to heaven (wherever else that might be by now). Perching there, as it were, the soul “Waves” or weaves“in its Plumes the various Light,” which is to say, in parallel to the shadesof shades in the preceding stanza, the gradated light, the refracted light, the ever-changing light that is still (nay, therefore) of this world:

	Here at the Fountains sliding foot,
	Or at some Fruit-trees mossy root,
	Casting the Bodies Vest aside,
	My Soul into the boughs does glide:
	There like a Bird it sits, and sings,
	Then whets, and combs its silver Wings;
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	And, till prepar'd for longer flight,
	Waves in its Plumes the various Light.

Beyond that liminal point this poet cannot go. Wallace Stevens, Marvellsurely in his mind, also stopped there, in a “green [and] fluent” realm atthe end of the third section of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” although he tried hard to imagine another world:

	They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
	We shall return at twilight from the lecture
	Pleased that the irrational is rational,
	Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
	I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
	You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.[6]

“When I think on that,” Yeats' Soul says, when pondering eternity in“Dialogue of Self and Soul” (a poem in the same genre as some of Marvell' own “dialogues” and closely related to “The Garden”), “my tongue'a stone.”^[7] As it turns out, Yeats' Soul' “stone” gives his Self a thing tobuild his worldly church on, and Marvell' “Bird” keeps us in his empiricalgarden, which in the eighth stanza provokes a sly speculation about Edenbefore Eve was created:

	Such was that happy Garden-state,
	While Man there walk'd without a Mate:
	After a Place so pure, and sweet,
	What other Help could yet be meet!
	But 'twas beyond a Mortal' share
	To wander solitary there:
	Two Paradises 'twere in one
	To live in Paradise alone.

The slant rhyme of Mate with meet across the opening couplets, alongwith the reader' silent restoration of the term helpmate or helpmeet that Marvell splits in the fourth line, tells the fuller story rhetorically—a storyanticipated by the sexual imagery in stanzas 4 and 5 and recapitulated inthe clinching couplet here, where one and alone are ostensibly identifiedwith Paradise, even as the doubling of paradise (“Two Paradises”) bothconjures the unstated inverse (the redoubled attraction of a paradise witha partner) and so flouts logic that the original proposition calls itself into

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question. In other words, who believes that last couplet? God didn't (see Genesis 2:18), and so it was that God delivered Eve from Adam' side. And because Marvell didn't believe it either, he sends up his own pronouncement, partly by his flagrant illogic and partly by his repetition of“Paradise[s],” so that the game reader may hear the pair in that word and infer the absurdity of a subtext, a pair o' dice alone. Indeed, the linessuggest, the real paradise involves a pair and a gamble, as plucky Eve—who, unlike her earnest companion, was pleased by the visual, gustatory, and epistemological delights of the apple—intuited.

The concluding stanza continues immediately—partly by way of anexotic, occluded pun—from the stanza on Eden:

	How well the skilful Gardner drew
	Of flow'rs and herbes this Dial new;
	Where from above the milder Sun
	Does through a fragrant Zodiack run;
	And, as it works, th' industrious Bee
	Computes its time as well as we.
	How could such sweet and wholesome Hours
	Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs!

The first lines refer us to the world at large, the fallen world, above which“the milder Sun / Does through a fragrant Zodiack run,” so that suddenlythe temporality of the world is inseparable from its heavenly fragrance. God mixes the smell of mortality with the scent of eternity. The son ofan Anglican minister might well say that it is precisely “the milder S[o]n” who combines these two. Not that we need that hypothesis to be persuaded at the poem' end that time is sacred and indeed essential to ourglimpses of perfection: “How could such sweet and wholesome Hours /Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs!” By simply reversing in his lastline the “flow'rs and herbes” of this stanza' second line, Marvell frameshis hortus conclusus—which is not, however, Eden but a larger garden, the garden into which his friend Milton' Adam and Eve walk at the end of Paradise Lost. The garden of the world. This green sundial or earthwherein we die all (the prosody dictates two syllables rather than a diphthong in Dial)—perhaps in order (although nothing here insists on spiritual rebirth) to be “new.”

“The Garden” is an emerald brilliant with facets or with different“shades” of meaning caused by a “various Light.” It begins with a renunciation of “Society,” “worldly endeavors,” and “incessant Labours” in favor

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of withdrawal, “repose,” and meditation; but it ends with a celebrationof a world marked everywhere by time and industry—a celebration sounalloyed that we can note only the irony of the “dust” in industrious. To put that another way, it begins by treating the particular remote gardenit is set in (although we do not know that the poet had a specific placein mind) as an opposite to the temporal, empirical realm; and it ends bytreating the world as a whole as a garden that includes or sublates that realm. How did this happen? The poem followed its aggressive thought.

An emblem of the kind of suave, lucid, serpentine ingenuity that Iadmire in Marvell can be found in “The Coronet,” a poem about, well, about the writing of such a poem as it turns out to be. Such a poem, because the poet explicitly hopes to honor his savior, Jesus Christ, withit, should be a “rich… Chaplet” or garland or a “curious Frame,” where curious means “painstakingly fine” or “elaborate”—and “The Coronet,” its simplicity of a sort notwithstanding, surely fills that bill. The poem'intricate structure, which does not allow for stanzas, can be representedby the following groupings: a ₅ b ₄ b ₄ a ₅ \c ₄ d ₅ d ₄ c ₅\e ₅ f ₄ f ₄ e ₅ \g ₄ h ₄ g ₄ h ₄\i ₅ i ₅\j ₅ k ₅ l ₅ j ₅ k ₅ l ₅\m ₅ m ₅.

Only one part' scheme (the first part') repeats itself (in the third part') in this wonderful prosodic filigree. “The Coronet” is equally daedalianwhen it comes to figure. Although the metaphor remains latent throughout, it emerges that the flowers gathered by the speaker are his tropesthemselves—or his lines—or the poem as a whole. (If not indeed thecapacity of language itself. The poem' twenty-six lines recall the Englishalphabet—which, however, cannot in the end spell the Word any morethan the poem can truly grace God.)

In any event, in the course of writing it, the poet discovers that thepoem is unworthy praise of Christ; in implicit contrast to Christ' gift tohumanity, his own “fruits” are paradoxically “only flowers”—forever immature, always insubstantial, never nourishing. They cannot but be sobecause they are mortal, rooted in the fallen world—which is to say boundup with “the Serpent old,” who makes his entrance at the poem' exactmidpoint, where he is discovered trying to conceal himself among theflowers:

	Alas I find the Serpent old
	That, twining in his speckled breast,
	About the flow'rs disguis'd does fold,
	With wreaths of Fame and Interest.

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But if that last is a figure a poet might take some pride in, Marvell implies, that is precisely the problem, that ineradicable human wish for “wreathsof Fame and Interest.” By this point the poet is in the toils of a doublebind because the coronet he had envisioned has transformed itself into apainful crown of thorns (the very sort of thing he had found himselfconstructing previously and had sought to put by at the poem' outset), as eulogy, chaplet, serpent, and sin have become inextricable.

Inextricable, that is, except by the savior himself, who only could “the Serpent tame,\… [and] his slipp'ry knots at once untie,\ And disentangle all his winding Snare.” But then this poem that seeks to denounceitself qua poem (or worldly enterprise) begins to prove anew the necessityfor the savior and thus to justify willy-nilly its own existence because thesavior alone can purify and redeem the poet' figures—can rid them ofthe slippery knots and lubricious negatives they otherwise must traffic in. In the alternative allegorical narrative—but the options come to the samething—Christ can simply destroy the serpent and

	…shatter too with him my curious frame:
	And let these wither, so that he may die,
	Though set with Skill and chosen out with Care.
	That they, while Thou on both their Spoils dost tread,
	May crown thy Feet, that could not crown thy Head.

Even as Marvell seems to welcome his poem' destruction, however, hecontinues to refine its “curious frame”—so that, for instance, that veryphrase shades off into both inquisitive temperament and ungainly body atthe same time that it designates the poem' or garland' fastidious structure, with its different flowers “set with Skill and chosen out with Care.”

And why not? to be worth sacrificing, the offering must be beautiful. Therefore Douglas Bush' observation that “‘The Coronet'…isareligious sacrifice of all poetry,”^[8] although not wrong, deserves qualification. One doesn't strew a monarch' path with random bunches of skunkweedand thistles. Far better an exquisite wreath like this one that might bothrecall God' promise that Christ will bruise his heel on the serpent' headand suggest that the ultimate poem, the poem that renders all othersvalueless, is Christ' feet—or that mere words must give way to the Word. I don't see how in this notably aesthetic context “thy Feet” can fail tocarry such intimations—although it might be that we should think of thepoet' own metrical feet as ultimately Christ', given that the poem is

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written for the latter. In either case “poetry” is perhaps not so muchsacrificed or chastened as it is exalted.

Volatile because creation is restless, virtually indefatigable, Marvell'verse discovers structures within structures. If he were writing now, hewould take account of fractals and other instances of asymmetrical synecdoche and nonlinear dynamics. Take “On a Drop of Dew,” almost assmall a subject as anyone in his day imagined (although Marvell himselfin this very poem conjures the dewdrop' “own Tear”), which subject heexpatiates on and treats in a prosodic scheme intricately irregular enoughto make one want to consider this poem (along with “The Coronet”) inthe development of the English Pindaric, which Marvell' contemporary Abraham Cowley virtually invented in 1656 (about the time that Marvellwas writing this poem) and which tradition runs on through Dryden'ode to Anne Killigrew and Wordsworth' “Intimations” ode. The poem'Neoplatonic conceit is well known: looking in the morning at a dewdropin a rosebush and foreseeing its evaporation by the sun later in the day, the poet discovers a metaphor for the soul that will return to heaven, itsorigin. (This cycle is a poetic staple into the twentieth century, when wefind it, for example, in Sylvia Plath' “Ariel.”) Marvell' poem emphasizeseverywhere the circularity inherent in the process. From the first letterof the title, through the initial letter of the first salient word, Orient (which here implies “eastern,” because the rising sun is in view, and means“brilliant” or “lustrous”), the configuration of the dewdrop, as well as that of both the drop' “Tear” and “the World,” to the final image of“th'Almighty Sun,” where the reader mindful of the Christian contextwill substitute the last o (for the u in Sun), the poem continually circlesitself.

This circularity manifests itself in part in terms of the natural cycle'balanced antitheses and parallelisms. The drop of dew, understood alsoto represent “the Soul” by the middle of the poem (the pertinent sentencebegins with line 19 of 40 total lines), is poised on the flower:

	In how coy a Figure wound,
	Every way it turns away:
	So the World excluding round,
	Yet receiving in the Day.
	Dark beneath, but bright above:
	Here disdaining, there in Love.
	How loose and easie hence to go:
	How girt and ready to ascend.
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	Moving but on a point below,
	It all about does upward bend.

The dewdrop or soul is dark or melancholy because of its separation fromthe Godhead and yet bright or hopeful of reunion, disdainful of theworldly and drawn to the heavenly, eager to depart the earth. In thisrespect this passage recalls earlier phrases indicating the soul' nostalgiafor its origin, such as its being “careless of its Mansion new” (the rosebush,“the humane flow'r”) and its shining “with a mournful Light\…\Because so long divided from the Sphear” (the celestial orb, heaven).

What we have yet to take into account is, first, Marvell' eroticizing ofthe language and, then, his poem' corresponding insistent materiality, thequality he attributes to the dewdrop when he marvels at “how coy a Figurewound” it makes. To be “in Love” and yet “disdaining” is precisely—isn'tit?—to be “coy” in two senses. One of the more captivating instances ofwhat Roland Barthes dubbed an enantioseme,^[9] a self-opposing verbal sign(in contemporary American English cf. cleave [vb.], ravel [vb.], fast [adj.]), coy means on the one hand modest or secluded or even inaccessible and on the other hand affecting reserve or artful or even lascivious. Whether Marvell' “Coy Mistress” is Janus-faced in such a way, as Robert Herrick'antiprecisianist model in “Delight in Disorder” certainly is, is debatable. But one can hardly dispute the presence of the paradox in this case, asthe poem proceeds to show. Even as the soul or drop of dew always “turnsaway” and is “excluding round,” retentive of its integrity, or virginal, wefind it also “receiving in the Day,” or admitting the ordinary. Moreover, loose meant to Marvell (as it does to us) both “unattached” and “morallylax” or “promiscuous,” as well as “loosely clad; ungirt; naked” (a senseevoked partly by the appearance of girt in the following line), whereas easie meant not only “free from constraint” but also “unchaste” (as it stilldoes). In the line in which the soul is “girt and ready to ascend,” then, the religious allusion to the virtuous, well-prepared soul (cf. Proverbs 31:17, Ephesians 6:14) contradicts or qualifies the phrase “loose and easie,” which has secular and erotic overtones.

My point is that the drop of dew as presented in these lines is hardlythat monad of purity, that dram of unalloyed essence suggested earlier inthe poem, where we are told with fitting succinctness—if not indeed withbrachylogical license—that it “Round in its self incloses,” which is to sayencloses a bit of that “clear Region where 'twas born” so that it, “in itslittle Globes Extent,\ Frames as it can its native Element.” Its spiritualitynow appears tinged with sensuousness. Do we begin to resolve the paradox

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if we suppose that Marvell is drawing on the tradition whereby the resurrected soul is the ardent bride of Christ? He certainly invokes it elsewhere, as in “Upon Appleton House,” where a cloistered nun providesthis glimpse of her convent' continuous preparation for what a campierspirit might call the ultimate prom:

	… our chast Lamps we hourly trim,
	Lest the great Bridegroom find them dim.
	Our Orient Breaths perfumed are
	With insense of incessant Pray'r.

My feeling, however, is that the venerable allegorical figure, with its rigidtenor and vehicle (the bride is to the soul as the bridegroom is to Christ), would be a Procrustean imposition on the pertinent lines in “On a Dropof Dew,” which are—in the basic sense—lubricious. Let' look again, forexample, at these lines on the dewdrop:

	How it the purple flow'r does slight,
	Scarce touching where it lyes,
	But gazing back upon the Skies,
	Shines with a mournful Light;
	Like its own Tear…

This passage is an erotic knot of regret and longing. On the one hand, because the rose is “purple,” it has ecclesiastical associations with the sorrowful and the penitent so that the dewdrop' shrinking from the floweramounts to a renunciation of renunciation or a yearning for transport—although at the same time the virginal dewdrop is itself explicitly “mournful” as it gazes moistly up at—its lover? On the other hand, if purple means “royal” or “splendid,” the dewdrop' aversion to the worldly (anaversion itself not unalloyed: “scarce touching” has its flirtatious overtones) involves an attraction to the otherworldly so strong that it seemsphysical. In the last analysis, then, the sexual and the spiritual simplycannot be teased apart. That “native Element” the soul embodies constitutes a comparable complexity because Marvell rapidly identifies “the Soul” not only with “that Drop” of dew that instigated the poem but alsowith “that Ray\ Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day” that draws thedew heavenward and implicitly transmutes it. Moreover, the primordiallight itself was or is already fluid, if we attend to the term Fountain. Liquidity and light, precipitation and evaporation, are intervolved.

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So, one might argue, or indeed has begun to argue, are sensuousnessand spirituality. That relationship is perhaps one reason for Marvell' concluding the poem with his reference to the manna as described in Exodus. Pierre Legouis pointed out some time ago the aesthetic problem presentedby the last four lines, which suddenly introduce an image “slightly different from that of the dew”^[10] and which might almost seem a superfluouscoda:

	Such did the Manna' sacred Dew destil;
	White, and intire, though congeal'd and chill.
	Congeal'd on Earth: but does, dissolving, run
	Into the Glories of th'Almighty Sun.

“Such” connects “the Soul” with “the Manna,” which seems to have beendistilled from a “sacred Dew.” In other words, as the drop of dew provides Marvell with a paradigm for the soul, so the soul now serves as his modelfor the manna, with the result that he creates a kind of dialectical progression. But the manna, as Legouis complains, is not the dew. The Bibleclearly distinguishes the dew that evaporated earlier in the morning fromthe manna that remained for the Israelites to gather, and in fact Marvellhimself sharply contrasts the two in “Upon Appleton House,” stanza 51. One difference is that the manna, although not natural, is more substantial and nutritional. Although according to Exodus the ungathered mannaitself finally dissolves, rather like the dew, it is clearly divine, althoughsomehow material—and even insistently so, because it is “congeal'd and chill…on Earth” and thus linked by virtue of the overtones of death-in-life with the corporeal self. Again, Marvell, an ineluctably worldly poettempted to transcendence—mercurial, hermetic—cannot let us thinkspirituality apart from materiality.

Marvell' is a metaphysics of double agency in an even more basic sense. As messenger of the gods and as psychopomp, Hermes or Mercury—godof roads and commerce as well as of invention and theft—blurs all bordersin the crossing of them. Beyond the relationship between the spiritualand the sensuous is the relationship between the naked concepts of division and unicity, or (to be Germanic) boundableness and boundlessness. This relationship is the matter Marvell addresses in “The Definition of Love,” beginning with the paradoxical title, given that the Latinate Definition signifies a demarcating of ends or boundaries whereas the fourletter Anglo-Saxon word Love implies an overcoming or obliterating ofsuch distinctions. A few readers of this poem think of it as an “expression

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of passionate ardour” for a particular woman (Legouis), and almost everyone emphasizes its “high abstract tone” (Bush), and at least one sees itspecifically as an allegory motivated by “the love of the embodied soulfor its heavenly life” (Ann Berthoff).^[11] I myself think that its subject, romantically motivated or not, turns out to be the relationship (at onceerotic, mathematical, and metaphysical) between the plural and the singular or the different and the identical. If not the “female” and the “male,” the beloved and the lover.

The prosodic and rhetorical schemes in “The Definition of Love” themselves generate divisions and convergences as alluring and intricate as thosein an astrolabe, or one kind of astrolabe, to appropriate an instrument Marvell refers to in his sixth stanza. The poem' opening lines containsome stark instances:

	My Love is of a birth as rare
	As 'tis for object strange and high:
	It was begotten by despair
	Upon Impossibility.

The abab quatrain itself adumbrates the theme—as couplets, for instance, could not—because it separates the rhymes yet binds them together inone stanza. Again, in the opening lines, the line break intervenes betweenthe speaker' “Love” and its “object,” and the closing pair of lines, whichfunction as a unit and bring together the progenitors of this rare love, undermine the postulate of separation. That is, if “despair” and “Impossibility” can come together to produce a “Love,” surely that love, nomatter how uncommon, and its object are not necessarily forever separate. Indeed, if we hark back to the overtones of words in the opening lines, we will find some preliminary mitigation of the lovers' separation. Rare means not just “exceptional” or “infrequent,” and not only that plus “setdistantly apart” (cf. Milton: “Among the trees in pairs they rose, theywalked;\ Those rare and solitairie, these in flocks”),^[12] but also less compacted, or closer to the empyrean, as fire is rarer than air and thereforethe highest of the elements. And because that is the case, rare and high, which seem at first markers of an insuperable difference, are virtual semantic rhymes that serve to draw the speaker' “Love” and its “object” together.

The agonistic relationship between union and division twists the fourthstanza into its tortuous shape:

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	For Fate with jealous Eye does see
	Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
	Their union would her ruine be,
	And her Tyrannick pow'r depose.

The second line above, whose fulcrum is nor, sets perfection against completion in an elegant paradox. To be “perfect,” the “Loves” would haveto “close,” it might seem; but precisely because perfection entails integrity, union is obviated. In other words, on the one hand, the loves are “perfect” because they cannot “close” or merge; but on the other hand, because theycannot merge, they cannot “close” or conclude and hence are immortal.(Or do I mean mortal?) Meanwhile, the third line pairs union with theappropriately imperfectly rhyming ruine, and the last word, depose, disposes with dispatch of any “close” or resolution we might have beenimagining. In the last analysis, then, perfection and endlessness impossiblyoppose and unite with each other.

In the second stanza, the first distich, if I may call it that—an independent clause that concerns the speaker' “Despair” at separation (or dispairing) from his beloved, that “divine… thing”—opposes the seconddistich, a dependent clause whose subject is the “Hope” that is all toomortal:

	Magnanimous Despair alone
	Could show me so divine a thing,
	Where feeble Hope could ne'r have flown
	But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

Because it takes two wings to fly, that Marvell' rhyme scheme seems tooblige him to use the singular and therefore pathetic “Wing” is convenient. In this as in most of his stanzas—with the possible exception ofthe fifth and the definite exception of the last—the quatrains fall into twoparts. Here is the eighth and concluding stanza, the piece de reésistance:

	Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
	But Fate so enviously debarrs,
	Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
	And Opposition of the Stars.

This final stanza is the only one in the poem in which a subject and apredicate are split across—or override—the distich division. Elsewhere,

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the first distich is separated syntactically from the second, even thoughthe rhymes make the lines mesh like gears. To put that another way, thisis the single stanza in which the syntax really enforces the interlacing abab quatrain and helps it tie a Gordian knot.

Let me approach this concluding stanza from another direction. Thepoem numbers thirty-two lines, so there are sixteen rhymes—or eightpairs. Most of the rhyme words highlight either the theme of separation(which is to say division) or that of union (convergence). As it happens, the words of the first kind predominate in the opening three stanzas. Italicizing these words, I'll paraphrase this part of the poem in a fashionthat is perhaps tedious—but not, I hope, factitious or eristic: “My loveis exceptional or rare. It is for a remote being, an object high beyond myreach, and it is the paradoxical product of the equally sterile despair and impossibility. My despair is the result of dispairing or of realizing how alone I am and how nonpareil is my beloved, an isolated thing apart, whohas in effect flown where I cannot follow, because I am—without her—but a single wing. I might arrive there, where she has been fixt like a star, and where my soul already is, if it weren't for Fate, which must drive itself betwixt us.”

With the exception of arrive these key end words point to separation. In the fifth stanza, the first two end words, steel and plac'd, echoing the“Iron wedges” of the third stanza, do so as well. (We might notice inpassing, however, that in that earlier stanza the speaker also identified hisdistant beloved with his own “extended Soul.”) But the following twoend words, wheel and embrac'd, might suggest union, and so in contextdo most of the subsequent rhymes: as Heaven might fall into Earth, sothe lovers might be all one, like the celestial poles in a planisphere, and all would be well because they would greet and meet each other who hadanyway by nature been truly parallel. Meanwhile, the printed poem isitself a “Planisphere,” an instrument that projects cosmic spheres on a flatsurface and conjoins the heavenly antipodes. As Marvell explains in stanzas 5 and 6, the speaker and his beloved are analogous to the celestial North and South Poles, separated always—except in the case of the planisphere. The poem' own “Lines,” “truly Paralel” in a visual sense on thepage and sometimes parallel syntactically, “meet” in the tropes they compose. Among these conceits is precisely the “oblique” comparison of thepoetic lines to lovers, who are by virtue of the poem—like the lovers in“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” whose author has to have known “The Definition of Love” by heart—forever joined in their disjunction.

In view of this paradox perhaps the most peculiar line in “The

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Definition of Love” is the penult, where “Love” is described in part as“the Conjunction of the Mind.” Now it might well be that we are simplymeant to understand the plural “minds,” especially given that “Mind” isthe sphere of the psychic powers (including the emotional, the volitional, the intellectual), but the use of the singular here strikes me as even morepointed than that in the second stanza' “Wing,” let alone the fourthstanza' “Eye.” The grammar stubbornly interrogates itself: how can anentity conjoin? One response would seem to be, it could do so if it werealso more than one thing, if its unicity entailed plurality. If this notion isflatly contradictory, that' perhaps a reason for us to think of God. Godis after all Bacon' “mind” inherent in the “universal frame” and Locke'“eternal infinite mind who made and governs all things.” If this universal“Mind” were relevant, the latent Christian hierarchy might dictate thelovers' ultimate or essential conjunction because nature' mechanisms arein God' hands. (“Our love is the engagement of [1] the Divine Mindwith [2] the stars' opposition to us, and the outcome is inevitable.”) And indeed we might hear at the poem' end not “the Stars” or unfortunatedestiny but the rhyme,“debarrs” with “Stars.” Even the debarring starsare made to pair up, so to speak. Who is to tell the green thought fromthe green shade?

So even as other strategies have demonstrated the lovers' division, forcesof convergence have been brought to bear. The basic issue here involvesthe relationship between one and two, or unicity and plurality, or identityand difference. Rather than simply pitting them against each other, Marvell entangles—or rather reveals the entanglement of—Love and Fate, which are other names for the archetypal paramours and nemeses that this poem always concerns. It' not only that human lovers have spiritualaffinities and practical obstacles, or even that (as courtly love decrees) truelove is possible only in abstinence, but also that Affinity and Obstaclethemselves are forever in an embrace or encounter. It is this poem' discovery that duality and unity are hopelessly bound up. In the last quatrain, where bind and Mind rhyme, as do debarrs and Stars, the endgame mightseem to result in a draw, then—unless we were to insist that the “Stars” and therefore the elements of “Opposition” or plurality get literally thelast word. In that case our dialectic might demand that we attend to theparallelism of the last two ostensibly antithetical lines and notice that Conjunction and Opposition are themselves conjoined; dual predicatenominatives of “Love,” they are the doves that draw the mythic carriage, to turn things around and put them in their proper order. Here the courtlyprinciple extends itself implicitly into metaphysics: Conjunction and Opposition

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themselves—Identity and Difference, Unicity and Plurality—depend on each other. There is a deep sense in which they are the lovers: intertwined, slippery, indivisible forever.

But in the beginning I swore allegiance to the quotidian. So I'll conclude with what is one of the least metaphysical (if nonetheless confounding) of Marvell' lyrics, “The Gallery,” which is also one of the mostcaptivating portraits of the “cruel lover” in the early seventeenth century, the golden era of that jaundiced genre. Although the poem' effect, chieflya function of the relationship between structure and tone, presupposesthe reader' acceptance of it as a dramatic monologue, the speaker' addressto his lover, which comprises eight stanzas, at no point contains a hint ofthe atrabilious. Indeed, there' almost nothing “personal” about it, thanksin part to the poem' rigorous adherence to its central figure, accordingto which the beloved' various moods and acts appear as descriptions ofdifferent painted portraits of her. From the outset, the speaker' “Soul” (or “Mind”—here anima and mens are used interchangeably, perhaps because the speaker' “several lodgings” or psychic compartments have beencombined “into one”) is insistently a “Gallery” devoted to “Pictures” ofthe beloved. (If he were writing the poem today, I suspect, Marvell'metaphor would have been a filmic montage.)

In the first stanza she—her name is Clora—is courteously invited totour and judge the speaker' memorial collection of portraits of her:

	Clora come view my Soul, and tell
	Whether I have contriv'd it well.
	Now all its several lodgings lye
	Compos'd into one Gallery;
	And the great Arras-hangings, made
	Of various Faces, by are laid;
	That, for all furniture you'l find
	Only your Picture in my Mind.

The scaldingly curatorial second stanza comes out of nowhere:

	Here Thou art painted in the Dress
	Of an Inhumane Murtheress;
	Examining upon our Hearts
	Thy fertile Shop of cruel Arts:
	Engines more keen than ever yet
	Adorned Tyrants Cabinet;
― 238 ―
	Of which the most tormenting are
	Black Eyes, red Lips, and curled Hair.

How gently, how conventionally, how utterly contrarily this stanza' firstand last lines frame the other six, with their overtones of Grand Guignol, and thus permit the transition to the sharply contrasting third stanza. Hardly has the shocked reader taken in the enormity of Clora' deeds (among them a promiscuity that just barely warrants mention in that plural “our Hearts”) than he or she is whisked back into la vie en rose inthe stanza on Aurora:

	But, on the other side, th'art drawn
	Like to Aurora in the Dawn;
	When in the East she slumb'ring lyes,
	And stretches out her milky Thighs;
	While all the morning Quire does sing,
	And Manna falls, and Roses spring;
	And, at thy Feet, the wooing Doves
	Sit perfecting their harmless Loves.

If these lines strike us right off as a touch saccharine, not to say uberous, they seem the less so for being somewhat reassuring after the precedingglimpse of horrors.

No sooner have we settled back into plush clicheé, however, than Marvell' speaker switches vocabulary again. Resuming the murder plot fromthe second stanza, he confronts the beloved with scenes of her handiwork, including a grisly haruspication (divination by means of entrails, whichof course presumes a disemboweling) and the subsequent disposal of theoffal:

	Like an Enchantress here thou show't,
	Vexing thy restless Lover' Ghost;
	And, by a Light obscure, dost rave
	Over his Entrails, in the Cave;
	Divining thence, with horrid Care,
	How long thou shalt continue fair;
	And (when inform'd) them throw't away,
	To be the greedy Vultur' prey.

It' with a sense of balance satisfied and with some relief that we come tothe fifth stanza, enchanting enough to conjure both Enobarbus' report

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of Cleopatra on the Nile and Botticelli' representation of the birth of Venus:

	But, against that, thou sit't a float
	Like Venus in her pearly Boat,
	The Halcyons, calming all that' nigh,
	Betwixt the Air and Water fly.
	Or, if some rowling Wave appears,
	A Mass of Ambergris it bears.
	Nor blows more Wind than what may well
	Convoy the Perfume to the Smell.

The poem comes to a seeming conclusion in stanza 6, which summarizesall of the “Pictures” in the psychic gallery and recommends them aboveeven those in the collections of Charles I and the dukes of Mantua in Italy:

	These Pictures and a thousand more,
	Of Thee, my Gallery do store;
	In all the Forms thou can't invent
	Either to please me, or torment:
	For thou alone to people me,
	Art grown a num'rous Colony;
	And a Collection choicer far
	Then or White-hall', or Mantua' were.

And thus “The Gallery” might neatly enough have ended.

“But,” as the actual final stanza begins (like stanzas 3 and 5—Marvellis the poet of “but”), it does not. Instead of a bland summary, we end onwhat seems a sweet and pastoral note, apparently meant to confirm thethird and fifth stanzas' amatory views of the seductive lover:

	But, of these Pictures and the rest,
	That at the Entrance likes me best:
	Where the same Posture, and the Look
	Remains, with which I first was took.
	A tender Shepherdess, whose Hair
	Hangs loosely playing in the Air,
	Transplanting Flow'rs from the green Hill,
	To crown her Head, and Bosome fill.

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This “extra” stanza, then (rather like the “extra” lines at the end of “ADialogue between the Self and Body”), unbalances the poem. But inwhich direction, in the last analysis? By cagily deferring until now theportrait that was at “the Entrance” of both the little exhibit and therelationship (the poet' presentation of the portraits thus differs significantly from the speaker' physical arrangement of them), Marvell introduces us only at the end of the tour to the fairest, most innocent versionof his mistress. This concluding yet original figure is not “Like to Aurora” or “Like Venus,” with the overtones of calculation and artificiality that those similes imply, but simply “A tender Shepherdess.” Are we to gatherthat the original beloved was an innocent who was later somehow to fallinto sadistic perfidy? Or is to think along such lines to be taken in anew?

Like the term loose in “On a Drop of Dew,” loosely is surely loaded, and“Transplanting” gleams with irony, given that Clora has plucked or cutthe flowers in order to adorn herself and to seduce admirers. It' nottransplantation but violation that we witness here (as in stanza 3 of “The Garden”). Moreover, seeing fit to “crown” herself, Clora might comeacross as a usurping “Tyrant” (my term harks back to stanza 2), as well asa “Murtheress” and an “Enchantress,” and the flowers might substitutefor trophies. If so, among the trophies would be the speaker' heart. Inthis light the “Posture” of “tender Shepherdess” would appear to be theinvidious mistress' masterwork of disguise.

At the same time, there' no denying the appeal to the speaker of that“tender Shepherdess.” Unless we take him to be a kind of dotard, then, the poet leaves us with a predicament: in spite of his damning knowledgeof her, if not indeed because of it, the speaker worships this woman. Forthe poet, if not for the speaker, her name, Clora, would have strongovertones of verdancy and fecundity, green thoughts and green shades. Isshe—in her endless variety and various illumination—Marvell' volatile Muse? Is she about to stride even now at the green light—or against thered: it makes no difference—across the intersection of Hollywood and Vine? I have to think so.

NOTES

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