World Enough and Time (12 page)

But in 1654 Marvell was still Cromwell's unofficial laureate. Around April of that year, the date of the signing of a treaty with the Queen of Sweden, he probably wrote the two Latin epigrams,
‘In Effigiem Oliveri Cromwell'
– a couplet praising an image that frightens his enemies and provides security to his people – and
‘In eandem Reginae Sueciae transmissam',
a slightly longer poem designed to accompany a portrait sent to the Queen (and once attributed to Milton), which praises her as the virgin Queen of the north (
‘Bellipotens Virgo'
) and Cromwell as the agent of the people's will. He may already have started work on a longer poem celebrating Cromwell's first anniversary as Lord Protector, a title he had assumed on 16 December 1653.

On 2 June, Marvell wrote from Eton to Milton at his home in Petty France in London, referring to having presented a copy of Milton's newly published
Defensio Secunda
to Bradshaw. Marvell's own reaction to this Latin work, a continuation of Milton's defence of the regicides that also contained some autobiographical passages and reflections on his blindness, was not a little hyperbolic: ‘I shall now studie it even to the getting of it by Heart: esteeming it to my poor Judgement (which yet I wish it were so right in all Things else) as the most compendious Scale, for so much, to the Height of the Roman eloquence.'
14
After rather more in this vein, including an analogy with the spiralling imperialist narrative of Trajan's column in Rome, which Marvell would have examined in 1645 and ‘in whose winding ascent we see imboss'd the severall Monuments of your learned victoryes', Marvell concludes with ‘an affectionate Curiosity' to know the latest news about Colonel Overton, who had been Governor of Hull since 1647 and had just met Milton. The letter suggests a regular and continuing intimacy between the two poets, though no other correspondence has survived from this time. Two years more would elapse, however, before they were finally working together.
15

Marvell's celebration of Cromwell's first year as Lord Protector, ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.', was written presumably to be circulated in time for the anniversary on 16 December 1654 but it was not published until the following year. The printer was Thomas Newcomb, the government printer, which suggests that Cromwell's men were pleased to see it circulated as propaganda. Its author was not disclosed.

Though not as great a poem as the ‘Horatian Ode', the poem is a complex, less dispassionate exploration of Cromwell's rule. Critics have interpreted it, variously, as simple praise, as a call to Cromwell to institute a new kingly dynasty, or as an attempt to portray Cromwell as a Davidic king. It is certainly not crudely propagandist, although it celebrates Cromwell and defends him against the charge that he had assumed arbitrary power and deplores his critics, particularly the radical sectarians who opposed him. It has the same gift for graceful and memorable epithet which marked the ‘Ode': ‘'Tis he the force of scatter'd Time contracts,/And in one Year the work of Ages acts.' After celebrating Cromwell's political virility the poem praises his ability to forge a harmonious polity: ‘Such was that wondrous Order and Consent,/When
Cromwell
tun'd the ruling Instrument.' Marvell's readiness to trust in power and the fateful moment is evident in the portrayal:

Hence oft I think, if in some happy Hour

High Grace should meet in one with highest Pow'r,

And then a seasonable People still

Should bend to his, as he to Heavens will,

What we might hope, what wonderful Effect

From such a wish'd Conjuncture might reflect.

Alas, the people are not always seasonable and Utopian hopes are thwarted by human folly. Cromwell's ability to survive ‘ponyarding Conspiracies' and a coach accident in Hyde Park (in September of that year) only makes him seem stronger and more predestined. Marvell returns to the theme of Cromwell's selfless abandonment of private life to serve the public good that he had explored in the ‘Ode': ‘Resigning up thy Privacy so dear,/To turn the headstrong Peoples Charioteer'. Where he was, in the earlier poem, a thunderbolt, he is here ‘a small Cloud' that swells to a drenching, beneficent, rainstorm ‘Which to the thirsty Land did plenty bring,/But though forewarn'd, o'r-took and wet the King.' This seems a rather weak metaphor to describe the violence of the regicide, but it reveals Marvell's conviction at this time – in contrast to his position twenty years later – that the King's fate was inevitable. Cromwell, in what he did, was a divine agent (‘an higher Force him push'd') and strong decisive government is preferred by Marvell to undisciplined plebiscite: ‘'Tis not a Freedome, that where All command;/Nor Tyranny, where One does them withstand'. For this reason Marvell is bitterly condemnatory of the Fifth Monarchy men and cognate sectarians – ‘Accursed Locusts' – who gleefully pounce on every political wobble of the strong leader. After a passage of envious praise put into the mouths of foreign rulers the poem ends with a salute to the man who ‘as the
Angel
of our Commonweal,/Troubling the Waters, yearly mak'st them Heal.'

The celebration of Cromwell, buttressed by classical and Biblical allusions that gave it a more epic resonance throughout, would have done Marvell's burgeoning career in the state no harm at all.

8

A Fine and Private Place

Rather at once our Time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r.

The period of the English Civil War and its aftermath was a time of great religious as well as political ferment in England. Millenarian sects – the ‘Accursed Locusts' of ‘The First Anniversarie' – swarmed around the body politic and even mainstream politicians saw themselves as the instruments of God. In the 1650s the Puritans interpreted their task as establishing the rule of the saints. Ordinary Protestants as well as the millenarians pressed forward with their demands. On 25 May 1653 a petition was presented from the Kentish Churches to Cromwell offering advice, ‘judging this a season in which the Lord doth especially call for the free contribution of his people to the work which through so much blood, etc. he hath wrestled into their hands'.
1
There was an expectation, in the more enthused, that at this glorious time many of the last things forecast in the Book of Revelation might come to pass, one of which was the conversion of the Jews. In August 1653 another petition to Parliament suggested that the Jews should be invited into the Commonwealth ‘for there [
sic
] time is neere at hand'.
2

Some scholars have been persuaded by this evidence to see the reference in Marvell's most famous poem, ‘To his Coy Mistress', to ‘the Conversion of the
Jews
', as evidence of its contemporaneity with that national mood, lending the poem an additional touch of playful irony. Others have taken another reference in the poem to the speaker loving his mistress, did time allow, ‘ten years before the Flood', to mean it was written in 1646, because contemporaries like Raleigh in his
History of the World
(1614) forecast the Flood in
anno mundi
1656.
3
Of the two dates, 1653 is a little more persuasive, but the risk of premature certainty in dating Marvell's poems must always be avoided. It is, however, not unreasonable to consider the poem at this point.

Marvell was aged thirty-two and unmarried. In the opinion of John Aubrey he was a reserved man of few words – not, perhaps, an ardent lover and wooer. ‘To his Coy Mistress' inevitably raises the question about the identity of its addressee. There is a long tradition in literary biography of attempting to identify the poet's mistress – Dante's Beatrice, Arnold's Marguerite – which sometimes meets with success, but often is no more than an innocuous and pleasant detective game. Nothing is known, unfortunately, about Marvell's mistress except what can be inferred from the poem itself, which is cast in the form of a highly literary exercise drawing on many traditional devices and themes, though Marvell, characteristically, gives it a wholly individual and original flavour. There could well have been no mistress at all. Unlike the amatory poems of John Donne where the extremity of erotic feeling, the reckless
hubris
of sexual love, is rendered sometimes with a startling intensity that is almost palpable, ‘To his Coy Mistress' is never less than controlled, witty, in command of itself, its soaring moments of eloquence just that, not cries of unchecked passion. The extraordinary effect of the writing lies in something else. Two arguments, however, may be exercised on the other side. The first is that poets invariably
do
root their poems in experience, actual lived experience.
4
The second is that the poem contains an oddly specific detail – ‘I by the Tide/Of
Humber
would complain' – locating the specific poet in a specific place. Could his mistress have been a young woman from Hull, kept in touch with during the years in London, more easily while in Yorkshire, and again since? He was in contact with the town throughout his life, visiting relatives, taking business advice from in-laws, and, later, acting as its Member of Parliament. To have kept a mistress there would not have been beyond the bounds of possibility. But those who date the poem in 1646, when he was either in Italy or Spain, have cast a young Italian or Spanish woman in the role. Coming to the end of his foreign trip, Marvell would have reason to emphasise the urgency of enjoying a love that might soon have to be cut short. And, finally, there is the question, discussed more fully later, of whether Marvell possessed any ardency at all towards the opposite sex.

Certainly, the literary precedents for the poem are many and obvious. The central theme comes from the famous ode of Horace (Book I.11), with its cry of
‘carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero'
(seize this moment, place the least possible trust in the future). The spoor of Marvell's more immediate contemporaries is also found on the poem, in particular, Abraham Cowley's poem ‘The Mistress', first published in 1647 in a collection with that name. Cowley (1618–67) was a precocious poet who wrote his first verse-romance at the age of ten. When the Civil War broke out he joined the Royalist side with a satire, ‘The Puritan and the Papist', and a political epic, ‘The Civil War'. He was later imprisoned as a Royalist spy but at the Restoration was more or less rehabilitated. Charles II said at his death: ‘That Mr Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England.' The correspondences between Cowley's poem and Marvell's are thematic and even linguistic. The phrase ‘vast
Eternity
' in Cowley passes straight into Marvell's poem but in the seventeenth century, which took for granted allusiveness and echo and reference back to poetic precedent, the charge of plagiarism would not even have arisen.

‘To his Coy Mistress', now considered one of the great canonical poems in the English poetic tradition, has attracted a corresponding body of criticism but, like most poems of its kind, its greatness lies in a certain quality of resistance. No one can ever quite manage to have the last word on it and, in spite of its allusiveness, it has an immediate intelligibility, a direct appeal to the reader. Unlike Marvell's satires and long poems it can be read happily without recourse to footnotes. The poet Philip Larkin was probably thinking of this poem when he wrote:

What still compels attention to Marvell's work is the ease with which he manages the fundamental paradox of verse – the conflict of natural word usage with metre and rhyme – and marries it either to hallucinatory images within his own unique conventions or to sudden sincerities that are as convincing in our age as in his.
5

Those ‘hallucinatory images' and ‘sudden sincerities' abound in a poem that is structured around an argument or logical syllogism. Numerous grave and censorious scholars have come forward to point out that the strict rules of the syllogism are not properly adhered to by the poet. John Crowe Ransom, a key member of the 1940s movement known as ‘the New Criticism', wrote in a book with that title that the poem's argument contains lamentable ‘indeterminacies that would be condemned in the prose of scientists, and also of college freshmen'.
6
Were the average college freshman, however, able to write a poem of the calibre of ‘To his Coy Mistress' it might prove possible to excuse him.

The poem has, even the New Critics would agree, a witty logic, and falls into three short movements or verse paragraphs:

‘Had we but World enough, and Time…'

[there would be no urgency]

‘But at my back I alwaies hear…'

[the pressure of passing time denies us that leisure]

‘Now therefore…'

[it is imperative that we seize the moment while we can]

The language of the poem is smoothly flowing and witty. ‘My vegetable Love should grow/Vaster then empires, and more slow' is a surprising but nonetheless effective image of the leisurely, incremental growth of a relationship, although some scholars have rebuked the common reader for assuming that this is a culinary rather than a Metaphysical term, offering this (speaking perhaps truer than they purposed) as ‘a typical example of how Marvell is misread'.
7
Similarly, the concluding image of the two lovers rolling up all their pleasure and passion into a ball which tears – like a Parliamentary cannonball crashing through the gates of a Cavalier park – ‘Thorough the iron gates of Life' is striking and arresting. But the most memorable lines of the poem, falling out with that instant memorability, that sense of inevitability in the phrasing – how could it possibly have been put better? – that characterise the greatest poetry, are the central lines, which point to the need for love to vanquish the force of time and human mortality by doing the one thing in its power: seizing the day.