World Enough and Time (10 page)

Bind me ye
Woodbines
in your 'twines,

Curle me about ye gadding
Vines,

And Oh so close your Circles lace,

That I may never leave this Place:

But, lest your Fetters prove too weak,

Ere I your Silken Bondage break,

Do you,
O Brambles,
chain me too,

And courteous
Briars
nail me through.

The poem ends with the arrival of
‘young Maria',
who ‘like a
sprig of Misleto,
/On the
Fairfacian Oak
does grow'. She is the only child of the Fairfaxes and Marvell refers to their hopes in her. Disappointed at the absence of a male heir they have made ‘their
Destiny
their
Choice
' and placed all their hopes for the future in Mary Fairfax. She would die, childless, as the Duchess of Buckingham in 1704, but for now she is seen as the centre of an imagined, prelapsarian world of beauty and innocence:
‘Heaven's Center, Nature's Lap/And Paradice's only Map.'
The sky is now growing dark and they must move in. In a final extravagant image – for which Marvell's knuckles were rapped by T.S. Eliot, but which is one of the most delightful and witty in the poem – the darkening sky is compared to the dark leather coracle that the salmon-fishers hoist: ‘And, like
Antipodes
in Shoes,/Have shod their
Heads
in their
Canoos
'.

Marvell's other topographical poem to Fairfax, ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow', concerns another house owned by Fairfax at Bilborough, a few miles from Nun Appleton. The hill referred to is, in that flat country, a rather risible eminence of 145 feet which Marvell claims in the poem can be used by seamen on the Humber as a landmark. It is ‘a perfect Hemisphere' with ‘a soft access and wide' which may be why, as a local farmer told the present author in 1997: ‘Folk ski off it in winter.' Again, Marvell alludes to the military past of Fairfax:

Much other Groves, say they, then these

And other Hills him once did please.

Through Groves of Pikes he thunder'd then,

And Mountains rais'd of dying Men.

The poem concludes that Fairfax does not want those hills without the corresponding groves: ‘Nor Height but with Retirement loves'. The suggestion seems to be that he needs both the active and the contemplative life and Marvell, in his poems to his patron, seems to be holding him to that balance, reminding him of the world left behind and his duty to it, as well as praising the pleasures of retirement.

‘The Garden' grants more allowance to the need for withdrawal. ‘How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the Oke, or Bayes', it begins, continuing in a mode of profound contemplation that does not seek to counterbalance every description of natural beauty with some allusion to politics or society or a call to the active life. It is thus different in temper from the Fairfax poems and may belong to a later date, when the need for calm reflection and quiet may have been more pressing. As a busy politician, Marvell often seemed in his correspondence to be rushed and harried. His letters of that period sometimes contain expressions of determination to go into the country to find the space to think and write. Although living in central London, during his years as an MP he spent some time in a cottage at Highgate, demolished in 1869 and now part of Waterlow Park. A memorial tablet in the wall of Lauderdale House, halfway up Highgate Hill, marks the putative spot of ‘Andrew Marvell's Cottage' today. Only one letter is actually dated from Highgate (24 June 1673), but there are several other references to going there in his correspondence. On 24 July 1675, for example, he wrote to his favourite nephew, William Popple, about being ‘resolved now to sequester my self one whole Day at
Highgate
'
7
and in another letter he apologised for a late reply to a letter, saying, ‘I am much out of Towne'
8
– probably a reference to a further spell in Highgate. His reputation for secrecy may have had as much to do with this need to find time to read and to compose as with darker intrigues.

The exclamation in ‘The Garden' – ‘Fair quiet, have I found thee here,/And Innocence thy Sister dear!/Mistaken long, I sought you then/In busie Companies of Men' – differs from the playful mock-languor of the Fairfax poems. There is an unqualified relish for seclusion – ‘Society is all but rude,/To this delicious Solitude' – and a frank sensual enjoyment of the fruits of the garden – ‘The Luscious Clusters of the Vine/Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine'. The governing antithesis of this poem, however, is not the simple Puritan pleasure versus ascetic purity of the pastoral-religious lyrics. From the sensual celebration of the fruits of the earth, Marvell passes not to renunciation or censoriousness. The movement is a transcendent one, to a mystical, disembodied rapture of pure contemplation that has left behind the poor world of mere sense:

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's made

To a green Thought in a green Shade.

The seductive smoothness and rhythm of these lines draws the reader into a contemplation of Marvell's garden-ecstasy, where all conscious intellectual activity and the world of actual sense melt into a Platonic idea of garden greenness, a sort of distilled essence of natural beauty, a ‘green Thought in a green Shade'. In his posthumous volume of
Miscellaneous Poems
Marvell uses the word ‘green' an extraordinary number of times, the colour operating as a potent symbol of the contemplative mood. The exalted state Marvell reaches in the poem, where his ‘Soul into the boughs does glide' like a bird, is compared with the Edenic state of unsexual bliss where pleasure was solitary: ‘Two Paradises 'twere in one/To live in Paradise alone'. Marvell never married and wrote many poems celebrating love without sex and the innocence that precedes sexual knowledge.

Marvell did not stay longer than two years at Nun Appleton, assuming he arrived there some time after November 1650 when he wrote the poem on the death of Tom May, perhaps as late as the beginning of 1651. Early in 1653 he was seeking an official government post, although the post he actually attained during the summer was another tutorial one. Two poems during 1651 can be accurately dated, the first being ‘To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty upon his Translation of the Popular Errors'. Witty was a Hull physician who translated a Latin treatise published in 1638 by another Hull doctor, James Primrose. Marvell's poem, together with a Latin one on the same theme, appeared among some commendatory verses to the translation, which seem to have been published very early in 1651, so he was thus still in contact with Hull during his Fairfacian retreat. The poem is of interest chiefly for its insight into Marvell's view of translation. He believed strongly that the translator should be servant of the text and not try to be clever at its expense. Too many translators ‘are Authors grown' and, by adding matter unnecessarily, ‘make the Book their own', a charge that could still be levelled at some poetic translators today. Translators who muddy the waters of good prose by their prolix additions are worse than those who miss out things from the original: ‘He is Translations thief that addeth more,' writes the poet.

The other poem was a Latin verse addressed to Oliver St John, who was chosen in February 1651 to undertake a mission to the United Provinces to negotiate an alliance with the Dutch. He reached the Hague on 17 March, but the mission was unsuccessful and he returned in June. The existence of the poem indicates that in Yorkshire Marvell was not isolated from the political world.

The hints of impatience with rural seclusion in the Fairfax poems make it unsurprising that Marvell was now looking for new employment. It is unlikely that the thirteen-year-old Mary had nothing more to learn in the field of foreign languages, but her tutor was getting restless. It was time to call in some favours. And Marvell's first approach was to another poet, John Milton.

7

A Gentleman Whose Name is Marvell

Cromwell had now dismissed the parliament by the authority of which he had destroyed monarchy, and commenced monarch himself, under the title of protector, but with kingly and more than kingly power.

Dr Johnson,
Life of Milton

In the period after Lord Fairfax retired to his Yorkshire estate to write poetry and collect medals, Oliver Cromwell had pressed ahead with the military action against the Scots from which Fairfax shrank. The following year, in 1651, Cromwell defeated Charles II at Worcester after his invasion of England, launched from Scotland. Cromwell was consolidating his power throughout this period. In 1653 he dissolved the Rump Parliament, choosing in its place the ‘Barebones' Parliament of impeccable Puritans whom he told: ‘Truly you are called by God to rule with him and for him.' By December 1653, however, Cromwell had clawed back the powers of the Barebones Parliament and styled himself Lord Protector. He refused the title of King but the matter of his acceptance of the crown continued to be debated and, in the view of some observers, Cromwell began to acquire the airs and graces of a monarch. For uncompromising republicans like Milton, however, Cromwell was the Great Helmsman, enjoying both temporal power and the additional convenience of having the endorsement of God. In his eulogy of Cromwell in the 1654
Defensio Secunda
– the latest polemical exchange in Milton's propaganda war in defence of the anti-Royalist cause – Milton called his Lord Protector
pater patriae
(father of the fatherland). The unsympathetic Tory, Dr Johnson, later remarked: ‘Caesar, when he assumed the perpetual dictatorship, had not more servile or more elegant flattery.'
1

Only weeks after the beheading of King Charles in 1649, Milton had been appointed Secretary for the Foreign Tongues and in that capacity the now blind poet and functionary dictated a letter to the President of the Council of State, John Bradshaw, on 21 February 1653:

…
there will be with you to morrow upon some occasion of busines a Gentleman whose name is Mr Marvile; a man whom both by report, & the converse I have had with him, of singular desert for the State to make use of; who alsoe offers himselfe, if there be any imployment for him. His father was the Minister of Hull & he hath spent foure yeares abroad in Holland, France, Italy, & Spaine, to very good purpose, as I beleeve, & the gaineing of those 4 languages; besides he is a scholler & well read in the Latin and Greeke authors, & noe doubt of an approved conversation, for he com's now lately out of the house of the Lord Fairfax who was Generall, where he was intrusted to give some instructions in the Languages to the Lady his Daughter. If upon the death of Mr Wakerley the Council shall thinke that I shall need any assistant in the performance of my place … it would be hard for them to find a Man soe fit every way for that purpose as this Gentleman.
2

Evidently, Milton did not consider the Fairfax connection to be a drawback, in spite of the former general's falling out with the Cromwellians. The letter shows him fully aware of Marvell's linguistic skills and scholarship, Milton's own being so formidable. The senior poet's willingness to praise others was so notoriously constrained that an encomium from him would be doubly valuable. Both author and recipient of this letter were fierce republicans. John Bradshaw had been President of the Parliamentary Commission to try the King in 1649 and his signature had headed the list on Charles's death warrant. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford keeps the high-crowned beaver hat lined with plated steel to ward off blows that he wore during that turbulent time. In a particularly grisly moment at the Restoration his was one of the corpses dug up and hanged in their coffins at Tyburn on 30 January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the regicide. Although Bradshaw would later oppose Cromwell's assumption of arbitrary power, he was at the time of Milton's letter an important figure in the government. Milton's entreaty, however, was fruitless. Marvell had to wait another four and a half years before gaining such a post. Perhaps Bradshaw was unwilling to favour a recent employee of the man who, unlike himself, had refused to sign the King's death warrant and whose wife had cried out in open court that he had more wit than to do so. The job went instead to Philip Meadows, later knighted and made ambassador to Denmark.

It is worth noting Milton's spelling of Marvell's name as ‘Marvile'. Its spelling on the baptismal register leaves no doubt that we have it right but English orthography was looser in those days and Marvell's name occurs in a variety of forms: Mervill, Mervile, Marvel, Mervail – all these by people who knew him well. Marvail was the spelling used by his fellow Hull MP Colonel Gilby. Current donnish practice is to pronounce Marvell's name with the stress on the second syllable (like the Irish patriot Parnell), but those of us who prefer to pronounce it as if Marvell were what he can so often seem, a prodigy in nature, may have equal warrant.

The letter of February 1653 is the first record of Marvell's acquaintance with Milton. The tradition that they met in Rome, deploring the papacy in the cloisters of the Vatican itself, is absurd, since by the time Marvell reached Rome Milton was back in London, teaching his schoolboy nephews in Aldersgate Street. The connection between the two poets – natural because of their common erudition and classicism, though the political temperature of the two differed markedly – would later serve Milton well when the enthusiastic defender of regicide found himself under threat of retaliation at the Restoration. It proved useful to have a friend in Parliament. When Milton had fallen from grace Marvell would visit him discreetly at his house in Jewin Street, Petty France in the early 1660s but probably less cautiously before the Restoration. Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, in his
Life of Mr John Milton
(1694) claimed that ‘he was frequently visited by persons of Quality … and … by particular Friends that had a high esteem for him,
viz
Mr Andrew Marvel'.
3
This was probably some time after Milton moved to Petty France on 17 December 1651. John Aubrey's brief life of Milton cites Marvell as being among the senior poet's ‘familiar learned Acquaintance'.
4
It has even been suggested that Marvell was the author of an anonymous life of Milton but the usual attribution now is Milton's friend Cyriack Skinner, the relative of the Mrs Skinner who figures in the story of the Reverend Andrew Marvell's drowning.
5
Marvell is also alleged to have helped Milton to write either his
Eikonoclastes
(1649) or his first
Defensio pro populo Anglicano
in 1651, which would imply an active collaboration between the two before and during the Nun Appleton residence, whereas the tone of Milton's 1653 letter is of one who has recently made Marvell's acquaintance. The evidence for Marvell's involvement in this tract is a letter from Anne Sadleir, Mrs Skinner's sister and an acquaintance of Marvell's father. In a letter to Roger Williams, the New England colonist and pioneer of religious liberty, she wrote: ‘as I have heard he [Milton] was faine to have the helpe of one Andrew Marvell or els he could not have finished that most accursed Libell'.
6