MARVELL'S "ENCLOSED GARDEN"

Abstract

This study of Andrew Marvell's garden poems aims at a partial explanation of the poet's characteristic use of imagery, and his eventual abnegation of it in favour of more straightforward poetic language. Comparing Marvell's "The Garden," V with Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst," ll. 41-44, a subtle but radical difference is found in the imagery of those two verses which treat of the same subject: i.e., the plenitude and variety of garden fruit. Marvell's fruits seem, as it were, to have an inward propulsion and have a positive effect upon the beholder, while Jonson's remain sedate and serene. A close study of Marvell's garden poems in the light of the age-old traditions of European garden literature will reveal that he rejected the "Epicurean" garden for that of the Stoics. His garden was a place for peaceful and virtuous contemplation, and was fundamentally incompatible with the erotic passions of the traditional "jardin d'amour" on the one hand, and with war and antagonism on the other. And we must remember that war was actually being waged outside the garden of Lrod Fairfax's Nun Appleton House when the poet was an inmate there in 1651-52. Especially significant apropos of this thesis is the technique with which the poet expressed the qualities of his garden: he not only depicted its peace and beauty through straightforward images, but set forth its virtues by giving to them the subtle foil of heterogeneous ideas. Among them is the introduction of sexual passion as a foil to his own solitary bliss among trees and flowers, and of rebellion as a foil to the peaceful state of the garden. These ideas are delicately and ironically superimposed upon the main, straightforward imagery, so that the latter gathers force in the course of description. Lastly the Christian hortus conclusus will explain that peculiar inner propulsion of the fruits in Marvells' graden. The hortus, according to the tradition of medieval Christian Platonism, was a symbol of the Christian soul engaged in contemplation as well as the mise en scene of the contemplation. There God worked upon man and was worked upon by him through nature, and this traffic agitated the trees, flowers and fruits. It is possible that this conscious and complex eclecticism of traditional garden literature and of related images is akin to the "amalgamating" quality which T. S. Eliot found in metaphysical poets. But, perusing Marvell's poems, we perceive that this eclectic technique was employed by the poet to create an artificial peace, a sort of poetic "enclosed garden," within him. Marvell, while using the imagery of war and rebellion as technical foils to the peaceful state of the garden, was acutely conscious of the artificiality of his garden and, simultaneously, of his poetry; and was drawn toward what was more real, what was outside the walls of his garden. This ambivalence is disclosed in, e.g., "The Mower against Gardens," and also in his complex attitude toward Cromwell, who was in fact the cause of his patron's retirement to Nun Appleton, and who was obliquely referred to as a "mower" in some of his poems. It is significant, therefore, that Marvell, in his "Horatian Ode," depicted Cromwell's assumption of Puritan generalship by the image of a man's leaving the peace and seclusion of his private garden. Marvell himself renounced Fairfax's garden when he became tutor to a ward of Cromwell's and, subsequently, threw himself into the turbulent life of an active M.P. He never returned to his enclosed garden again; and his poetic pathway also led him gradually away from the "metaphysical" to a direction more explicitly logical, more "Augustan." If we limit ourselves to Marvell's garden poems, Eliot was right in his later and more reserved

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