The Garden: Andrew Marvell

The Garden: Andrew Marvell
 
IGNOU MEG01 - Block -3 Unit-16 Andrew Marvell: A Study of his Poems

A play of the senses in which the woman has no part. The true end of the garden is 'quietness withdrawing from the world, meditation'. True ecstasy is in being rapt by intellect, not by sex.

 

The poem begins by establishing that of all the possible gardens, it is dealing with that of retirement, with the garden of the contemplative man who shuns action. Man vainly runs after Palm (is for victors), Oak (for rulers) and Bayes (is for poets) but retired life is quantitatively superior. If you appraise action in terms of plants you get single plants, whereas retirement offers you the solace of not one but all plants.

 

Innocence may be found only in the green shade. Society is all but rude

 

Female beauty is reduced to its emblematic colours (red and white) and unfavourably compared with the green of the garden, as a dispenser of sensual delight. A foolish failure to understand the superiority of green, causes lovers to insult trees by carving on them the names of women. Since it is the green garden and not women that the poet chooses to regard as amorous, it would be farcical logical for him to carve on the trees their outn names.

 

Love enters this garden, but only when the pursuit of the white and red is done, and we are without appetite, (love is here both pursued and the pursuer). Weary with the race and exertion, 'it' makes a retreat to the garden. The place of retreat has therefore love but not women; they are metamorphosed into trees. Even the gods have been misunderstood, they pursue women not as women but as potential trees. And hence the usefulness of the myths of Apollo and Daphne and Pan and Syrinx.

 

The garden has nonetheless, all the enchantment of Earthly Paradise, and all its innocence; this is the topic of the fifth stanza

 

The sixth stanza begins with a typical puritan ambivalence - "from pleasures less". It can mean any one of the following - i) reduced by pleasure, ii) the mind retires because it experiences less pleasure than the senses, iii) that it retires from lesser pleasure to the greater. The second meaning establishes a relation between mind and sense which is obviously relevant to the theme. The third meaning is the one most closely associated with this interpretation - the mind withdraws from sensual gratification in order to enjoy a happiness of the imagination. This doubt gives grandeur to the next line - a reference to the then commonly held belief that all species found on land have their counterparts in the sea. The idea here is that the forms exist in the mind of man as they do in the mind of God. By the virtue of the imagination the mind can create worlds. green is still opposed to red and white; this is possible only when women are absent and the senses are innocently engaged.

 

The fountain is here a symbol of purity and the bird is an emblem of the soul. It "waves its plumes of various light " - we are reminded that the ascent towards the pure source of light cannot be achieved, but that it is a product of solitude, not of jouissance and that it is an alternative to libertine behaviour in gardens. It is the ecstasy not of beauty but of heavenly beauty.  

 

The notion that Adam would have been happier without a mate is of course not new. This is . another way of saying the same thing - that women offer the wrong kind of beauty and love, the red and white, instead of the green. Eve deprived Adam of solitude and gave him an inferior joy. Her absence would be equivalent to the gift of a paradise. In the last stanza, the temperate quiet of the garden is once more asserted, by way of conclusion. The time, for us as well as for the bee is sweet and rewarding. Hours of innocence are conveyed by a dial of herbs and flowers. The sun is inilder ' because here heat is substituted by fragrance. The time computed is likewise spent in fragrant rather than hot pursuits. This is solitude, not jouissance, the garden is of the solitaire

 

The themes of alienation, harmony, Nature and Art are present in the poem, poetic imagination, and spirituality.

The chief point of the poem is to contrast and reconcile conscious and unconscious states

 

Words- 

 

Upbraid - to criticize severely

Prudent - acting with or showing care and thought for the future.

Toil - To work extremely hard

Ensnare - To catch as a trap

 

Andrew Marvell

 

Born 31 March, 1621 in Yorkshire where his father was a rector but later moved to Hull in 1624.

Graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1633

 

Marvell grew up in an age which Abraham Cowley was later to describe as 'a warlike, various and a tragic age'. It was an age which saw radical changes in the institutions of the Church and the State and the questioning of many fundamental beliefs about the nature of man and society and the universe he inhabits. Neither the church of England nor the Monarchy survived the revolutionary decade of the 1640s.

 

Both the life and writings of Andrew Marvell can be interpreted as the responses of an intelligent and sceptical mind to the need to find new bearings amid the confusions and challenges to inherited assumptions of a period of revolutionary change. 

 

Works - Young Love, The Match, The Unfortunate Lover, The Nymph Complaining~for the Death of her Faun and of course To His Coy Mistress, The Garden. To his Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace, Uphold the Death of Lord Iiastings, Elegy upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers

You can check out my YouTube videos on the same topic where I have explained everything in Hindi in detail. Links are below-

 

Block-3 The Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert

Marvell's Poems -

 

To his Coy mistress The Garden An Horation ode

 

More related and helpful links in the description box of my YouTube channel.