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.