Read World Enough and Time for Free Online

preoccupation with love. A conventional poem, ‘Eyes and Tears’ – Marvell’s poems invariably begin from some generic precedent or prior treatment, however deeply individuated, and are almost never a naked utterance or blurt of feeling – contains a phrase, ‘The sparkling glance that shoots desire’. An innocent shepherdess exhibits a shy sexual knowingness. The shepherdess Clorinda in ‘Clorinda and Damon’, who fails to persuade her newly pious swain, Damon, to sport with her in the hay, teases her companion. Did Mary Fairfax in this way tease her young tutor, in their garden walks, sensing his indifference? All these hints and suggestions culminate in ‘Young Love’.
    The poem is of course derivative in theme. Scholar-critics such as J.B. Leishman in his essential The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (1966) have traced the topic from The Greek Anthology to Marvell’s contemporaries, Randolph and Stow. Perhaps it should be taken as no more than a poetic exercise, written – as many of these lyrics were – to be set to music, a wholly innocent playing with a conventional poetic theme. Or perhaps there was a little more personal pressure behind it:
    Â Â Â Â  I
    Come little Infant, Love me now,
    Â Â Â Â  While thine unsuspected years
    Clear thine aged Fathers brow
    Â Â Â Â  From cold Jealousie and Fears.
    Â Â Â Â  II
    Pretty surely ’twere to see
    Â Â Â Â  By young Love old Time beguil’d:
    While our Sportings are as free
    Â Â Â Â  As the Nurses with the Child.
    The speaker goes on to argue that ‘Common Beauties’ must wait until the age of fifteen before experiencing love. His addressee’s innocent beauty, however, should be enjoyed now, not as sexual love (‘too green/Yet for Lust’) but as a more Platonic encounter. Implicated in this theme is the carpe diem subject that Marvell would treat so triumphantly in ‘To his Coy Mistress’: ‘Now then love me: time may take/Thee before thy time away’. The co-existence of these poetic moments with the religious lyrics celebrating the defeat of sensuality by the resolved soul, and the likelihood that these were poems written to be read at Nun Appleton by Mary’s father, should perhaps persuade us to cancel any thought that they might be anything other than conventional Renaissance tropes.
    Several other lyrics of this pastoral group address more directly the theme of disappointed or frustrated love. Again, the frequency of the theme may have more to do with the fact that thwarted rather than fulfilled love was the conventional stuff of poetry than with Marvell’s need to deposit his own woes in verse. In ‘The Unfortunate Lover’ he draws on the Renaissance emblem tradition, specifically here the series drawn by Otto van Veen in Amorum Emblemata, published in Antwerp in 1608. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books illustrated and expanded various metaphors and allegories from classical or Biblical sources, decorating the picture sometimes with an improving text, and were enormously popular. In this poem Marvell paints a sequence of vivid verbal pictures in a way that shows the great creative potential in the encounter of a fine poetic intelligence with conventional matter, for the poet’s treatment is wholly his own. The eponymous lover had a violent birth when his pregnant mother was thrown against a rock after a shipwreck. From this nautical Caesarean the lover never looks back and is subjected to the rough handling of ‘Tyrant Love’ thereafter. Marvell contrasts the savage actuality of the unfortunate lover’s experiences with their literary transformation into a pleasant aesthetic construct (‘Musick within every Ear’). ‘The Coronet’ also expresses a doubt about the worth of art. In this poem the poet, weaving a garland of flowers as a coronet symbolically intended to