text:
Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics
Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics

The Space Between

Joan Faust

University of Delaware Press

Newark
Published by University of Delaware Press

Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2012 by Joan Faust

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faust, Joan, 1955–

Andrew Marvell's liminal lyrics : the space between / Joan Faust.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61149-410-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61149-411-2 (electronic)

1. Marvell, Andrew, 1621–1678—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Liminality in literature. I. Title.

PR3546.F38 2012

821'.4—dc23 2012025451

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The Concept of Liminality and Marvell's Liminal Life

Chapter 3: Marvell's Portrait of a Liminal Realm: "Upon Appleton House"

Chapter 4: Blending the Arts in the Act of Creation: "The Garden"

Chapter 5: In Between Life and Art: Marvell's Mower and Nymph

Chapter 6: Smoke and Mirrors: "On a Drop of Dew," "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning," and "The Gallery"

Chapter 7: In Between Concept and Understanding: "The Definition of Love"

Chapter 8: Marvell's "Soul" and "Body": The Dialogue Continues

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Parts of this work previously appeared in two articles: "Blurring the Boundaries: Ut pictura poesis and Marvell's Liminal Mower," Studies in Philology 104, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 526–55; and "'Upon Appleton House': Marvell's Creation of a Liminal Realm," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 35, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 54–74. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to use material from these essays.

My thanks also to colleagues in the Andrew Marvell Society for feedback in sessions of annual meetings of the South-Central Renaissance Conference, to Mark and Joey Faust and the staff at Southeastern Louisiana University's Center for Faculty Excellence for technical advice throughout the production of this work, to the Interlibrary Loan Department of Sims Memorial Library for many dogged searches for materials, to David Hanson for his scholarly guidance, to Joe Brown for valuable editing recommendations, and to the readers at the University of Delaware Press for their insightful suggestions. I am indebted to Southeastern Louisiana University for a one-semester sabbatical that allowed valuable time for the research of this work. Finally, I humbly dedicate this book to Brother Alfred Kolb, S.C. (1917–2007), whose decades of scholarship, enthusiasm, holiness, and unselfish service have inspired generations of students and epitomize the motto of one of his many classes: "We are but a grain of sand in time, but our mark may last forever."

Permissions

Cover: NPG 554, Andrew Marvell, by unknown artist. Oil on canvas, c. 1655–1660. Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo design by Joey Faust.

Chapter 3: Faust, Joan. "'Upon Appleton House': Marvell's Creation of a Liminal Realm." Explorations in Renaissance Culture 35.1 (Summer 2009): 54–74.

Throughout: Faust, Joan. "Blurring the Boundaries: Ut Pictura poesis and Marvell's Liminal Mower." Studies in Philology, vol. 104, no. 4. (Fall 2007): 526–55.
Chapter One

Introduction

"Unhoopable"—that is the conclusion reached by Elisabeth Story Donno about Andrew Marvell, explaining that though many have tried to categorize the poet and his poetry, the man and his works somehow fall "in between": early commentators link him to his contemporaries Donne, Jonson, Lovelace, Suckling, Cowley, Waller, Herbert, Herrick, and Milton; some try to "synthesize" him with different literary strains—"a blend of Donne and Milton, of Donne and Butler, of Jonson and Herrick, of Crashaw and Vaughan." Later scholars attempt to connect him with later writers and with their own contemporaries—Cowper, Crabbe, Claire, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Meredith, Hopkins, Tennyson, Hodgson, Archibald MacLeish, E. E. Cummings, and W. H. Davies. To Harold Bloom, Marvell is "the most enigmatic, unclassifiable, and unaffiliated major poet in the language," while Nigel Smith simply calls him "The Chameleon."1

Admittedly, Marvell left us little to go on by way of his poetic canon. Of the ten poems that were published during his lifetime (and one of those only partially), only half carried either his name or initials.2 Even during his "poetic reassessment" in the years 1892–1921, the question of Marvell's niche remained uncertain, as Donno queries: "Was he classic or romantic, metaphysical or Augustan, Cavalier or Puritan, or—in witness now to the impact of the 'Horation Ode' rather than to the controversial works—republican or royalist?" Rosalie Colie judges Marvell a "mediator" in lyric style, noting that "from the concettismo of Cleveland and Crashaw to the smoothness of Carew, from the understatement of Herbert to the brilliant emblematism of Vaughan, from the wit of Donne to the metaphysics of Traherne, examples may be found in Marvell's work." J. B. Leishman believes that, although Marvell cannot equal any of the poets to which he is compared in their poetic specialties, "he can rival each and all in variety and breadth" partly because "he is, in comparison with them, singularly uncommitted, or, as M. Sartre would say, disengagé." Even Marvell's poetic language has been labeled as in-between. M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas comment that his poetic vocabulary is "not yet subjected to the 'dictionary' methods of Seth Ward and his Oxford friends, or the mathematical ideals of Hartlib and Wilkins: it has the fluidity of Shakespeare's England rather than those virtues of limitation and clarity which are associated with Dryden."3

Constantly Marvell is likened to the ambiguous space between two boundaries: he is "a poet of transition," standing "on the frontier of two sharply defined periods"; he was both metaphysical and Augustan and yet neither, a mind "detachedly at play over a number of possible choices." Though likened to the deity Janus, "the spirit of the doorway, seeing before and behind" in his works, Marvell seeks not to cross the doorway or limen (from whence "liminal" derives its name) but to remain in the "betwixt and between" state conducive to creativity.4 Like the pentimenti of Leonardo's sketches or the sfumato of his paintings, the blurred boundaries of Marvell's life and art both bewilder and entrance. Biographies lament their inability to peg him. In 1905, Augustine Birrell's first book-length biography on Marvell, written as part of the English Men of Letters series, commented, "A more elusive, non-recorded character is hardly to be found." Seventy-three years later, biographer John Dixon Hunt agreed: "Marvell remains mysteriously hidden from us today behind much playful, artful refusal to commit himself to anything that would help in bringing a picture of an obviously complex character into some focus," only seconded by the so-far-unequalled biographer Niles Smith, judging that the quality of Marvell's poetry "has to do with indecipherability, with irresolvable ambiguity, with seeing things all ways at once, and never really revealing what the hidden author thinks."5 It is the very blurred, unfocused picture of the man that intrigues.

Likewise, Marvell's lyrics approach traditional modes and genres—the Country House poem, emblematic verse, literary dialogue, pastoral—yet never really stay within the defining lines. Marvell seems to agree with John Shawcross that the expected parameters of genres are doorways, not walls:

Genre and mode, and such "devices" as allusion and onomastics, are conscious entries into a literary work: they become liminal means to enter into that work, the threshold over which one may step to enter the world of the literary work. Its space is confined but may allow for extension and vision beyond that space; it may also figure forth other rooms, and other rooms in other places furnished differently. Liminal existence, we should remark, presupposes an overt, conscious creation, both the threshold and that introduced by the threshold.6

This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. This approach differs from previous attempts to "explain" Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multimedia contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. Past studies have focused on one quality of Marvell's art or life that helps define an aspect of his work. For example, David Norbrook, John Wallace, Nigel Smith, Annabel Patterson, Kevin Sharpe, Steven Zwicker, Michael Wilding, Warren Chernaik, David Lowenstein, Blair Worden, Conal Condren, and A. D. Cousins, among many others, convincingly demonstrate that Marvell's poems can be, perhaps must be, seen in a political light and explain contemporary political issues and conflicts, though some of his lyric poems sometimes have to stretch to fit that mold.7 Other studies have focused on allegory, classical and contemporary influences on Marvell, biographical views of his works, his use of irony and satire, and implications of nature and pastoral.8

But those commentators who acknowledge the visual arts and emblematic influences on Marvell's poetry more successfully approach the key to our fascination with the man and his works. Ernest Gilman, Kitty Scoular, Harry Berger Jr., Jeffrey Spencer, L. E. Semler, and Colie recognize that Marvell straddles word and image, yet they continue to impose boundaries that attempt to categorize. Even in her seminal study "My Ecchoing Song," Colie employs various contexts in an attempt to encompass Marvell's works, for example, "Theme and Form," "Problems of Pastoral," "Carpe Diem Poems," "Pictorial Traditions," "Diminution," and so on, though she can only draw all together in describing his poetry as a criticism of life. And though Marvell has been compared to specific visual artists—Velázquez, Marino, and Cellini—the comparisons are limited to specific instances of similarity.9

These outstanding studies certainly elucidate important aspects of Marvell's life and work, but most fall short of a perspective that can explain the basis of the enigma that is Marvell. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell's work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell's life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet's works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain.

Chapter 2, "The Concept of Liminality and Marvell's Liminal Life," offers an overview of anthropologist Victor Turner's theories of liminality conceived during the two-and-one-half years he lived with and studied the rituals and passage rites of the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia. Turner discovered that the most significant experiences in a person's or a culture's life occur during the time of transition from one stage to another, during which the subject belongs to neither stage yet to both, an existence Turner describes as "betwixt and between" or liminal, from the Latin limen or threshold.10 Though Turner's original concept dealt with life growth and changes, the concept soon expanded to other aspects of in-between experience and can illuminate Andrew Marvell's own life and lyric poems in more specific, related contexts that encourage liminal states: the ephemeral state between innocence and experience, the blurred borders of visual and poetic arts, the interdependence of art and nature in horticulture, the mystical aspects of mirror images, the space between word and concept, and the interchange of dialogue.

Chapter 2 concludes with a brief biography of Marvell to demonstrate more specifically the ambiguous aspects of his life. Though others have compared Marvell's themes and techniques to specific visual artists (as seen above), this study offers a broader view: in life experiences, world view, and theories of the artist and his art, Marvell more closely resembles the equally enigmatic Leonardo da Vinci, whose life and work also hide more than they reveal. Marvell shared with Leonardo not only personality traits but the very concept of artist and the necessity to blur the lines in all representations, visual as well as literary, to achieve a sight less distinct but more true.

Turning to specific poems, we will see how an analysis of the most disputed points with references to liminal states indicates Marvell's intentional purpose to remain in that area in between, refusing a closure that would delineate yet accordingly disappoint. Because most of the poems in this study are believed to have been composed during or immediately before and after Marvell's sojourn at Sir Thomas Fairfax's estate at Nunappleton, where he served as tutor to Fairfax's daughter, chapter 3, "Marvell's Portrait of a Liminal Realm: 'Upon Appleton House,'" begins the lyric analysis with a look at "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax." This variation of the Country House poem not only clarifies a biographical context of Marvell's work but also introduces liminal aspects of horticulture, mirrors, and the in-between profession of tutor in the early modern period. As he describes the house, history, and grounds of Nunappleton, the home of Sir Thomas Fairfax, who led parliamentarian forces until his growing dissatisfaction with the English revolution prompted an early retirement in 1650, Marvell uses his praise of the general and his family to demonstrate not only his knowledge of and admiration for his patron, Lord Fairfax, but also his value to his patron. As resident of Nunappleton from 1650 to 1652 and tutor to the Fairfaxes' only child, Mary, Marvell monopolizes on the liminal position of tutor, half-servant, half-guest, to dare to present a type of "Mirror for Magistrates" to Fairfax, himself in an existence in between duty to country and duty to self during these years. In its discussion of the confusion of history, images, symbols, and playful perspectives in the poem, this chapter demonstrates Marvell's skillful blurring of Fairfax's own interests in art, poetry, architecture, horticulture, politics, and, perhaps most importantly, family, to show Marvell's ability to position his patron and himself within a liminal realm of mutuality.

Once setting the biographical and topographical stage of most of these lyrics, chapter 4 explores Marvell's own concept of nature and the artist in "Blending the Arts in the Act of Creation: 'The Garden.'" Marvell's "The Garden" has perhaps elicited more commentary and questions than most of his other lyric poetry because of the diversity and richness of possible interpretations. This idle ramble through an Edenic place, not necessarily Fairfax's estate since the date of composition is estimated closer to 1668 but rather an ideal concept of a garden, indicates a longing for "that happy garden-state / While man there walked without a mate" (lines 57–58).11 The poem appears to offer a misogynistic lament over the complications of sexual love; however, this prelapsarian garden needs no female presence, not because the speaker desires the lushness of green over the sensuality of red and white, but because the subject of the poem is a solipsistic one that requires solitude: the creation of art itself. Marvell describes the process of artistic creation by presenting a garden of delights that annihilates the boundaries between literary, visual, and horticultural art; between art and nature; between artist and his work; as his garden rambler enacts the role of the artist who absorbs, reflects, and creates the world around him. This chapter explores how "The Garden" as poetry evidences Marvell's affinity with the visual arts, particularly in the practice and theories of Leonardo da Vinci, and with the almost religious fervor in the seventeenth century for horticultural art. Marvell's garden resides in the resulting sfumato connecting all three modes of art.

Because "The Garden" revels in the multidimensional and innocent realm of art and nature, chapter 5, "In Between Life and Art: Marvell's Mower and Nymph," focuses on two figures who reside in this world: the Mower and the Nymph. Marvell's poems often feature naïve, seemingly innocent characters at a transitional time in their lives chronologically as well as psychologically, experiencing early but inevitable disappointments in life and love. The Mower, subject or speaker in the four poems known as the "Mower series"—"The Mower against Gardens," "Damon the Mower," "The Mower to the Glow-worms," and "The Mower's Song"—enacts the painful transition period from the pastoral ideal of unity with nature to the passionate real of alienation and disappointment. The Nymph, speaker of "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," similarly is pushed to the threshold of maturity by "Unconstant Sylvio" (line 25), but refuses to exit that doorway, even when her surrogate love, the Fawn, is also torn from her. The plight of both the Mower and the Nymph can best be understood in the context of early modern developments in visual art, which succeed in blurring the too-sharp lines between images, between planes, between innocence and experience, allowing the figures to dwell a while longer in the comfortable sfumato of the space between.

Turning from the concept of liminality as a temporary transitional life phase to the in-between state of other visual experiences, chapter 6—"Smoke and Mirrors"—analyzes four poems that use the power and mystique of mirror images and their use in visual art to demonstrate the area in between object and image, appearance and reality. Commentators have noted the self-containing and even self-constituting images in Marvell's poetry that place the readers in the in-between state of cause and effect, creator and creation, in a perpetual self-reflecting series of mirrors,12 but none has pursued the symbolic and historical significance of the mirror image and its role in anamorphic portrayal in explaining Marvell's effectiveness in keeping us in between image and reflection. In "On a Drop of Dew," "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning," and "The Gallery," Marvell manipulates reflective surfaces—eyes and tears—and the spiritual and physical power of the mirror to capture, reproduce, clarify, and skew images, keeping the reader guessing not only the source of the reflection but also the validity of the reproduction itself. The result is a self-perpetuating maze of mirrors that leaves the reader in between a tangle of reflections. This chapter surveys the historical significance of mirrors—their ambiguous ability to clarify and instruct, yet distort and confuse; their spiritual symbolism; and their soul-sucking threat. Each of these four poems demonstrates the liminal power of the mirror. "On a Drop of Dew" employs the mirror's power to condense and compress in order to express the dewdrop's desire to return to "the clear region where 'twas born" (line 5), while "Eyes and Tears" furthers the concept of the dewdrop's appearance as "its own tear" (13) to explore the power of the mirror both to clarify and distort. With a survey of the improvements in mirror clarity yet the early modern popularity of anamorphic pictures, the reader understands that the tears of repentance that blur the physical eyes actually can produce a spiritual "sight more true" ("Eyes and Tears," 27). "Mourning" attests to the danger of misinterpretation and even purposeful deception with the manipulation of mirror images. Though Chlora's tears could indicate true sorrow, assumed in a state of mourning, these same tears, like catoptric anamorphic pictures, have the capacity to hide and deceive accurate interpretation. The speaker questions Chlora's true motives, but at the end, the view in the mirror is not a conclusion but a reflection of the question. The final poem of the chapter, "The Gallery," presents a series of reflections that make up not only a gallery of art but the speaker's very soul. The most ecphrastic of the four poems, "The Gallery" has generally been interpreted as evidence of Giambattista Marino's influence on Marvell, but the mirror's symbolic role in the portrayal of God's image in the soul has not been strongly connected with Marvell's gallery.13 This portrayal of multiple images of the speaker's beloved crowding the gallery of his soul monopolizes on the ability of the mirror to produce distorted and self-reflecting images, causing the viewer to question which face is the real one. And since the mirror symbolizes the mind and soul, which should reflect one's image as the image of God, this speaker's soul, containing only the "num'rous colony" (46) of Chlora's portraits, indicates that the speaker has lost his own reflection, his very own soul.

Just what constitutes a "definition"? Rhetorically speaking, the OED defines it as "A precise statement of the essential nature of a thing; a statement or form of words by which anything is defined."14 As in the self-reflecting quality of most of Marvell's lyrics, we must use words to define words and to erect boundaries; thus, a definition is "the setting of bounds or limits; limitation, restriction," so never easy for Andrew Marvell. The essential aspect of a definition is the verb connecting the term and its "essential nature," the limen that allows two concepts to be joined, the space between. Chapter 7, "In Between Concept and Understanding: 'The Definition of Love,'" investigates the liminal area of becoming and uncertainty that lies in the impossibility of ever defining a concept, particularly one as multifaceted as love. In his effort to "define" love, Marvell attempts to bridge the space between the idea and its explanation, the abstract and the concrete portrayal of that abstract, the ideal and the real, by utilizing three seemingly unrelated, so parallel, contexts: logical rhetoric, cartography, and mathematics. This chapter explores Marvell's probable knowledge of these areas, as well as the expectations of his contemporaries and the surprising interconnectedness of all three fields of study in seventeenth-century thought as well as in the poem. By the end of the poem, the reader concludes that, like the space between parallel lines, the gulf separating concept and understanding, idea and representation, is often unbridgeable and thus "infinite" ("Definition of Love" 28), though there is richness in the space between.

A very appropriate literary form to indicate the liminal area of "becoming" latent in all literature is the dialogue, so it is also appropriate and even expected that the author who prefers to remain in between would pen three (possibly four) of these exchanges. In essence, the poems are just that—exchanges, interactions, not static images—so that the potential and "becoming" of liminality is revealingly enacted in them all: "A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure"; "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body"; "A Dialogue between Thrysis and Dorinda"; and possibly included in the group, the eclogue "Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-Ropes." Chapter 8, "Marvell's 'Soul' and 'Body': The Dialogue Continues," examines one particular dialogue poem, "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," to survey the beliefs of the Body's relationship to the Soul that would prompt such a "contest" between the two, to determine the historical connection the poem has with the methods and structure of debates and dialogues in earlier religious and pedagogical practices, to reveal the influences that advances in human anatomy might have had on Marvell's corporeal images, to explore the critical cruxes of the apparent lack of "winner" in the interchange, and to find the poet's and the reader's place in between it all.

Though this study restricts itself to thirteen of Marvell's most enigmatic poems, these analyses represent the angle of liminality that can be extended to other works in his canon, both poetic and prose. They exemplify and explain how and why Marvell remains ambiguous, uncommitted, unwilling to trace a clear line among a welter of pentimenti of possible interpretations. In the context of liminality, readers can cease agonizing over conclusions, definitive meanings, and coherent images and revel in Marvell's own appreciation of the process, the potential, the doorway, the space between.

Notes

1. See Elizabeth Story Donno, "Introduction," in Andrew Marvell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 13–14; John Killham, "Tennyson's Maud: The Function of the Imagery," in Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, ed. John Killham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960); Henry Wells, New Poets from Old: A Study in Literary Genetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 202, 234–44; Harold Bloom, "Introduction," in Modern Critical Views: Andrew Marvell, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 1; and Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

2. Of the five he chose to claim, all were occasional in nature: the Greek and Latin verses on the birth of Charles I's fifth child, written while he was still a student at Cambridge; the commendatory poems to Lovelace's Lucasta, to Dr. Witty's translation of the Popular Errors (in Latin and English), and to Milton's Paradise Lost (the latest update); and the elegy "Upon the Death of Lord Hastings." See Elizabeth Story Donno, "The Unhoopable Marvell," in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 21.

3. See Donno, "Introduction," 13; Rosalie Colie, "My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 75; J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 11; and M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 26.

Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci, to whom Marvell will be compared in this study, thought this breadth of talent was a necessity for a good artist:

Of some it may plainly be said that they deceive themselves when they call a painter a good master who can do only a head or a figure well. Certainly it is no great accomplishment if, having studied for one sole thing for the whole of your life, you bring it to a degree of perfection. But since we know that painting embraces and contains within itself all things produced by nature or whatever results from man's passing actions—and ultimately everything that can be taken in by the eyes—he seems to me to be a pitiful master who can only do one thing well. . . . Therefore painter, you should know that you cannot do good if you are not a master universal enough to imitate with your art every kind of natural form, which you will not know how to do unless you observe them and retain them in your mind.

See Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 201–2.

4. See Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 9; F. L. Lucas. Authors Dead and Living, 1926 (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1968), 16; A. Alvarez, The School of Donne (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 1–2; and Thomas Clayton, "'It is Marvell. He Outdwells His Hour': Some Perspectives on Marvell's Medium" in Friedenreich, Tercentenary Essays, 73.

5. See Augustine Birrell, Andrew Marvell (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 2; John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 11; and Smith, Chameleon, 3.

6. See John Shawcross, Intentionality and the New Traditionalism: Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 18.

7. See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Annabel M. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Michael Wilding, Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Warren Chernaik, The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins, The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1990).

8. For allegory, see Bruce King, Marvell's Allegorical Poetry (New York: Oleander, 1979) and Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell's Major Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); for classical and contemporary influences, see J. A. K. Thomson, Classical Influences on English Poetry (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951) and Joseph H. Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); for biographical views, see Hunt, Andrew Marvell; Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000); Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); and Michael Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell (London: Macmillan, 1979); for use of irony and satire, see A. B. Chambers, Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Harold Toliver, Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); and Raymond A. Anselment, "Betwixt Jest and Earnest": Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift, and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); for nature and pastoral, see James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Friedman, Pastoral Art; Edward Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); and Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

9. See Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 204–31; Kitty Scoular, Natural Magic: Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spenser to Marvell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 121–90; Harry Berger Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Jeffrey B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 201–39; and Colie, both in Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Hamdon, CT: Archon Books, 1976), 273–324, and in her all-encompassing "My Ecchoing Song," 188–214, 8, and 4. For comparison to Velázquez, see Gilman, Curious, 204–31; for Marino, see Colie, "My Ecchoing Song," 106–9, and Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 114–17; for Cellini, see Semler, English Mannerist Poets, 215–25.

10. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 41.

11. See Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2007), 150. All quotations from Marvell's poetry will be taken from Nigel Smith's edition of The Poems and cited by title and line numbers.

12. For other explorations of Marvell's use of mirror images, see Christopher Ricks, "'Its own resemblance,'" in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 108–35; John Carey, "Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell's Imagination," in Patrides, Approaches, 136–54; and Vincent Buckley, Poetry and the Sacred (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), 115–16.

13. See Colie, "My Ecchoing Song," 106–9, and Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 114–17.

14. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., 1989, s. v. "definition." Unless specified, all dictionary definitions will be taken from this source.
Chapter Two

The Concept of Liminality and Marvell's Liminal Life

According to noted anthropologist Victor Turner, who spent two and a half years living with and studying the rituals and passage rites of the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia, the most significant experiences in a person's or a culture's life occur during the time of transition from one stage to another, during which the subject belongs to neither stage yet to both, an existence Turner describes as "betwixt and between" or liminal, from the Latin limen or threshold. Employing evidence from Ndembu circumcision rites and Nkang'a, girls' puberty rites, Turner theorizes that because rules and expectations governing the previous stage no longer pertain, and those governing the subsequent stage do not yet apply, this liminal period is characterized by creativity and freedom from restraint. It is the site of "becoming," of possibility, of play. According to Turner, the conditions of liminality frequently generate myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art as a culture attempts to reclassify reality and the individual's relationship to society, nature, and culture. Classified by Arnold van Gennep as "rites of passage," these periods can be interpreted as negative, since individuals or society are no longer in the positive past nor in the positive future, but Turner counters that the liminal phase can be very positive and active, since it is during this interface between established cultural subsystems, during this "instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance," that meaning is generated.1

But what type of meaning? In Turner's linguistic metaphor, the liminal phase can be seen as culture's "subjunctive" mood, when social distinctions are leveled and formal structure is questioned and subverted through ritual and often play. These subversions provide the "seeds of cultural creativity" that generate new models, symbols, and paradigms. The leveling or blurring process pertains especially to those individuals undergoing the experience, according to Turner. Ritual participants are often stripped of their clothing and their names and considered "invisible, like the sun or moon in eclipse or the moon between phases." Because they are in between an old self and a new, these liminal figures are "temporarily undefined" and linked to ambiguity or merging of traditional distinctions such as life and death, male and female, order and chaos, and secular and profane.2

Turner sees a dialectic here, though. An individual and/or a society cannot remain in this realm of possibility, this ambiguous state, for long; eventually the innovations become structuralized and part of the status quo. Thus van Gennep, in his concept of rites of passage, defines three distinct stages in a liminal experience: separation, transition, and incorporation. The separation phase demarcates for the participant a sacred space and time which is apart and, in a sense, "out of time," in a realm outside the temporal concerns and routines of society. Turner includes in this phase "symbolic behavior—especially symbols of reversal or inversions of things, relationships and processes secular—which represents the detachment of their ritual subjects (novices, candidates, neophytes or 'initiands') from their previous social statuses." In the transition or "liminal" phase, "the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few . . . of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states." Finally, the incorporation or "reaggregation" stage represents "the return of the subjects to their new relatively stable, well-defined position in the total society." If the rite of passage is a life-cycle ritual (like a circumcision rite), the initiand emerges with enhanced status; if the experience is part of a calendrical or seasonal ritual, no change in status might occur but the participants may have been prepared for changes in their relationships with others. Applying linguistic metaphors to van Gennep's theories, Turner describes the liminal phase as moving from the "indicative" mood of cultural processes through culture's "subjunctive" mood back to the "indicative" mood, "though this recovered mood has now been tempered, even transformed, by immersion in subjectivity." Though the liminal phase can be brief and seems to have been futile because negated by the subsequent incorporation phase, Turner believes that "no society can function adequately without this dialectic."3

As the seedbed of creativity and therefore art, the liminal phase is worthy of fuller exploration and can be seen as key to Marvell's own poetic creations. The importance of liminality can best be discerned in the individuals undergoing the stage. Since they cannot be definitively classified, they are also considered unclean or polluting, so are hidden away or at least separated from the rest of society during the liminal phase. In patrilineal and matrilineal cultures, they can also be considered neither male nor female—"sexless or bisexual and may be regarded as a kind of human prima material—as undifferentiated raw material" (to use a modern metaphor, a "human stem cell"). The liminal subjects thus undergo a "leveling" process, in which "signs of their preliminal status are destroyed and signs of their liminal non-status applied."4 This might include the imposition of uniforms or the banning of clothing altogether, even the stripping of names, as much "structural invisibility" as possible. Though their "outsider" status weakens the novitiates, it also liberates them from structural obligations, and binds the group into an egalitarian camaraderie Turner calls "communitas," for which he offers a clear definition:

[Communitas is] the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses, enacting a multiplicity of social roles, and being acutely conscious of membership in some corporate group such as family, lineage, clan, tribe, nation, etc., or of affiliation with some pervasive social category such as a class, caste, sex or age-division.5

Turner explains, "In liminality, profane social relations may be discontinued, former rights and obligations are suspended, the social order may seem to have been turned upside down. . . . Liminality may involve a complex sequence of episodes in sacred space-time, and may also include subversive and ludic (or playful) events." Among the ludic events Turner discusses are the distorting and reinterpretation of a culture's traditional "multivocal symbols" like trees, images, paintings, and dance forms, rearranging these elements of culture "in terms of possible or fantasied rather than experienced combinations. . . . In other words, in liminality people 'play' with elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them."6

The implications of liminal figure as artist are as obvious as is the concept of liminality as the realm of art and necessary for the health of a society. As humans, we have a basic need to escape from the structures of our social order, even if it means we must structure a lack of structure: thus, postindustrial societies, no longer following natural seasonal cycles and rites de passage, must structure specific activities to differentiate between "work" and leisure" periods. These leisure periods constitute the realm of the artist—the liminal areas of time and space that are open to the play of thought, feeling, and will, including rituals, carnivals, dramas, and poetry. Spariosu, in fact, calls these areas "liminal worlds," "indeterminate ontological landscapes or gray areas located in between alternative worlds, subworlds, and superworlds," and cites as examples "religious and nonreligious communes, secular and religious festivals, ceremonies and rituals, public and private games, works of art such as novels, poems, dramas, paintings, sculptures, musical compositions, and so forth."7

Though the study of liminality as a unique status or experience is a twentieth-century phenomenon, the concept of art, particularly poetry, as a liminal state is indirectly invoked by Aristotle in Poetics with his notion of mimesis. According to Spariosu, for both Plato and Aristotle, mimesis does not mean so much "imitation" as "simulation," since they describe poetry as a form of play that simulates other kinds of discourse for pleasurable purposes, and for this reason, poetry cannot be held to the same standards of truth as philosophy and history. Thus, contends Spariosu, Aristotle "implicitly situates [poetry] in the liminal space between history and philosophy," making it "an in-between form of discourse that concerns both possibility and necessity." Aristotle thought poetry expressed the universal, while history expressed the particular: "Aristotle obviously implies, however, that poetry simulates not only philosophy but also history and, consequently, is an in-between form of discourse that concerns both possibility and necessity."8

Like liminality, then, poetry demonstrates the "subjunctive" mood of society, destroying, distorting, and rearranging societal structures to explore possibilities that might be. Later traditional defenses of poetry from Sidney to Schiller to Shelley stress the power of poetry to create and correct because it is between fact and philosophy. This liminal realm connects word to image. Sidney compares the best poets to the best painters who, in their imitation of nature, "borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be": poetry "nothing affirms and therefore never lieth." Shelley's description of poetry's ability to distort and recombine accepted structures matches that of the liminal stage: poetry "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought." It gives the imagination "thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food." Thus the poet creates at these very intervals and interstices that which continually creates more in-between, unfinished passageways. Like Ulysses's notion of experience in Tennyson's "Ulysses," the liminal area in which poetry thrives is "an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades / Forever and forever when I move" (lines 19–21).9

Poetry and other literature can offer fresh cultural alternatives because it is a form of play, "an as if mode of activity and being, in which the world of actuality and that of the imaginary become interwoven" in a liminal space "separate from, yet contingent upon, the other two," as Spariosu explains:

By staging a real or imagined state of affairs and presenting it from various perspectives, literature can contribute to a better understanding of the existential choices open to the polis and can play a significant role in proposing modes of historical change. Like other ludic manifestations, therefore, literature is a liminal phenomenon in the most profound sense.10

Spariosu believes poets "necessarily function as unacknowledged legislators and prophets because they can and should operate only at a liminal level." The poet "beholds the present very intensely" and "sees what ought to be," but the poet especially, in Shelley's concept, "beholds the future in the present"—his ideas are both "the germ of the flower and the fruit of the latest time." As the liminal phase serves the necessary function of showing a society its possibilities, says Spariosu, so can poetry serve to cleanse and refocus society: "Through its liminal nature, poetry both precedes and anticipates the paradigm of thought that other forms of discourse take up and concretize in a particular historical manner." Linguistically speaking, from the subjunctive mood of liminality comes a future-perfect picture of society, what society "will have been."11

Interestingly, this "future-perfect" aspect of liminality strengthens its connection with performative and narrative genres like art, entertainment, literature, sports, and theater through the symbol of the mirror. Turner likens these performative and narrative genres to "a hall of mirrors or better, magic mirrors":

[These are mirrors] (plane, convex, concave, convex cylinder, saddle, or matrix mirrors to borrow metaphors from the study of reflecting surfaces) in which social problems, issues, and crises . . . are reflected as diverse images, transformed, and evaluated or diagnosed in works typical of each genre, then shifted to another genre better able to scrutinize certain of their aspects until many facets of the problem have been illuminated and made accessible to conscious remedial action.

All creative endeavors sparked by liminality can then be seen as various modes of metacommunication, Gregory Bateson's term for a form of communication in which the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers, and this self-reflexive aspect especially ties ludic creativity to the magic of the mirror.12

The properties of mirrors have long made them a rich source of imagery. Benjamin Goldberg explains that, in ancient China, a mirror's "physical reflection" was analogous to mental reflection so that "the mirror became the philosopher's touchstone for incisive metaphor," particularly for "the kind of mental reflection required by a wise man." The metaphor extended to other reflecting surfaces, like a tranquil pool likened to the mind of a wise man; in Wing-tsit Chan's words, "When the mind of the sage is tranquil, it becomes the mirror of the universe." Chuang Tzu, a Chinese philosopher who wrote c. 350 BCE, also compared the calmness of a mind to a mirror, in Goldberg's paraphrase:

It does not lean forward or backward in its responses to things. It responds to things but concedes nothing of its own. It is, therefore, able to deal with things realistically. . . . It is like a shining mirror in which a beautiful object produces a beautiful reflection, and an ugly object an ugly one. But the mirror itself has no likes or dislikes.

Thus the mirror embodied the concept of wisdom obtained through undistorted reflection, contemplation, and receptivity.13

As a literary term, "mirror" takes its meaning from the Medieval Latin use of the word speculum to mean a true reflection or description of a particular subject, thus a compendium. As I have argued elsewhere, seventeenth-century genres including advice-to-patron books (like the 1559 Mirrour for Magistrates), and Jacobean court masques were used as "mirrors" in many senses of the word to reflect, idealize, distort, and, in Ben Jonson's case, angle the image of the sovereign to include the poet himself, actually creating a desired poet-patron relationship.14 Through use of distortions, magnifications, and other manipulations of the mirror, argues Turner, the image presented in literature may "provoke not merely thought, but also powerful feelings and the will to modify everyday matters in the minds of the gazers. . . . Mirror distortions of reflection provoke reflexivity." Gilman explains that, as the traditional emblems of sight, the noblest of the senses, mirrors have been portrayed as the cognitionis vis—the way to enlightenment through the eye. The dedication of Mirrour for Magistrates stresses the importance of rulers viewing an accurate reflection of their virtues and vices for self-improvement:

For here, in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like hath bene punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the soner amendment. This is the chiefest ende, whye it is set furth, which God graunt it may attayne.15

Marvell's own use of self-reflections and mirroring in his lyrics has long been noticed by critics, who have ventured several theories as to the poet's purpose.16 In the context of liminality, Marvell's motivation seems clear, particularly as poet/artist, and perhaps surprisingly connects him to another artist who shares his concept of the blurring of boundaries—Leonardo da Vinci.

The role of the visual artist, according to Leonardo, is similar to that expressed by Wing-Tsit Chan and Chuang Tzu described above: passive reflexivity. In fact, through passive reflection, the artist can actually reflect the mind of God: "The divinity which is the science of painting transmutes the painter's mind into a resemblance of the divine mind." Leonardo advises painters to walk in the countryside to absorb various scenes to be used in paintings ("in turn look now at this thing and now at that, . . . making a compound of different kinds of things chosen and selected from among those of less value"), but then to reflect, even become, the images they choose:

The painter ought to keep his own company and reflect upon that which he sees. He should debate with himself and choose the most excellent parts of the kinds of things he sees. He should be like a mirror which is transformed into as many colours as are placed before it, and, doing this, he will seem to be a second nature.17

Even during the painting process, Leonardo stresses the importance of the mirror as an aid to accuracy and objective self-evaluation:

When you wish to see whether your whole picture accords with what you have portrayed from nature, take a mirror and reflect the actual object in it. . . . You should take the mirror as your master, that is a flat mirror, because on its surface things, in many ways, bear a resemblance to a painting. . . . The picture has but one surface and the mirror the same. . . . And if you recognize that the mirror by means of outlines and shades and lights makes things appear to stand out, you, who have among your colours stronger light and shade than those in the mirror, will certainly, if you know how to put them together well, make your picture, also, look like something from nature seen in a large mirror.

Leonardo advises the artist to use the mirror's liminal qualities to gain distance and therefore objectivity: "When you are painting you ought to have by you a flat mirror in which you should often look at your work. The work will appear to you in reverse and will seem to be by the hand of another master and thereby you will better judge its faults."18

Leonardo was not the only artist who recognized the value of mirrors to art. In the fifteenth century, painters and glass- and mirror-makers were so closely connected that, in Bruges, the two groups even joined in the same Guild of St. Luke, the patron saint of both professions. Heinrich Schwarz explains the symbiotic relationship that connected "the painter who sought to attain an image as precise and true as only the mirror—symbol of Truth—could yield and the mirror-maker who could provide the artist with an aid enabling him to reflect and retain such an exact image of reality." Mid-fifteenth-century contemporaries of Leonardo, Leone Battista Alberti and Filarete, both Italian writers on the theory of art, also discussed the value and importance of the mirror to art. Alberti echoes Leonardo in saying, "A good judge for you to know is the mirror. I do not know why painted things have so much grace in a mirror. It is marvelous how every weakness in a painting is so manifestly deformed in the mirror." David Hockney describes several artists in the mid-fifteenth century (like Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck) who even painted mirrors and lenses in their paintings and speculates that mirrors were a factor in these artists' success: "Surely it is no coincidence that such mirrors arrived in painting at the same time as greater individuality appeared in portraiture"—greater individuality, that is, through greater use of shading, of blurring the boundaries with the liminal space of sfumato.19

Leonardo, Sfumato, and the Liminal Life of Marvell

Though Leonardo probably intended to compile a treatise "On Painting," since many of his notes were given this title, this opus shared the fate of many other of his projected books—"On Water," "On the Elements of Machines," "On the Human Body," "On the Flight of Birds"—and was never completed. All that did remain after his death in 1519 was, as Leonardo's translator and editor Martin Kemp describes, "a magnificent legacy of personal manuscripts, consisting of large-scale notebooks, small pocket-books, compendia of miscellaneous sheets (some extracted from dismembered codices), and collections of separate pages, including those containing drawing for works of art." Attempting to improve upon the work of Leonardo's pupil Francesco Melzi who, after Leonardo's death, compiled the original Trattato from some eighteen notebooks divided into eight sections (each section with empty pages for planned later additions), Kemp combed through various manuscripts and surviving papers to try to organize the artist's scattered advice and theories of the visual arts, contributing for the first time a sense of coherence to Leonardo's brilliant but disjointed concepts.20

Like Marvell's dialogue poems that illustrate the eternal struggle between the spiritual and the corporal, Leonardo's notes indicate that he believed everything in life can only be perceived in comparison to its opposite, especially in the artistic concept of light and dark. The contrast of light and dark, he notes, is the only means by which the painter can show the shape of a figure and its three-dimensional aspect: "Shadows and lights are the most certain means by which the shape of any body comes to be known, because a color of equal lightness or darkness will not display any relief but gives the effect of a flat surface." However, as Leonardo keenly observes, objects perceived, particularly from a distance, really do not have sharp boundaries, and the greater the distance of the object from the viewer, the less distinct are the boundaries. Reality on canvas, as in life, is actually portrayed at the boundaries of those dichotomies of dark and light, in the liminal space that is neither light nor dark, an area Leonardo advises should be painted "in the manner of smoke without strokes or marks." Thus Leonardo's practice of blurring boundaries, his signature technique of sfumato or "smoke-like" appearance, produces a liminal area that is neither light nor dark yet a mixture of both: "Lights and darks . . . comprise the excellence of the science of painting. . . . Lights and darks, that is to say, illumination and shadow, have an intermediate quality that cannot be called light and dark, but partakes equally of light and dark." Paradoxically, then, a clearer view of reality is achieved by blurring the boundaries. In fact, it is the contrast of light and dark and the shading that blurs and connects them both that constituted Leonardo's contribution to the paragon, the popular debate over the relative merits of painting and sculpture. Though one of the standard arguments in favor of sculpture was that statues were three-dimensional images so were more "real" than painting and capable of creating a more "deceptive" illusion, Leonardo and Galileo thought that painting was the better art because it did not depend on exterior light for its third dimension but creates its own illumination.21

Leonardo reiterates the in-between, liminal aspects of boundaries:

The boundaries of bodies are the least of all things. This proposition is proved to be true because the boundary of a thing is a surface, which is not part of the body clothed in that surface, nor is it part of the air surrounding these bodies, but it is the division interposed between the air and the body as is proved in the right place. But the lateral boundaries of these bodies is the boundary line of the surface, which as a line is indivisible. Therefore, painter, do not surround your bodies with drawn lines, above all when representing objects smaller than they are in nature. Not only will these objects not exhibit their lateral boundaries, but their component parts will not be visible from a distance.

Others recognized the truth in Leonardo's conception. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Italian painter, architect, and author of the first narrative history of art, Vite de'più eccellenti architetti picttori e scultori, praises those outlines "hovering between the seen and the unseen." Likewise, in notes to his Italian translation of Vitruvius's De architectura, Titian's contemporary Daniele Barbaro (1513–1570) praises the sfumato technique that helps us to "understand what one does not see" by softly blurring boundaries on the horizon, forming a liminal space "which is and is not, and this can only be achieved by infinite practice, delighting those who do not understand it better and stunning those who do."22

Leonardo's use of sfumato on portraits is legendary and creates the intriguing, often enigmatic aspects of his sitters. Through delicate shading at the corners of the eyes, nostrils, and mouth, Leonardo illustrated the advice he gave to other painters of painting motions and aspects of the sitters not only to portray surface accuracy but also to reveal the inner motivations of the subject. The Mona Lisa has puzzled centuries of admirers because of the mysterious shading around the eyes and mouth, giving her an expression, admits Murray Roston, "which puzzles us with the enigma, the question forever beyond verification, whether she smiles in amusement, in melancholy, in gentle mockery, or whether, indeed, the suspicion of a smile is altogether our own imagining."23

Leonardo, in fact, recommended painting in the shadows "toward evening, when it is cloudy or misty and this will be the perfect atmosphere" to add the quality of grazia or "grace" (though Kemp stresses this term has "more far-reaching implications than our modern use of the term"):

The utmost grace in the shadows and the lights is added to the faces of those who sit in the darkened doorways of their dwellings. Then the eye of the beholder observes the shaded part of the face thrown into deeper shade, by the shadows of the aforesaid dwellings, and sees brightness added to the illuminated part of the face by the radiance of the atmosphere. Because of such increases in the shadows and lights the face acquires great relief, and in the illuminated part the shadows are almost indistinguishable, and in the shaded part the lights are almost indistinguishable. The face depicted in this way acquires much beauty with the increase in shadows and lights.24

Relating to his blurring of boundaries is the life of Leonardo. Like Marvell, Leonardo poses a puzzle to scholars, as if his life and tendencies possessed the indefiniteness of his portraits. L. D. Ettlinger comments that, for all his ingenious ideas, techniques, and philosophies, Leonardo never really "finalized" anything:

In all encounters with Leonardo, there is never a definite answer to any of the artistic, aesthetic, historical, or psychological questions which he raises. The sfumato—the suggestive smoke-like contour—is as much a characteristic of his personality as it is a feature of his drawing. Moreover, the drawings and notebooks give testimony of a mind perpetually in rapid motion, now proceeding with logical exactitude of the schooled thinking, now flitting poetically from image to image in the most unexpected manner.

Noting his lack of completion of any single scheme for a treatise on painting, Ettlinger queries, "Did something in his nature revolt against any attempt to force his ideas into too rigid a mould?" Perhaps, like Victor Turner, Leonardo realized potential is far greater than reality. In his didactic lectures on the visual and literary arts Due lezzioni, Benedetto Varchi (1502/3–1565) agreed that a truly great work must remain incomplete: "[W]hoever makes something does no more according to the Peripatetics, than take it from its potential existence and reduce it to its actual existence."25

Gombrich notes that Leonardo's creativity, then, was not a result of self-discipline and study but of deliberately remaining in a liminal state of potentiality. Leonardo would induce himself into a dreamlike state so that his imagination could play with blots and shapes, and "these shapes in turn helped Leonardo to enter into the kind of trance in which his inner visions could be projected on to external objects," as Leonardo describes: "I have in the past seen in clouds and walls stains which have inspired me in beautiful inventions of many things. These stains, while wholly in themselves deprived of perfection in any part, did not lack perfection in regard to their movements or other actions." E. H. Gombrich, whose work has greatly enriched the psychological study of art, relates that Leonardo believed crumbling walls, glowing embers, speckled stones, clouds, and other irregular shapes could inspire artists as sounds could inspire writers, and this realization was the source of his use of sfumato. In the artist's mind, the indeterminate stimulates the mind to further inventions: "The sketch is no longer the preparation for a particular work, but is part of a process which is constantly going on in the artist's mind; instead of fixing the flow of imagination it keeps it in flux."26

Like Marvell, whose portrait belonging to the Duke of Baccleauch is described by Legouis as a "dreamy young man gazing queerly," Leonardo, intentionally or not, lived a liminal existence, always in the realm of possibility and becoming. And Leonardo strongly recommends to all potential artists this refusal to commit to boundaries:

O painter, when you compose a narrative painting, do not draw the limbs on your figure with hard contours or it will happen to you as to many different painters who wish every little stroke of charcoal to be definitive. These kinds of painters well suppose that they will accumulate riches, but they will not acquire praise for their art for on many occasions the creature represented does not move his limbs in a manner that reflects the motion of his mind.

The danger, Leonardo advises, is that once these clean lines are drawn, the artist hesitates to change them, even to improve their quality, so settles for neat but only adequate work. But also Leonardo's figures often enact their identities through action, not through still portraiture, and these multiple lines helped convey that action. Leonardo expounds in great detail in his notes the proper way to portray actions by various figures, believing that action defined motivation: "That figure is most praiseworthy which best expresses through its actions the passion of its mind. . . . The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way that they could not signify anything else." Gombrich demonstrates that some of Leonardo's sketches were such a welter of pentimenti that the artist "had to clarify his idea by using a stylus and tracing the line he finally chose through the paper to its reverse."27

The quality of "unfinishedness" has a more significant effect on the audience of a painting or other work of art. Gombrich explains that all representation (which can be interpreted as visual or literary) relies to some extent on what he terms "guided projection." It is the audience's filling in what is not given in a painting (or other work of art) from the memory. Sometimes we as viewer/reader expect something that is not there, so we naturally compensate for what is missing, adding to or ignoring the original composition—then "projection" takes over "perception." Like Keats's "Doctrine of Negative Capability," omissions and uncertainties blur the boundaries of a work, creating a liminal space that involves the reader/audience into the work, spurring the reader to create the "closure" that is not evident. Gombrich believes this process is necessary "if the work is to come to life for us":

The interpretation produces no contradiction, no jarring split. In looking at a work of art we will always project some additional significance that is not actually given. . . . The penumbra of vagueness, the 'openness' of the symbol is an important constituent of any work of art.

Gombrich agrees with Ulric Neisser that "all perceiving is a constructive process" and calls this constructive process the "Beholder's Share," arguing that "strictly speaking, no two-dimensional image can be interpreted as a spatial arrangement without such a constructive contribution of our spatial imagination." The more vital the feature that is indicated by the context and yet omitted—as we will discuss in Marvell's portrayal of his enigmatic characters of the Mower, the Nymph, and Chlora of "Mourning,"—the more engaging is the "Beholder's Share." Hence Leonardo's best portraits are achieved by blurring those very features in which the expression, the personality resides, "compelling us to complete the act of creation." Gombrich describes the effect, similar to the viewer's tendency to step away from a painting to view it from afar:

The distance from the canvas weakens the beholder's power of discrimination and creates a blur which mobilizes his projective faculty. The indistinct parts of the canvas become a screen provided only that certain distinctive features stand out with sufficient force and that no contradictory messages meet the eye to spoil the impression.28

As Gombrich discusses in his chapter "Psycho-Analysis and the History of Art," too much truth, too much reality, discourages and distances the audience and produces a type of "aesthetic discomfort." He exemplifies his theory by a comparison of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c. 1485; figure 2.1) with the 1879 Birth of Venus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879; figure 2.2). Though Gombrich admits that Bouguereau's rendition is more "accurate," aided by the advent of photography, he also concedes, "This is a pin-up girl rather than a work of art": "By this we mean that the erotic appeal is on the surface—is not compensated for by this sharing of the artist's imaginative process. The image is painfully easy to read, and we resent being taken for such simpletons."29 The creativity, the cooperative aspects of liminality are missing, and we have the harsh light of reality Leonardo discouraged.

If there were ever a poet whose shadowy outlines prompted the Beholder's Share, it is Andrew Marvell. Marvell's known life is defined by ambiguity and uncertainty. Few specific personal details exist upon which to form a clear opinion, or even an understanding of his person. Though he left solid evidence of his political devotedness to Hull, even his political leanings contradict: he shows himself a loyal follower of Cromwell who equally welcomed the Reformation, a dedicated public servant for Hull yet a private man who had no exalted (or even recorded) sense of his role as a poet, as Smith comments: "Unlike major talents such as Milton or Dryden, and unlike lesser contemporary poetic talents like Waller and Cowley, [Marvell] kept his literary views and achievement almost entirely silent: we only know about it from the works that were published after his death." Ann Berthoff adds that we also know nothing of his theoretical concepts of his literary work: "There is no record in letter or reported conversation of Marvell's attitudes towards his art." We know only Aubrey's unfortunate and probably exaggerated legacy of his drinking alone "to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse."30

Figure 2.1. The Birth of Venus, c. 1486. By Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510). Tempera on canvas 172.5 cm × 278.5 cm (67.9 in × 109.6 in). Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality/copyright status: Italian/out of copyright.

Figure 2.2. The Birth of Venus, 1879. By William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Oil on canvas. 300 cm × 218 cm (120 in × 86 in). Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.

Born at Winestead, Olderness, Yorkshire, on March 31, 1621, to Andrew Marvell Sr. and Anne Pease Marvell, Andrew Marvell fully exhibits the "betwixt and between" qualities of liminality in his life as well as in his poetry. He may have attended Hull Grammar School from 1629–1633,31 and though he matriculated at Trinity College, he left in 1641 without his M.A., probably because he ran out of funds, since his father drowned in the Humber in the same year, while his mother had died three years earlier.32 Marvell seems noncommittal in religion, turning from his Puritan roots to run away from his studies at Trinity College to join the Jesuits, "from whom he was recovered from his father," reportedly at a London bookshop. Legouis believes the younger Marvell's possible conversion might have been a possible "reaction to his mother's death" but also indicative of his attraction to visual arts. Jim Swan agrees that Catholicism offered a more visually oriented religion. Marvell's possible conversion to Roman Catholicism, then, serves both as argument for and evidence of the visual aspects of Marvell's work.33

From 1642/1643 to 1645–1649, Marvell's life blurs to conjecture. John Milton's testimony in a letter of February 21, 1653, to John Bradshaw that Marvell "hath spent foure years abroad in Holland, ffrance, Italy, and Spaine, to a very good purpose. . . gaineing of those 4 languages" is taken as the best evidence of Marvell's activities during these years, though specifics are lacking. Smith questions the order of countries Marvell visited but acknowledges, "It was not the most extensive tour but it was certainly broad-ranging and credible as a strategy for gaining experience." Hunt recaps some of the uncertainties of Marvell's activities during this time: Did he remain a while in Hull after his father's death, serving a clerkship? Did he fight in the Civil War? Which of his works might be attributed to those years abroad? Which references in his poetry (like the references to "the toril / Ere the bulls enter at Madril" in "Appleton House," lines 447–48) might be attributed to experiences abroad? And more significant to this study, did these years pique his interest in visual art and gardening? Whatever the influences, the 1649 publication of the elegy "Upon the Death of Lord Hastings" indicates Marvell was back in England by then and indicating Royalist tendencies, a point given credence by his move to Nunappleton in 1650 or 1651 to serve as tutor to Mary Fairfax, the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the former general of what would become Cromwell's New Model Army who had retired to his estate in Yorkshire at the tender age of thirty-eight in protest of the trial of Charles I and the invasion of Scotland. Besides the country-house poem "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax," several of Marvell's more pastoral poems—"The Garden," "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," the Mower poems, and others—are assumed by many to be products of these two years at Nunappleton in the beauty of the Fairfax garden and estate, though Smith agrees with Allan Pritchard that a later date of 1668 is more likely for "The Garden."34

After leaving his position as tutor at Nunappleton in 1652, and completing another tutoring position for Cromwell's ward William Dutton, Marvell totally changed directions from the tranquility and solitude of the years at Yorkshire. As Hunt comments, "It is . . . totally characteristic of Marvell's fascination for antithetical states that having fully appreciated the values of retreat, solitude and contemplation he wants to try involvement, business and activism." On September 2, 1657, he was appointed assistant to Latin Secretary John Milton, employed in the office of John Thurloe, a post that brought him into "closer personal contact" with Oliver Cromwell.35

He definitely elicited criticism for the uncertainty of his political allegiance. Hunt explains that after his Nunappleton years, during the Restoration, Marvell "was variously hailed as a coffeehouse wit, a hack writer paid for by dissenters, a stooge for Milton . . . and an affected Ingenioso." In addition, Marvell was accused of an in-between sexual orientation. In 1673 Richard Leigh named Milton a "stallion" having ready access to Marvell, his "gelding," a rather liminal gender designation, which can be interpreted as the feminine half of a homosexual couple or a less-than-virile male. In his satiric response to this accusation, The Rehearsal Transpros'd, Marvell admits that he often wrote "betwixt Jest and Earnest." Yet, after Cromwell's death and the restoration of the monarchy, Marvell continued as assistant secretary of foreign tongues until February 1660 and as member of Parliament representing Hull in the Commons from 1659 to his death in 1678—a man seemingly able to remain in the uncertain area between sides.36

Even in his death, Marvell remains tauntingly secretive. He died August 16, 1678, in London at the house in Great Russell Street that he had instructed Mary Palmer to rent the year before. According to Pierre Legouis, because the death was sudden, poison was suspected (possibly by Jesuits), and Legouis quotes a contemporary poem that queries "whether Fate or Art untwined his thread." However, Legouis assures us that Marvell was killed

strictly in accordance with the rules of medicine, by an old-fashioned physician who, finding him laid up with a tertian ague, bled and sweated his patient into a profound sleep, during which he died "apoplectice," i.e. comatose, though the doctor could have saved his life by giving one ounce of a bark introduced into Europe by the Jesuits, known as 'Jesuits' powder,'"

and called by Richard Garnett in his 1895 The Age of Dryden "Peruvian bark."37

Perhaps even more intriguing is the 1681 posthumous publication of his Miscellaneous Poems with a notice to the reader that these poems were by Andrew Marvell and signed by his wife, "Mary Marvell." The ill-fated Mary Palmer, "widow of a poor keeper of a tennis court and mother of several children" and Marvell's landlady in Westminster, claimed the connection possibly in hopes of profiting from the wifeless, childless poet, her claim perhaps supported by the fact that Marvell took the Great Russell Street House in her name. Smith offers no judgment of the truthfulness of the marriage, though he acknowledges, "[W]e cannot be certain that this was not an unusual marriage."38

Surviving portraits, whether or not they actually portray Marvell, do succeed in representing his enigmatic self, if only because of the uncertainty of their authenticity. As Legouis rightly judges, the portraits "resemble one another so little that one hesitates to accept them all as authentic," and his descriptions of the person in three of the paintings proves this: the "dreamy young man, gazing queerly, of the miniature that belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch," the "man with a high and broad forehead painted by Hanneman in 1658," and the man "whose brow is more than half concealed by a flowing head of curly hair (or a periwig) in the picture presented by Nettleton to the English nation."39

Figure 2.3. NPG 554. Andrew Marvell. By unknown artist. Oil on canvas, circa 1655–1660. 597 mm x 470 mm (23½ in x 18½ in) oval. Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Authentic or not, all of these portraits indicate that the sitter appreciated the greater shadowing advocated by Leonardo da Vinci to portray "the motion of the mind" and "mental attitudes" of the sitter. The one portrait accepted as authentic, the "Nettleton" version in the National Portrait Gallery, which may have served as the source of the engraved portrait published posthumously in the Miscellaneous Poems of 1681, certainly exemplifies the more intriguing shadowing becoming more popular in England in the seventeenth century and, following Leonardo's suggestion, seems to portray the inner life of the sitter. According to Marvell's clothing, the portrait was painted in 1655–1660, when Marvell was either assistant to Latin Secretary John Milton or was abroad as a tutor to Cromwell's ward and intended son-in-law, both positions indicating public status. Spencer believes Marvell's pose indicates "self-conscious stylishness" intended to convey this status; however, Murray gives a much less complimentary view of the sitter, whom he describes with the "plump cheeks and cold demeanor of a discountenanced pork butcher," demonstrating that the enigmatic Marvell, even in pictorial representation, prompts the Beholder's Share.40

In physical appearance, personality, and motivation, then, the picture of Marvell offers shadowing but few hard lines, inviting his admirers to join with him in the in-between realm of possibility. His lyric poems, too, draw us in to the space that is neither in nor out of clear intention and meaning, the space intriguing because uncertain, the space between.

Notes

1. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 41–42 and 44; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 128–29; and Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Chaffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

2. Turner, From Ritual, 82, 26–27.

3. See van Gennep, Rites, 21; Turner, From Ritual, 24, 82; and Turner, Ritual Process, 129.

4. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 98, and Turner, From Ritual, 26.

5. Turner, From Ritual, 44.

6. Turner, From Ritual, 27.

7. Turner, From Ritual, 30–31; and Mihai Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 68.

8. Spariosu, Wreath, 41–42. Aristotle explains:

[I]t is not the poet's business to tell what has happened, but the kind of things that would happen—what is possible according to probability or necessity. The difference between the historian and the poet is not the difference between writing in verse or prose. . . . The difference is that the one tells what has happened, and the other the kind of things that would happen. It follows therefore that poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history; for poetry unifies more, whereas history agglomerates.

See Aristotle, On the Art of Fiction: An English Translation of Aristotle's Poetics, edited by L. J. Potts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), chapter 9, lines 4–14; page 19.

9. See Sir Philip Sidney, "The Defense of Poetry," in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford Authors Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 218, 235; Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry," in Shelley's Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophesy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), 282–83; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses," in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1: 615–20.

10. Spariosu, Wreath, 29–30.

11. Spariosu, Wreath, 46; and Shelly, "Defense," 279.

12. Turner, From Ritual, 104–5; and Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 178.

13. Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 55 and 56; and Wing-tsit Chan, A Sourcebook of Chinese Philolosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 208.

14. Joan Faust, "Queenes and Jonson's Masque of Mirrors," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 28, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 1–29.

15. Turner, From Ritual, 105; Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 167; and William Baldwin, "Dedication," in Mirrour for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938; repr. Barnes & Noble, 1970), 65–66.

16. For further exploration of the self-reflecting aspects of Marvell's works, see chapter 6, "Smoke and Mirrors."

17. A. Philip McMahon, ed. and trans., Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270) by Leonardo da Vinci (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 1: 113, para. 280; and Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 202.

18. Kemp, Leonardo, 202–3.

19. See Heinrich Schwarz, "The Mirror of the Artist and the Mirror of the Devout," in Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E. Suida on his Eightieth Birthday (London: Phaidon, 1959), 99; Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, ed. and trans. John R. Spenser, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 83; and David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Studio, 2001), 72.

20. Kemp, Leonardo, i.

21. Kemp, Leonardo, 88 and 198; and Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1954), 7–8. Ironically, according to Erwin Panofsky, Galileo did not share Leonardo's love of sfumato but objected "to whatever, in his opinion, amounted to a blurring of borderlines within the realm of art itself," including allegorical poems or anamorphic art. See Panofsky, Galileo, 12–13.

22. Kemp, Leonardo, 53; and E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 4th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1972), 221–22.

23. Kemp, Leonardo, 200; and Murray Roston, Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 264–65.

24. Kemp, Leonardo, 312 and 215–16. Kemp explains that grazia "embodies a sense of individual virtue, much in the manner of the theological sense of 'grace.' It should be regarded as distinct from 'beauty,' which is a more exclusive visual property." See Kemp, Leonardo, 312.

25. L. D. Ettlinger, "Magus," review of Leonardo da Vinci on Painting, New Statesman, May 7, 1965, 732; and François Quiviger, "Benedetto Varchi and the Visual Arts," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 50 (1987): 222.

26. E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), 61; and Kemp, Leonardo, 222.

27. Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 240; Kemp, Leonardo, 222 and 144–45; Gombrich, Norm and Form, 58.

28. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 203–8; and Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 18; Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), 95; Gombrich, "The Evidence of Images," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 40–41; Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1971), 10; and Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 222.

29. Gombrich, Meditations, 37.

30. Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 10; Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell's Major Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 34; and John Aubrey, Aubrey's Brief Lives (Secker & Warburg, 1949, repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 196.

31. John Lawson notes, "Andrew Marvell's connexion with the school is as probable and as unprovable as Shakespeare's with that at Stratford-on-Avon." See John Lawson, A Town Grammar School through Six Centuries: A History of Hull Grammar School against Its Local Background (London: Published for University of Hull by Oxford University Press, 1963), 83. Nigel Smith acknowledges that Hull did not keep a register of students until 1635, so no record exists of Marvell's attendance; however, he finds it "improbable" that Marvell did not attend the school, not only because it was the only grammar school in the area, but also because Marvell's "later descriptions of grammar school experience are wide and vivid." See Smith, Chameleon, 28–29.

32. Noting the devastating effects of the elder Marvell's death on the poet, Smith comments, "[I]n losing his father Marvell had lost the means to a certain career." See Chameleon, 39.

33. Muriel C. Bradbrook, "Marvell and the Masque," in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 205; J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 11; Legouis, Poet, Puritan, Patriot, 4; and Jim Swan, "History, Pastoral and Desire: Marvell's Mower Poems," International Review of Psycho-Analysis 31 (1976): 200. Though the incident at Cambridge has never been proven, Estelle Haan reports of a letter discovered by Grosart written by the Reverend John Norton, vicar of Welton, to Marvell's father. In the 1640 letter, Norton recounts his own son's similar experience with the Jesuits, also at Cambridge. Referring to "some such prank used towards your sonne," Norton asks the senior Marvell for advice: "I desire to know what you did therein." Haan states that the letter is among the municipal archives of Hull. See Haan, Marvell's Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (Bruxelles: Latomus, 2003), 75 and note 96.

34. John Milton, The Life Records of John Milton, ed. Joseph Milton French, 5 vols. (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 3:323; Smith, Chameleon, 46 and 219; John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 27–56, 79–80; Allan Pritchard, "Marvell's 'The Garden': A Restoration Poem?" Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 23, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 371–88.

35. Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 112, 133; Smith, Chameleon, 136.

36. Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 11; Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, edited by Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble, and Nicholas von Maltzahn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:268. All quotes from Marvell's prose works will be taken from this this edition. Leigh includes these comments in his invective a "Tetrastich":

O marvelous Fate. O Fate full of marvel;

That Nol's Latin Pay two Clerks should deserve ill!

Hiring a Gelding and Milton the Stallion;

His Latin was gelt, and turn'd pure Italian.

Leigh elaborates:

Certainly to see a Stallion leap a Gelding; (and this leap's fair, for he leapt over the Geldings head) was a more preposterous sight, or at least more Italian, than what you fancy of Father Patrick's bestriding Doctor Patrick.

See Richard Leigh, The transproser rehears'd, or, The fifth act of Mr. Bayes's play (Oxford: Hugo Grotius and Jacob Van Harmine, 1673), 135, Early English Books Online (hereafter cited as EEBO. For quotes throughout the book, long s will be updated).

37. Legouis, Poet, Puritan, Patriot, 161–62; and Richard Garnett, The Age of Dryden (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1895; repr. 1932), 50. For more on the healing powers of Peruvian bark, see Grimault and Cie, Ferruginous Syrup of Red Peruvian Bark (Haarlem, Holland: John Enschede, 1865), EEBO.

38. Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 183–84; Smith, Chameleon, 338. The "astonishing tangle of litigation and human machinations" in the aftermath of Mary Palmer's claim is detailed in Hunt's biography, while accounts of Mary Palmer Marvell's accusations of being cheated out of Marvell's estate are quoted from her testimony in The National Archive by Philip Withington. See Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 184–86; and Philip Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 226–29.

39. Legouis, Poet, Puritan, Patriot, 240. Hunt prints images of all portraits that have been said to portray Andrew Marvell in Andrew Marvell, 13–15 and 190.

40. Kemp, Leonardo, 200 and 222; Jeffrey B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 14; Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 2.
Chapter Three

Marvell's Portrait of a Liminal Realm: "Upon Appleton House"

Marvell's contribution to the country-house poem tradition, "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax," serves as a perfect example of Marvell's characteristic blurring of boundaries. Purportedly an encomium to his patron Sir Thomas Fairfax, who led parliamentarian forces until his growing dissatisfaction with the English revolution prompted an early retirement on June 26, 1650, "Appleton House" has prompted interpretations that run the spectrum of possible genres, from epic to topographical to pastoral to typological to apocalyptic and, finally, to the epideictic celebration of the Fairfax family and estate.1 What fascinates and confounds commentators are the reflected and sometimes anamorphic images from every kind of perspective that confuse the "within" and "without," giving "Appleton" a pictorial quality not normally seen in country-house poems.

But this very structuring of the poem as a series of reflective tableaux with vague or nonexistent boundaries helps both to explain and to enact Marvell's purpose in describing his strange walk through the Fairfax estate and the Fairfax family tree: not content to serve strictly as employee of the Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron, Marvell not only creates the reflective surfaces and underlying depths of meaning in the separate tableaux of his poem but also explores the transitional space between these portrayals to demonstrate his understanding of and value to the Fairfax circle. Designing the poem as a type of "mirror for magistrates," yet angling himself within the portrait/mirror, Marvell can present images of the Fairfax family and of the house and landscapes that reflect the family, creating a depiction that is both canvas and reflection, celebration and advice. The poet creates a place for himself as painter and as subject, not only inserting himself into this Fairfax portrayal but also empowering himself as its artist and exegete.

As we see throughout this study, Marvell's critics have long connected his poetry to the visual arts. Harold Toliver believes the pictorial qualities in Marvell's poetry create a disengagement "not only from its subject but from the logic and the pressure of serial time," a quality that can be seen as both a strength and a weakness: "By stopping an action for contemplation, it frees the mind from time, but it also emphasizes even more the corporeality of surfaces and creates a problem of gaps that neither rhetoric nor music has" so that "the eye is left with teasing breaks in logic between parts of an exhibit."2 This perfectly describes the various sections of gallery-like images that make up "Upon Appleton House." Like E. H. Gombrich's theory of the "Beholder's Share" in visual art seen in chapter 2, these gaps engage Marvell's patron, as well as his readers, as they attempt to fill in the liminal space between pictures.

Marvell's first priority in creating a relationship with Lord Fairfax through the poem is to demonstrate their like-mindedness, necessary for Fairfax to appreciate the poet's praise and advice. Fortunately for Marvell, both he and his patron were at a liminal time in their lives and in their careers. Marvell probably wrote "Upon Appleton House" during his stay at Nunappleton in Yorkshire with the Fairfax family from late 1650 to the end of 1652, serving as tutor of languages for the Fairfaxes' only child, daughter Mary.3 These years fell after the poet's rather mysterious four-year period of travels in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain in the 1640s and before his distinguished career in public service. Likewise, Fairfax was experiencing an in-between time during these years. In December 1644, the Parliament Commons majority amalgamated the three existing armies, and in 1645, after he commanded the parliamentarian forces to brilliant victories, Fairfax was named commander-in-chief of this new entity, which was soon to be known as the New Model Army. Yet Fairfax opposed the arrest of the king and refused to continue his position on the court of high commission that eventually condemned Charles as a traitor. In protest of a preemptive invasion of Scotland, Fairfax resigned his army commission and retired to Nunappleton in 1650, leaving much doubt as to whether he still supported the parliamentarian cause, a doubt that seemed resolved when, in 1660, Fairfax helped Charles II regain the throne. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes, "It was a fitting symbol of Fairfax's role in bringing back the king that the chestnut-brown horse which Charles II rode at his coronation was a gift from Fairfax's own stable."4

As with Marvell, other aspects of Lord Fairfax's personality and beliefs are hard to pin down. Even his religious beliefs indicate ambivalence. Marvell's very temporary and possibly coerced or seduced fall into Roman Catholicism is a well-known biographical anecdote, matched by Fairfax's contradictory preferences. Though the general considered himself "a non-sectarian puritan" and believed "that the appetite for material things was one of the devil's snares," he intervened to save the largest collection of medieval stained glass in England at York Minster. John Aubrey later credits Fairfax with the preservation of the Bodleian Library when, during the parliamentarian occupation of Oxford, he installed a strong guard around the library to stop the theft and vandalism of books that had been tolerated by the royalists during their occupation.5 And, of course, there is Fairfax's famous love for antiquaries. His impressive personal collection included engravings, curios, coins, and medals, which Charles H. Hinnant believes "reflected the spirit of aristocratic connoisseurship and rivalry that brought into being the great Stuart collections." Fairfax also demonstrated interest in the technical aspects of painting, particularly landscapes. His library included a copy of Edward Norgate's early painting treatise, Miniatura, which was presented to his daughter Mary by her drawing teacher, Daniel King, who obviously claimed the work as his own.6

Marvell's employment with this enigmatic patron as tutor is itself a liminal position, in between companion and servant, yet, as discussed in chapter 2, Victor Turner's concept of liminality is a realm of potential, of possibility, of play, as a culture attempts to reclassify reality and the individual's relationship to society, nature, and culture.7 Marvell, then, uses his liminal position in the Fairfax household to create in "Upon Appleton House" a realm of mutual possibility in which the past is referenced, the future is promised, but the present is pure potential. In his in-between state, Marvell can assume a playful autonomy allowing him the freedom to socialize, fantasize, and even criticize his patron. The opening of the poem links it to the country-house poem tradition, appearing to praise the humility and appropriateness of the house (traditionally representing the character of its owner, as in Jonson's "To Penshurst"), yet the "play" spawned by liminality soon predominates in Marvell's description, as he paints a cartoon-like picture subtly questioning the too-humble and premature retirement of the former commander-in-chief. Marvell admits some may "smile" (line 39) at the "dwarfish" house, a house that, "distressed" (53), has to swell (51) to accommodate its owner. Though Marvell acknowledges "Honour better lowness bears, / Than that unwonted Greatness wears" (57–58), obviously the message is that a man of Fairfax's greatness has a duty to assert himself for the good of his nation. Thus, even in these opening lines, Marvell subtly paints a portrait of house and owner that mirrors the tensions created by the owner's retired presence there.8

Appealing to his patron's interest in antiquaries, Marvell interrupts his picture of Appleton and its owner with an epic-like historical interlude of their origins in the priory, which dated back to 1148, that gave the estate its name and the ruins of which remained. The account acknowledges Fairfax's "strong sense of his own family roots" indicated by the retainer he paid to Roger Dodsworth, an antiquarian, who composed the genealogy of the Fairfax family tree and who was compiling "what was to become the greatest of English monastic histories, the Monasticon Anglicanun." Fairfax also owned a table of "The Saxon-Monarchs, or ye Kings of England since the Year of Christ 800," which stops at Henry VII but indicates that the right of Charles I to the throne was hereditary, not based on conquest, and so helps to explain Fairfax's rejection of the parliamentarian cause.9

The convent episode almost revels in ambiguity, hinting at the near-seduction and imprisonment of the "virgin Thwaites" (line 90) within the "gloomy cloister's gates" (89). The convent inhabitants slyly promise Isabel Thwaites a protected existence, in between "[d]elight" and "vice" (170), where "pleasure piety doth meet; / One perfecting the other sweet" (171–72). In probably their most persuasive argument, these "subtle nuns" (94) deceptively present their mode of life as a temporary, liminal experience: "Try but a little while, if you be wise: / The trial neither costs, nor ties" (195–96). In a direct message to his patron, Marvell portrays ancestor William Fairfax in an indecisive state, in between action and retirement: "He would respect / Religion, but not right neglect" (225–26). But William Fairfax proves himself a man of action who rejects escape from duty, recognizing that these nuns, who boast of their embroidery skills (123–36), have deformed "sanctity" (203) into "[a]n art by which [they] finelier cheat" (204), almost cheating the Fairfax family of their descendants. The comical rescue scene, reminiscent of Swift's "Battle of the Books," anticipates Marvell's subsequent portrayal of Appleton's gardens, a mixture of nature, art, and whimsy. The nuns literally employ sanctity in the art of war, opposing Fairfax with "wooden saints" (250) and an "old holy-water brush" (252), rosary "chain-shot" (254), and their "sharpest weapons," "their tongues" (256). In Marvell's account, as William whisks away his future bride, the sinister priory seems to disappear, "in one instant dispossessed" (272). Was it ever there?10

The juxtaposition of this event with the description of the present gardens is carefully contrived, then, to accentuate the poet's shared appreciation of Fairfax's interest in nature and landscaping, to link the stanzas to the playful theme of nature shaped by art, and to offer again an ambiguous criticism of Fairfax's retirement there. Marvell sets up the estate as one that allows nature free rein: "Nature here hath been so free / As if she said, 'Leave this to me'" (75–76); however, we soon see the grounds are carefully structured and mirror the Lord General's past exploits. Because Fairfax "could not cease" his military role (284), he attempts to stay in between action and contemplation, laying his "gardens out in sport / In the just figure of a fort" (285–86).11 Marvell playfully pursues this tactic by creating a picture of all nature sharing this liminal existence between the peace of nature and the contrivances of war, as each morning dawn raises the "colours of the day" (290), the bee buzzes reveille (291–92), the flowers display "silken ensigns" (294) and reload their muskets with "odours new" (296) before they "let fly" the "fragrant volleys" (298) in salute of Lord Fairfax and of his daughter, who herself seems "a flower to be" (302). With his obvious interests in gardening and in collectibles, Fairfax would appreciate this mixture of art and nature.

By now, just as the reader is convinced that the poet creates his anthropomorphic plants in praise of his patron, Marvell inserts a lament accentuating Britain's loss in Fairfax's early retirement. Like Fairfax's lovely garden, England could have flourished with Fairfax's capable leadership, but without it, Marvell must move on to "the abyss" (369) of the Appleton estate meadows. There, he creates images that defy single-point perception and instead portray the liminal realm of possibility (the grass is, after all, "unfathomable" [370]). Yet if we consider Marvell's odd portrayals of giant grasshoppers towering over men (371–74) as visual art, the images make sense. In England before the seventeenth century, perspective was either not noticed or handled multiple ways, not with a uniform sense of "space" but more concerned with objects in the space. Thus, painting demonstrated multiple perspectives on some canvases. Henry Hawkins's 1633 emblem book Partheneia Sacra displays an image that, because of lack of visual perspective, portrays near a castle a rose that R. I. V. Hodge estimates would be twenty feet high, with a bee next to it the size of an airplane. Fairfax would have understood the reference to the "deception" involved in painting, referred to by Norgate in Miniatura: "[T]he end of all drawing [is] nothing else but soe to deceave the Eyes, by the deceiptfull ingling and witchcraft of lights and shadowes, that round embost and sollid bodyes in Nature may seeme round embost and sollid in Plano." This deception includes inventing new creations, like chimeras and griffins.12

The unfixedness of liminality allows Marvell to blend physical states: "unfathomable grass" (line 370) changes from solid to liquid, as men become diving mariners, sounding the depth of the meadow (377–84), then Israelites parting the "green sea" (390), then cruel soldiers massacring the grass and the rail living there (393–400). Marvell's depiction of violence intruding on the seemingly pastoral scene is not totally fanciful. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker explain that the summer of 1651 (which they demonstrate was the probable time depicted in the poem) was a time of crisis shown by renewed millennialism, trapping Fairfax and his family literally in between: "[T]o be situated at Nun Appleton in these weeks, between Levellers to the east of the estate and the massing English army at Ripon just to the west, was to live the contradictions as well as the physical dangers of scriptural politics." Also, threats of Scottish invasion remained: if Scottish forces that were moving toward the border in late July 1651 took the eastern road into England, they would pass within a few miles of the Fairfax estate.13

Zooming in on one figure in the landscape, Marvell introduces "bloody Thestylis" (line 401), who scoops up the murdered rail to serve to the mowers, a reference, some think, to King Charles. In directly addressing the reader and referring to Marvell's own words—"'He called us Israelites'" (406)—this character also serves as a liminal figure in the visual portrayal of the meadows. Probably familiar both to Fairfax and Marvell, Thestylis performs a function known in the visual arts as a "Sprecher" (or "speaker") figure, a character in mannerist painting who exists in between the world of the artist and that of the portrayal. Her equivalent in painting, Wylie Sypher explains, is often seen as "a sharply accented foreground figure who faces outward toward the spectator, yet twirls inward, gesturing or glancing toward the action behind him," while in drama the direct address of an intimate soliloquy performs the same function. As such a figure, Thestylis blurs the boundary between art and life, involving us, "by direct address, almost by shock tactics, . . . shortening the aesthetic distance" between us and Marvell's poem, according to Sypher.14 The inclusion of this Sprecher makes us wonder if we are inside or out of the poem, as we attempt to focus on a scene now turning kaleidoscope-like to a bloody battle scene (417–24), then a country dance (425–32), then hay islands in a sea (433–36), then hay pyramids in the desert (437–40), then back to the tabula rasa state before creation (446). Marvell can use this liminal space of potentiality (409–46) as a blank canvas (444) to create any landscape he desires: a bullring (447–48), a field of cattle (451–54), Davenant's image of creation (455–56), and, through the use of optical instruments, fleas (461–62).15

The subsequent flooding of the Denton River appropriately serves as an initiation rite, cleansing the initiate for a new role as he emerges from the liminal state. We attempt to visualize this seemingly violent scene of destruction as all blend into one self-reflecting watery state—"The river in itself is drowned" (471)—a liminal state spawning imaginative creations of every kind: eels bellowing within oxen (473–74), horses hanging on to leeches (475–76), boats sailing over bridges (477), and fish intruding on horses' stables. Even this fanciful depiction might refer to the general's military past. On September 14, 1643, Fairfax and his father Ferdinando cut the banks and opened the sluices from the Hull and Humber Rivers, which, in Fairfax's own words, "drowned the Land two Miles about the Town," stopping the Royalist army.16 Thus the scene paints an anamorphic yet historical picture that reiterates the self-reflecting aspects of "Appleton House" and helps to empower Marvell as artistic creator and adviser.

These mirror images connect with Marvell's purpose in "Appleton" in several ways. The seventeenth century was fascinated with perspective and reflections/interreflections of the landscape, particularly in mirroring surfaces like water. In fact, the second edition of Norgate's Miniatura expands his discussion on landscape and its importance in the visual arts. Thus, use of reflective surfaces in describing the Appleton estate would appeal to Lord Fairfax not only in his interest in art but also in his love of nature and gardening. Also, the mirror has been used as an indicator of truth, giving a pure image of reality. Mirrors then became associated with Holy Scripture since they gave one a true image of humankind, and then, as a "speculum," the mirror image began to be applied to any book that gave an accurate image of correct behavior, with topics from governing, as in A Mirror for Magistrates, to etiquette, as in The Mirrour of Good Manners. Similarly, as was seen in Marvell's description of the arrangement of Fairfax's gardens, "Appleton House" does give accurate description of the Fairfax estate, yet in his subtle criticisms of what Fairfax could offer his country, it also offers frank advice. Mirror images in the poem also connect the work to visual art, since, as discussed in chapter 2, mirrors have long been used to reflect a three-dimensional image onto a two-dimensional plane, a practice advocated by Leonardo da Vinci.17

Finally, because of their use as indicators of truthful (or deceiving) self-image and interpretation, mirrors are linked to the period in one's maturity during which "the (infant) self attempts to fashion an individual identity by separating itself from otherness and then seeking to reincorporate this otherness within the new fictional identity." Named by Jacques Lacan as the "mirror stage" and more thoroughly discussed in chapter 5, this stage of liminality, as in various liminal realms of "Appleton House," is a period of nonidentity and possibility, shown in many scenes of the poem.18

Up to this point in the poem, Marvell has served as painter; as he retires to the wood, he inserts himself ("myself embark" [483]) into the canvas as a type of Sprecher figure himself, bridging the gap between his patron and his portrayal and becoming a part of the picture. The wood has long been associated with unknown dangers and darkness, explains Milena Romero Allué, a place of initiation and trial with its "symbolic threshold, whose crossing enacts a rite of passage" as in Dante's selva oscura. Marvell seems to return to the essence of liminality—pure potential and nondifferentiation (note his use of "green" in lines 484, 496, and 628, reminiscent of the state of pure imagination in "The Garden")—so that he can understand the universal language of nature and become a "great prelate of the grove" (592), bridging the gap between man, art, and nature:

Already I begin to call

In their most learn'd original:

And where I language want, my signs

The bird upon the bough divines. . . . (569–72)

In this liminal realm, Marvell can expand and experience the condition of pure potentiality, metamorphosing, as Allué describes, into "a vegetal element belonging to the wood and, then, into an almost Arcimboldesque figure with chaff instead of hair ([line] 600)."19

Marvell as Sprecher reminds Fairfax that this wood images his own ancestry, too, in the "double wood of ancient stocks" (489) that literally figures the "family trees" of Fairfax and Vere. As Fairfax artfully laid out his garden in the "Cinq Ports" (349) of defense, Nature reflects the owner here in the actions of the forest inhabitants. Commentators have long interpreted the actions of the hewel, who is able to fell a great oak because the tree was weakened by "[a] traitor-worm," (554) to be a political allegory for the execution of Charles I.20 In light of Marvell's canvas also serving as mirror, I can interpret it in no other way, particularly in the oak's "seem[ing] to fall content, / Viewing the treason's punishment" (559–60) and Fairfax's own disillusionment with the parliamentarian cause. However, Marvell's mirror instructs as well as reflects, so that, as "prelate of the grove" (592), Marvell can demonstrate to the retired Fairfax the temptation and even danger of remaining in a state of potential and not action: Marvell the Sprecher is forcibly taken by the wood, embroidered with oak leaves (587), clasped by ivy (589–90), bound by woodbines (609), chained by brambles (615), and nailed by briars (616). And the imprisonment is not only physical: Marvell also has "encamped [his] mind" (602) and heart (603–4) behind the trees, hidden from the call of active thought and love. This type of retreat might seem enticing to a patron without a cause, but to remain so, undifferentiated from nature, is to remain in pure liminality, in permanent potentiality with no individuality at all, in a state "[w]here all things gaze themselves, and doubt / If they be in it or without" (637–38).

The call to action, both for Marvell, left suspended in between the earth and sky idly fishing from the osier's tough branches, and for Fairfax, in retreat from an active military career, is not the Fairfax estate and ancestry but the Fairfax future, embodied in their only hope, daughter Mary. Her entrance brings all parts of the canvas from liminality to a focused stasis: nature "recollect[s]" itself (658), the sun displays proper respect and modesty (661–64), and even the halcyon is outdone by Mary, whose presence congeals the air and the stream, trapping "stupid fishes" (677) like "flies in crystal" (678); "Nature is wholly vitrified" (688). As Toliver notes, under Mary's influence, "the topography becomes akin to landscape painting"21

Marvell angles the mirror away from the playful, even anamorphic aspects of Nunappleton as a reflection of the liminal life of Fairfax to present it now as a much more focused reflection of Mary. She gives the "wondrous beauty" to the gardens (689–90) and sweetness to the meadows (692); she makes the river "crystal pure" (693–94) and bestows "straightness" (691) on the previously pure potentiality of the woods. And as the "gardens, woods, meads, [and] rivers" (696) reflect Mary's qualities, they give these natural gifts back to her in forms of art: grassy "carpets" (699), flower crowns (700), a brook-made looking glass (701–2), and an arboreal privacy "screen" (704). Like nature, Mary possesses the universal language of beauty, "heaven's dialect" (712), but unlike Marvell in the wood and her own father in retirement, Mary will not remain in a state of potential but will marry and continue the Fairfax line. In referring to Mary as "a sprig of mistletoe / On the Fairfacian oak" (739–40), Marvell introduces a rather solemn message, even advice, to his patron. As Erickson and Semler explain, the Appleton House estate was entailed on Fairfax's only daughter, who was to suffer an obviously unhappy match with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and was forced to try to sell Nunappleton to pay off some of her dead husband's debts. Whereas sons mythically follow the pattern of leaving but returning to take their father's place, daughters break family bonds, leaving to enter another family, according to Lydia Boose. Turner calls a daughter the liminal "threshold" figure within a cultural space, "whose very presence asserts a breach in the genealogical fence of family enclosure. . . . She exists only to be lost."22

Likewise, the mistletoe is a liminal type of plant in legend as well as in science. A semiparasitic plant, the mistletoe does undergo limited photosynthesis to produce organic matter but gets water and mineral nutrients from its host. Its seeds germinate and root between the bark and the inner wood of the host and form a "limen"—a connection through which water and nutrients pass from the host to the mistletoe. Interestingly, the plant grows on oaks but especially prefers old apple trees, both figuring in the poem. However, some experts believe that, as a semiparasitic plant that penetrates the bark of its host for survival, the mistletoe is harmful to the tree and may contribute to its decline and death. The reference to Mary as mistletoe, then, ironically foretells the loss of the Appleton estate and places her between benefit and liability.23

The rather ominous acknowledgment that at Mary's wedding, the Fairfaxes must "make their destiny their choice" (744) echoes the inevitability expressed by Cromwell's leadership in "An Horatian Ode" ("'Tis madness to resist or blame / The force of angry heaven's flame" [25–26]) and reminds Fairfax that often destiny controls choice.24 Lord Fairfax may remain on his estate, an estate that mirrors the in-between stage of life for Fairfax now, but he should remember that the outside world exists; life on the Nunappleton estate is only a stage in the continuing legacy of Thomas Fairfax, Third Lord Fairfax of Cameron, a legacy carried by daughter Mary.

Marvell completes his canvas with a final nod at his intimacy with his patron and an image of the topsy-turvy aspects of liminality: salmon fishers wearing their canoes like shoes on their heads (771–73). Even in likening these "tortoise-like" men of the sea to "rational amphibii" (774), Marvell presents an in-between state and also appeals to his patron's passion for collecting. The tortoise recalls Fairfax's humility indicated by Appleton House, stretching to fit its owner in stanzas 4–7. Also, Ralph Thoresby describes a "large Sea-Tortoise" among the collections in the Leeds Museum, which houses Fairfax's own artifacts, "brought from the Isle of Ascension in South America, by Dr. Midgley of this Town" who gave the shell to Thoresby: "[the shell] is near a Foot above three Yards in Circumference. The Natives make Boats of the Shells."25 With Fairfax's penchant for rarities, he might well have owned a similar shell or at least saw those of others, increasing his appreciation of Marvell's final image. But perhaps more significantly, though the curved canoes modestly accommodating the heads of the salmon-fishers also resemble Fairfax's home, which "grows spherical" (52) to fit his greatness, these canoes do not function as permanent refuges but liminal ones: they are temporary means of passage from one state to another. Likewise the Fairfax estate, Marvell seems to advise, is not intended as a permanent retreat from social responsibility but "for an inn to entertain / Its Lord a while, but not remain" (71–72).

In presenting the house and estate of Lord Fairfax as a realm of imaginative whimsy and possibility that also mirrors the general's in-between state, neither in the world of action nor in a haven protected from violence, and by inserting himself into the portrait as a participant in the istoria,26 Marvell succeeds in creating and deepening a relationship with his patron, empowering himself as artist and as adviser. Having led Fairfax on a tour of the playful potentiality of Fairfax's life and interests, of the realm of liminality, the poet can confidently invite his patron out of this transitive state, to join him in crossing the threshold, not into a refuge from the world, but into the beginning of the Fairfax future, a future that includes Andrew Marvell, as he invites his patron and his readers, "Let's in" (775).

Notes

1. For Fairfax's retirement, see Warren Chernaik, The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 23; for interpretations of "Appleton House" as epic, see John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 239–43; as topographical, see Jeffrey B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 68–80; and James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 49–84; as pastoral, see Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 199–252; as typological, see Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, vol. 1: 1600–1700, 2nd ed. (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1962), 172–90; as apocalyptic, see Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 46–66; and as epideictic celebration, see Annabel M. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 101–10.

2. Harold E. Toliver, "Marvell's Songs and Pictorial Exhibits," in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 113–14.

3. See Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 88. Derek Hirst and Steve Zwicker more specifically place the poem's context in the "High Summer" of 1651. See their "High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax's Occasions," Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (June 1993): 247–69.

4. Ian J. Gentles, "Fairfax, Thomas, third Lord Fairfax of Cameron (1612–1671)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8: 935, 940.

5. Muriel C. Bradbrook, "Marvell and the Masque," in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 205; and John Aubrey, "Thomas Fairfax," in Aubrey's Brief Lives (Secker & Warburg, 1949, repr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 104. Aubrey's praise is unmitigated:

When Oxford was surrendred, the first thing General Fairfax did was to sett a good Guard of Soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. 'Tis said there was more hurt donne by the Cavaliers (during their Garrison) by way of Embezilling and cutting off chaines of bookes, then there was since. He was a lover of Learning, and had he not taken this speciall care, that noble Library had been utterly destroyed.

6. After his death, Fairfax's collection was sold to the family of Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquarian. Thoresby lists the contents of his museum in Ducatus Leodiensus: or, the Topography of the Ancient and Populous Towns and Parish of Leedes. . . (Leeds, West Yorkshire, England: Printed by B. Dewhirst for Robinson, Son, and Holdsworth, 1816). See also Charles H. Hinnant, "Marvell's Gallery of Art," Renaissance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 28. Fairfax's copy of Norgate's Miniatura is housed in the British Museum, Add. 12461, dedicated to Mary Fairfax. On one of the pages before the dedication, signed by Daniel King, appears Thomas Fairfax's coat of arms, cut from the original cover. See Martin Hardie, ed., Miniatura or the Art of Limning by Edward Norgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919), xviii–xix. Later Norgate editors Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell comment that the unpublished Miniatura was fair game for plagiarizers: "For [Daniel] King and the rest of the scavengers who began to pick at it, Norgate's unpublished text was a useable scrap to tinker with and sell." See their Miniatura or the Art of Limning by Edward Norgate (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1997), 16.

7. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 128–29.

8. Jonathan F. S. Post reports that the present remnants of Appleton House are not of the house described in Marvell's poem: "The present building is probably a remnant of a grander, double-winged house that Fairfax remodeled in the mid-1650s, after Marvell's departure." See Post, "'On Each Pleasant Footstep Stay': A Walk about 'Appleton House,'" Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Ages of Elizabeth, James, and Charles II (2004): 168. See also Lee Erickson, "Marvell's Upon Appleton House and the Fairfax Family," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 163ff.; John Newman, "Marvell's 'Appleton House,'" Times Literary Supplement, January 28, 1972, 99; A. A. Tait, "Marvell's Appleton House," Times Literary Supplement, February 11, 1972, 157; and J. G. Turner, "Upon Appleton House," Notes and Queries 24 (1977): 547–48. This later house is the subject of the "not-always reliable topographical etcher, Daniel King" in "An Orthographical Designe of Severall Views upon the Road in England and Wales" (c. 1660). Post, "'On Each,'" 168. Nigel Smith provides Daniel King's sketch of the later house (c. 1656; Bod Gough Maps 1, fol. 1) in figure 7, page 211, of his Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlowe, England: Pearson Longman, 2007). However, W. McClung thinks Marvell could have been describing the new house, citing the similarity of Marvell's lines 69–71, describing the house as a temporary "inn" for the general, to Fairfax's own poem "Upon the New-built House att Apleton": "Thinke not o Man that dwells herein / This House's a stay but as an Inn." See Bodleian M2S Fairfax 40, quoted in McClung, "The 'Real' Appleton House?" Notes and Queries 26 (1979): 434.

9. Post, "'On Each,'" 163 and 175; and R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and the Seventeenth-Century Revolutions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978), 136–37. George W. Johnson, editor of The Fairfax Correspondence, indicates that the Fairfax family demonstrated an impressive care in preserving evidence of their lineage, judging their efforts "almost without a parallel":

In no other collection are there to be discovered such a mass of letters and documents, public and private; pedigrees, not only of the different branches of their own family, but of all the families with whom they were connected by intermarriage; seals, mottoes, arms, and the varied paraphernalia of heraldic honours.

See Johnson, ed., Fairfax Correspondence: Memoirs of the Reign of Charles the First (London: R. Bentley, 1848), 1: lviii.

10. In 1518, Sir William Fairfax of Steeton did marry Isabel Thwaites, a wealthy orphan whose inheritance included Bishop's Hill in York and the estate at Denton mentioned in stanza 10. (See "Sir William Fairfax of Steeton," www.tudorplace.com.ar/Bios/WilliamFairfaxofSteeton.htm.) Marvell's account, however, falls in between fact and fiction. According to Robert Wilcher, "There is no documentary evidence . . . to authenticate the story Marvell tells in stanzas 12–34." See Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 150. Hodge, in fact, calls the story "a Founder's myth for the House of Fairfax." See Hodge, Foreshortened, 145. Though Sir Clements R. Markham's 1870 biography of Fairfax recounts the story as fact, he cites only Marvell's poem as evidence. See Markham, A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Parliament of England (London: Macmillan & Co., 1870), 4. Lee Erickson concurs that Marvell's account in the poem is the only authority of Isabella's "confinement by the abbess of the Cistercian nunnery and the subsequent legal order which sanctioned Sir William's forcible rescue of his bride." See Erickson, "Marvell's Upon," 160. And though Marvell indicates that the marriage of William Fairfax and Isabel Thwaites began a "simultaneous founding of a dynasty and acquisition of a country estate," the "surrender" of the priory is recorded on December 5, 1539, a full twenty years after the marriage. Marjorie J. Harrison details the fate of Nunappleton, with many of the structures stripped or destroyed and only the steeple and churchyard reported intact when William Fairfax bought the site in 1553. Harrison reports he "pulled down the nunnery buildings and built a house there," speculating he "may have adapted existing buildings, such as the hall and including possibly the prioress's accommodation, on a north-south axis utilising the stone and other materials from the site." See Brian Patton, "Preserving Property: History, Genealogy, and Inheritance in 'Upon Appleton House,'" Renaissance Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 829; Claire Cross and Noreen Vickers, Monks, Friars, and Nuns in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire (Leeds: Yorkshire Archeological Society, 1995), 580; and Marjorie J. Harrison, Nunnery of Nun Appleton, Borthwick Paper No. 98 (York, England: Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 2001), 21–23.

11. The obvious source for confirmation of the accuracy of Marvell's description of the garden would be Clements R. Markham's 1870 biography of Fairfax, and Markham does appear to support Marvell's claim: "In this flower garden the general took especial delight. The flowers were planted in masses—tulips, pinks, and roses, each in separate beds, which were cut into the shape of forts with five bastions." Indicative of the self-reflecting aspects of Marvell's portrayals, however, the only source Markham identifies for this information is Marvell's poem itself. See Markham, A Life, 366.

12. See Alistair Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7–10; Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra (Rouen: John Cousturier, 1633), facing title page, EEBO; Hodge, Foreshortened, 43; Hardie, Miniatura, 80; and Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England: James Hall, 1981), 44. The unreliability of sight in portraying reality had been understood at least since Leonardo da Vinci's writings on painting. In 1608, George Hakewill commented on the diminishing of size by distance, an important feature of landscape:

[F]rom the topps of high mountains, heardes of cattell seeme to be but ants, and from a watch tower a farre of, shipps under saile, but as flying doves; large square towers like little round pigeon houses, and the sea and heavens to embrace & kisse each other. These things all men knowe, and the greatest part acknowledge, to be errors of the eie.

See Hakewill, The vanitie of the eie (Oxford: Printed for Joseph Barnes, 1608), 51, EEBO.

Similarly, James Turner likens the images of the bulging brain and arched eyebrows in stanza 1, and the distorted images in the meadow and the wood sections, to anamorphoses, "slanted portraits which seem normal when viewed from the side." See Turner, Politics of Landscape, 78. In these anamorphic figures, we can depend only on Marvell to indicate the correct angle of vision.

13. See Hirst and Zwicker, "High Summer," 253, 250.

14. See Hodge, Foreshortened, 150; and Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 143–44.

15. Marvell's use of the term "Landskip" (line 458) establishes theoretically his use of the flea and other fanciful images, since Norgate explains in Miniatura, "Lanscape is nothing but Deceptive visions, a kind of cousning or cheating your owne Eyes, by our owne consent and assistance." See Hardie, Miniatura, 51. The flea reference also fits in with new concepts of relativity in the mid-seventeenth century. Hodge gives a reproduction of a flea from R. Hooke's engraving in Micrographia (1665). According to Hodge, Hooke's original plate folded out into a drawing nearly two feet long, "clearly intended to astonish, as well as to display the anatomical features of the louse." See Hodge, Foreshortened, 44–45.

16. Allen Gray, "The Surface of Marvell's Upon Appleton House," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 171; and Lord Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas, Lord Fairfax. Written by Himself (London: Printed for Ri. Chitwell, 1699), 64, EEBO.

17. See Muller and Murrel, Miniatura, 12; Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 127, 145; and Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 202. For a fuller explanation of the relation of mirror images and liminality, see chapter 6, "Smoke and Mirrors."

18. Mihai Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 91; and Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 2.

19. Milena Romero Allué, "Things Greater Are in Less Contain'd," Annali di Ca' Foscari: Rivista della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere dell'Università di Venezia 37, nos. 1–2 (1998): 463–64.

20. For commentators with this interpretation, see James Auty, "Walking Upright: The Oak and the Hewel in Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House: To My Lord Fairfax,'" Cahiers Elisabéthains 52 (October 1997): 63–81; Wallace, Destiny, 232–57; Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 27–90; Patterson, Civic Crown, 95–110; and Chernaik, Poet's Time, 28–42.

21. See Toliver, "Marvell's Songs," 116. "Flying betwixt the day and night" (line 670), the halcyon presents an amphibian image similar to the tortoise in stanza 97. Douglas Brooks-Davis links the halcyon to Mary directly, since the mythical bird, believed to breed during the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea and to have the power to calm the wind and waves during this period, can be seen as the Hermetic equivalent of the Virgin Mary. See Brooks-Davis, "Marvell's Political Mysticism: Hermes and the Druids at Appleton House," Studies in Mystical Literature 1 (1980): 105; and "halcyon" (Oxford English Dictionary [OED] 1. a) at www.oed.com.

22. Erickson, "Marvell's Upon," 161–63; L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 233; Lynda E. Boose, "An Approach through Theme: Marriage and the Family," Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's King Lear, ed. Robert Ray (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986), 62; and Turner, Ritual Process, 94–130.

23. For these and other symbolic interpretations of the mistletoe, see Murdoch De Baar, "The Misunderstood Mistletoe: Friend or Foe?" Between the Leaves, [Queensland, Australia] DPI Forestry and Department of Natural Resources Journal (1997): 14; and M. Grieve, "Mistletoe," in A Modern Herbal: The Medicinal, Culinary, Cosmetic, and Economic Properties, Cultivation, Folk-Lore of Herbs, Grasses, Fungi, Shrubs, and Trees with All Their Modern Scientific Uses (New York: Hafner, 1967), 2: 547. The reference to the priest cutting the "sacred bud" (line 742) from the "Fairfacian oak" (740) alludes to the tradition, known from Pliny and repeated by John Selden and others, that the mistletoe was sacred to the Druids, who seventeenth-century English believed were ancient inhabitants of Britain descended from Noah. See Brooks-Davis, "Marvell's Political," 110–13. Selden reports that mistletoe was used in Druidic rituals as "both preservative against all Poisons and a remedy against Barrennes." See John Selden, "Illustrations" to "The Ninth Song" in The Poly-Olbion: A Chorographical Description of Great Britain, by Michael Drayton, Spenser Society, no. 1, n.s., 1889; reprint Burt Franklin Research and Source Works Series no. 150 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 172.

24. For an account of the negotiations surrounding Mary's wedding to Villiers, see Erickson, "Marvell's Upon," 158–68.

25. Thoresby, Ducatus, 5.

26. A key term in Leon Battista Alberti's influential 1435 treatise Della Pictura (On Painting), the word istoria has no present-day verbal equivalent. It was first used in the fifteenth century to refer to the complex new narrative and allegorical subjects that were growing popular among painters. As Alberti translator John R. Spencer explains, an accurate interpretation of the term must be derived from Alberti's treatise itself, but in his description of the istoria, Alberti advocates "new humanist art which will be capable of incorporating the finds of the literary and theological humanists while at the same time satisfying the demands of the artistic humanist." See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, ed. and trans. John R. Spenser, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 24. The achievement of istoria was considered the "most ambitious and most difficult category of works a painter can attempt." See Patricia Emison, "Istoria [Historia]," in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove Dictionaries, 1996), 16: 613.
Chapter Four

Blending the Arts in the Act of Creation: "The Garden"

Among Marvell's less political poems, "The Garden" epitomizes the richness of critical directions possible in the discussion of this intriguing poet. The poem's surreal imagery, deviance from traditional genres, echoes of classical to contemporary works, and uncertainty of the speaker's attitude stymie even the most diligent of critics. Røstvig justifiably comments, "Any publisher who might wish to print an anthology of critical exposition and commentary dealing with this one poem only, would be faced with a sufficiently formidable proposition," while Patrides evades the issue by suggesting the poem "may be described best after the fashion of the theologia negativa, i.e. not what it is but what it is not." One may consider the many angles of approach suggested by the poem's form and content. In its celebration of nature, "The Garden" naturally falls into pastoral mode and its classical background in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, but the poem also illustrates the early-seventeenth-century trend of celebrating rural retreat. Yet, since pastoral generally idealizes real nature and Marvell's garden is rather set apart from reality, perhaps the nonpastoral epicurean tradition in line with Horace's Odes and Satires is more appropriate.1

Because the "The Garden" celebrates prelapsarian solitude, it is assumed to have been composed during Marvell's before-mentioned sojourn at Nunappleton as tutor to Mary Fairfax, daughter of the former Lord General of the Parliamentary forces, who resigned his commission at the tender age of thirty-eight to retire to his Edenic estate. The final image of the poem, a bee circling the hours of a sundial made of "flow'rs and herbs" (line 66), supports this biographical interpretation, since it indicates an admonition to Fairfax to return to active life—that even in the contemplative site of the garden, time/thyme remains a factor. Also, since Thomas Fairfax translated Saint-Amant's own "La Solitude" and "Le Melon," many look for influences of the French poet, utilizing stanza-by-stanza comparisons of Saint-Amant's and Marvell's works.2

Here, though, one notes a major deviation from the traditional praise of rural retreat and solitude, themes extremely popular in seventeenth-century England among those aristocrats enmeshed in the turmoil of civil war and evidenced in Saint-Amant's work: most poems of this type include romantic love in the retirement experience. Marvell's speaker instead ends on praise of life before women. There's the critical rub, prompting many to cry "misogyny," "homosexuality," and even "androgyny" in the speaker's stance.3 Many agree that the speaker's seeming rejection of women—his disdain for the red and white of romantic love, preferring the nymphs in their green, metamorphosed states, praising life in Eden "While man there walked without a mate" ("Garden" line 58)—defies the Petrarchan mode and veers instead toward traditional religious misogynistic dogma of St. Paul and St. Ambrose or more satiric treatment in Ronsard in his dismissal of women from his rural retreat. However, erotic imagery and the blatant sexuality of the plants in stanza 5 cause Hyman to question, "What kind of garden is this where all plants are sexual and man is not?" Does Marvell's speaker share Sir Thomas Browne's lament, wishing he could "procreate like trees"?4

Marvell's "Garden" needs no female presence, not because the speaker desires the lushness of green over the sensuality of red and white, but because the subject of the poem is a solipsistic one that requires solitude: the creation of art itself. Marvell describes the process of artistic creation by presenting a garden of delights that annihilates the boundaries between literary, visual, and horticultural art; between art and nature; between artist and his work—as his rambler through "The Garden" enacts the role of the artist who, in Leonardo da Vinci's words, is "master of all sorts of people and of all things."5

Leonardo's theories on visual art offer a striking explanation for the uncertain aspects of Marvell's poem because Leonardo, like Marvell, understood the importance of the space in between boundaries; in between states, genres, and language. Though Leonardo wrote on virtually every topic of interest of his day, he left at his death in 1519 a confusion of "large-scale notebooks, small pocket-books, compendia of miscellaneous sheets, . . . and collections of separate pages, including those containing drawings for works of art," totaling over five thousand pages. Leonardo had no need to compartmentalize and organize his studies because to him they were one, as Edward MacCurdy, one of his editors, explains: "He sought to establish the essential unity of structure of all living things, the earth an organism with veins and arteries, the body of man a type of that of the world. The perceptions of his brain are hardly if at all fettered by bondage of time and place."6

As explained in chapter 2, Leonardo keenly observed that objects as perceived visually really do not have sharp boundaries between them, and the greater the distance of the object from the viewer, the less distinct are its boundaries. Both in painting and in life, reality is better portrayed by the blurring of boundaries, producing an area that is neither light nor dark, painted, he advises, "in the manner of smoke without strokes or marks." Thus Leonardo's signature technique of sfumato, or "smoke-like" appearance, produces a liminal area that paradoxically portrays a clearer view of reality by blurring the lines.7 In "The Garden," Marvell also realizes that the boundaries separating the literary, visual, and horticultural arts are "annihilated" in their common goal of mimesis.

Platonists have long considered humans as mirrors of nature.8 The artist goes one step further and uses his mirror images to create new forms of nature, making him both mirror and maker. As discussed in chapter 2, Leonardo da Vinci explains that the mind of the artist not only mirrors nature but transforms itself into the object viewed in order to create anew. Therefore, the painter should experience as much of nature as possible:

The painter's mind should be like a mirror, which transforms itself into the color of the thing that it has as its object, and is filled with as many likenesses as there are things placed before it. Therefore, painter, knowing that you cannot be good, if you are not a versatile master in reproducing through your art all the kinds of forms that nature produces—which you will not know how to do if you do not see and represent them in your mind—as you go through fields, exercise your judgment of various objects, noting first this thing and then that, making a collection of various objects, selected and harvested from among those less good. . . . And if he does this he will be like a second nature.

Fascinated with this power to create a new nature, Leonardo names the painter "lord" and "creator":

Indeed, whatever exists in the universe through essence, presence, or imagination, he has it first in his mind and then in his hands, and these are of such excellence that within a given space of time they have created a proportioned harmony reflecting things in nature as seen in a single glance.

Since the painter actually joins his mind to nature, he serves as mediator between art and nature, making painting, according to Leonardo, superior over sculpture: "Painting is a matter of greater mental analysis, or greater skill, and more marvelous than sculpture, since it compels the mind of the painter to transform itself into the very mind of nature, to become an interpreter between nature and art".9

In the literary arts, Sir Philip Sidney perhaps best expresses the role of poetry as mimesis and the poet mirroring nature, then creating a new and better one:

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any . . . subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature . . . so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done.

And in his notebooks, Leonardo acknowledges and even encourages the similarity of the literary and visual arts, insisting that accuracy of both literary and visual portrayal depends on uncertainty of line:

Have you never reflected on the poets who in composing their verses are unrelenting in their pursuit of fine literature and think nothing of erasing some of these verses in order to improve upon them? Therefore, painter, decide broadly upon the position of the limbs in your figures and attend first to the movements appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative rather than to the beauty and quality of their limbs.10

Of course the similarity of literary and visual arts has long been noted, perhaps first articulated in a statement attributed by Plutarch to Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 BCE) that "painting is silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks." The more famous comment linking the two arts is that of Horace (65 BCE) in Ars Poetica, a phrase, according to Norman K. Farmer "that has become almost as popular as it has proven ambiguous": "ut pictura poesis," "A poem is like a picture." However, the science and art of horticulture also connects theories of literary and visual art in sharing their basic goal of mimesis and their basic technique of blurring boundaries. George Puttenham makes the complete connection among painter, poet, and gardener in his Arte of English Poesie:

In his invention, crafting, and metrical presentation . . . , [the poet] is as the painter, or carver that worke by imitation and representation in a foreign subject, in that he speaks figuratively, or argues subtly, or persuades copiously and vehemently, he doth as the cunning gardener that using nature as a coadjutor, furthers her conclusions and many times makes her effects more absolute and strange.11

The titles of various poetic miscellanies illustrate Puttenham's view in presenting books of poems in horticultural terms, with ample mythological precedent in the Garden of Hesperides: Briton's Bowre of Delights (1591, 1597); The Arbor of Amorous Devices (1597); England's Helicon (1600, 1614); Bel-vedere: or the Garden of the Muses (1600).

Likewise garden theorists describe the planning and experience of a garden in literary and visual terms. Simon Pugh considers a garden a discourse, since it "proposes a complex set of narratives involving journeys of discovery and the enjoyment of pleasures contained within a carefully defined terrain." At the same time, the garden is art, framed by its walls which separate it from the surrounding landscape. "A frame suggests a new mobility and portability, an off-site detachable commodity, an easel painting," says Pugh, that neutralizes nature, making it "an object of detached contemplation."12

Gardens are, after all, liminal areas: though Marvell's speaker implies he is escaping the intrusion of society by retreating to the garden, by its nature, the garden is artifice. Any garden, for example, automatically refers to what lies beyond its boundaries, since it is constructed in and out of the materials outside the garden walls. The garden walls, like the picture frame, may define it "yet do not insulate it from the world in which and out of the materials of which it is constructed," explains Hunt. Almost invariably the garden contains references within the site to other places and events, even themes, and the realization of both the garden and its references "enhances the experience of each."13 Even people and their beliefs and accomplishments are made part of the garden with sculpture of heroes and gods and the events that made them famous. An interesting illustration of this fact from the visual arts might be René Magritte's La Conditionne humaine (figure 4.1), which indicates the self-reflective aspects of art and nature.

Figure 4.1. La Conditionne humaine (The Human Condition), 1933. By René Magritte (1898–1967). Oil on canvas. 100 x 81 x 1.6 cm (39 3/8 in x 31 7/8 in x 5/8 in). Banque d'Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, NY. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Copyright © ARS, NY.

Simon Schama quotes Magritte explaining his concept in a 1939 lecture: "This is how we see the world. We see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside." The National Gallery website describes the effect of Magritte's portrayal of reality:

At first, one automatically assumes that the painting on the easel depicts the portion of the landscape outside the window that it hides from view. After a moment's consideration, however, one realizes that this assumption is based upon a false premise: that is, that the imagery of Magritte's painting is real, while the painting on the easel is a representation of that reality. In fact, there is no difference between them. Both are part of the same painting, the same artistic fabrication. It is perhaps to this repeating cycle, in which the viewer, even against his will, sees the one as real and the other as representation, that Magritte's title makes reference.14

Gardens have a similar self-reflexive effect. B. Sprague Allen writes that gardens become "a reflection of the mind and feeling of an age, an index of its civilization as instructive in its way as painting, sculpture, or architecture." As Hunt describes, early modern gardens featured hydraulic devices that duplicated weather events and created movement; even bird and other animal sounds were imitated. If, as many believe, Marvell's garden was what Roy Strong has termed the "mannerist late Renaissance garden," it would contain fountains, grottos, topiary, and "terraced 'quadratures' or squares" organized around a central theme, "creating allegory rather than symbol, after the fashion of mannerist art."15

In "The Garden," Marvell, in his usual self-reflecting manner, portrays the artist's role in creating an image that portrays the artist's role. Marvell's garden is not a particular garden, though many would like to connect it with his stay with the Fairfaxes at Nunappleton, but the garden, linking the scene to thousands of years of visual, literary, and horticultural metaphors dealing with the concept of gardens and therefore perfect to enact the power of the artist as well as the slipperiness of art and the nature it mirrors. In all three of these modes of art, the artist does the same—he or she absorbs and mirrors nature, takes the best, synthesizes it, and presents a work that reflects both the artist and nature, so that the space between artist, subject, and creation is annihilated.

From the very first line of "The Garden," Marvell's speaker commences the blending of the arts, framing his actual garden experience with personal commentary stanzas (stanzas 1 and 9, both beginning with "how") that introduce metaphoric and symbolic images combining the visual, literary, and horticultural arts. His first stanza sets up what many believe to be the subject of the entire poem, the superiority of retirement over active life:16

How vainly men themselves amaze

To win the palm, the oak, or bays;

And their uncessant labours see

Crowned from some single herb or tree,

Whose short and narrow vergèd shade

Does prudently their toils upbraid;

While all flow'rs and all trees do close

To weave the garlands of repose. (1–8)

Though the first stanza does indicate the inadequacy of rewards for active life in the symbols of palm, oak, and bay, it also condemns the constrictions of boundaries: these rewards produce only "short and narrow vergèd shade" (5)—"vergèd" in its noun form meaning "the bounds, limits, or precincts of a particular place" (OED n.1 11 a.) and in its verb form "to provide with a specified kind of verge or border" (v1 trans. 1).17 The stanza also indicates the restrictions of the "single herb or tree" (line 4) of these symbols of active life vs. unbounded "all flow'rs and all trees" (7) contained in "the garlands of repose" (8).

The speaker begins to break boundaries between the literary, visual, and horticultural arts by calling our attention to the use of language (a skill Marvell perfects), literalizing the metonymical terms palm, oak, and bay to treat them as real plants, just as he does in stanza 4 with the pursuits of Apollo and Pan ("Apollo hunted Daphne so, / Only that she might laurel grow; / And Pan did after Syrinx speed, / Not as a nymph, but for a reed" [lines 29–32]). This literalizing of metaphor actually dissolves the boundaries between artist and audience and draws them into a relationship in a liminal realm between word and symbol. Ted Cohen explains literal language is "conventional and static, predetermining what can be said regardless of what we may want to say." Metaphoric language, however, intends to "initiate explicitly the cooperative act of comprehension which is, in any view, something more than a routine act of understanding." The listener has been invited into a relationship of shared assumptions and understanding, and only those who share information about another's knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and attitudes can accept the invitation. Though relationships are formed with literal information, also, the use of metaphor throws the bond into relief and calls attention to the act of language.18 Marvell's use here draws the reader into the metaphoric understanding of the symbolic oak, laurel, and reed only to literalize the use, leaving the reader in between contexts.

Even the speaker's condemnation of carving a beloved's name on the bark of a tree ("Fair trees! Wheres'e'er your barks I wound, / No names shall but your own be found" [23–24]) indicates a shared point of reference and a blending of the arts. Exactly what would this act entail? The carved name certainly asserts an artificial presence into the garden, perhaps even harming the tree; it is a visual display of art, involving planned font, perhaps encircled with a heart, and varying size; it is a literary device, proclaiming love for another and attempting to immortalize the name as symbol of the person, a theme of much Renaissance poetry; and it assumes the reader shares the joke of literalizing of the metaphor in substituting tenor for vehicle—the name of the tree for the love of the beloved, as he substitutes the laurel and reed plants for the women sought by Apollo and Pan.

The continued use of literary devices in the poem also draws the connection to the visual arts. In "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting," Dryden likens literary "tropes and figures" to lights and shadows in paintings: "Strong and glowing colours are the just resemblances of bold metaphors." By stanzas 2 and 3, the speaker intensifies the blend of rhetoric and the visual and horticultural arts, apostrophizing and anthropomorphizing "Fair Quiet" (9) and her "sister" "Innocence" (10) and seemingly serving as tour guide in a garden locale: "I have found thee here" (9), "here below" (13), "this delicious solitude" (16), "this lovely green" (18), "these beauties" (22), "hither makes his best retreat" (26; emphases mine). His directional descriptions also link him to the dramatic and the visual arts, serving as a "Sprecher" figure or interlocutor, the character in mannerist painting, discussed in chapter 3, who exists in between the world of the artist and that of the portrayal. The speaker's equivalent in the visual arts is often seen as a figure in the painting who looks directly at the viewer yet points to a significant figure or action in the istoria of the painting, thus existing in both the world of the painting and the world of the audience. Sypher sees the figure combining the arts: "The Sprecher is a mannerist mode of direct address corresponding to the intimate soliloquy in Jacobean drama, a form of brusque communication between actor and audience that tends to violate dramatic distance."19

As the speaker begins to describe his experience walking through the garden, he also fulfills mirroring roles of actor and audience and introduces a temporal dimension to this third nature. Hunt explains that the dimension of garden as theater in which the world can be represented blurs the boundaries of creator, creation, actor, and spectator:

In a garden responsibility for the action rests with the temples, statues, inscriptions, and other such devices, for the human has no permanent place in the design; the "action" of a garden's painting is supplied by the visitor, stimulated by the scene and its allusions; the garden visitor becomes a protagonist by his act of reading these devices. In practice, the garden visitor is both spectator of the elements of its design and an actor in its dramas.20

Hunt contends that the specific enclosure of a garden for a specific purpose and microenvironment (whether for Hunt's "second nature" of use or "third nature" of aesthetics) and the planned establishment of entrances, exits, paths, and gateways link the experience of a garden to "rudimentary, conversational narrative ('I go down this path,' 'We grow apples in this orchard,' 'He irrigates this patch')." Thus, any description of a garden experience becomes, in effect, a narrative. And the more artificially contrived the naturalness of a garden is, Hunt adds, the more complicated the narrative becomes—"more complex, more various, and also paradoxically more independent of the site." The narrative moves from simple conversation to "more self-conscious and literary recountings" as the subject of the narrative moves from pragmatic to larger issues, "either announcing how separated parts are related within the designed whole or connecting what is within a world of myriad concerns that lie outside the enclosure." In order to understand fully the significance of these "literary recountings," visitors (or we as readers) must have a shared experience to appreciate the narrative.21 Stanzas 3 and 4 certainly illustrate Hunt's description of a more literary, independent garden experience since, in praising the superiority of the garden's beauty over a lady's, the speaker assumes readers of this poem understand the Petrarchan references to the "white" and "red" of a Petrarchan mistress (line 17), the "cruel . . . flame" of "Fond lovers" (19), the practice of carving the name of a beloved in a tree's bark (19–24), and the "passions' heat" of unrequited love. The reader must also have some knowledge of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the legends of Apollo and Daphne and Pan and Syrinx in order to understand again Marvell's witty speculation about the gods' desires for the laurel and the reed (27–32).

Part of the irony in the speaker's speculations on the desires of Apollo and Pan and a blending of the arts is that physical representations of these gods were often a part of a mannerist garden. Allen recounts that a typical part of a mannerist garden is a "mount" or artificial hillock providing an elevated place to view the garden. It was formally planted with shrubs and flowers, often topped with an arbor and columns and a bust of "a human figure, a satyr, or Pan whose trunk merged into a pedestal that gradually tapered toward its base." Eugenio Battisti describes the Medici garden topiaries, typical in humanist gardens in late fifteenth-century Italy, which imaged "elephants, a wild boar, a ship with sails, a ram, a hare with its ears up, a wolf fleeing from dogs, and an antlered deer" so that the humanist garden, in Strong's view, "becomes a fantasy world of escape where box sculpture fulfills the metamorphoses of Ovid."22 Battisti admits the blurred boundaries of the arts in this interest: "One image, that of Daphne transformed into a laurel, dominates . . . for symbolic reasons, . . . with poetry itself or the fine arts."23 Since stories of Ovid dominated early modern gardens, the images from Ovid's tales that Marvell's speaker describes could actually describe topiaries in this garden. Hunt explains the relationship of Ovid's tales and horticulture, a mutually reflecting symbiotic relationship of visual, horticultural, and literary art:

[In the Metamorphoses,] [l]andscape . . . is one if its main subjects, especially in Books I–IV, XIII and XIV. Its dramatis personae inhabit a world where natural features are prominent and the narratives frequently relate characters' actions and transformations to that habitat. Equally, features of the physical landscape are explained in terms of its presiding deities, whose stories are often told to validate some particular numen of a territory. . . . Ovid's descriptions declare an art that belies their supposedly natural forms; how easy then to translate, transform, the scenery of his poem into art.

Horticulturalists sought to incorporate Ovid's literary tales into their landscape, truly creating a narrative, as in the Villa D'Este in Tivoli where, in 1645, John Evelyn describes "a long & spacious Walk, full of Fountaines, under which is historiz'd the whole Ovidian Metamorphoses in mezzo Relievo rarely sculptur'd." 24

Yet the speaker in Marvell's "Garden" revels not in the company of topiary numen but in solitude. In stanza 2 he celebrates the discovery of "Fair Quiet" (line 9) and her sister "Innocence" (10), not in "busy companies of men" (12) but in the "delicious solitude" (16) of the garden. Though this praise of seclusion was a popular topic in Marvell's time, Marvell's speaker's preference of the "lovely green" of foliage over the "white" and "red" of romantic love goes beyond the typical poem praising retirement. Generally all nonclerical writers, and many ecclesiastical ones too, included romantic love, or perhaps a union of souls, as the consummation of rural peace. Even Saint-Amant concludes his "La Solitude" acknowledging his desire to see Bernières.25 But the speaker's desire for total solitude identifies him as more than a visitor of the garden: he is an artist, requiring isolation for his art. Both visual and literary art treatises recommend solitude, even solipsism, as the best prompt to artistic excellence. Leonardo believes distraction hinders the artist's genius and creativity:

The painter or draughtsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body may not sap the vigour of the mind; and more especially when he is occupied with the consideration and investigation of things which by being continually present before his eyes furnish food to be treasured up in the memory.

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself; if you are accompanied even by one companion you belong only half to yourself, or even less in proportion to the thoughtlessness of his conduct; and if you have more than one companion you will fall more deeply in the same plight.

Likewise in his study of pastoral poetry, Renato Poggioli describes the poet's private inward journey necessary for true inspiration: "As the pastoral poet replaces the labors and troubles of love with an exclusive concern for the self, he changes into a new Narcissus, contemplating with passionate interest not his body but his soul." Then the pastoral becomes "the poetic vehicle of solipsism."26

In his seeming preference for trees over women, Marvell not only praises solitude for literary and visual art inspiration, but also ironically comments on a very real and topical horticultural subject in mid-seventeenth-century England: the shortage of forests and the timber they produce. Simon Schama explains that trees would have been a much-desired commodity in Marvell's time. In the sixteenth century, wooded areas were sold to replenish much-needed government funds. According to Schama, though the Tudor and Stuart governments still pretended to be guardians of the English woods, "[i]n 1580, William Harrison lamented he could ride for twenty miles and encounter virtually no woodland at all" except where inhabitants had planted a few elms, oaks, hazels, or ashes around their houses to protect from the elements. The result of this rampant destruction of the royal forests during the Civil War was "sylvan anarchy": "After so many years of being fenced off by contractors, whether parliamentarian or royalist, the woods were simply invaded by great armies of the common people who whacked and hacked at anything they could find." The sad state of arboreal affairs prompted John Evelyn to compose Silva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees for the restored King Charles II in February 1664. Though originally intending to plead for the practical conservation and replanting of trees, Evelyn became so emotionally involved in the loss of trees he veers toward the extremes of Marvell's "Garden" speaker, elevating trees over traditional goals of ambition.27 The book experienced great success, prompting four editions in Evelyn's lifetime and directly leading (according to Evelyn's preface to the third edition) to the planting of "millions of timber trees" by private landowners.28

This utilitarian need for trees did not, however, preclude their figurative value. As in "The Garden," trees were also sought after as symbols of their communities or even as God's representatives. Ralph Austen's 1653 manual for fruit growers extols the spiritual, literary, and even oratorical power of trees:

The World is a great Library, and the Fruit-trees are some of the Bookes wherein we may read & see plainly the Attributes of God his Power, Wisdome, Goodnesse, &c. and be Instructed and taught our duty towards him in many things even from Fruit-trees for as trees (in a Metaphoricall sense) are Bookes, so like-wise in the same sence they have a Voyce, and speak plainely to us, and teach us many good lessons.29

Marvell's speaker indicates this same venerated admiration of his verdant surroundings. After extolling the garden trees, in his solitary, introspective state, Marvell's speaker marks the middle of his garden journey echoing the exclamatory opening line and anticipating the concluding stanza ("How vainly," line 1; "What wondrous," 33; "How well," 65). His description of an interactive encounter with the fruits of the garden in stanza 5 prompts interpretations of influences from the Odes of Casimire and the Book of Job to Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden, particularly with the mention of "Ripe apples" (34) and "melons" (39), which in the Greek etymology means "apples."30 In stanza 5, the garden fruits go beyond facilitating the speaker's experience; they aggressively pursue him. Apples "drop" about his head (34); grapes "crush their wine" upon his mouth (35–36); nectarines and peaches reach into his hands (37–38); melons trip him (39); flowers tackle him to the grass (40). Marvell demonstrates his power to blur boundaries in the unexpected term "curious peach" (37), ambiguously both active and passive, both meanings mutually reciprocal. As Hodge observes, Marvell eliminates the point of reference so that we cannot locate the source of movement: "of fruit to hands and lips or of lips and hands to fruit," blurring the picture as does the sfumato Leonardo perfected in his paintings. So is Hyman correct in judging this rather aggressive flora as forming a garden "where plants are sexual and man is not"?31

Not if we take stanzas 5 and 6 as a unit; then instead of a vegetative rape, we see the speaker as artist undergoing the creative process. Stanza 6, perhaps the most analyzed stanza in early modern studies, describes the mind as "that ocean" (43) that reflects all outer creation withdrawing from "pleasures less" (41) to its inner being. Marvell's speaker indicates this through connecting the reflective ability of human consciousness to the commonplace of medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy that the seas contained exact replicas of all the animals to be found on land: "The mind, that ocean where each kind / Does its own resemblance find" (43–44).32 But, says the speaker, the mind does more than reflect the world—it creates "Far other worlds, and other seas" (46) until it "annihilat[es]" reflection and creation to one image: "a green thought in a green shade" (48).

If there were ever an example of verbal sfumato, or uncertainty of line that creates intrigue and prompts the reader / viewer / audience/ garden visitor to further interest, it is Marvell's image of "Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade" (47–48). The many interpretations of Marvell's use of the term "annihilating" (47) reinforce the opinion that other ambiguities are intentional and are types of the uncertain language of the "tropes and figures" Dryden parallels with the "Strong and glowing colours" of visual art. But in light of the role of the artist in visual, literary, and horticultural arts, the lines truly illustrate the process of creative art. The artist, necessarily walking alone, filling his mind with the natural beauties of garden foliage as well as the literary myths, historical facts, metaphors, and beliefs of natural philosophy that form the planned narrative of this seventeenth-century garden, reflects and transforms his mind into what he views, changing it (as Leonardo recommends) "into the very mind of nature, to become an interpreter between nature and art."33

The image of "a green thought in a green shade" also relates to concepts in visual art. Accurate portrayal of color in shade and shadow in a natural scene is a problem Leonardo tackles in several sections of his notebooks. According to Leonardo, "No body is ever shown wholly in its natural colour" but is affected by illumination and shadow. He identifies areas of shadow as liminal: "Lights and darks, that is to say, illumination and shadow, have an intermediate quality that cannot be called light or dark, but partakes equally of light and dark." As the artist creates a "new nature" in absorbing, mirroring and transforming nature, an illuminated object is affected by the source of illumination and reflects the light back while mixing with its shadow, creating a new color and light:

And because the place of impact of the derived shadows [shadows that are derived from original shadows of bodies] is always surrounded by the impact of luminous rays, which by reflected transmission are projected back towards the source of the original shadow, they mix with this shadow and modify it, altering its nature to some extent.

Leonardo acknowledges that in shadow or shade, colors lose their traits and blur to the darkness of the shade:

Just as all the colours are tinged with the darkness of the shadows of night, so the shadow of any colour ends in that darkness. Therefore, painter, do not make it the practice that in your final shadows you are able to discern the colours which border on one another, because if nature does not let this happen and you make claims to be an imitator of nature, as far as art allows, do not make it seem that you intend to rectify her errors, because there is no error in her, but you should understand that the error is in you.

He specifies the proper use of shadows with green surroundings:

[Y]ou should skillfully arrange things so that you can ensure that the shadows of green bodies impinge upon green things such as meadows and on other suitable things, so that the shadows share in the colour of the object opposite and do not degenerate and appear to be the shadow of a body other than green, because if you place an illuminated red so that it impinges upon a shadow that is in itself green, the reddish shadow will compound a shadow which will be very ugly and very different from the true shadow of the green.34

Since the imagination—the thoughts of the artist—gives life and illumination to his creation and since nature, art, and artist mirror one another, all three are annihilated in the act of creation to one liminal color, and in the garden, that would be "a green thought in a green shade."

In terms of visual art, also, the color green definitely illustrates the dissolving of boundaries and the self-reflecting aspects of Marvell's poem. Edward Norgate (a copy of whose work on painting Miniatura was in Fairfax's library and was dedicated to Mary Fairfax, so was probably known to Marvell) believed, "Greene is of all Collours most Gratefull and most plesante to the Eyes." Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard explains that it was often used to shadow "patches of colour and model them into deeper reliefs, along with red and white which on the contrary heighten them." He judges green an essential color in painting: "As a shadowing colour, green plays an important role since it connotes the deeper recesses of nature, either in profound valleys or underneath trees in a forest." Most relevant to this discussion, Costa de Beauregard deems green a liminal color: "[G]reen shadows connote the limits of the visible: they indicate the borderline where representation ends and imagination must be left to shift for itself." In a landscape, green holds the liminal area between sky and hell, serving a role that is "essentially mediatory, that is to say initiatory because it connotes the crossing of boundaries into the unknown." In a painting, it functions as "an undetermined area which is neither the horizon nor the foreground."35 And especially relating to the concept of dissolving of boundaries and self-reflection, Norgate's editors comment that in seventeenth-century limning, painters actually used plants to create the pigment they employed in painting those plants, including "fleur-de-lys and pansy greens"; they report that recipes for greens from violet and rose leaves are appended to the BL Add. 23080 copy of Norgate's first treatise. Muller and Murrell comment that John Hoskins made a "very beautiful green" from white roses. There can be no better illustration of Polixenes's comments in The Winter's Tale, "The art itself is nature."36

By stanza 7 of "The Garden," the artist has undergone the transformation to "become" what he sees and to reflect nature back to itself so that now he can create "forms such as never were in nature . . . freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit." As the "interpreter between nature and art," the poet / painter /gardener creates a self-reflective image of the soul, freeing itself from its natural body, hovering between the realm of nature and art, between the earth and heaven, and appropriately perched on the bough of a tree, the metaphoric subject upon which we began this garden journey. Stanza 7 blends all the arts into a dream-like scene including items of Hunt's "second" and "third nature" of the garden ("fountain's sliding foot" and "fruit-tree's mossy root," lines 49 and 50) as well as the visual picture of the bird-soul who "sits, and sings, / Then whets, and combs its silver wings" (53–54), culminating in another very ambiguous reference that blurs the point of reference and passivity / activity as the bird "Waves in its plumes the various light" (56). Is the bird passively allowing the light to shine on its iridescent wings, or is it actively capturing the light, as a good painter must do? And is this a real bird or an artistic imitation? Evelyn describes artificial birds in several gardens he visited in 1645. At the villa of Aldobrandini about fifteen miles out of Rome, he saw a garden "so form'd by nature, as if it had been cut out by Art." Below a cascading river to an artificial grotto lay "curious rocks, hydraulic organs, & all sorts of singing birds moving & chirping by force of the water, with severall other pageants and surprizing inventions." At Tivoli, Evelyn experienced "a noble Aviarie, the birds artificial & singing, till the presence of an Owle appeares, on which the[y] suddainly chang their notes, to the admiration of the Spectators."37 Again, "The art itself is nature."

Besides the obvious precedents of bird imagery to reference the soul, which itself is considered in between God and man, the bird, real or artificial, is an appropriate image to portray this mediator between art and nature.38 Not fully of land, not solely of the sky, the bird images not only the soul but the artist himself, absorbing, reflecting, and displaying the light in its feathers. And as Christine Rees notes, the choice of "plumes" instead of "feathers" certainly recalls the poet's pen, particularly when both Milton and Marvell use terms of flying to refer to poetic inspiration.39

Miner thinks Marvell should have ended his poem with this bird-soul image, eliminating the seemingly misogynistic praise of life before woman, in the "happy garden-state" of Eden before Eve's creation in stanza 8. However, these last two stanzas clinch the blend of visual, literary, and horticultural art. The speaker does not necessarily condemn women but extols the recommended solitude for the artist as previously described, a state only completely existent before the creation of the second human being, who is assumed to be a woman. References to Eden in stanza 8 fit in to the goal of horticulturists in the seventeenth century, since, as Nicholas A. Salerno explains, the basic philosophical justification for the cultivation of gardens was to create memorials to Eden and prelapsarian man. He lists garden manuals that evidence this: The Garden of Eden (1653–1960) by Sir Hugh Platt; Adam, Eden, or Nature's Paradise (1657) by W. Coles; and Adam out of Eden; or an Abstract of certain excellent Experiments touching the Advancement of Husbandry (1659) by Ad. Speed. The subject of Eden and man's expulsion has also served, of course, as a favorite subject of visual art, and finally, the speaker refers to literary art in his use of the pun on "help meet" in line 60 and irony of lines 63–64: "Two Paradises 'twere in one / To live in Paradise alone." Thus, we need not assume this stanza illustrates "the narrator's unconsciously blasphemous parody of Genesis" nor the Hermetic belief in an androgynous Adam but the enactment of art itself.40

Stanza 9 brings us literally full circle from the speaker's first stanza lament, "How vainly" (line 1), with reference to meaningless pursuits of earthly reward, to the final stanza's "How well" (65), in praise of the garden as image of artistic creation. Many, particularly those who see Marvell's theme of "The Garden" as either the impossibility of a permanent contemplative life or the necessity to combine action and contemplation, concentrate on the sundial image as the inevitable intrusion of outside reality, perhaps mitigated with nature, on the speaker's idyllic solitude. And it is true that sundials were a very popular part of the mannerist garden, either decorated with plants or made up totally of "herbs and flowers."41 However, in light of the instances of Marvell's literalizing of figurative language to call attention to the poetic creative process throughout this poem, we should be wary of an automatic response. The speaker's literal interpretation of the worth of "the palm, the oak, or bays" (2), his readjustment of the meaning of carving names on trees, and his slippery use of irony and puns has challenged us by defamiliarizing the familiar, a goal of any artist. Our assumption after previous literalizing of metaphors by stanza 9 is that a physical sundial exists in "The Garden." How appropriate, then, for Marvell to "deliteralize" this image to make it instead a metaphor: the sundial, the work of art that "the skilful gard'ner drew / Of flow'rs and herbs" (65–66), is not in the garden but is the garden, a permanently liminal space existing in and mirroring the temporal world but generating the timeless realm of art.

And what of the final reference to "th'industrious bee" (69)? An image rich in artistic, governmental, and horticultural implications, the bee adds a depth of meaning to the stanza and draws together previous images and themes. Honeybees are indigenous to the British Isles, and beekeeping is one of the oldest crafts in the area. In Marvell's time, when forest land was scarce and gardens served as microcosms of perfected wilderness, domesticated beehives served as a feature of gardens, producing honey and mead and sharing space with garden statues of gods like Apollo and Pan. Bees, however, were prized parts of nature. Also relevant to "The Garden," bees, like birds, were considered to represent human souls, connected with the Greek belief in transmigration of souls. Porphyry (c. 232/4–c. 305) writes that the term "bee" was given to souls about to be born, while Plato held that the souls of moderate and just men came to life as bees and ants. Virgil also writes in Georgics that bees possess a share of the divine reason and the breath of life.42

The bee also serves to contrast the solitude and tranquility of the garden. During Marvell's time, the "Commonwealth of Bees" was referenced as a model for government, just as it had served in Virgil's Georgics. But more relevant to "The Garden" and perhaps contradicting this traditional comparison to the smooth running of the commonwealth, bees were also associated with the muses and poetic inspiration. In The Feminine Monarchy (1609), Charles Butler calls sacred bees the "Muses Birds," "chiefe, and worthily to bee most admired," giving the gift of eloquence and song to men. Sophocles, Plato, Virgil, and Lucan were all said to have been either "fed by bees or had their lips touched by honey in their infancy," while Horace directly compares the work of a poet to that of a bee.43

Because in this garden the bee "Computes its time as well as we" (line 70), many would make the image an admission of the necessity to leave the timeless retirement of the garden for the active responsibilities of the world beyond garden walls. Though this interpretation has merit, the reference to time does not necessarily refer to "real time" outside the confines of the garden but could refer to the symbolic significance of the bee itself. Ransome reports that in the British Isles, the bee was regarded as a sacred creature: "[I]t came from Paradise innocent, and therefore its wax was the only substance worthy to make the candles for the sacred mass." Beekeeping became an important occupation not only for the wax required by the church for candles but for candles used to measure time.44 Perhaps more importantly, this stanza concludes the time spent on the garden ramble, ending the spatial and temporal narrative experienced in this garden of art.

We leave the garden walls with a better understanding of the liminal realm that joins all the arts and with a better appreciation of the power of the artist. He is "the skillful gard'ner" (65), as is any type of artist who has undergone the passive and active process of absorbing, reflecting, and perfecting nature into a new creation, be it a garden, a painting, or a poem. But he is also "th'industrious bee" (69) since the role of artist is to glean the best in nature, transform himself into that nature, and improve it into a new creation, producing sweetness and light, following Leonardo's advice to the painter: "[G]o through fields, exercise your judgment of various objects, noting first this thing and then that, making a collection of various objects, selected and harvested from among those less good."45 Whether or not Marvell composed the poem with Fairfax in mind, "The Garden" remains as a paean to all artists and their media.

Notes

1. Maren-Sofie Røstvig, "Andrew Marvell's 'Garden': A Hermetic Poem," English Studies 40 (1959): 65; C. A. Patrides, "'Til prepared for longer flight': The Sublunar Poetry of Andrew Marvell," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 49; Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, vol. 1: 1600–1700, 2nd ed. (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1962), 1:55–67; James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1–7; and James Siemon, "Generic Limits in Marvell's 'Garden,'" Papers on Language and Literature 8, no. 3 (1972): 261–62.

2. For a sampling of possible influences on Marvell's poem, see Jeffrey B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 80–85; Røstvig, "Marvell's 'Garden'"; John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 89–95; H. M. Richmond, Renaissance Landscapes: English Lyrics in a European Tradition (Paris: Mouton, 1973), 113–15; Muriel C. Bradbrook, "Marvell and the Poetry of Rural Solitude," Renaissance English Studies 17 (January 1941): 38–39; and Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 319–29. Frank Kermode warns against any automatic biographical interpretations; since, he reminds us, the date of "The Garden" is uncertain, we cannot assume it is an accurate account of personal experiences at Nun Appleton. See his "The Argument of Marvell's 'Garden,'" Essays in Criticism 2, no. 3 (1952): 226. However, Nigel Smith finds Allan Pritchard's case for dating the poem during the Restoration "not absolutely convincing." See Smith, The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlowe, England: Pearson Longman, 2007), 153. If the poem does belong to the Nunappleton years, we can only guess if it reflected or affected Fairfax's decision of retirement from political life. In a Dedicatory Epistle to the posthumously published edition of General Fairfax's Short Memorials, Fairfax's cousin Brian Fairfax indicates Marvell's patron planned his retirement to be a temporary experience:

The retired part of his Life gave him greater Satisfaction than all his former Victories, when he lived quietly at his own House at Nun-Appleton in Yorkshire; always earnestly wishing and praying for the Restitution of the Royal Family, and fully resolved to lay hold on the first good Opportunity to contribute with his part towards it; which made him always lookt upon with a jealous eye by the Usurpers of that time.

See Brian Fairfax, "Epistle Dedicatory," in Lord Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas, Lord Fairfax. Written by Himself (London: Printed for Ri. Chitwell, 1699), vii.

3. For interpretations of misogyny, see Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 89–91; Joseph H. Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 151–52; Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 251; and Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 172; for homosexuality, see Paul Hammond, "Marvell's Sexuality," The Seventeenth Century 11 (1996): 110; for androgyny, see Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, vol. 1: 1600–1700, 2nd ed. (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1962), 261; Røstvig, "Marvell's 'Garden,'" 65–76, and "Images of Perfection," in Seventeenth-Century Imagery: Essays on Uses of Figurative Language from Donne to Farguhar, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1–24; Lawrence Hyman, "Marvell's Garden," English Literary History 25, no. 1 (1958): 13–22; and Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), chap. 2. Those advocating an androgynous interpretation cite as evidence that his patron Lord Fairfax demonstrated familiarity with the androgynous Adam tradition, since this doctrine was prominent in the "Pimander" of Hermes Trismegistus, which Fairfax translated. See Snyder, Pastoral Process, 190, note 1; and Røstvig, "Marvell's 'Garden.'" These interpretations often veer to the biographical, as commentators use the poem to identify Marvell's own tendencies. Paul Hammond uses this and several other poems as well as biographical evidence to argue Marvell's own homosexuality. See Hammond, "Marvell's Sexuality," 87–123. Interestingly, Lord Fairfax's son-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, hints at Fairfax's own androgyny in an "Epitaph," an appendix to Fairfax's Short Memorials: "Both sexes Vertues were in him combin'd / He had the fierceness of the Manliest mind, / And all the meekness too of Womankind." See Buckingham, "Thomas Lord Fairfax his Epitaph," in Lord Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas, Lord Fairfax. Written by Himself (London: Printed for Ri. Chitwell, 1699), Kir.

4. See especially Pierre Ronsard, Elegies in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Gustave Cohen (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 2:7–55; Richmond, Renaissance Landscapes, 75; Hyman, "Marvell's Garden," 13; and Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, new ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 1:83.

5. See A. Philip McMahon, ed. and trans., Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270) by Leonardo da Vinci (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 1: 24, par. 35.

6. Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1; and Edward MacCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: G. Braziller, 1954), 14.

7. Kemp, Leonardo, 198.

8. See Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1956), 8–9; Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 256; and Anthony Stevens, Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 329.

9. McMahon, Treatise 1: 48–49, par. 71–72; 1: 24, par. 35; 1:41, par. 55.

10. Sir Philip Sidney, "The Defense of Poetry," in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford Authors Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 216; and Kemp, Leonardo, 222.

11. Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936, rpr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 4.3.501, lines 346ff.; Norman K. Farmer Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), ix; Horace, Ars Poetica, in Horace: Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, ed. G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Edition, 1926. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 481, line 361; and George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, intro. Baxter Hathaway (London: A. Constable and Co., 1906; facsimile reproduction, Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970), 312.

12. Simon Pugh, Garden, Nature, Language (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1988), 9, 33, 103.

13. John Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 76, 97.

14. Maigrit is quoted in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995), 12; for the description of the effect of Maigrit's painting, see National Gallery of Art, "The Collection," www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=68966+0+none.

15. B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619–1800) (New York: Pageant Books, 1958), 1: 114; and John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), passim. For a description of the impact of the new breed of "Renaissance engineer" and the types of automated garden devices he created, see Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 75–97; and Curtis Whitaker, "Andrew Marvell's Garden-Variety Debates," Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 62, nos. 3–4 (1999): 299. Strong explains, "The garden evolved into a series of separate yet interconnected intellectual and physical experiences which required the mental and physical co-operation of the visitor as he moved through them." See Strong, Renaissance Garden, 20. In his travels in the 1640s, Marvell would have visited many European gardens, and those of the Netherlands could have particularly influenced him. Hunt speculates on the specific places Marvell would have visited, using John Evelyn's diary as evidence. See Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 36–56.

16. See Nigel Smith's excellent introduction to the poem, in Poems, 152–54.

17. And, interestingly in the later image "a green thought in a green shade" (line 48), the OED offers two other usages for the verb "verge": "to approximate in shade or tint to a specified color" (v 2 3 c.) and "to pass or undergo gradual transition into something else" (v 2 3 d.).

18. Ted Cohen, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," Critical Inquiry: A Voice for Reasoned Inquiry 5 (1978): 7–8. Gombrich adds that in normal communication, the symbol, whether word in poetry, image in painting, or plant in the garden, becomes transparent since the message overshadows the medium. For example, he explains, "You may read a whole book and yet be unable, on closing it, to specify what font it was printed in." But the artist engages in "a constant fight against the automatisms of perception." The painter does not want the audience to ignore color, technique, and composition and simply recognize the scene; the gardener does not intend the visitor to ignore choices, heights, textures of plants and see a generic landscape; nor does the poet want the reader to disregard the choice of words for the message: "All art needs an awareness of form." See E. H. Gombrich, "The Evidence of Images," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 51. In "The Garden," Marvell foregrounds art by calling our attention to figures of speech by literalizing them, preventing us from skipping image for interpretation.

19. John Dryden, "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting, Prefaced to the Version of du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica" (1695), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 2:149; and Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 143–44.

20. John Dixon Hunt, "Ut pictura poesis, ut pictura hortus, and the Picturesque," Word and Image 1, no. 1 (1985): 95.

21. Hunt, Greater Perfections, 33–34, 126.

22. Allen, Tides, 1:131; Eugenio Battisti, "Natura Artificiosa to Natura Artificialis," in The Italian Garden, First Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, ed. David R. Coffin (Washington, DC: Trustees for Harvard University, 1972), 16; and Strong, Renaissance Garden, 15.

23. Battisti, "Natura," 21. According to Battisti, "artists of the first rank were involved in this kind of decoration" including Leonardo da Vinci, who is mentioned in a letter to Francesco Gonzaga from Gonzaga's agent Francesco Malatesta. The agent was helping Gonzaga to find the appropriate person to build a villa near Mantua:

I did not commit Leonardo either to color the drawing or to make ornaments of verdure in it, such as ivy, box, cypress, and laurel, as can be found here, because it did not seem to be necessary. But if you would like, Leonardo offers himself to do it either in painting or in model (cosi de pictura che di modello), as you prefer.

This is quoted in Carlo Pedretti, A Chronology of Leonardo da Vinci's Architectural Studies after 1500 (Geneva: E. Droz, 1962), 26; see also Battisti, "Natura," 17.

24. Hunt stresses the dominance of Ovid's tales in early modern gardens: "It is doubtful whether any garden of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries avoided some appeal, specific or general, to Ovid's poetic world." See Hunt, Garden and Grove, 42; and John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 2:396.

25. These lines appear in Saint-Amant's 1661 text:

Je l'ayme pour l'amour de toy

Conoissant que ton humeur l'ayme,

Mais quand je pense bien à moy,

Je la hay pour la raison mesme,

Car elle pourroit me ravir

L'heur de te voir, et te servir.

Richmond quotes and translates these lines from Saint-Amant, Les Oeuvres, 1661, page 12: "I love [solitude] because I love you [Bernières], knowing that your temperament loves it; but when I think well to myself I hate Solitude for just that reason, for it could steal from me the time to see you and serve you." See Richmond, Renaissance Landscapes, 113.

26. MacCurdy, Notebooks, 885–86; and Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 22.

27. See Schama, Landscape and Memory, 153, 158–59; and John Evelyn, Sylva, or a discourse of Forest-Trees (London: Printed by John Martyn & Ja. Allestry, 1664), 326–27, EEBO.

28. Evelyn, "To the King," in Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, 3rd ed. (London: Printed for John Martin, 1679), n.p., EEBO. Tying together possible autobiographical aspects of "The Garden" with this arboreal crisis, Lord Fairfax reportedly fought to save his own trees at Nun-Appleton. His cousin Brian Fairfax composed a poem celebrating Lord Fairfax's efforts, "The Vocal Oak: Upon Cutting Down the Woods at Nun-Appleton." In it, an oak tree praises its master and protector Fairfax who retired to his Yorkshire estate, "Where twenty years' retirement pleased him more / Than all the trophies he had won before": "he did me defend / From the injurious hand of foe or friend." At Fairfax's death, the oak reports, "To him obeisance made each neighbour tree; / And at his funeral pile desired to burn, / And consecrate their ashes in his urn." See Brian Fairfax, "The Vocal Oak: Upon Cutting Down the Woods at Nun-Appleton," in The Fairfax Correspondence: Memoirs of the Reign of Charles the First, ed. George W. Johnson (London: R. Bentley, 1848), 1:cxxiii, lines 29–30 and 23–24, and 1:cxxiv, lines 58–60. After Fairfax's passing, the trees were gradually cut and sold to cover the enormous debt daughter Mary was forced to assume from her late profligate husband Buckingham, so that all that remains of them is art: "Till all's reduced at all to what we see, / Painted in landscapes and in tapestry," according to Brian Fairfax in "Vocal Oak," 1:cxxiv, lines 71–72.

29. Ralph A. Austen, A Treatise of Fruit Trees . . . Togeather with The spirituall use of an orchard (Oxford: Tho: Robinson, 1653), Part 2, sig. [*3r]f, EEBO.

30. Smith, Poems, 157, notes to lines 33–40; Stevens, Private Myths, 313.

31. Hodge compares the confusion of point of reference to the station leaving the train. See R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and the Seventeenth-Century Revolutions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978), 88; and Hyman, "Marvell's Garden," 13.

32. Some works referring to this belief are Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra (Rouen: John Cousturier, 1633), 234–41; John Cleveland, "Upon the death of M. King drowned in the Irish Seas," in The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 1–2, lines 33–34; Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), part 2, canto 2, lines 241–44; and Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, new ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 2:242–44. See also Friedman, Pastoral Art, 164; and J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 313.

33. Dryden, "Parallel," in Essays, 2:149; and McMahon, Treatise, 1: 41, par. 55. In Neoplatonic thought, the Soul is the third hypostasis, emanating from the Mind and forming a transitional stage between the intelligible Mind and the corporal realm. See Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 86, note 13. In Christian thought, Augustine also considers the Soul holding an in-between position from which it receives the Light of God "by which the soul is illumined, in order that it may see and truly understand everything, either in itself or in the light." See Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor. Ancient Christian Writers (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 2:222.

34. Kemp, Leonardo, 74, 88, 97, 73, 76.

35. Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 157; and Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, Silent Elizabethans: The Language of Colour in the Miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver (Paris: Université Paul Valéry de Montpellier, 2000), 266.

36. Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 120–21; BL Sloane 2052, 29, quoted in Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 121; and William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington. 6th ed. (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009), 4.4. 97.

37. Sidney, "Defense," 216; McMahon, Treatise, 1.41, par. 55; Hunt, Greater Perfections, 33–34; and Evelyn, Diary, 2:392 and 396.

38. Sources of the soul as bird are numerous. In Phaedrus, Plato explains that when the soul is "perfect and winged it journeys on high and controls the whole world; but one that has shed its wings sinks down until it can fasten on something solid, and settling there it takes to itself an earthly body which seems by reason of the soul's power to move itself." See Plato, Plato's Phaedrus, trans., intro., and comm. by R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952; repr. 1989), 70. Quarles offers an emblem that parallels Marvell's usage:

My soul is like a bird, my flesh the cage, . . .

From sense she climbs to faith; wherein for a season

She sits and sings: then down again to reason:

From reason back to faith, and straight from thence

She rudely flutters to the perch of sense. . . .

See Francis Quarles, Emblemes (Cambridge: Printed by R.D. for Francis Englesfeild, 1643), 5.10. page 285, lines 1 and 9–12, EEBO.

Other explanations of the concept of soul as bird include Kermode, "Argument," 239–40; Maren-Sofie Røstvig, "Benlowes, Marvell, and the Divine Casimire," Huntington Library Quarterly 18, no. 1 (November 1954): 13–35; and Stocker, Apocalyptic, 247–48.

39. Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter, 1989), 191. In Paradise Lost, Milton intends to "soar / Above th' Aonian mount," while Marvell's words echo Milton's:

And above human flight dost soar aloft

With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.

The bird named from Paradise you sing

So never flags, but always keeps on wing.

See John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 2000), 1: Bk. 1, lines 14–15; and Marvell, "On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost," in Smith, Poems, 183, lines 37–40.

40. Miner, Metaphysical Mode, 89; Nicholas A. Salerno, "Andrew Marvell and the Furor Hortensis," Studies in English Literature 8, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 111; and Siemon, "Generic Limits," 271.

41. Stanley Stewart offers an explanation for the popularity of garden sundials at this time: "With men of the seventeenth century, the idea of time was almost an obsession. Time confounded them with its austere detachment and with what seemed like power to deliver or remove the precious." See The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 98–99. Commentators offer much historical and symbolic background on the use of such "horologues," from specific details of their composition to their use in emblems. See Salerno, "Andrew Marvell," 117; Stewart, Enclosed Garden, 100; Karl Josef Höltgen, "Floral Horologues prior to Marvell's 'Garden,'" Notes & Queries n.s. 14, no. 10 (1969): 381–82; and Smith, Poems, 159, notes to lines 65–66.

42. Hilda M. Ransome, The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 77 note 4; Plato, Phaedo, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1:287; Virgil, Virgil's Georgics, trans. Janet Lembke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 4.220, page 67. Porphyry writes, "All souls, however, proceeding into generation, are not simply called bees, but those who live justly, and who, having performed such things as are acceptable to the gods, will return whence they came. For this insect loves to return to the place whence it came, and is eminently just and sober." See De ant. nym. 18; quoted in Ransome, Sacred Bee, 106.

43. Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchy (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1609), 1–2, EEBO; and Ransome, Sacred Bee, 105. Horace's reference is in the Odes:

ego apia Matinae

more modoque

gratia carpentis thyma per laborem

pluimum circa nemus uvidique

carmina fingo.

Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 4: 2, lines 27–32.

Siemon translates the above: "I, a humble poet, like the Matinian bee laboriously gathering the pleasant thyme about many groves and along the banks of the watery Tiber, fashion my elaborate songs." See James Edward Siemon, "Andrew Marvell's School Learning: A Study of His Poems in Light of the Curriculum," PhD diss., Stanford University, 1966, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 172.

44. Ransome, Sacred Bee, 196–97.

45. McMahon, Treatise, 1: 48, par. 71.
Chapter Five

In Between Life and Art: Marvell's Mower and Nymph

[H]ast thou marked how antique Masters limn

The alley-roof, with snuff of candle dim,

Sketching in shady smoke prodigious tools?1

As discussed, the connection of Andrew Marvell to the visual arts is not a radical concept—critics have long noted his ability to blend "the conceptual and the pictorial."2 His works come tantalizingly close to expected pastoral, carpe diem, or other conventional modes of poetry and are often compared to visual arts because of their pictorial qualities; however, an even stronger connection to the visual arts in Marvell's lyrics lies in the very indeterminate nature of his poems and the characters that inhabit them: in blurring the boundaries of expected convention, Marvell creates a liminal area similar to Leonardo's use of sfumato in his paintings, intriguing and drawing the reader into the depths of complexity indicated by his poetic shadowing. Just as contemporary styles of English portraiture demonstrate a darkening from the bright colors of Elizabethan optimism to the more shadowy chiaroscuro of Jacobean realism, Marvell's poetic portraits evidence his expertise in these changing trends in visual arts. In his profession and in his views of art, of nature, of love, and of himself, the puzzling personae of the Mower and the Nymph perhaps best demonstrate Marvell's ability to blur the lines defining pastoral, an already "in-between" form linking poetry, landscape, and visual art.

The connection of poetry and the visual arts has a long history, perhaps, as mentioned in chapter 4, first articulated in a statement attributed by Plutarch to Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 BCE) that "painting is silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks."3 The more famous comment linking the two arts is that of Horace (65 BCE) in Ars Poetica, "ut pictura poesis"("A poem is like a picture.")4 Though commentators through the ages have disagreed whether painting or poetry is superior and which appeals to the higher parts of the human soul, most must acknowledge that both arts best stimulate the imagination and most engage the reader in their uncertain aspects, the very traits that caused Plato to condemn the visual arts because they blurred the line between truth and falsehood and remained in a type of "twilight realm" which is neither appearance nor reality.5

In his intricate notebook writings and sketches, Leonardo da Vinci acknowledges and even encourages the similarity of the literary and visual arts, insisting that accuracy of both literary and visual portrayal depends on this uncertainty of line.6 As he keenly observed, objects as perceived really do not have sharp boundaries, and the greater the distance of the object from the viewer, the less distinct are its boundaries. Reality on canvas, as in life, is actually portrayed in the liminal space that is neither light nor dark, an area Leonardo advised should be painted "in the manner of smoke without strokes or marks." As discussed in chapter 2, Leonardo's practice of blurring boundaries, his signature technique of sfumato or "smoke-like" appearance, produces a liminal area that paradoxically portrays a clearer view of reality by blurring the lines. Others recognized the truth in Leonardo's conception. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), Italian painter, architect, and author of the first narrative history of art, Vite de' più eccellenti architetti picttori e scultori, praises those outlines "hovering between the seen and the unseen." Likewise, in notes to his Italian translation of Vitruvius's De architectura, Titian's contemporary Daniele Barbaro (1513–1570) praises the sfumato technique that helps us to "understand what one does not see" by softly blurring boundaries on the horizon, forming a liminal space "which is and is not, and this can only be achieved by infinite practice, delighting those who do not understand it better and stunning those who do."7

Ultimately, it is the very liminality of the visual arts, the smoky "twilight realm" of the imagination, that best connects it with poetry, particularly that of Andrew Marvell. In his composition techniques, Leonardo's insistence on uncertainty of line confirms the theories of anthropologist Victor Turner, who, as discussed in chapter 2, defines human liminality as the "in-between" period of transition from one stage of life to another and as a realm of possibility and creativity. Demonstrated by the welter of pentimenti that made up his preliminary sketches (as seen in chapter 2, Gombrich mentions the artist "had to clarify his idea by using a stylus and tracing the line he finally chose through the paper to its reverse"), Leonardo conceived of a sketch as a liminal stage, a stimulation of the mind to further inventions, not a preparation for a particular work. In his concept, drawing becomes a "process which is constantly going on in the artist's mind," and instead of fixing the flow of imagination, the uncertainty of line keeps it in flux. In both the literary and the visual arts, because the real story/picture lies between the lines, in the liminal space of the imagination, the reader/audience is also engaged in the process of creation, a phenomenon mentioned in chapter 2 that Gombrich terms the "Beholder's Share," as the reader/observer involuntarily attempts to define and clarify the uncertain boundaries. The more vital the feature that is indicated by the context and yet omitted, the more engaging is the Beholder's Share.8

As discussed, Marvell's life itself blurs into an uncertain sfumato, prompting biographers to contribute the Beholder's Share. However, the pictorial aspects of Marvell's poetry clearly indicate not only an interest in and knowledge of newer trends in the visual arts but also a particular way of viewing the role of the artist and the landscape of the world. True, Marvell was inevidently influenced by his four years abroad in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain in the 1640s, at a time, according to Spencer, when "the painters' craft flourished most notably." Though Marvell wrote little about these years, Hunt relies on accounts by contemporary travelers like John Evelyn to speculate what might have impressed Marvell during this time, and Holland especially would have offered Marvell both impressive high Renaissance garden art and, particularly in Italy, the use of greater chiaroscuro. Peter Paul Rubens died May 30, 1640, and had worked at Antwerp and Brussels, bringing to Northern European art the classical influences of Italy, while Jan Vermeer, with his striking use of light and shadow, was thriving in Delft by the 1650s. Evelyn was "struck at the Dutch taste for paintings," according to Hunt ,and sent home several "Landcips and Drolleries."9 In fact, the Dutch gave the world both the term "landscape" and the concept of landscape as worthy of more than a small hint through the window of an interior scene: landscape could be the main subject of the painting. According to James Turner, this new view of landscape in the seventeenth century was used "as a means of expressing the grand creative power of the eye itself" and offered to Marvell and his contemporaries the new experience of "seeing the world as a landscape," a significant development in capturing the pastoral mode as in the Mower poems.10

As an influence in seeing the world, landscape concepts soon influenced the styles as well as the content of literature. In his preface to Gondibert, D'Avenant describes poetry in terms of landscape:

[S]urely Poets (whose business should represent the Worlds true image often to our view) are not lesse prudent than Painters, who when they draw Landschaps entertaine not the Eye wholly with even Prospect, and a continu'd Flatte; but (for variety) terminate the sight with lofty Hills, whose obscure heads are sometimes in the Clowdes. 11

This interest in vistas combined well in the 1630s–1650s with the increase in number and quality of retirement and garden poems, indicating a longing for quiet retreat from English political unrest yet highlighting the contradiction between the courtly, metropolitan culture of the Stuarts and its agrarian base. Like the Mower poems that feign pastoral yet blur the lines in a metaliterary comment upon the mode, poems of country life, according to Turner, play "an important role in this ideology of dissociation" by "insisting on the irrelevance of the world, or suppressing its painful contradictions, or interrogating, transforming or inverting it."12

Besides the increased appreciation of landscapes and a broader worldview, Marvell experienced, in both Holland and Italy, revolutionary uses of light and shadow in painting that reflected his own worldview and contributed to his visually oriented poetic style. Leonardo's shadowy technique of sfumato especially demonstrated a style strikingly different from the more medieval, isolated form of Elizabethan portraiture prevalent before the seventeenth century. This earlier portrait style is perhaps epitomized by Nicholas Hilliard (c. 1547–1618/19), Elizabeth's court miniaturist and goldsmith in the 1570s and sergeant painter in 1581.13 Hilliard's most striking style is his preference for clear, strong boundaries and lack of shadow, a preference encouraged by his queen since it allowed her to present a rather timeless, iconographic, and unrealistic image (figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1. Elizabeth I Portrait Miniature, c. 1600. By Nicholas Hilliard (1547–1619). Private Collection. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.

However, toward the end of the sixteenth century and with the death of Elizabeth, a change was felt in the atmosphere of the visual and literary arts. The new popularity of "Curious Painting" and trompe l'oeil delighted audiences in optical tricks of perspective. Hilliard's pupil and rival Isaac Oliver (1568–1617) soon overshadowed (literally) his master in his realistic miniatures produced by creating the liminal space of sfumato, blurring the boundaries and encouraging the Beholder's Share. In his strong use of shadow, Oliver demonstrates other Italian influences, according to Strong, particularly "the Venetian masters, but more particularly the works of the Milanese School, in the aftermath of Leonardo, which would have appealed to the essentially mannerist vision of Oliver with its preoccupation with light and shade and mystery."14 Like Marvell, Oliver traveled to the Continent and the Low Countries, achieving the European Renaissance style unknown to Hilliard, particularly in his use of linear and aerial perspective and chiaroscuro. Oliver's miniature The Head of Christ (figure 5.2), considered the most extraordinary of his miniatures both in style and subject, evidences the judgment that he "designed not only heads, but various compositions of histories."15 The lack of sharp boundaries produces the liminal aspects of the shadowing that draw us into the painting.

Oliver's portrait style was in high demand when, after his travels, Marvell joined the family of Lord Thomas Fairfax at Nun Appleton House in Yorkshire, serving as tutor to the Fairfax daughter Mary from 1651–1653. Lord Fairfax's library certainly offered the poet an opportunity for knowledge on several subjects, one of which was very possibly the visual arts.16 Since literature on painting theory was becoming more popular in the early-to-mid seventeenth century, Marvell was very likely aware of the newer preference for poetic shadowing that appealed to his own predilection for shadowy uncertainty. Lucy Gent, who gives a thorough survey of treatises on painting available in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, explains that, although not many books on contemporary painting were found in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English libraries, many did have Guicciardini's Descrittione . . . di tutti i paesi bassi (Antwerp 1567) from which Marvell and his contemporaries could have learned about Netherlandish painting and engraving. Gent believes interest in painting theory increased in the Jacobean period: many Elizabethans ignored contemporary painting theory because of the "climate of iconoclasm"; also, up until 1600 in England, contemporary painting and sculpture did not constitute a category of knowledge, much less the status of a liberal art.17 Treatises on architecture and perspective were often categorized under mathematics. Evidence of the change in English opinion of visual arts is seen in a comparison of the third and fourth editions of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy: the 1628 edition lists the topics of study offering "extraordinary delight" as "Arithmeticke, Geometry, Perspective, Opticke, Astronomy, Architecture, Mechanicks and their misteries," while the 1632 edition lists these topics as "Aritmeticke, Geometry, Perspective, Opticke, Astronomie, Architecture, Sculpturâ, Picturâ, of which so many and such elaborate Treatises are of late written."18

Figure 5.2. Head of Christ Portrait Miniature, n.d. By Isaac Oliver (1565–1617). Victoria and Albert Museum. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of Marvell's knowledge of and appreciation for the newer shadowy style of English art is one particular book in the Fairfax library: Edward Norgate's important early study Miniatura, considered "the most important source for the study of Tudor and Stuart miniature painting," not only in terms of theory and technique, but in our understanding of the assimilation of European artistic culture by the English aristocracy.19 The text was not only owned by Lord Fairfax but also dedicated to Fairfax's daughter Mary, Marvell's pupil at Nun Appleton during that productive period in the early 1650s during which most of his lyrics are believe to have been composed. As mentioned in chapter 4, this copy of Norgate's first treatise was obviously plagiarized and dedicated to Mary by Daniel King, believed to be Mary's painting instructor and a man described by Sir William Dugdale as "a pitiful pretender to antiquities" and "a most ignorant, silly fellow . . . an arrant knave and not able to write one line of true English," making his living by "progging and necessitous tricks and shifts." Though Hardie estimates King presented the manuscript to Mary Fairfax between 1653 and 1657, the gift could certainly have been earlier, when Marvell served as Mary's tutor in 1651–53. The copy now exists in the British Museum, BL Add. 12461, 1-54v, signed by Daniel King and displaying the arms of Lord Fairfax on the cover; however, this manuscript is not a random compilation by an ignorant pretender to artistic knowledge but is Norgate's own work, linking both Fairfax and Marvell to this important contribution to theories and techniques of limning and to the increasing appreciation of landscape as an independent genre of painting.20

According to Ogden and Ogden, Norgate's career (1620–1649) coincided with "the first great period of picture collecting in English history," with Norgate himself playing an important role in the artistic activities of the court circle. Though Norgate did not publish either of his two treatises on limning in printed form, both An Exact and Compendious Discourse concerning the Art of Miniatura or Limning (c. 1625) and the enlarged Miniatura or the Art of Limning (1649) circulated widely in manuscript, according to Muller and Murrell, among a rather elite group, including Henry Howard, third Earl of Arundel; Sir Thomas Kyvett; John Hoskins; and Marvell's employer, Thomas, Lord Fairfax:

The earliest owners of these manuscripts formed a tight-knit group of artists and virtuosos—all male—linked to the court of Charles I and to the circle of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. During the Civil War and Interregnum they were retired aristocrats, Royalist with one exception, for whom limning might provide a secret refuge along with poetry, gardening, or fishing.21

Marvell's probable familiarity with Norgate's work supports the poet's interest in shadowing and landscape in his poetry, since the treatise contains fundamental information and concepts about Netherlandish landscape, pastel drawing, the naturalization of foreign critical terms into English, and the work of artists like Rubens, Van Dyck, Holbein, Paul Brill, Orazio Gentileschi, and Hendrick Goltzius.22 Unlike Hilliard, who disdained shadowing, Norgate agreed with Oliver, advising that the best way to make a portrait "close, smooth, and even" is to "drive the shadowes with that softnes, and airie tenderness which the Italians call La maniera fumata," a technique which "adds exceedingly to the life, likenes and roundnes of the picture." Norgate also advocates blurring the boundaries into a liminal area, similar to Leonardo, "that nothing bee left with a hard edge . . . that your shadows may lie soft and smooth . . . like ayre or vapory smoke."23 Norgate's treatise also would have supported and encouraged Marvell's concept of landscape as a worldview.

Norgate believed landscape was worthy of more than background: it could, in fact, serve as an established genre—"an absolute and entire art"—and believed it to be, of all types of painting, "the most honest and Innocent, and noe colours in the world expresse it with that Beauty and perfection, as those of Lymning." However, this "innocence" and accuracy of landscape can only be achieved through shadowing, a technique that Norgate, like Hilliard, judges deceptive; however, unlike Hilliard, Norgate praises its effect:

Landscape is nothing els but Deceptio visus, A kind of cousning or cheating your owne Eyes, by your owne consent, and assistance and by a plot of your owne contriving, together with an apt accommodation of Colours, lights, and shadowes, that make grounds seeme neere or farre off, according to those representations you find in your owne fancy, or by diligent observation.24

Acknowledging the probability that Marvell read Norgate and other treatises available during the sixteenth century and that he experienced newer trends in landscape and portraiture in his travels, Spencer concludes that Marvell in his young adulthood possessed "a much greater knowledge of the visual arts than most Englishmen of his century possessed."25 His choice of pastoral mode for his Mower poems and "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," then, is appropriate and only confirms his knowledge of and appreciation for the visual arts and the role of the artist as absorber, reflector, and transformer, since pastoral exists in a liminal realm between art and nature.

Since its origins in Theocritus's Idylls, pastoral literature pretends simplicity but, as Tayler explains, is "highly stylized and carefully calculated" and requires "a poet and an audience sufficiently civilized to appreciate primitive simplicity." In Puttenham's words, pastoral's purpose is, "under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters." Like a landscape, the pastoral is a painting framed (and therefore distanced) by poetic expectations. Differentiating between "pure" and "impure" pastoral, Louis Martz describes the limits of the mode:

The sorrows, labors, and misfortunes of daily life, then, are not to be excluded from pastoral, but they are carved within delicate, yet firm, borders of ivy and acanthus, symbols of poetic and artistic inspiration. Pastoral art defines a limit, a perspective, a distancing that diminishes the pain, while recognizing its necessity.

Part of the deception Norgate praises in landscape painting, this distancing of pastoral necessitates blurring within the frame for correct effect, as Norgate explains:

By any meanes lett your passengers and people by the way lesson and lose themseluis, both in forme and colleur. I have seene people in a landscape which must necessarily bee imagined to be 4 or 5 myles off in distance, yet soe foolishly represented that you might haue told their buttones. Beware of perfection at a distance.26

Marvell's unique contribution to pastoral in his Mower poems and "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn" is that he not only blurs within the frame but also blurs the pastoral frame itself, challenging the expectations of the mode with his personages, the Mower and the Nymph.

The Mower Poems

Identified as "Damon" in one poem, the Mower figure dominates a possible series (even this aspect is uncertain)27 of four poems collectively known as the Mower poems: "The Mower against Gardens," "Damon the Mower," "The Mower to the Glow-worms," and "The Mower's Song." Taken in the order printed in the only source for these four poems, the folio volume of Marvell's poems printed in 1681, three years after his death, the Mower poems portray a persona suffering a progressively deteriorating relationship with nature and with love. The Mower's sincerity, awareness, and culpability in the process remain uncertain and intriguing until, finally, we realize the very ambiguity of the causes and effects of his suffering serve as the source of our fascination. Like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dr. Faustus, and even Milton's Satan, the Mower indicates the complexity of personality and imprisonment within the self that is characteristic of late Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and portraiture. Perhaps the most debated point about the poems is the Mower himself—in the already ironic mode of pastoral, which, by purging life of its darker shadows and portraying a world so ordered and idyllic that it questions those ideals,28 why would Marvell choose a cutter of hay instead of the traditional shepherd figure? Early commentators on the pastoral insist upon shepherds and shepherdesses as the only appropriate characters in the mode, while reapers are listed among professions prohibited in pastoral.29

The implications are numerous: instead of the idealized shepherd of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," dwelling in the preagricultural golden age of simplicity, feeling uncomplicated love uncontaminated by worldly considerations, Marvell's Mower instead recalls the biblical metaphor "All flesh is grass" (Isaiah 40:6–8), so he becomes a natural symbol for death. The figure blurs the traditional line between the farmers in Virgil's Georgics, epic-like heroes who "transform nature through productive labor throughout the seasons," and the piping swains in Theocritus's Idylls, contemplatives who devote their lives to games of love. Or, as Swan notes, the Mower blends the biblical figures of Cain and Abel: because Cain, the agricultural laborer, did not find favor with God, and his shepherd brother Abel did find favor, their story became an allegory of God's preference of contemplative over active life. Because of the seasonal nature of his work and his symbolic scythe, he can also symbolize time, and because he does not "pastor" or lead in full cooperation with nature but destroys and cuts down, he can be seen to symbolize man's alienation from nature.30 With the association of the "fall" of grass/flesh, the Mower has also been associated with Adam and Satan, and like Milton's Satan, has elicited contradictory judgments: "an attractively melancholy figure" who appears "frighteningly vulnerable"; a "figure of fun" and "Clown of Death" who comically thinks of himself as "a big shot in the rustic world" yet is granted mythic status as "Marvell's symbol of fallen man, the lowest of angels and the highest of the beasts."31 The Mower is all of these things because he is none of these things . . . exactly. He is a liminal figure, the blurred form in the framed landscape, challenging the expected characteristics of art and nature, good and evil, action and contemplation, life and death. "The Mower against Gardens" foregrounds one such duality: human creative art and "unfallen" nature.

In "The Mower against Gardens," the Mower presents a diatribe against man's art symbolized in the image of the garden, an ironic choice in light of its associations with innocent, prelapsarian man, but totally in keeping with what Turner describes as the ironic blurring of art and nature in pastoral: "[Pastoral personae] describe their innocent provincial lives as an urbane stranger would, in terms of public opinion. . . . The poet must see the peasants as an art form, and they must not; this is the essence of the pastoral, the beatus ille convention and the antemasque."32 Here, Marvell's Mower condemns the gardener's "seduction" and entrapment of wild plants, tainting their purity with "forbidden" horticultural techniques like grafting and fertilizing and manipulating the natural scene with artificial decorations like "enforced" fountains, grottoes, and statues. The garden, then, becomes a liminal space between art and nature, experience and innocence. However, note the ambiguity in this condemnation: is the Mower chastising the "framing" of nature into a contrived, artistic landscape, "within the gardens square" (5), or is he condemning the defiance of boundaries in "Forbidden mixtures" (22) as the gardener mingles species and artificially exaggerates the natural attributes of plants? Marvell's own interest in art and gardening, intensified by his Continental travels, helps to explain the ambiguity in the Mower's approach as he distances us and blurs the lines between pastoral, poetry, and landscape.33

Hunt explains that after the Civil War, when Marvell wrote his Mower poems, gardening seemed to take the place of religious enthusiasm and represented order and restraint: "Gardens became places of horticultural research and, even when only decorative, still proclaimed human control. An obviously ordered garden is an outward and visible sign of man's scientific understanding of nature's processes."34 Hunt describes a seventeenth-century gardening guide that advised mathematical precision in the planning of the garden, dividing circular garden beds into quadrants and even further: "Whatever extravagant cadenzas these rectangular spaces contain, they also restrain them and ultimately teach fancy to submit to geometry."35 Ironically, trends in the visual arts impacted the fashion of artificial gardens. As topographical paintings increased in popularity, the French more "contrived" style of gardening decreased; eventually, Dutch painting succeeded in mediating the two by portraying the naturalness of a scene in nature but choosing the details of the scene to convey an intended effect. The concept, explains Hunt, was "to find the same kinds of enjoyment in actual views as in ideal prospects, and to associate with external nature the moods imparted by landscapists to their canvases." As Heffernan describes, "[L]andscape was not a natural phenomenon but a cultural one, something jointly created by the triangulated arts of painting, poetry, and landscape gardening."36 Thus, gardeners began to consult contemporary landscape paintings from Holland and Italy to plan their gardens, and many might have echoed the Mower's complaints on the unnaturalness of some garden plots.

Though the poem is an attack and not a personal revelation, the speaker's choice of words in "The Mower against Gardens" betrays shades of a complex personality in the dim light and indicates a fear of the power of human imagination: seventeenth-century gardening becomes a "vice" (line 1) and a sexual one at that—the image is of kidnapping innocent plants, imprisoning them in the gardener's "dead and standing pool of air" (6), drugging or "stupefying" them with luscious fertilizer, and either forcing them into prostitution, dousing them with cheap perfume and overdone makeup as part of his "seraglio" (27), or, through grafting, castrating them to provide "eunuchs" to care for the fallen flowers. Man, then, forces nature into an in-between existence—these flowers and plants no longer belong to their natural families but are a new hybrid, between nature and art. However, as the Mower laments, instead of liminality serving as the seedbed of creativity, here, man's creativity produces liminality—"Forbidden mixtures" produced in the liminal area "between the bark and tree" (22, 21).37 While the Mower concludes by including himself with the gods of the natural world ("The gods themselves with us do dwell" line 40), the condemnation of the art of man by a Mower, a man, in a poem, a work of man's art, calls his validity into question. In fact, Hunt comments that as "mower," the speaker could have worked to keep the grassy lawn areas in Italian-style gardens trimmed, so that he would contribute to the garden's maintenance.38 The "unfinishedness" of his character prompts us to give the Beholder's Share in our analysis of him, particularly since he uses the first person plural pronoun in the last line, in Sprecher fashion, including "us" with him and with those sharing his condemnation of artifice.

With his one-sided view of the evils of gardening and his inability to see himself as fallen (he is totally separate from "Luxurious Man"), the Mower expresses naïveté similar to that of Perdita in her comments on art versus nature in The Winter's Tale (4.4.82–83ff.), associating him with the liminality of pastoral. Snyder defines pastoral not as a condition but as a "process," thus, as an in-between period of transition:

"Process" implies the temporal, something altering over time. In this context it has to do with paradise once possessed and then lost, with an original pastoral perfection that later transmutes to its opposite, time and change creating a gulf between idyllic then and blighted, alienated now.39

Appropriately, then, characters in pastoral also are at a liminal time in their lives: not children, but "on the threshold" of adulthood, and therefore inexperienced and unreliable as speakers, since, as part of the landscape, they describe their situation from a limited point of perspective. To remain pastoral, however, these figures must remain on the threshold, in the realm of possibility and play: Poggioli judges that "adolescence and early adulthood are the only important pastoral ages."40 Unable to mature within this pastoral landscape, this Mower cannot reconcile nature and the art that derives from human nature. Distanced and framed within the "ivy and acanthus" borders of pastoral, the Mower and his validity remain out of focus.

The other three Mower poems also deal with a persona of limited and therefore ambiguous perspective, an ironic device connecting poetry and painting. "Damon the Mower" now identifies the Mower, whom most commentators interpret as the speaker of all the Mower poems. Not content with the vague "us" of "The Mower against Gardens," Damon proudly proclaims his identity: "'I am the Mower Damon, known / Through all the Meadows I have mown'" (41–42). Yet even accepting the name "Damon," identified by Alistair Fowler as one of the traditional, "nuclear" pastoral names that can be used automatically to "set the generic mood" of pastoral, the reader soon sees this "I" is a false and even anamorphic image of the speaker, so misguided that we must be introduced to him by an omniscient narrator in the first and tenth stanzas.41

The first and tenth stanzas, in effect, "frame" Damon's narration as does a picture frame, a method of formal display introduced during the Renaissance. Heninger explains that before the Renaissance, "paintings were incidental to a larger project, and their borders were determined by the construct into which they fitted," whether an altarpiece or an articulated wall. A frame thus actually gives a work of art autonomy and independence: "A frame indicates that a painting is a fictional space which contains its own raison d'être, which requires no extraneous support to substantiate its existence or provide a context for its significance. A framed picture generates its own meaning."42

However, is the frame a part of the painting, or a part of the outside world? It delineates, yet only because it belongs to both worlds—it is a liminal device similar to the early use of a third-person narrator, a figure who helped make the transition from medieval allegory to modern fiction. In placing the reader/audience into the correct perspective, the narrator blends nicely with a device advocated in the visual arts and described in chapters 2 and 3: the Sprecher, a figure in the painting who looks at the viewer and points to a significant event within the painting, as Alberti describes:

In an istoria I like to see someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there; or beckons with his hand to see; or menaces with an angry face and with flashing eyes, so that no one should come near; or shows some danger or marvelous thing there; or invites us to weep or to laugh together with them. Thus whatever the painted persons do among themselves or with the beholder, all is pointed toward ornamenting or teaching the istoria.43

In bridging the frame between scene and audience, Marvell's narrator in "Damon the Mower" draws us into the work of art, particularly since he uses the conventions of pastoral and rhetorical art, adjusting our perspective to see how "ev'ry thing did seem to paint / The Scene more fit for his complaint" (3–4).

The narrator's description of the pathetic fallacy, so much a part of pastoral,44 also connects poetry and painting, since he paints a scene mirroring Damon's distress, utilizing similes:

Like her fair eyes the day was fair;

But scorching like his am'rous care.

Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was,

And withered like his hopes the grass. (5–8)

Puttenham compares rhetorical art to visual art, arguing that a man who allows women artful enhancement should also accept rhetorical devices, "the flowers as it were and coulours that a Poet setteth upon his language by arte."45 Coming after a poem condemning floral hybridization by comparing it to the evils of women's face-painting practices, the rhetorical devices used by the framing narrator call even his validity into question.

Damon's first personally narrated stanza sets up the reader for a traditional pastoral love-complaint, including the requisite pathetic fallacy, in terms of the visual arts, as Damon elaborates on how his surroundings "paint / The scene more fit for his complaint" (3–4), providing the mirroring background for the unclearly outlined figure at center. The two stanzas introducing the traditional pathetic fallacy topos also help "frame" Damon's complaints, distancing us and enabling us to recognize the limited perspective Damon actually portrays. We expect the conventional tripartite structure of the conventional amorous pastoral eclogue as seen in Theocritus's Third Idyll, Virgil's Second Eclogue, and Spenser's "January" Shepherd's Calendar and described by Patrick Cullen: first, a complaint to the reluctant mistress, in which the shepherd contrasts his misery with the happiness of the rest of nature, or a lament that the mistress has refused his pastoral gifts; second, the shepherd's self-evaluation, boasting of his looks, the merits of his profession, or his material prosperity; and finally, a form of resolution consisting of a repudiation of the mistress (as in Virgil's Second Eclogue) or a decision to die.46 But Marvell does not give us the traditional shepherd figure, living like Eve's son, Abel, humbly, contemplatively, in total sympathy with his fields, but instead gives us Damon the Mower—proud, arrogant, active, making his living by "Depopulating all the ground" (line 74) of his fields—a figure of shadowy uncertainty whose very gifts to his Juliana indicate liminality: his offered "'harmless snake'" is "'Disarmèd'" (35–36), so no longer an image of fear; "'chameleons'" are caught between colors, "'changing hue'" (37); "'oak leaves,'" symbols of masculine civic honor (as in "The Garden") are compromised with "'honey dew'" (38) which Andrew Kinney believes represents feminine fertility.47

Other uses of language indicate Damon's in-between state: in terms of tense, we note that the third person narrated frame of stanzas 1 and 10 places Damon's plight in past tense and call into question the Mower's solipsistic view, since nature only "seemed" to reflect his misery. Damon's own words, however, remain in present and conditional tense, evidencing self-deception as he describes a relationship with nature and with Juliana that no longer exists. Robert Wilcher believes verb tense is evidence of Damon's inaccurate perception: "[T]he Mower is trying to prolong a sense of relationship with Nature which only existed in his imagination and which is already firmly in the past."48 Another indication of Damon's in-between state is the use of puns that rhetorically blur the meaning of key words: "'scythe'" (72) and "sighs," "presents" (34) and "presence," "Disarmèd" snakes (36) meaning without arms and without weapons, "discovers" (51) meaning "finds" and "uncovers," and "mown" (80) and moan. Even in his egotistical self-identification as "the Mower," Damon seems misguided, as Anderson explains: since mowing was a seasonal occupation, Damon would have to have other occupations to survive the rest of the year.49 Like other victims of pain in Marvell's poetry—the Nymph and Fawn in "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," King Charles in "Horatian Ode," the speaker of "The Unfortunate Lover"—Damon's innocence is shadowed, called into question, and invites the Beholder's Share in our interpretation. To ensure our involvement, Marvell adds one more stanza from Damon's limited perspective, evidencing a greater awareness of his self-induced grief and his affinity with the grim reaper than previously indicated: after he inadvertently cuts his own ankle, Damon comments that exterior wounds can be treated, but inner wounds can only be healed by death, "'For Death thou art a mower too'" (88).

Set up by the self-reflecting, self-perpetuating aspects of Damon's suffering and his attempts to impose that suffering upon nature, the reader can almost expect the Mower's self-inflicted wound, which forces him to suffer the same pain he inflicts on the meadows—"By his own scythe, the mower mown" (80). The description of Damon's skill in cutting "Each stroke between the earth and root" (76) recalls the condemnation in "The Mower against Gardens" of man's dabbling "between the bark and tree" (21), in both cases disturbing a natural growth. The incident also adds to the concept of "Mower as Death" the concept of "Mower-as-artist." The pastoral convention of pathetic fallacy reversed, like a mirror image, connects to the distorted reflection of Damon's face within his scythe, the instrument of his "art." As discussed in chapters 2 and 6, the concept of art as a mirror of the artist was a Renaissance commonplace. In his comments on painting, Leonardo believed that painting reflects the artist physically and mentally, just as the mind of the artist should serve as a concave mirror, reflecting and condensing all he views. In fact, in his On Painting (1435–1436), the first modern treatise on the theory of painting, Alberti calls Narcissus "the first painter."50 In his "art," then, Damon sees himself lifted aloft by "'The deathless fairies'" (61) who contract around his solipsistic self, even as the mower filters his perceptions through his own dejection.

Damon's anamorphic image not only reiterates his naive, distorted view of his environment but also connects him with the liminal, preadult state of pastoral characters in general. As twentieth-century psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has shown, maturing children pass through a crucial stage in their development in which they acquire subjectivity, a sense of differentiation from the outside environment. Gallop describes that in this stage, "the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture and who is supported by either another person or some prosthetic device will, upon seeing herself in the mirror, 'jubilantly assume' the upright position," seeing in the mirror not what she is but what she will be, or perhaps more appropriately, what she "will have been" in the future-perfect sense. Labeled by Lacan as the "mirror stage," this experience allows a child to form a self-image. It is "both an anticipation and a retroaction," so a "turning point" in development. However, as Snyder explains, though this separate image appears to the child as coherent with his own body, this image is a "false unified totality" that the child joyfully accepts as himself: "the acceptance nevertheless creates another fissure, between the integrated 'I' perceived in the mirror and the perceiver's lived experience of fragmentation and uncoordination" until he matures to a full identity of self.51 Damon's mirror image of himself and of his world is skewed in the crescent-shaped blade of the scythe, and since we see him mown down with hints of death at the poem's end, Damon will remain in his mirror stage, an artist who distorts and is distorted by his art.

The third Mower poem in Marvell's printed works, "The Mower to the Glow-worms," also attempts to portray the Mower's distracted love for Juliana, but the liminal aspects of the poem hinge on the Mower/Damon's use of language and the symbol of the glow-worm. Appropriately enough, the glowworm has significance for the Mower's predicament both in the realm of nature and in the realm of art. The poem, spoken by the unnamed Mower figure, is an apostrophe to these insects that are really not worms at all but belong to the order Coleoptura along with beetles and weevils. The interesting fact of the use of glowworms in this poem is that, in nature, only the females emit a "shiny green light from the extremity of the abdomen" and, in fact, the females are known to utilize "aggressive mimicry" to trick, attract, and eat males of other species.52 This female malevolence naturally mirrors that of Juliana in this poem, since the Mower, in the liminal state of being lost, between destinations, laments the fact that the glowworms' "courteous Lights" (line 13) are ineffective guides since Juliana "hath so displaced" (15) his mind that he will never find his home (16). The ambiguity of the glowworms' help is a typical condition of liminality. Hennelly explains that during the liminal period, "definitive boundaries dissolve, making it profoundly difficult to distinguish between autocratic mentors and tormentors, especially since the threshold itself was originally a place to go for 'threshing' or 'thrashing' ripe grain."53 Thus the glowworms, usually benevolent guides but now natural representations of Juliana, no longer serve as helpful landmarks but actually work against and lead the Mower astray, perpetuating his liminal state. The Mower himself mirrors this malevolent relationship with nature in his profession of cutting fields of grass, the glowworms' home.

The Mower's language fits Puttenham's description of the "painted faces" of rhetorical tropes and contributes to the in-between aspects of the poem and of his character, since he addresses the glowworms using oxymoronic metaphors, interpreting these creatures as in between art and nature: "living lamps" (1), "officious flame" (9), "courteous lights" (13). In his use of more sophisticated terms like "officious" and "country comets" that "portend / No war, nor prince's funeral" (5–6) but instead "presage the grass' fall" (8), the Mower reveals himself as more astute than any country mower could be and adds intrigue to our interpretation of him. As Swan comments, such a rustic mower would lack the point of view to utter such phrases: "[I]t is only from an urbanized perspective that a mower's life is a mower's life, that it becomes perceived as something other." Defined by Natalie Hess as "code switching," this use of language inappropriate to the speaker or situation creates "faults" between the building blocks of oral or written language, forming "a liminally creative and fertile linguistic underpinning for literary designs": "These fissures—the subtleties and ambiguities, the betwixt and between territories—provide the most fertile ground for the study of representational arrangements" in which the marginal becomes the pivotal.54 Thus the Mower's language images his condition: he is in between destinations, lost, his mind "so displaced" (15) by Juliana that he will remain on the threshold but never reach home.

In many ways the glowworms serve as sacra, Turner's anthropological term for the sacred objects that must be communicated to a neophyte during the liminal period of his initiation process. These sacred, multivocal symbols can range from life values, ethical ideas, and social norms to bodily processes and phenomena, including relics, musical instruments, mirrors, masks, and even food. Communicating these sacra also imparts to the neophyte the gnosis or secret knowledge necessary to pass from liminality to reintegration and maturation. Enumerating the multifaceted associations of the glowworm from ancient to early modern sources, Scoular supports the uncertain benevolence of the creature, which has been described positively as "a shepherd's star, foretelling the harvest," "A moving diamond," a spark of fire, and even "an earthly signature of the heavens," yet also imaging "a traitor to the state" and "a false fire," since it appeared to have "heat which it did not possess, like false love."55 The speaker of "The Mower to the Glow-worms" acknowledges the secret knowledge possessed by these representatives of nature; however, because of Juliana's interference, the uninitiated neophyte fails to receive the gnosis inherent in the glowworms, only able to understand their essence through descriptive metaphors. Thus, he fails to pass through the maturation process and remains lost in the meadows, in the liminal process of pastoral.

The glowworms also relate the Mower's plight to visual arts and indicate Marvell's embodiment of the shadowy view of life and knowledge of painting technique. Muller and Murrell, editors of Norgate's Miniatura, or the Art of Limning, a pirated version of which, as mentioned, was owned by Lord Fairfax, explain that most early English treatises on painting, like Norgate's, were not only "first-hand record[s] of the critical and social values attached to miniature painting at the court of Charles I," but also types of "recipe books" of the materials and techniques needed to paint miniatures. In the mid-sixteenth-century Bletsho manuscript, Oliver, Lord St. John of Bletsho gives a recipe for making luminous ink by grinding glowworms.56 Thus observers of such a painting, thinking the surface actually glowed, would be as misled by these deceptive glowworms as is Marvell's lost Mower.

In its pictorial use of mirroring, the final poem of the Mower series, "The Mower's Song," not only reflects the Mower's deteriorating relationship with nature and with Juliana but also recapitulates liminal aspects of the previous three poems, leaving us uncertain as to his fate. As in "Damon the Mower," "The Mower's Song" hinges on the pastoral convention of the pathetic fallacy gone wrong: he used to have the mind of Leonardo's artist, mirroring a nature that also reflected his green hopes "as in a glass" (line 4), but with the coming of Juliana, his unity with nature is destroyed: "she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me" (5–6). Instead of reflecting his misery, the grass thrives—grows "more luxuriant still and fine" (8), forgoing their "fellowship so true" (14). He decides to force a unity with nature by taking revenge for its lack of compassion by "Depopulating all the Ground" ("Damon the Mower" 74) in a type of murder-suicide: "And flow'rs, and grass, and I and all, / Will in one common ruin fall" (21–22). Then, he reasons, the meadows will provide the "heraldry" with which he may "adorn [his] tomb" (26–27). In destroying nature here for the sake of art, the speaker recalls "The Mower against Gardens," intensified by the very artistically contrived refrain ending each stanza, "For Juliana came [or comes] and she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me" (here, too, the change in tense indicates an uncertainty in the speaker's reliability).

Our analysis of the previous Mower poems indicates a lack of true awareness in the Mower figure and a reversal of the pathetic fallacy from nature mirroring man, to man mirroring nature. In imposing his grief on the grass to create a unity with nature, the Mower appears oblivious to his unity with nature through Juliana, whose destructive actions reflect his own. If nature, as in "Damon the Mower," reflects the "scorching beams" (24) of Juliana's eyes and cooperates in her torment of the rustic, and if in "The Mower's Song" Juliana mirrors the Mower's destructive actions by cutting "[his] thoughts and [him] (6)," the unity of Mower, nature, and Juliana is complete, each reflecting the misery of the other. Also, because the Mower, as pastoral figure, has proven himself to be naive, at the liminal stage of adolescence (at least in his relationship with Juliana), the suggestion of nature and his mind mirroring each other recalls the mirror stage of development, which, as we have seen, implies a misinterpretation of the image as a "false unified totality." At this transitional stage, the Mower obviously claims a former mirrored unity with nature that simply does not exist.

Here, too, language intensifies the mutually reflecting images in the poem. Marvell appropriately uses the term "survey" (1), a precise visual representation of a landscape, to describe the reflected image of the meadow in the Mower's mind. As "an accurately measured, artistically coloured estate map, made to scale by a skilled surveyor," the term "survey" (which can be used as a noun or verb, similar to the word "garden" condemned by "The Mower against Gardens") is a human attempt to reflect, analyze, and even improve nature through art. The refrain rhetorically mirrors the motions of the Mower as he sweeps a swath of destruction through the meadow. Code switching also contributes to the sense of disjointedness and uncertainty: the appearance of "heraldry" (27) adorning the Mower's "tomb" (30), like the use of sophisticated terms in "The Mower to the Glow-worms," indicates a "fault" between expected images, since only wealthy, aristocratic landowners would expect such monuments. Also, a Mower used to participating in "gaudy May-games" (15) could not have the critical distance to judge them "gaudy," a term that even in Marvell's time was used in a "disparaging sense" as "[e]xcessively or glaringly showy, tastelessly gay or fine."57 Once again, as in "Damon" and "The Mower to the Glow-worms," the Mower laments a liminal existence and fails to find final reintegration because the conflict lies in his perception, not in reality. After all, the only difference between the Mower's "revenge" and destruction of the unsympathetic grass is in the mind of the Mower—he is actually just doing his job. The flourishing meadows are only "Unthankful" (13) in the Mower's eyes, and the fact that the greenness of the grass is not mirrored in his mind is the fault of the Mower's mind, not of nature. Like Milton's Satan, the Mower indicates inner complexity—a "hell within"—which causes us to question Juliana's culpability in the Mower's torment and draws us to his plight.

As a child unhappy with his own reflection might smash the mirror, the Mower gains revenge through destruction of the distorted mirror of his mind: "And flow'rs, and grass, and I and all, / Will in one common ruin fall" (21–22). Identified by Rees as "Marvell's familiar mode of poetic closure,"58 the Mower's transformation of violent love or grief into a permanent art form as a solution to love's miseries ultimately fails in this poem. The freshly mown green grass gathered to create the "heraldry" (27) for his tomb will soon fade and wither; likewise, the Mower's decayed body will truly join with nature as part of the next harvest, only to be mown by his successor. The pathetic fallacy becomes a hall of mirrors perpetuating an unclear image.

In the complexity of his motivation, the ambiguity of his sincerity, and the shadowy melancholy of his thoughts, Marvell's Mower figure elicits more than casual interest from the reader and exemplifies the more skeptical, darkening view of human nature evident in Jacobean literature and the visual arts. Through blurring the boundaries of expected conventions and characterization in his Mower poems, Marvell succeeds in joining poem and reader within the smoky area of sfumato, a liminal area of creativity and possibility—the realm of art.

"The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn"

Another naive, semipastoral figure who seeks to remain in a permanent liminal state is Marvell's Nymph. Cullen describes "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn" as "one of Marvell's simplest poems, though it has been subjected to such a spate of allegorical or quasi-allegorical interpretations that it has become one of his least understood poems," while Martz acknowledges that "[e]veryone agrees that the poem must have some symbolic significance—but hardly anyone agrees on what it is." Naturally, it has elicited innumerable diverse and contradictory interpretations.59 Depicting the sorrowful narration of a seemingly innocent Nymph's loss of her beloved pet by the careless disregard of "wanton Troopers" (line 1), the poem introduces us in its very title and speaker to an uncertain, in-between realm. As a literary "complaint," the poem purports to express the lament of "a lover to his inconstant, unresponsive or exacting mistress"; however, with its subject as the death of an animal, Marvell instead connects the poem to other classical precedents: Catullus's lament on the death of Lesbia's sparrow and Ovid's lament over Corinna's popinjay.60

In addition, both the narrator and the object of her sorrow present us with liminal figures: in her language and tone, the Nymph appears innocent and somewhat naive and introduces a type of pagan, mythological aspect to the poem. Nevertheless, the term "nymph" already indicates her in-between state, since the term can describe both innocent and experienced figures. In poetry particularly, "nymph" is associated not only with a beautiful young woman (OED n1. 2. b) but also as "[a]ny of a class of semi-divine spirits, imagined as taking the form of a maiden inhabiting the sea, rivers, mountains, woods, trees, etc., and often portrayed in poetry as attendants on a particular god" (OED n1. 1), so the figure blurs the line between human and divine. In a zoological context, "nymph" refers to a transitional stage between childhood (the larva) and adulthood ("nymph," OED n1. 3. a.), supported by the figure's naive and innocent lament for her fawn. However, this shading darkens as we contrast her persona in the poem with the meaning of "A prostitute; a woman regarded as a means of sexual gratification" (OED n1. 2. a) and the use of the term nymph as short for "nymphomaniac" (OED n2. a.) or a person exhibiting "nymphomania," or "[u]ncontrollable or excessive sexual desire, spec. in a woman" (OED n). With the meaning of nymph as a"fishing fly made in imitation of the aquatic larva of a mayfly" (OED n1. 3. b.), we have a blurring of nature with art and even an indication of the artful deceit about which Plato complained, hinting that perhaps the Nymph's artful innocence is itself a display of art. Without an objective narrator to delineate the true character of the Nymph, the lines of her character can be defined only by her own narration.

Unlike "Damon the Mower," "Nymph Complaining" lacks the defining frame of an omniscient narrator, a trait that contributes to the ambiguity of the poem as nature or art. As Alberti describes in his influential work On Painting, the painter begins his creation by drawing a rectangle that Alberti regarded as "an open window through which I see what I want to paint." Heninger explains that in Alberti's program for painting, the frame is "essential to the artifice, as the means of both setting apart the fictive space and of providing access to it." By employing perspective in this limited area, the painter can set up mathematical laws that not only organize the subjects in the frame but also reach out of the painting, incorporating the space inhabited by the viewer, situating them "in a precise relationship to the objects within the frame." Without such a frame provided by a narrator in "Nymph Complaining," we have an unclear perspective of and relationship with the Nymph speaker. Allué compares her to mannerist painting—"instead of functioning as a fixed center to which irradiates ordered organized images," the Nymph "urges the reader to look for a convenient position from where the chaotic and incomprehensible fragments acquire a logical shape," in other words, a correct angle of vision.61

As is the viewer of a mannerist painting, then, we are drawn into Marvell's poem, as Allué explains:

[F]ar from being a passive receptacle of notions, the spectator or reader of a Mannerist work of art is supposed to enter, participate in the artistic product, blurring the distances between himself and the author, functioning as an active creator of the work, as an "amphibian" between object and subject.62

This narration, in both vocabulary and poetic form, only contributes to shadowing the outline of her character. As the Nymph naively recounts her deepening relationship with the fawn after Sylvio's rejection, the artfulness of the poem's rhymed couplets tends to contradict the simplistic vocabulary and natural speech rhythms exhibited by the narrator Nymph. The reader is caught between regular meter and strong masculine end rhymes and frequent enjambment and caesurae imaging natural speech patterns. Then, amidst the Nymph's child-like incredulity of the evil that has intruded on her world ("Thou ne'er didst alive / Them any harm: alas nor could / Thy death yet do them any good" [lines 4–6]) appear the lines, "Ev'n beasts must be with justice slain; / Else men are made their deodands" (16–17). This rather sophisticated term "deodands" (17), a formal old English legal term referring to a creature or object forfeited to God or to the Crown in recompense for causing the death of a person (OED), complicates the heretofore innocent picture of our narrator. As seen in "The Mower to the Glow-worms," this is another instance of Hess's "code switching," the use of language inappropriate to the speaker or situation, creating gaps in interpretation, blurring the boundaries.63 Other examples of code switching are the Nymph's obvious (or not?) appreciation of Sylvio's pun, "'your huntsman here / Hath taught a fawn to hunt his dear'" (31–32) and her own lament that Sylvio "Left me his fawn, but took his heart" (36), with the pun on "hart," a technical term for an adult male deer (OED 1). Can a pastoral innocent like the Nymph appreciate literary puns? Should she?

The object of the Nymph's lament, the fawn, originally a gift from the "Unconstant Sylvio" (25), also indicates a creature, like the zoological "nymph," in a transitional state between childhood and adulthood and even between male and female, since the term refers to both a buck and a doe in the first year ("fawn," OED n1. 2.). The expected animal in a pastoral-type poem like this is a lamb, not a fawn, blurring expectations of the pastoral genre, since fawns are generally considered creatures of the wild, not members of domesticated flocks of shepherds. The name, spelled "faun" in Margoliouth's edition based on the 1681 folio, also associates the creature with "a class of rural deities" (OED n.) often accompanying the woodland deity Pan, another ambiguous figure. According to Allué, Neoplatonic and Christian philosophies both considered Pan as "the synthesis of paganism, due to his inclination to lust and to the terror—panic—that emanated from him" and Christianity, as we see in Marvell's "Clorinda and Damon," in which Pan is obviously Christ. The cruelty and waste of the fawn's murder by the "wanton Troopers" is intensified not only by its immature, innocent age but also by its status as deer. Allen explains that mature deer are only supposed to be killed in season and with ritual, while fawns should never be killed.64 The senseless slaughter also recalls other mythological careless killings of deer: Ascanius's ill-advised hunting of Silvia's deer, Agamemnon's killing of Artemis's deer that brought death to his daughter Iphigenia in the Aeneid, and Ovid's story of Cyparissus's accidental slaying of his own beloved deer in Metamorphoses.65 And the Nymph's description of her fawn as artfully adorned with "silver chain and bell" (28) and "silver feet" (64) presents the creature as a blend of art and nature.

Once abandoned by Sylvio, the Nymph seems easily to have transferred her love from giver to gift, "very well content" to spend her "solitary time" with the fawn (39, 38), realizing that the fawn's love "was far more better then / The love of false and cruel men" (53–54). The fawn begins to mirror the Nymph, "bless[ing] / Itself" in the Nymph (43–44) and growing "more white and sweet" (58) than both the milk and sugar she feeds her pet and the hands that offer it (55–58). Such a seemingly immature and innocent speaker turning from a human object of mirroring and love to an alternative object recalls Lacan's "Mirror Stage" described previously, as the Nymph sees herself mirrored in Sylvio's gift. The fawn serves for the child-like Nymph as what is termed in developmental psychology a "transitional object," an object that helps bridge for an infant the liminal area between the state of being merged with and mirrored in the mother to the state of realization that the mother is something outside and separate from the infant. According to D. W. Winnicott, because the infant does not see the mother, he or she does not see himself or herself mirrored in the mother, and looks around for other ways to see the mirror image. Marvell's Nymph is abandoned into this area, described by Winnicott as "the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear," seeking self-reflection and self-confirmation in the fawn, who, in the absence of Sylvio, mirrors the Nymph's own qualities of whiteness, sweetness, and softness. However, the transitional object can be a "denial of separation," becoming "a thing in itself" rather than a representation of the loved person, a method to transition between unity and individuality, often a dangerous development, according to Winnicott.66

The Nymph's description of life with the fawn is an artificial game, another liminal state that is set apart from real life and abides by its own rules. In their games of skipping races, the fawn, unlike Sylvio, would faithfully return to the Nymph within the safety of their garden, long a symbol, as seen in chapter 4, of a protected setting, in between the natural and the artificial and blending pagan and Christian allegory. Unlike the idealized "green world" of traditional pastoral, the Nymph's garden lacks the lush green of living (so fleeting) nature and instead blossoms with the red and white artifice of courtly literature. Emphasizing its blur of purity and passion, this garden, "with roses over grown, / And lilies" (72–73), mirrors and is mirrored by the fawn, whose combination of "Lilies without, roses within" (92) blends perfectly with the cultivated artificiality of the place.67

The Nymph's garden, though "over grown" (72), follows Bacon's recommendation for gardens in his Essays—a garden should image artificial naturalness or the "delightfull confusion" and "wilde Regularitie" recommended by Henry Wotton in Elements of Architecture. Allué sees the garden as yet another mirroring aspect of the poem, reflecting the Nymph's amphibious nature, "simultaneously wild and gentle, human and divine—close to the hortus conclusus of the Old Testament."68 Even the affection demonstrated by the fawn is a blend of life and art: though its lips appeared to "bleed" from feeding on the garden roses (84), the kisses it gives the Nymph are not true indications of love but artwork, as it "print[s] those roses on [her] lip" (86). The Nymph's rather melodramatic lament at the fawn's actual death (93–100) references "the wounded balsam" (97), another self-mirroring image, since balsam can refer both to "an aromatic oily or resinous medicinal preparation, usually for external application, for healing wounds or soothing pain" (OED A. n. I. 2.) and the tree that produces it (OED A. n. II. 8). Her reference to the "brotherless Heliades" (99) places the Nymph in the mythological context of women mourning their love objects, though here the transformation of the Heliades is to nature—poplar trees—not art. But reference to this myth leads to the Nymph's attempt to meld the living and the eternal by gathering both her own and the fawn's tears in "a golden vial" (101) to lay before Diana's shrine, an appropriate site since the goddess is directly associated with women, children, and especially margins, as Asp describes: "Associated with the earth as huntress, she is patroness of both chastity and fertility, and ironically, of the hunter as well as the hunted beast. She is the divine model of Concordia discors."69 But the tears, visible evidence of mourning, once gathered, become an object and not an active, living enactment of sorrow by the mourner. This will be the fate of the fawn, who, even in death, will mirror the Nymph's "unhappy statue" (111), its effigy "Of purest alabaster made" (120).

As surrogate love, as transitional object, the fawn should serve the Nymph only as temporary assistance, not as way of life, since all living things, if they remain living, must mature and lose innocence. Even the Nymph admits her uncertainty of the fawn's own future faithfulness:

Had it lived long, I do not know

Whether it too might have done so

As Sylvio did: his gifts might be

Perhaps as false or more than he. (47–50)

After all, liminality is only liminality if it bridges two permanent states, if it blurs the boundaries of two clear visual planes. Or can one exist in a permanent state of in-between, of potentiality, without maturing to adulthood, without resolving to a solid plane? The obvious solution to change and disintegration is preservation in art, and critics have turned to the concluding carved images of the Nymph and fawn as illustrating that very solution, after she "bespeak[s]" the fawn's grave and dies (110).70

Even as the Nymph describes her own "unhappy statue . . . / . . . cut in marble" (111–12), she illustrates the self-contradictory relationship between life and art described by Richard Shiff:

Neither a life perfected as art, nor an art perfected as life seems possible for us. . . . Life as art allows neither change nor growth; art as life conveys no meaning. Our world lies between the two extremes. . . . In this way we maintain ourselves as individuals in a state of doubt. . . . [W]e see ourselves in transit between life and art.71

In assuring the sculptor that he need not create representations of tears, for her statue will so "bemoan" the fawn that it "shall weep, though [it] be stone" (115–16), the Nymph refuses to commit either to art or to life, choosing instead to live an eternally liminal existence between the two. In crying tears that will then fall upon her statue's breast, "themselves engraving there" (118), the Nymph embodies within herself ut pictura poesis, as she ends, the narrator and subject of her own literary lament, the sculptor and sculpture of her own visual image, the embodiment of Escher's Drawing Hands (figure 6.1).

The image of the Nymph left to the reader serves as a precursor to Keats's Grecian urn: a "Cold Pastoral,"72 teasing the reader "out of thought," caught in an uncertain existence in between life and art. Marvell thus proves that by remaining in between, the Nymph can continue to love, continue to mourn, continue to "become" as both artist and creation.

Notes

1. Andrew Marvell, "The Last Instructions to a Painter," lines 9–11.

2. Colie believes Marvell "constantly plays between extremes of art and nature" allowing "his natural scenes to appear in the dress of sophisticated civilization": in "Bermudas," the "eternal Spring . . . enamels ev'rything" (lines 13–14), with oranges "Like golden lamps" (18) and jewels; the "mosaic" (582) of leaves in the wood scene in "Appleton House" resembles "Mexique paintings" (580); his poetry casually refers to "landskip ("Appleton" 458), portraits, and statues; he mentions names like Lely and Rubens; he presents a picture salon in "The Gallery"; he partakes of the "Advice to a Painter" tradition in his satirical work; he presents sepulchral sculpture in "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn"; his verbs call to mind artistic endeavors ("enamels," "embroiders," "bejewels"); the list goes on. See J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 130; and Rosalie Colie, "My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 39. Among other studies exploring the pictorial aspects of Marvell's poetry are Harold E. Toliver, "Marvell's Songs and Pictorial Exhibits," in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 105–120; and John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

3. Plutarch's full quote is more illustrative:

Simonides, however, calls painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting: for the actions which painters portray as taking place at a moment literature narrates and records after they have taken place. Even though artists with colour and design, and writers with words and phrases, represent the same subjects, they differ in the material and the manner of their imitation; and yet the underlying end and aim of both is one and the same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes the narrative like a painting.

See Plutarch, "Were the Athenians More Famous in War or in Wisdom?" in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936, rpr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 4.3.3, page 501, lines 346ff.

4. Marvell himself echoes Horace's comparison of the sister arts: "Painter, adieu, how will our Arts agree; / Poetick Picture, Painted Poetry." See "The Last Instructions to a Painter," lines 943–44.

5. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 4th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1972), 127.

6. Leonardo suggests that painters follow the composition process used by poets:

Have you never reflected on the poets who in composing their verses are unrelenting in their pursuit of fine literature and think nothing of erasing some of these verses in order to improve upon them? Therefore, painter, decide broadly upon the position of the limbs in your figures and attend first to the movements appropriate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative rather than to the beauty and quality of their limbs.

See Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 222.

7. Vasari, Vite, ed. Milanesi. IV, 9; Preface to Part III; quoted in Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 221. Barbaro is quoted from Vitruvius Pollio, I dieci libri dell' architettura (Venice, 1556), Bk. VIII, Ch. V, 188, quoted in Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 222.

8. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 41; E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), 58 and 60; and Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 203–8. In his Preface to the translation of du Fresnoy, John Dryden notes that tropes and figures in poetry are like sfumato in painting, in that both blur meaning and engage the imagination. See Dryden's "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting, Prefaced to the Version of du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica" (1695), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 2: 147–48.

9. Jeffrey B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thompson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), xi; Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 35 and 36; and John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 39.

10. James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 8.

11. Sir William D'Avenant, Sir William Davenant's Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 4. Marvell refers to this same author's work in "Upon Appleton House," alluding to D'Avenant's description of a painting of the story of creation in Gondibert II.vi. See "Appleton," lines 455–56.

12. J. Turner, Politics, 25.

13. Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain: 1530–1790, The Pelican History of Art (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 38; also see Roy Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered, 1520–1620: 9 July–6 November, 1983 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), 72. Evidence in literature of the time confirms Hilliard's influence. According to John Donne in "The Storm," ". . . a hand or eye / By Hilliard drawne, is worth an history, / By a worse painter made." See The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor, 1967), 189, lines 3–5. Even in Spain, Francisco Pacheco, art theorist and teacher of Velásquez, thought Hilliard's work "leaves far behind it whatever has been seen in this genre": "I say truly that it seems to me that limning can advance no further, that the art is ended there." See Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, 1638, ed. F. J. Sánchez (Madrid: Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1956), 2:36.

14. Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 103–4.

15. Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, 97; and George Vertue, Notebooks, original mss. in British Library VI, 53, quoted in Mary Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two Great Miniaturists (London: R. Hale, 1983), 173.

16. For a partial listing of Fairfax's library holdings, see Sir Clements R. Markham, A Life of the Great Lord Fairfax, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Parliament of England (London: Macmillan & Co., 1870), 368–70.

17. Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England: James Hall, 1981), 75–77.

18. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is, . . . By Democritus Junior, 3rd ed. (Printed by John Litchfield for Henry Cripps, 1628), Pt. 2 sect. 2 member 4, page 260, EEBO; 4th edition (Printed by John Litchfield for Henry Cripps, 1632), Pt. 2 sect. 2 member 4, page 275, EEBO. For a listing of books on art, perspective, and architecture in English Renaissance libraries from 1580 to 1630, see Gent, Picture and Poetry, "Appendix," 66–86; and Sears Jayne's Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956). See also Henry V. S. Ogden and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955), passim; and Murray Roston, Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 317–18.

19. See Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell, eds., Miniatura or the Art of Limning by Edward Norgate (New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1997), xi. The multi-talented Norgate (1581–1650) worked for James I, Charles I, and Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel as musician, painter, secretary, herald, and connoisseur. Journeying abroad after Charles I lost his throne, Norgate might have been in the Netherlands at the same time as was Marvell, between March and September, 1646.

20. Spencer, Heroic Nature, xv; Dugdale is quoted in Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 15.

21. See Ogden and Ogden, English Taste, 13; and Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 14.

22. Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 81.

23. Martin Hardie, ed., Miniatura or the Art of Limning by Edward Norgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919), 73, lines 9–19; and Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 75, lines 6–8 and page 148 n. 105. Interestingly, Norgate shares with Leonardo several other views. Like Leonardo, Norgate recommends roughly sketching figures in the first sitting, not committing to a clear outline. See Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 74. He also recommends that painters cultivate the qualities of the poet, possessing "a prompt and ready hand, acute Invention (easier to tell than teach) well read . . . in story and something of the Poet (whereof they say painting is a silent species)." See Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 90.

24. Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 83, 77, lines 13–15 and 87; and Ogden and Ogden, English Taste, 11. If familiar with Norgate's work, Marvell undoubtedly was familiar with the deceptive aspects of painting described in Miniatura: "[T]he end of all drawing [is] nothing else but soe to deceave the Eyes, by the deceiptfull juggling and witchcraft of lights and shadows, that round embost and solid Bodyes in Nature may seeme round embost and solid in Plano." See Hardie, Miniatura, 80. Many of the enigmatic scenes in both "The Garden" and "Appleton" might indicate an agreement with this view.

25. Spencer, Heroic Nature, xv.

26. See Edward Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 5; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, intro. Baxter Hathaway (London: A. Constable and Co., 1906; facsimile reproduction, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), 53; Louis L. Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 118; and Ogden and Ogden, English Taste, 172.

27. Commentators disagree whether or not the four poems should be taken as a series. Those arguing the Mower poems are a series include Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 89; John Carey, "Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell's Imagination," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, edited by C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 142–43; Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 120; George de F. Lord, "From Contemplation to Action: Marvell's Poetical Career," Philological Quarterly 46, no. 2 (April 1967): 208; Louis Martz, The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 177–79; Don Parry Norford, "Marvell and the Arts of Contemplation and Action," English Literary History 41, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 62; C. A. Patrides, "'Til prepared for longer flight': The Sublunar Poetry of Andrew Marvell," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 42; A. J. Smith, "Marvell's Metaphysical Wit," in Patrides, Approaches, 69; and Jim Swan, "History, Pastoral and Desire: Marvell's Mower Poems," International Review of Psycho-Analysis 31 (1976): 193–94. Commentators believing the poems were not intended as a series include Michael Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell (London: Macmillan, 1979), 139; Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell's Major Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 140–41; and Colie, "Ecchoing," 30, 124. Those who do not see the group as a series usually view "The Mower against Gardens" too different from the other three. See Linda Anderson, "The Nature of Marvell's Mower," Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 31, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 131. Toliver acknowledges the impossibility of a decision, but he believes "in the original folio order (retained by Margoliouth) the progress in the Mower's dilemma up to this point of self-destruction is unmistakable." See Harold Toliver, Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 104.

28. Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie identifies pastoral as a literature of disguise, devised "not of purpose to counterfeit or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication but under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters." See Puttenham, Arte, 53.

29. William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) lists "sheepeheardes, Neteheardes, and Goteheardes" as appropriate characters, while George Puttenham mentions "shepheards, heywards, and such like." Fletcher's preface to the dramatic pastoral Faithful Shepherdess (acted 1609, published 1610 and 1630) specifies the shepherds must be "owners of flocks, not hirelings." And in his treatise on pastoral, "A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali" (printed 1684), Jesuit priest Rapin prohibited "Fishers, Plow-men, Reapers, Hunters and the like" because they did not have the leisure time necessary for poetry and song. For Webbe, see G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1: 262; Puttenham, Arte, 52; for Fletcher, see A. H. Bullen, ed., The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (London: G. Bell & Sons and A. H. Bullen, 1904), 3:18; for Rapin, see Idylliums of Theocritus, trans. Thomas Creech (Oxford: L. Lichfield for Anthony Stephens, 1684), 27, quoted in J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England 1684–1798 (New York: Haskell, 1968), 57.

30. See Owen Schur, Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 3; and Swan, "History," 193. Rees quotes an early reference to Mowers emphasizing their seasonal aspects: "[H]e comes in with the two months of Iune, and Iuly, and when they are done. He is never thought on till next yeare." See Wye Saltonstall, Picturae Loguentes, sig. G12r, quoted in Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter, 1989), 152. Turner speculates that Marvell may have been fascinated by the "amphibious economic status of mowers, half adjuncts of the estate, half free agents" at a time in Marvell's sojourn at Appleton House as Mary Fairfax's tutor, an equally liminal position of servant and gentleman scholar. See J. Turner, Politics of Landscape, 177, note 118. Mark M. Hennelly Jr. similarly associates Jane Eyre's position of governess as a liminal state. See his "'In a State Between': A Reading of Liminality in Jane Eyre," Victorian Literature and Culture 22 (1994): 104.

For the Mower's alienation from nature, see Joseph Summers, "Marvell's Nature," English Literary History 20 (1953): 126. Legouis credits Marvell for introducing the mower figure into English verse. See his Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 50. Even if this were not accurate, Spencer acknowledges that Marvell was at least the first to give the figure a sustained treatment. See Spencer, "Heroic Nature," 74.

31. For these and other comments, see Anderson, "Nature," 131; Colie, "Ecchoing," 130; Wilcher, Andrew Marvell, 89; William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1950), 106; Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 187; and Tayler, Nature and Art, 163.

32. J. Turner, Politics of Landscape, 180–81.

33. Hunt believes Marvell's travels had a profound effect on his work: "Given Marvell's subsequent poetry and political career it would be safe to assume that Europe held two particularly dominant interests for him: religion and gardens." See Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 32.

34. See John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 26.

35. Hunt, Figure, 27.

36. See Hunt, Figure, 39; and James A. W. Heffernan, The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1984), xviii.

37. Michael Craze relates these "forbidden mixtures" to Mosaic Law which forbids certain combinations. Leviticus commands, "Thou shalt not let thy cattle gendre with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed, neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee" (19:19). Deuteronomy also specifies "Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seeds: lest the fruit of thy seed, which thou hast sown and the fruit of thy vinyard be defiled" (22:9). See Craze, Life and Lyrics, 135.

Craze also relates line 21, "between the bark and tree" to budding, in which a bud is sliced off a stem and bound to the cambium of wild stock. When the bud has "taken," the stock above is cut off. Contributing to the unnatural sexual aspects of the poem, budding can be seen as a metaphor for adultery, since the closeness of the bark and tree symbolized true marriage. See Craze, Life and Lyrics, 135. Nicholas A. Salerno gives specific horticultural explanations for the processes condemned in the poem, and Price connects the evils of face-painting referred to in line 12 to concepts of dissimilation in general. See Salerno, "Andrew Marvell and the Grafter's Art," Etudes Anglaises 21 (1968): 125–32; and Michael W. Price, "'Offending without Witness': Recusancy, Equivocation, and Face-Painting in John Donne's Early Life and Writing," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 22 (1996): 67–69.

38. Hunt, Andrew Marvell, 95.

39. In the debate between Perdita and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, Polixenes concludes, "This is an art / Which does mend nature, change it rather, but / The art itself is Nature" (4.4.95–97). Also see Susan Snyder, Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.

40. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 57. Snyder thinks Marvell turned to pastoral at a liminal time in his own life, "between protected childhood and the decisions and definitions of full adult selfhood . . . an obscure period . . . immediately after leaving Cambridge" that included his time of travels and his work as tutor. See S. Snyder, Pastoral Process, 149–50.

41. Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 77–82.

42. S. K. Heninger Jr., "Framing the Narrative," in Perspective as a Problem in the Art, History, and Literature of Early Modern England, ed. Mark Lussier and S. K. Heninger Jr. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1992), 9.

43. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, ed. and trans. John R. Spenser, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 78. According to Heninger, "This imputed narrator imposes perspective on the characters and episodes, organizes them into a plot, lining them up so they lead toward a single-point on the horizon—the end of the story." See Heninger, "Framing," 19.

44. Edward Tayler defines the pathetic fallacy as "the idyllic correspondence between man and Nature" and deems it "the central tenet of pastoral verse," while Donald Friedman connects the concept with "that part of the cosmology which focused on man as a microcosmic model of the macrocosmic universe." However, Arnold Hauser disagrees that pathetic fallacy is ever possible and explains instead why Damon cannot make nature suffer as he tries to do: "It is, indeed, not nature which answers man and argues with him; rather it is men who come to terms, somehow, with the natural data. . . . Nature has nothing in mind for [man] and asserts itself against him without intention. It is only men who have intentions toward nature: nature at best asserts a passive resistance to them." See Tayler, Nature and Art, 154; Friedman, Pastoral Art, 14; and Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 385.

45. See Puttenham, Bk. 3, Ch. 1 "Of Ornament Poeticall," in Arte, 150.

46. Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, 185.

47. Andrew Kinney, "Death and Desire in Marvell's 'Damon the Mower,'" Discoveries: South-Central Renaissance News and Notes (Fall 2002): 7–8.

48. Wilcher, Andrew Marvell, 97.

49. See Anderson, "Nature," 134.

50. Kemp, Leonardo, 200; and Alberti, On Painting, 64.

51. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 2; S. Snyder, Pastoral Process, 129–30; and Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 78–79, 81.

52. See "Glow-worm," OED a. and J. E. Lloyd, "Mimicry in the Sexual Signals of Fireflies," Scientific American 245 (July 1981): 140. This malevolent behavior might explain why the term "glow-worm" was also applied figuratively in the seventeenth century as a term of contempt. See "glow-worm," OED, def. b.

53. See Hennelly, "'State Between,'" 108.

54. Swan, "History," 194–95; and Natalie Hess, "Code Switching and Style Shifting as Markers of Liminality in Literature," Language and Literature 5, no. 1 (1996): 5–6.

55. See Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 102–8; and Kitty Scoular, Natural Magic: Studies in the Presentation of Nature in English Poetry from Spenser to Marvell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 103–8.

56. Muller and Murrell, Miniatura, 22.

57. OED adj 2 3a. This sense can be seen in Polonius's famous advice to Laertes in Hamlet, "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy; But not exprest in fancie; rich, not gawdie." See Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington. 6th ed. (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009), 1.3.71. The term "gaudy," from the Old French, also ironically comments on other aspects of the Mower. The word has been used in combination with "green" to indicate a yellowish green color (OED adj 1), so reflects on the pastoral, naive themes in the Mower poems. And in the definition related to its aforementioned meaning of "excessively showy," the term can imply "full of trickery" (OED adj 2 2), recalling other sources of deceit and trickery in these poems: the glow-worms, gardens, Juliana, landscape painting, and art itself.

58. Rees, Judgment, 162.

59. See Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, 169; and Martz, Wit, 180. "The Nymph" has proven particularly enigmatic to critics, as Toliver explains: "Whether or not or to what extent it is a religious allegory, for example, or whether its illusions are directly relevant or indirectly enriching have become questions of some nicety." See Ironic Vision, 129. Among those exploring the poem's pastoral, antipastoral, ironic, contradictory, artistic, and allegorical aspects are George Klawitter, "Andrew Marvell and the Nymph's Little Foot," in New Perspectives on Andrew Marvell, ed. Gilles Sambras (Reims, France: EPURE [Éditions et Presses universitaires de Reims], 2008), 145–60; Daniel Jaeckle, "Marvell's Dialogized Nymph," Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43, no.1 (Winter 2003): 137–150; Cullen, Spenser, Marvell; Berthoff, Resolved; Geoffrey Hartman, "'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn': A Brief Allegory," Essays in Criticism 18 (1968): 113–35; Phoebe Spinrad, "Death, Loss, and Marvell's Nymph," Publications of the Modern Language Association 97, no.1 (1982): 50–59; Katherine Thomason, "Marvell's Complaint against His Nymph," Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 95–105; John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, "What is the Nymph Complaining For?" English Literary History 45 (1978): 410–28; Harry Berger Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Tayler, Nature and Art; Norford, "Marvell and the Arts"; Friedman, Pastoral Art; Carolyn Asp, "Marvell's Nymph: Unravished Bride of Quietness," Papers on Language and Literature 14, no.4 (Fall 1978): 394–405; Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo (New York: Methuen, 1986); Earl Miner, "The Death of Innocence in Marvell's Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun," Modern Philology 65 (1967): 9–16; Ruth Nevo, "Marvell's 'Songs of Innocence and Experience,'" Studies in English Literature 5 (1965): 1–21; and Sarah Annes Brown, "Ovid and Marvell's The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," Translations and Literature 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1997): 167–85. For a complete summary of critical approaches and problems of interpretation, see Nigel Smith's introduction in The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlowe, England: Pearson Longman, 2007), 65–69.

60. See "complaint" in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd ed., ed. J. Cuddon (London: Penguin Books, 1991); Cattullus, The Complete Poetry of Catullus, trans. and commentary by David Mulroy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), Poem 3, page 4; and Ovid, Amores, in Ovid: The Love Poems, trans. A. D. Melville, with intro. and notes by E. J. Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 2.6. Rees notes that even the poem's place in the 1681 Folio indicates its in-between qualities—"at a point of transition between poems that have religious or philosophical overtones, and those that are concerned, directly or indirectly, with sexual love." See Rees, Judgment, 81–82.

61. See Alberti, On Painting, 56; Heninger, "Framing," 10; and Milena Romero Allué, "Perspectives of the Mind: Marvell's 'Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn,'" Textus 12, no. 1 (1999): 74.

62. Allué, "Perspectives,"74.

63. See Hess, "Code Switching," 5–6.

64. Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 1:22–24; Allué, "Perspectives," 62; and Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry, enlarged ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 170. According to Fairfax biographer C. R. Markham, the Fairfax estate at Nunappleton had three hundred head of deer, so perhaps one was a white fawn: "A noble park with splendid oak-trees, and containing 300 head of deer, stretched away to the north, while on the south side were the ruins of the old Nunnery, the flower-garden, and the low meadows called ings extending to the banks of the Wharfs." See Markham, A Life, 365. However, if Nigel Smith is correct, "Nymph" was probably written soon before Marvell's stay at the Fairfax estate. See N. Smith, Poems, 65.

65. See Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 7.664–95 and 2.159–60; and Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd ed., rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.10.106–42. Allen describes these and other precedents in Image and Meaning. He further blurs the distinction of pagan myth and Christian allegory by describing the fawn as a symbol of Christ. See Image and Meaning, 167–80. The term "troopers" in a poem probably written in the early to late 1640s seems to intend political significance, and several studies make the poem an allegory of the execution of Charles I. However, as Martz clarifies, the term was used for "marauding cavalrymen of the Civil War on both sides," so was really a general term. See Martz, Wit, 180.

66. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 14, 112, 2, and 19.

67. The white lilies in the Nymph's garden strengthen her connection to the fawn since the OED definition of "nymphaea" is "the common white water lily" (OED n.). Since nymphs are often associated with deities of the water, this meaning ties together the fawn, disappearing amid the white lilies, and the nymph mirroring them all.

68. See Francis Bacon, "Of Gardens," in The Essayes or counsels, civill and morall, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), 266–79, EEBO; Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, collected by Henry Wotton Knight, from the best authors and examples (London: John Bull, 1624), 109, EEBO; and Allué, "Perspectives," 61.

69. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.340–66; Patricia Monaghan, "Diana," in Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2010), 2:453; and Asp, "Marvell's Nymph," 402. Allué sees Diana's sinister aspects at play here, also, since she had been known to punish women who yielded to seduction and punished offender Actaeon by turning him into a stag and letting him be destroyed by his own hounds. Allué sees the nymph as having been seduced by Sylvio, and he has been replaced by a fawn. See Allué, "Perspectives," 67–68.

70. The term "bespeak" adds to the ambiguity of the Nymph's emotions here, since the term can most logically mean "to arrange for, engage beforehand, to 'order'" (OED v. 5) but can also mean "to be the outward expression of; to indicate, give evidence of" (v. 7). Thus, since the Nymph arranges for her own effigy seemingly before the creation of the fawn's, she would have had to order it beforehand, and since the fawn's own alabaster image will lie before her statue's feet, her crying image will give the outward expression of inner grief.

71. Richard Shiff, "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 120.

72. See John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899), 135, lines 45 and 44.
Chapter Six

Smoke and Mirrors: "On a Drop of Dew," "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning," and "The Gallery"

The presence of self-reflective, self-containing, even self-constituting images have long been noted in Marvell's works. John Carey names numerous examples of Marvell's blending of containers contained and self-mirroring images: the "subtle nuns" (line 94) of "Appleton House" lock out the world while "hedg[ing]" in the "liberty" (100) of Isabel Thwaites; the River Wharfe on the Appleton estate is not contained by the meadow but "holds" the meadow out (633–34); the "Drop of Dew" is presented as self-containing—"Round in itself incloses" (6)—while it serves as "its own tear" (13); the fawn in "The Nymph Complaining" eats so many roses and lilies, he begins to mirror the "little wilderness" (74) of her garden, with "Lilies without, roses within" (92); Chlora in "Mourning" is both tear and weeper, "Herself both Danaë and the show'r" (20). Marvell's technique fits E. H. Gombrich's explanation of Escher's famous self-reflexive / self-generating sketches, including a hand drawing itself: "What all these prints have in common is that they compel us to adopt an initial assumption that cannot be sustained as we try to follow it through."1 (See figure 6.1).

Christopher Ricks agrees that Marvell's images often defy visualization, citing specifically "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," in which the Soul complains that the Body "impales me so, / That mine own precipice I go" (lines 13–14). These images, argues Ricks, allow "balance and conflict; inclusion and yet exclusion; withdrawal and yet emergence; microcosm and yet macrocosm, self and yet all else." In other words, these depictions blur themselves into the space between opposites, creating a liminal realm. Victor Turner, in fact, comments, "Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection." To create this liminal effect, Marvell monopolizes on the historical, artistic, and symbolic significance of the very source of reflection: the mirror.2 In poems like "On a Drop of Dew," "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning," and "The Gallery," Marvell's understanding of the liminal aspects of the mirror enable him to keep the reader in between a self-perpetuating tangle of reflections.

Figure 6.1. Drawing Hands, 1948. By M. C. Escher (1898–1972). Lithograph. 33.2 cm x 28.2 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Copyright © 2011 The M. C. Escher Company—Holland. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com.

In his thorough depiction of the role of mirrors in human life, Goldberg traces the changing meaning of mirrors as advancements improved their accuracy of depiction:

[A]s the mirror evolved from a pool of water to the modern looking glass, it developed into an instrument of strangely diversified attributes: feared or extolled by some, worshipped or exploited by others, an instrument both for self-revelation and revelation of the universe.

Even from the earliest times, man was awed with his reflection in a pool of water or a piece of polished metal—it "had the power to show him a duplicate of himself that he identified as his spiritual double or soul," revealing to him some ghostly form of his person that lived on, he believed, even after death.3 Thus a mirror image offered a positive, even comforting, sense of immortality. Torti credits fourth-century theologian Athanasius in the Contra Gentes as "the first to introduce the idea of soul as a mirror—capable, when pure, of reflecting God's image—into Christian thought." Socrates offered a similar idea in Plato's I Alcibiades (c. 432 BCE) when he said that man's knowledge of the divine was acquired by knowledge of the self. Because God created the soul to reflect His image, knowledge of one's own soul is essential to knowledge of God. Similarly, the concept of mind as mirror, providing an accurate representation of the world, was prevalent in the seventeenth century, according to Dosia Reichardt, "refined by Descartes into an instrument of knowledge which could be made more accurate through empirical inspection."4

The common practice of covering mirrors or turning them to the wall after a death in the house emphasizes this belief that the mirror could actually capture the soul of the deceased. Even a sick person, it was recommended, should cover any mirror in his room since the mirror could truly project the soul out of the body by reflection. This myth lives on today, Goldberg explains, in literature like Bram Stoker's character Dracula, who has no reflection because has no soul, and E. T. A. Hoffman's 1840 Story of the Lost Reflection, the hero of which sells his mirror reflection (thus his immortal soul) to the devil for the love of an evil seductress. He spends the rest of his life searching for that lost soul. Associated with this mystical power of the mirror is the appearance of "scryers," chosen people able to stare into a mirror or other reflecting surfaces (a pool of water, the bottom of a shiny cup, or a crystal ball) to see images of future events. Herbert Grabes explains that in the sixteenth century, this practice of "crystallomancy" became well known, especially through the experiments of John Dee. Both Reginald Scot (Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584) and Thomas Lodge (Wits Miserie, 1596) discuss the practice. Though originally thought a power of the gods, the Catholic Church later linked conjuring with mirrors to the devil and condemned scryers as witches.5

Though the mirror continued to serve as a metaphor of the soul because of the concept of soul as reflection of God, the mirror experienced drastically changing powers as the accuracy of mirror production improved. Originally, primitive Roman (via their Egyptian subjects') methods of producing mirrors used white plastic or resin to back the glass, with little success. Newer metallic backing was more successful, though these early mirrors were convex, with glass blown as large bubbles ten to twenty-eight inches in diameter. Melted lead was poured in the concave side until the bubble set, with viewing done from the convex side. With such a poor quality of craftsmanship, Goldberg explains, mirrors symbolized "a poor imitation of a real thing": "At best these mirrors gave dark, distorted reflections," prompting Plato's philosophy that our view of reality is only a distorted mirror reflection of the ideal, or St. Paul's address to the church in Corinth, a major mirror producer in 54 CE, "For now we see through a glass, darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12). However, during the Renaissance, the Venetians developed the process of making mirrors with clear, colorless glass and backing with "a bright, silvery reflecting surface to produce brilliant images never seen before." Because the newly perfected mirrors of the Renaissance now reflected nature clearly and accurately, intellectuals, poets, and painters replaced the spiritual significance of the mirror as producing a dim, imperfect (Pauline) view of the world with a new, worldly outlook. Spenser and Donne, notes Goldberg, reinterpreted Paul's ultimate revelation represented by a dim mirror image of a future revelation to a concept that "by seeing one's true appearance in the mirror, one finds a true knowledge of the soul."6 The blended meanings of "reflection" as both "The action of a mirror or other smooth or polished surface in reflecting an image" and "The action or process of thinking carefully or deeply about a particular subject, typically involving influence from one's past life and experiences" (OED n. I. 3. a, n.; II. 7. a.), became simultaneous interpretations. Now mirrors could symbolize faithful, accurate earthly knowledge and could help in contemplating the glory of God.

Further evidencing the mirror's ambivalent state in culture, visual art, and literature, critics argued that the more accurate images in mirrors could also lead to the sin of pride and eventual damnation, as Goldberg explains: "Moralists termed the mirror a flattering glass, an item that nourished the vanity of the vain." Naturally, the myth of Narcissus embodied this danger, with Platonic writers seeing in his story an allegory of man failing to distinguish material form from spiritual beauty, mistaking the transitory world for the true world, so condemning the soul to imprisonment in the body.7 Yet painters recognized that the new mirrors could provide artists with more accurate images of a scene, even aiding in one of the greatest advances in the art of painting, linear perspective, which provided a satisfying illusion of depth or of three dimensions in the faithful representation of real objects. Linear perspective implies an objective view of the world, in which the artist's chosen point of view becomes the single permissible one, converting the relationship between persons and things "into the relationship of subject and object, defining both in a mute and immutable contract."8

As seen in chapter 2, Leonardo himself advocated the use of a mirror in composition for greater objectivity: "I say that when you are painting you ought to have by you a flat mirror in which you should often look at your work. The work will appear to you in reverse and will seem to be by the hand of another master and thereby you will better judge its faults." Likewise Alberti, considered the father of perspective, recommends painters use a mirror not only to improve art but also to improve nature:

A good judge for you to know is the mirror. I do not know why painted things have so much grace in the mirror. It is marvelous how every weakness in a painting is so manifestly deformed in the mirror. Therefore things taken from nature are corrected with a mirror.9

Artists like Jan Vermeer and Petrus Christus, and architects like Filippo Brunelleschi, also achieved both striking realism yet subtle symbolism with both the use and depiction of mirrors in their work. Thus the mirror could be part of the process and the product of art. Similarly, smaller hand and pocket mirrors attained popularity both as aids to bettering appearance and also as a part of that appearance, since the mirrors themselves became an essential part of dress, evidenced by Renaissance portraits that often showed a square, octagonal, or round mirror attached to a woman's girdle by a ribbon or chain.10

Even the poorer-quality mirrors symbolically served a mediation role, since they allowed man to see the sun's form in the darkened mirror, a feat impossible without its mediation. Dante uses this concept in Paradiso, having Beatrice's eyes serve as mirrors reflecting but tempering the pure light of God for his benefit. 11 Similarly, in pagan mythology, Perseus is only able to slay Medusa by employing Athena's shield as a mirror to mediate her fatal glance. The more accurate mirrors made of glass and lead also provided a spiritual analogy, particularly for the Blessed Virgin Mary as mediator. In fact, the unspotted mirror or speculum immaculatum was one of the most frequent medieval epithets of the Blessed Virgin.12

And, finally, the power of mirrors to represent accurately the external world also allowed them purposely to distort that reflection as well as to serve as the means to correct distortion. Anamorphosis, or the technique of skewing pictures so that they are a mass of lines and shapes that can only be viewed clearly from a specific angle of vision or by using a convex cylindrical mirror to correct the picture, was extremely popular in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As Clayton describes, the technique intrigued on several levels:

Almost from the discovery of the art of receding perspectives in the fifteenth century to the present time, systematic distortions of perspective have fascinated graphic artists not only as a matter of 'technical curiosity' but as a means of reconstituting reality and revealing aspects and modalities ordinarily concealed.13

Figure 6.2. The Ambassadors, 1533. By Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). Oil on Wood. 207 cm x 209.5 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. Nationality/copyright status: German/out of copyright. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

One of the most famous examples of anamorphosis inserted in a painting is Holbein's 1533 The Ambassadors, now in the National Gallery in London, which features an anamorphic momento mori—a floating skull at the bottom of the painting that must be viewed obliquely, preferably through a mirror held at the proper angle to the right of the distorted figure, to recognize (see figure 6.2).

Naturally, when the spectator does see the skull clearly, the rest of the painting is undecipherable. Clayton confirms, "[T]he significance is obvious; the effect startling." And the significance, of course, is that at some perspectives, art (the mirror) can transform art (the anamorphic distortion) into what appears natural. Other specifically catoptrical anamorphic paintings, according to Allué, "are generally structured in a circular way and can be visually rectified, or rightly visualized, by means of a conic or cylindrical mirror placed in the middle of the painting." The portrait of Charles I and its verso image Charles II done after 1649 (figures 6.3 and 6.4), both now in Gripsholm Castle in Sweden, are examples of catoptrical portraits, as is William Scrots's Portrait of King Edward VI (1546), at the National Portrait Gallery in London (figure 6.5).14

Figure 6.3. Anamorphic portrait of Charles I (post-1649). Oil on canvas. 41 cm × 50 cm. Recto of Anamorphic portrait of Charles II. Copyright © The National Museum, Stockholm.

Figure 6.4. Anamorphic portrait of Charles II (post-1649). Oil on canvas. 41 cm x 50 cm. Verso of Anamorphic portrait of Charles I. Copyright © The National Museum, Stockholm.

Figure 6.5. Anamorphic Portrait of King Edward VI, 1546. By William Scrots (active 1537–1553). Oil on panel. 425 mm x 1600 mm (16 3/4 in x 63 in). Purchased 1901. Copyright © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The uses and symbolism of anamorphism intertwined with rhetoric and even epistemology, as Grootenboer explains:

Anamorphoses were often used to conceal dangerous political messages. . . . The immanent structure of disguise and revelation also served as an allegory of God's omnipotence as it manifested itself in or behind all natural phenomena. The chaos of the world was compared to the jumble of lines and colors behind which a perfect order was assumed to hide. For the one who truly sees, this perfection would become visible. Anamorphosis's logic of concealment, therefore, invests in revelation as much as obfuscation.

And, as Baltrušaitis demonstrates, artists often used mirrors to create as well as to decipher anamorphic images. The implications of this use of mirrors are numerous: as the mirror led to linear perspective in art, more accurately representing a unified reality, so could the mirror demonstrate the fragmentation and relativism of the world in which absolute truths do not exist, yet these same mirrors can correct the skewed images. Allué explains that this uncertainty reveals a new aspect of creation:

Anamorphic painting is but the tangible manifestation of the impossibility to create an objectively exact representation of the universe: due to the relativity of the perspective of space, the image of the world is determined by the position held by the observer and, since the infinite universe is not a centre any longer, the possible existence of innumerable images of the world has to be admitted.

Thus creation is dependent upon the observer, and recognition occurs in the space between object and viewer, the space often occupied by the mirror. Anamorphic images are liminal, potential pictures, in between confusion and focus. They remain in a state of becoming, "transformation, movement, and fragmentation."15

With its ambivalent qualities, it is no wonder that the mirror would prove a significant literary metaphor, especially for the metaphysical. Grabes explains that the mirror had the power to "remake" an object so could be sent as a representation of "poetic creativity" that "perceived the unity and dissimilar and thus gave expression to universal analogies." Rather than a vehicle for conceits, "it was itself a metaphor for the conceit" in early seventeenth-century metaphysical mode. Both paradox and metaphor can be seen as mirrors. Colie describes the equivocation produced by paradox: "It lies, and it doesn't. It tells the truth, and it doesn't." The meanings of subjects in a paradox are "infinitely mirrored, infinitely reflected, in each other." Similarly, metaphor, consisting of tenor and vehicle, "straddles two incompatible orders; there is no threshold dividing these; rather the trope itself is a liminal object—that is, a third site where tenor and vehicle cohere and interfere, exchange values and modify each other."16 In several of his poems, Marvell utilizes the many-faceted meanings of mirrors and their liminal status to keep us guessing.

"On a Drop of Dew"

"On a Drop of Dew," judged by Elizabeth Cook to be "Marvell's most explicitly religious poem," illustrates Marvell's striking use of mirror imagery and its power of mediation. Smith estimates the poem's date of composition to be before Marvell's stay at Nunappleton, probably in the late 1640s. The fact that Marvell composed a "mirror image" in its Latin counterpart Ros prepares the reader for a series of reflections, both physical and mental, on the liminality of the soul.17 Though Marvell was obviously influenced by Henry Hawkins's Parthencia Sacra (1633), which contains an entire chapter on the analogy between dew and Christ's Incarnation, Marvell presents his dewdrop as "an emblem of the soul," even structuring the poem like an emblem poem, first describing the physical properties of the dewdrop in Sprecher fashion ("See how . . ." line 1), then drawing the spiritual comparison to the soul ("So the soul . . . ," line 19). However, as Wilcher points out, instead of keeping the physical and spiritual aspects of the image separate as in most emblems, Marvell "allows them to permeate each other, so that the opening description has symbolic colouring, and the subsequent interpretation continues to draw upon pictorial vocabulary." Thus Marvell places us in a liminal realm between physical and spiritual significance.18

The physical description of the dewdrop includes spiritual implications—the dewdrop is "careless" (94), "mournful" (12), "Restless" (15), while the concluding analogy with the soul continues concrete description—the soul is "that drop, that ray" (19) contained in "the human flower" (21) and "recollecting its own light" (24). It is a tightly "wound" figure (27), "girt and ready to ascend" (34) and "bend[ing]" upwards (36). The syntactic ambiguity of the line "Round in itself encloses" (6) presents an image that readjusts itself anamorphically—what is the subject and what is the object? Does the dewdrop enclose within itself the "clear region where 'twas born," or does it close in upon itself because it rejects "its mansion new"?19 In addition, Marvell's objectivity—Smith notes the "impersonal nature of the speaker's viewpoint"—reflects the objectivity of the mirror itself, a major reason why painters employed mirrors in their composition. Goldberg recounts Dutch artist Jan Vermeer's practice of using mirrors to assure accuracy: "By painting scenes reflected from one or two mirrors, he attained an objectivity almost impossible to obtain by a direct view of a scene."20 Thus we might consider "On a Drop of Dew" as an objective reflection by Marvell to achieve distance and accuracy.

Notwithstanding its popularity in emblem literature as a "microcosm of eternity" since it was believed to come directly from heaven, then ascend back to the light of the sun, the dewdrop appropriately enacts the power and significance of the mirror. In its tightly woven appearance on "the purple flower" (line 9), the drop of dew perfectly images a convex mirror, the common type of mirror in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries since these mirrors were blown, not founded, and backed with lead or lead antimony. Evidence abounds that, because of their ability to condense larger images, convex mirrors were utilized by painters to aid in accuracy of portrayal, especially in self-portraits and in landscapes. As Leeman explains, in several respects, the laws of linear perspective did not reflect actual visual experience, so mirrors sought to correct that, blurring the line between art and nature.21 The convex shape of the dewdrop, then, accurately reflects "its native element" (8) yet condenses it to the size of a drop, similar to the technique utilized by famous miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, who probably used convex mirrors to reduce images for his portrait miniatures.22 Attempting to "frame" and contain the reflection of its heavenly home, the dewdrop recalls other paintings that both use and feature framed convex mirrors in their composition, most notably Jan van Eyck's The Marriage of Arnolfini (1434), which features a convex mirror on the back wall that allows the artist to add an entirely additional scene into the painting, reflecting not only the reverse of the figures facing the viewer, but also two figures reflected from in front of Arnolfini and his bride, witnesses to the ceremony, one of whom is probably van Eyck himself (see figure 6.6).

In its stance as unwilling "pilgrim" far from its place of origin, and in its effort to capture and preserve the image of its sacred home, the drop of dew recalls a practice of devout Catholics making their own religious pilgrimages, in Germany called Heiltumfahrten, during the late Middle Ages. At certain times, these shrines held a Heiltumweisungen or exhibition of their most treasured relics. To attempt to capture and preserve their presence at these holy shrines, pilgrims bought small convex mirrors and held them up to the relics and shrines to catch them in reflection, as Goldberg explains: "When they returned to their villages, they exhibited their mirrors to friends and relatives, boasting that they had brought back physical evidence as well as the inspirational qualities of their pilgrimage because their mirrors had captured the reflection of the sacred scene." Peter Vischer's woodcut from the Nuremburg Heiltumbuch (a small book sold at the shrine, which usually listed and sometimes illustrated the relics at the shrine) called "Heiltumweisung" in Nuremburg (1487) portrays the Heiltumweisung (the shrine displaying reliquaries) with clergy explaining the relics' significance to the crowd below. Two women and a child in that crowd can be seen holding up round mirrors identified by Heinrich Schwarz as Heiltum mirrors.23 In an ironic backwards reflection, however, Marvell's dewdrop does not leave home to visit a holy place, then to return home with some of its purity, but seeks instead to preserve its heavenly home during its temporary sojourn in an impure earthly "mansion" (line 4).

Figure 6.6. The Marriage of Arnolfini, 1434. By Jan van Eyck (1395–1441). Oil on wood 81.8 cm x 59.7 cm (32¼ in x 23½ in). National Gallery, London. Nationality/copyright status: Netherlandish/out of copyright. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.

In its origins as condensation of water vapor, then, the dewdrop, like the mirror, is both a tool for and a subject of representation of reality, since, as condensation itself, it is able to "condense" and portray its origins.24 Like the mirror, the dewdrop is a liminal image, not static but mediating between heaven and earth, between source and reflection, existing only to evaporate. Even Marvell's description stresses its instability, inclosing itself (6), rolling restlessly (15), "Trembling lest it grow impure" (16). Marvell further anthropomorphizes the drop by giving it the ability to "gaze" at the sky, ambiguously reflecting the sun yet shining with its own "mournful light" (12).

In his describing the dewdrop as an eye and "its own tear," Marvell brilliantly employs a type of image William Empson terms as "self-inwoven simile" or a "short-circuited comparison," described by Christopher Ricks as "a figure which both reconciles and opposes, in that it describes something both as itself and as something external to it which it could not possibly be." Ricks sees Marvell's image as a "metaphysical paradox, the fact that the eye is itself a mirror, and can be the seer, the seen, and the seen in." Perhaps an accurate modern parallel of the drop as eye, tear, and mirror is Magritte's False Mirror which Mary Ann Caws describes as "a reversal of the seen in the seeing"25 (see figure 6.7). And though the OED does acknowledge a meaning of "evaporate" for the verb "exhale" (OED v.1 4), Marvell's expression of the dewdrop enduring its earthly plight until the sun "exhale it back again" (18) gives the same self-inwoven impression of misdirection, or perhaps multidirection.

In the second half of the poem, the "So the soul" analogy to the Drop of Dew (19), Marvell's images continue to mirror each other—the spiritual soul is a "drop" (19), so water; a "ray" (19), so light; but the source of that light is again liquid—"the clear fountain of eternal day" (20). Hodge comments that this "crossing of the attributes in a single image leads to an effect analogous to that of a hall of mirrors; water is defined as light, which is defined as water, which is defined as light, which is defined as water." As painters like van Eyck used mirrors to insert objects and people into a painting that would not be able to be seen by spectators from single-point perspective, Marvell presents to us what would be seen if we could see the soul within its "human flower" (21). If we could see it, the soul, like the Drop of Dew, also "recollect[s]" (24) by condensing and capturing its spiritual light into a tight image of a convex mirror, not a static image but swirling with "pure and circling thoughts" (25), drawing together the ability of a convex mirror to collect and compress an image (expressing "The greater Heaven in an heaven less" [26]), but also including the associated meaning of "recollecting" as "remembering" (OED v2 4).26 Like the dewdrop, the soul is a pilgrim, in transit, in between homes. In the description of the soul's figure as "coy," Marvell brings in the positive and negative meanings that the mirror itself enjoyed/endured: "coy" can mean "Shy and modest" (OED a. 2), "Of distant or disdainful demeanor" (OED a. 3) (supporting its "disdaining" the world in line 32), but also the uncertain meaning of "Lascivious" (OED a. 5) (perhaps foreshadowing the "loose and easy" of line 33?). The visual description of "Dark beneath, but bright above" recalls Leonardo's recommendations to painters using light and dark shadows, chiaroscuro, to create a rounded figure, making "a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane." He calls the ability to use dark and light "an accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned."27 In describing the soul's compressing itself away from its "human flower," Marvell again uses an image of simultaneous containing and contained as the soul compresses itself and "turns away" (line 28) from its "human flower" while simultaneously "excluding" the world (29).

Figure 6.7. Le faux miroir (The False Mirror), 1929. By René Magritte (1898–1967). Oil on canvas. 54 cm x 80.9 cm (21½ in x 31 7/8 in). Banque d'Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, New York. Private Collection. Copyright © ARS, New York.

Marvell's final image of manna joins together the physical qualities of the dewdrop with the spirituality of the hidden soul, since manna is in between matter and spirit. According to The New Jerusalem Bible, the supposed nature of this substance has been disputed: "In Exodus 16 manna is described as food from heaven, 'something fine and granular [margin or "rounded" or "coagulated"], as fine as hoarfrost on the ground. . . . It was like coriander seed; it was white and its taste was like that of wafers made with honey.'"28 Though sometimes described as flakes, this "rounded" and seed-like description of manna mirrors that of the drop of dew, and like the dewdrop, according to Exodus 26:21, any uncollected manna melted in the heat of the day, and, "dissolving" (39), presumably then evaporated "Into the glories of th'Almighty Sun" (40).29 Manna can be interpreted liminally, of course—not exactly food, not exactly drink. In the poem, it is introduced in past tense, "Such did the manna's sacred dew distill" (37), but completes its actions in present tense, "does, dissolving, run" (39). Thus, the historical Biblical event is considered as itself in time as well as an allegory, a prediction, of what will have happened to the redeemed. In terms of Victor Turner's theory, liminality exists outside of time, in between past and future: "[T]he ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few . . . of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states."30 The drop of dew, the human soul, the manna all exist in between their past/present earthly trial and what they will be (or will have been) in eternity, when they will be "exhale[d]" again "Into the glories of the Almighty Sun" (line 40).

Leonardo, who insisted that "the mind of the painter should be like a mirror," understood himself the plight of these in-between figures, as he recalls in his Notebooks:

Behold now the hope and desire of going back to one's own country or returning to primal chaos, like that of the moth to the light, of the man who with perpetual longing always looks forward with joy to each new spring and each new summer, and to the new months and the new years, deeming that the things he longs for are too slow in coming; and who does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this longing is in its quintessence the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned within the life of the human body desires continually to return to its source.

And I would have you to know that this same longing is in its quintessence inherent in nature, and that man is a type of the world.31

The Drop of Dew, restless in the brief sojourn in its temporary home, remains a liminal figure.

"Eyes and Tears" and "Mourning"

Moving from a drop of dew that produces and is its own tear to two poems developing implications of human tears, we see that Marvell creates in "Eyes and Tears" and "Mourning" mirror (so reversed) images of the validity of tears as evidence of truth. Whereas "Eyes and Tears" employs the interpretation of tears as catoptric devices with the power to untangle the anamorphically skewed sight of frail mankind enabling a "sight more true" (line 27), "Mourning" focuses on tears as mirrors that themselves deceive.

Smith estimates that both poems were composed in the summer of 1648, around the time of the composition of "On a Drop of Dew." Most acknowledge both were influenced by the numerous "tear" poems appearing in the Renaissance, particularly characteristic of the Baroque style.32 Though many of the "tear" poems connect tears with repentance and so prove religious in nature, "Eyes and Tears" elicits disagreement about its intent. Of the six Marvell poems he designates as religious, Leishman does not include "Eyes and Tears." Smith more specifically affirms, "Marvell's poem begins and remains secular in subject-matter." 33 However, Barbara Lewalski believes that the early placement of "Eyes and Tears" in the order of poems in Marvell's 1681 posthumous Miscellaneous Poems indicates it should be considered one of the religious poems. Kucher agrees, arguing "the anamorphic tropes and the overall shift in theological outlook expressed in the poem" connect "Eyes and Tears" with "the reformation of tear poetry begun with Herbert," though Kucher acknowledges that the problem with identifying the poem as secular or sacred lies in its influence from "devotional, scriptural, Petrarchan, as well as Ovidian" texts.34 However, because "Eyes and Tears" explores the power of the mirror to correct inaccuracy of vision, and that inaccuracy can only be taken as a focus on material rather than immaterial good, any interpretation cannot reject a spiritual basis.

In contrast to "Mourning," "Eyes and Tears" more obviously follows the pattern of Crashaw's "The Weeper" in that the fourteen stanzas do not form a tight, interconnected whole but offer various emblematic images of tears, with stanza 8 describing Mary Magdalen, the central personage in tear poems because of her historical fame as repentant harlot and disciple of Jesus, usually identified with the female sinner who washed Jesus's feet with her tears in Luke 7:37–8. While some stanzas of the poem describe different aspects of or images associated with tears, including the various causes of tears, others instead form individual descriptions of or commentaries on the significance of tears.

The very subject introduced in stanza 1, the wisdom of Nature's decision to make eyes the source of both sight and tears, takes the reader to the liminal realm of eyes, tears, and mirrors. Physically, Mary Douglas explains, entrances and exits of the human body are, as any margin, sacred, polluting, and/or feared, depending on the situation. As limen, the eye is in between; Arabian philosopher Averroes (1126–1198 CE) describes the eye's ability to comprehend the forms of things "like a mirror whose nature is intermediate between that of air and that of humour at the eye's rear."35 The eye is liminal as neoplatonic window of the soul and of the mind, so is a passageway from exterior to interior, as Helkiah Crooke's Mikrokosmographia (1618) describes: "The eyes are the discoveries of the mind, as the countenance is the Image of the same; by the eyes as by a windoe, you may looke euen into the secret corners of the Soule." Augustine's theory of perception also added the conception of the eye as a mirror of the soul, and since, as seen above, the soul is considered a mirror of God, the eye also was associated with mirroring God. In De Trinitate, Augustine differentiates the physical sensation of sight from perception. Sight occurs by means of the eye, but perception occurs, in Grabbes's summary of Augustine, "only when the soul—which is distributed over the whole body and consequently is also to be found in the eye—has by its own power created an image of the representation of an object which is accessible to the physical sense."36 Thus, while the eye is a passive gateway and only sees what is before it, the soul actively creates an image, persisting even when the image is not there. Miles adds that the object is not only "touched" by the viewer's active seeing; the object is actually "printed" on the soul of the viewer—the soul is "fitted together" with or "takes the shape of" the object of sight. Thus in the act of vision, the viewer and object are momentarily united, in a type of liminal state. Gilman suggests that mirrors image human understanding, prompting the use of the mirror as "a traditional emblem of sight, the noblest of the senses, and hence the cognitionis via—the way of enlightenment through the eye."37

For Leonardo, the eye was the most accurate of the organs of sense "because it sees by none other than the straight lines which compose a pyramid, the base of which is the object, and the lines conduct the object to the eye." As in Augustine's concept of perception, Leonardo saw the eye as a passageway and a mirror "in which the beauty of the world is mirrored for spectators" and which allows "access to all the works of nature." The soul, then, is dependent upon the eye for its perception:

The soul is reconciled to stay in its human prison on account of its vision of these works through the eyes—by means of which all the varieties of objects in nature are presented to the soul. But he who loses his eyes leaves his soul in a dark prison in which every hope is lost of seeing again the sun, the light of the world.38

Like eyes, tears are considered liminal, not only in their reflective qualities like mirrors, but also, explains Douglas, because they issue from an opening of the body, and any matter that has traversed such a boundary "is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind." Grabes labels human tears as "an adjunct—as water or congealed to ice—to the category of eye-mirrors," a subcategory of the concept of "man as mirror."39

Marvell begins "Eyes and Tears," then, with a mutually beneficial relationship of the power of the eye to open the world to the soul, and the soul's response to any "object vain" (line 3) by arousing emotion, whether it be dissatisfaction, sorrow, grief, pity, or joy, resulting in tears. Leonardo's praise of the eye as the most truthful of the organs of sense is here refuted, though perhaps not. Though eyes might see the world by the "straight lines" of single-point perspective, the eyes are not discriminating, taking in all "vain" objects of the world, even those able to corrupt the soul. In terms of the eye providing the image for the soul to perceive and reflect, the objective inclusion of all the material world can be worse than trapping the soul in the "dark prison" of a blind body. Saving the soul from "self-deluding sight" (5) are the liminal tears, which, Douglas admits, unlike other bodily fluids that exit a boundary of the body, "do not defile":

This is partly because tears are naturally pre-emptied by the symbolism of washing. Tears are like the rivers of moving water. They purify, cleanse, bathe the eyes, so how can they pollute? But more significantly tears are not related to the bodily functions of digestion or procreation. Therefore their scope for symbolizing social relations and social processes is narrower.40

Flowing from the eyes, tears literally enact the "two central components" of Victor Turner's concept of liminality: they represent, in Gregory Wilson's description, "a condition of in-betweeness, of transition between one stage or condition and another," and they are "fluid, difficult to delineate." And, by blurring the deluded (though perspectively accurate) sight in stanza 2, these liminal fluids, whether prompted by complaint (stanza 1), sorrow (stanza 3), joy (stanza 4), pity (stanza 6), or grief (stanza 7), provide a "better measure" (line 7) of the material world by skewing earthly snares and temptations into a self-mirroring anamorphic blur that is itself liminal, since, according to Turner, "blurring and merging of distinctions may characterize liminality."41

Tears, then, level all strong emotions to the same anamorphic skew that privileges insight over sight, allowing the subject to think about how he thinks, a definite advantage: "Yet happy they whom grief doth bless / That weep the more, and see the less" (lines 25–26). In terms of the topsy-turvy state of liminality (and in the paradoxes of Christianity), however, the blurring of sight by sincere tears serves not to distort vision but clarify it, as does a mirror for catoptric anamorphic drawings like those of Edward VI, Charles I, and Charles II (see figures 6.3, 6.4, and 6.5). As Clark comments, the power of anamorphosis lies in its questioning of perspective: "Precisely in being a derivation of perspective, anamorphosis was able to act as its interpreter, exposing its claims to objectivity and truth by adapting it for yet more manipulative and deceitful purposes." Accurate physical vision can confuse spiritual insight; mirror-like tears are needed to blur what is material and focus what is spiritually true. It is this power of tears that allows the Magdalen, an ambivalent figure herself, to "Dissolv[e]" her harlot past, "those captivating eyes" (30), to attach herself to Christ, expressed in the anamorphic image by Marvell as fettering Christ in "liquid chains" (31).42

As liminal fluids, tears enjoy the "sacred power" of other liminands. Van Gennep describes liminal beings as "sacred and holy, and therefore untouchable and dangerous, just as gods would be." This in-between position gives tears and their producing eyes admirable qualities—beauty (stanza 9), and the ability to drown the fire of both sexual passion ("The sparkling glance that shoots desire" [37]) and that of nature ("hissing lightning" [40]). In their position on the threshold, tears have the potential to be any substance, from incense (41) to sparkling stars (43).43 The maternal imagery in stanza 9 presents more in-between implications. The ships "hasting loaded home" (33) introduce both fecundity and movement from one place to another, while the maternal imagery, "the chaste lady's pregnant womb" (34) and "Cynthia teaming" (35), give to "two eyes swoll'n with weeping" (36) additional feminine and fertile traits. Julia Kristeva judges pregnancy as "the dividing line between nature and culture" while Aguirre, Quince, and Sutton say the female body is a "vessel" that serves as "a kind of way-station, a place from which one is expelled into the outer world": "In other words, it houses within itself a threshold or gateway, which, in theory, at least, like any other gateway, opens onto two spaces at once and would therefore permit one to think of exiting as well as going back in."44

The speaker's command to his eyes to open "your double sluice" is especially appropriate, since the word "sluice" not only refers to a dam but "a gap, breach, opening, or hole," so a limen to another realm (OED n. 3). The images in stanzas 12–14 stress the lack of boundaries in liminality by likening the eyes not only to water-producing entities but to water itself—"two clouds dissolving" (49), "two fountains" (51), "two floods" (52)—until the climax of a complete merge of eyes and tears, all boundaries dissolved, "Till eyes and tears be the same things" (54). This is the essence of liminality: a lack of individuality, a "'leveling' process, in which signs of . . . preliminal status are destroyed and signs of . . . liminal non-status applied." 45 And it is the eyes' production of these anamorphic mirrors that succeeds, by blurring, in clarifying a spiritually accurate vision, a "sight more true" (27), a paradox that leaves us in a liminal realm of "weeping eyes," "seeing tears" (56).

In "Mourning," Marvell offers us the mirror image of the ability of tears to clarify and untangle worldly confusion, presenting instead a rather distanced approach to the question of tears/mirrors as means to confusion, deceit, and uncertainty. Even its genre is deceptive, labeled "a pastoral mock-elegy" by Smith and Paul Delany, and as a perfect illustration of skepticism by Semler, who declares the poem "Marvell's basic reference point for a philosophy that denies any knowledge of any absolute reference point." As a type of denial of the high status given to weeping in "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning" explores the sincerity of tears, a topic seen in several seventeenth-century poems.46 The speaker himself assumes an uncertain stance, beginning with apparent naïveté seeking insight in stanzas 1–3, then turning to a seeming objectivity in relating the general opinions of others in stanzas 4–7, then indicating a personal cynicism in stanzas 8–9 while not really revealing anything. Though presenting an angle different from that in "On a Drop of Dew" and "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning" evidences some of the same mirror images from those other two poems, causing the reader to question the relationship of the three poems, prompting readers to "doubt / If they be within it or without" ("Upon Appleton" lines 637–38). Are the poems meant to be reflecting? Ironically juxtaposed? Totally unrelated?

"Mourning" appears to be the least studied poem of the three. In fact, David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham feel the poem "should not be taken too seriously," that it is only "a jeu d'esprit" criticizing the insincerity of women, along the lines of Donne's "Goe, and catche a falling starre" and "Twicknam Garden," and Shakespeare's sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."47 One main difference from "On a Drop of Dew" and "Eyes and Tears" is the more personalized subject—Chlora, not a random dewdrop or eyes and tears in general—though the poem ends with a generalization about all women. The name, then, fits well with the figure's position in the poem, being a rather "generic" pastoral name, derived from the Greek chlora meaning "green" yet recalling other Chloras of Marvell's lyrics: Clorinda of "Clorinda and Damon"; Clora of "The Gallery"; and Chlora, described by Delany as the "bereaved, but chaste, fiancée in the 'Elegy upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers,' a poem probably by Marvell." Whereas Delany believes Marvell intends to suggest a relationship between the Chlora of "Mourning" and these other seductive heroines, Ormerod and Wortham do not think readers should try to identify this figure with any other female subjects in Marvell's poetry: "While there is strong reason to believe that there was a real person behind the Chlora of the Villiers elegy, the use elsewhere of this pastoral name does not mean that Marvell had the same woman or any woman at all in mind for his other poems involving the figure of Chlora." Perhaps more relevant to the choice of name is its association with "green," a very "loaded" color in Marvell's lyrics and one that relates to the deception possible in mirror/perspective imagery.48

The poem begins from a particular perspective in the title: as opposed to the many possible causes of tears listed in the generalized "Eyes and Tears," "Mourning" indicates sorrow for a lost loved one as the ostensible cause of Chlora's tears (though, as "Eyes and Tears" makes clear, the same tears can be prompted by radically different emotions). However, in beginning the poem with a question of the meaning of these tears, the speaker changes our secure angle of vision, particularly when the speaker asks the question to astrologers, who can only predict the future influence planets will have in horoscopes for children cast at their birth, not necessarily interpret the meaning or origin of the child's/tears' birth. Whereas it was a Renaissance commonplace that "babies" were formed in the reflection of a lover in the other's eye, as Smith explains, from the pun on the Latin term papilla, here Chlora's eyes are stars (relating to astrologers) and her tears are "infants" (line 3). As seen in both "On a Drop of Dew" and "Eyes and Tears," both eyes and tears serve as mirrors, so tears can be seen as "offspring" of Chlora's eyes, reflecting her, though not necessarily revealing the source of their birth. And, Grabes reminds us, though mirrors can clarify and sharpen an image, they also have the power to deceive, especially "a beholder who does not realize that the mirror is a mirror, that the reflected image is distinct from or is ontologically dependent on, the object reflected."49

As mirrors can deceive, so can the tears to which they are compared. From early religious writings, tears have been interpreted as a evidence of sincerity; however, even Ovid recommends tears, real or feigned if necessary, for manipulation, even for men: "Tears too are useful; with tears you can move iron; let her see, if possible, your moistened cheeks. If tears fail (for they do not always come at need), touch your eyes with a wet hand." As Marjorie Garber discusses, from the question posed Tiresias (who experienced life temporarily as a woman) of whether men or women enjoyed sex more, to Meg Ryan's rather spontaneous display of fake orgasm in a restaurant in the movie When Harry Met Sally, the impossibility of determining the sincerity of women has perplexed men throughout history.50 Chlora's tears are no different, blurring the emotional line between mourning and manipulation as well as the visual line between clarity and confusion. We are reminded of the liminal power of tears/mirrors to reflect and skew in stanza 2 with "eyes confused, and doubled o'er" (line 5) in an anamorphic blur combining eyes and tears right at the margins—"suspended ere they flow" (6), so eyes not yet releasing tears and tears not yet separate entities.

Because of the mixture of eyes and tears, the grammatical subject of "Seem" in line 7 is uncertain—are the tears "bending upwards" (7) like convex mirrors, recalling the dewdrop's reflection of "its native element" ("On a Drop of Dew," line 8); are they literally ascending to heaven as do the tears of Crashaw's "The Weeper" ("Upwards thou does weep," 309, line 19); or are the eyes turned upwards (a reading Smith prefers)? We are left in between, though the point of lines 7–8 still reverses the image from "On a Drop of Dew" since, instead of "fram[ing]" ("Drop of Dew," 8) and capturing the heavens in a convex mirror like those used by medieval pilgrims, Chlora's eyes and tears seek to reflect and return their woe to heaven, "whence it came" (8). Likewise, the word "moulding" in line 9 blends several meanings. Smith thinks it indicates that "the tears take their shape from the eyes," so that they become round and "untie themselves away" (line 9), thus the meaning "To shape (fluid or plastic matter) into a required shape by pouring or pressing into a hollow form or matrix; to press or cast in or into a particular form" (OED v1. 2. A).51 However, the tears are "bending upwards" (7), molding themselves to the sky by reflecting it as does the drop of dew, not molding to the eye. Even in this interpretation, though, this sense of "moulding" is a transitive verb, and we do not appear to have a direct object—instead we have the teardrops "moulding of the watery spheres" (line 9, emphasis mine). The only explanation can be the tear is molding itself into the round shape of the heavenly spheres, as the dewdrop makes itself "its own tear" ("On a Drop of Dew," 13), so readers are caught in the liminal area of subject and object, rabbit and duck. Since the tears then "untie themselves" from the eyes (10), we begin to interpret the tears as active, perhaps manipulative, participants in the poem rather than passive secretions, until Marvell again re-angles the mirror to transform the tears into inanimate tributes with which Chlora can "strow the ground where Strephon lay" (12). True, the tears are "precious" (11), yet here another loaded adjective, meaning not only "of great moral, spiritual, or other non-material value" (OED A. adj. 1. a.) and "Aiming at or affecting refinement in manners, language, etc." (OED A. adj. 3.), but also, in an ironic sense, "Of little value, worthless" (A. adj. 4. b.). Are tears which must "untie themselves" to fall a true indication of mourning, or of anything else?

Smith and others see a change from the naive, objective voice in stanzas 1–3 to a more "wry, insinuating tone" in stanzas 4–9. Yet like the objective mirror praised by Leonardo and Alberti, even stanzas 4–7 reflect to us the insinuations of others, not of the speaker. Thus the speaker himself reflects the uncertainty of Chlora's sincerity—just what does he think? We as readers must then find our own angle of vision because of the speaker's ambiguous words and syntax. For example, in stanza 4, what is described by the phrase "pretending art" (13) is uncertain: are "some" accusing Chlora of indicating craftiness (Smith's gloss on the phrase) because they see that her tears have only softened a place on her bosom for another arrow from Cupid, or are the critics of Chlora themselves "pretending art" through their cynical interpretation of her mourning? These critics continue by labeling her solitary grieving as "vain Pomp" (17), a noun that can mean both "ostentatious, specious, or boastful show" but also, in rare use, "an imposing movement of water" (OED n1.1. a. and 2. b.), fitting with Chlora "court[ing] herself in am'rous rain" (19). In naming her "both Danaë and the show'r" (20), Marvell both reiterates Empson's "self-inwoven simile" or "short-circuited comparison" imagery in the poem and also plays upon the significance of tears as coins, since they are "precious" (11), hard-won, and reflect the face/eyes of the person crying. In having these coins represent a self-love, with Chlora's own image on each tear-coin, he suggests the Narcissus myth, which always stresses the deceptive power of the mirror and a self-yet-false love.52 Like any coin, of course, these tears can be counterfeit, particularly when they are created by, for, and of Chlora herself.

Even more cynical onlookers, reports our noncommittal speaker, suggest that Chlora's tears are a purging of grief to make room for new joy, a joy that includes a replacement for Strephon. The picture of her grieving tears then morphs to tears of joy and largesse, tear-coin "donatives" for her new lover cast from the windows of her eyes (stanzas 6–7).53 By stanza 8, readers expect a final definitive judgment, since the speaker discounts these speculations of the insincerity of Chlora's tears and seems to distance himself from her critics' views. The imagery is exotic, placing us in tropic lands of Indian slaves and daring dives for precious pearls, appropriate not only because it extends the trope of the preciousness of tears from coins to pearls (both of which can be counterfeited), but it also reiterates Chlora's own mystery and the danger involved in a relationship with her: like the sea, Chlora's tears are "profound," implying not only physical depth, "That has great downward or inward extent; very deep" (OED II. 3. a.) and emotional depth, "having great depth or intensity; intense, extreme, thorough" (OED adj. A. I. 2. b.) but also deceit, "crafty, cunning" (OED A. I. 1. a.). Unlike the "wat'ry lines and plummets" in "Eyes and Tears" (8) that take spiritually "better measure" (7) of creation, Chlora's tears cannot be measured, cannot be "sound[ed]" ("to ascertain the depth of the sea, a channel, etc., or the nature of the bottom," OED v2 2. a.) because they themselves may not be "sound" (32) ("Sincere, true; not doubtful or disaffected in any way," OED a. II. 10. b.).

Though tears as pearls was a common metaphor (ironically, the OED gives one definition of "pearl" as "The pupil or the lens of the eye" [A. n1.I. 1. a.]), in "Mourning," the image is even more appropriate for Chlora's tears: among the many early theories about the formation of pearls, the ancient Romans believed they were "frozen tears of oysters or the gods." Another theory supported from antiquity through the seventeenth century said that pearls were drops of dew captured by clams. These dewdrops "impregnated" the clam, then "when heavy are delivered, and the offspring of the shells are pearls that correspond to the quality of the dew received." Because we now know mollusks form pearls to cover an invading foreign body to lessen the irritation it causes, the pearl, like Chlora's tear, is a beautiful shell covering a worthless entity, the perfect image for hypocrisy. This fact is especially relevant since almost all pearls on today's market are cultured, or artificially produced by intentionally implanting a foreign body within the mollusk. Since the Roman Empire, imitation pearls made of ground seed pearls, glass, and fish bones have been used, questioning the authenticity of Chlora's pearl-like tears even more.54

If readers expected a personal judgment from the speaker after all the suggestions of disbelief by the speaker, we are disappointed. The speaker teasingly keeps his "silent judgment" (line 33), confirming that he does hold a judgment and certainly not contradicting the condemnation of others, merely leaving us with the ambivalent, "But sure as oft as women weep, / It is to be supposed they grieve" (25–26). We can interpret these last lines as "whenever women weep, they intend to give the impression of grieving, or "whenever women weep, it is polite to suspend disbelief and assume they are sincere." Adding to the distancing of judgment is the wording in passive voice—"is to be supposed." What we see, then, is our own reflection in the dark—we know no more of Chlora nor of the speaker than we did in line 1. As Reichardt rightly judges, Marvell "is always the spectator—never the 'sight.'"55 Like Chlora's tears, Marvell's poem becomes a mirror that reflects away any clear revelation, leaving us with an unsettling image much like that of Magritte's Forbidden Reproduction—we know what we should see in the mirror, but it just isn't there (figure 6.8).

Figure 6.8. La Reproduction interdite (Forbidden Reproduction), 1937. By René Magritte (1898–1967). Oil on canvas. 81 cm x 65 cm. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Banque d'Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, New York. Copyright © ARS, New York.

"The Gallery"

In this final poem, Marvell again utilizes the mystery and symbolism of the mirror to reveal its danger and power to seduce, to destabilize perspective, and even to steal one's soul. Characteristic of Marvell, the poem falls in between genres. In its name and premise of guiding the reader through five different portraits of a beloved, "The Gallery" falls into the group of ecphrastic poems that place the reader in the cabinet of some fictitious collector, perhaps best characterized by Giambattista Marino's La Galleria (Venice 1620), a collection of poems describing portraits of actual people and real sculptures as well as mythological subjects. A similar English counterpart, Lovelace's "Amyntor's Grove," also introduces a picture gallery but the portraits feature a variety of women; Marvell instead displays five poses of one woman, stressing the notion of the beloved imaged in the speaker's heart, soul, or mind, similar to Donne's "The Dampe."56

Colie justifiably calls "The Gallery" a "memory poem," since it locates the various images of Clora in a room to aid his recollection, utilizing the mnemonic aids of place and image formulated by Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 BCE) and formalized by Cicero in De oratore (55 BCE). The fact that Marvell includes five portrayals of Clora in "The Gallery" associates it even more with memory, since in his chapter Ars Memoriae, seventeenth-century Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd suggested five as the best number for a group of memory places, with one main image in a memory room. Reichardt places "The Gallery" not so much in the ecphrastic mode but more in the group of so-called "mirror poems" or "looking-glass sonnets" that describe a woman viewing herself in a mirror, then directing her gaze into the lover or into some part of his anatomy that then becomes that mirror.57 Reichardt is on track with the importance of mirror imagery in the poem, but the symbolism extends beyond woman's vanity and into the liminal realm of the mirror itself.

The poem begins with the paradox of the speaker, once again in the imperative voice as in "On a Drop of Dew," "Young Love," "Clorinda and Damon," and "The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers," blurring the line between spectator and participant by inviting Clora to "view [his] soul" (line 1), normally the true essence of a person but here an artificial "contrivance." Her images, as his collection, "reflect" and display his own power, taste, and privilege as well as compliment and inspire Clora.58 In his recent remodeling, obviously, the speaker has removed outdated "arras-hangings" (5), tapestries that generally portray a narrative, and has torn down individual walls of rooms displaying other women's portraits to combine the formerly "several lodgings" (3) into "one gallery" (4), a relatively recent architectural addition in early modern England. David Evett describes the typical gallery:

[It was] that special room that every prosperous sixteenth-century Englishman added to his old house or built into his new one, a long, narrow room marked off at large intervals by windows and at smaller intervals by the recurrence, both vertical and horizontal, of wainscoting, on which, in turn, hung a stately procession of portraits—not identical of course, but similar in style and composition.

Ormerod and Wortham explain the gallery was "[o]riginally a covered walkway or colonnade attached to the side of a house and open to the elements on one side," so it was a liminal area connecting the house to the elements. Its lack of "connection" and arrangement explains the term "Gallery" in titles of Elizabethan works of literature containing a series of unrelated poems, like Thomas Proctor's A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), the entire title of which explains its rationale: Garnished and decked with divers dayntie devices, right delicate and delightfull; to recreate eche modest minde withall. First framed and fashioned in sundrie formes, by divers worthy workemen of late dayes: and now joined together and builded up.59

Whatever the type of gallery intended, Marvell's gallery is comprised of anamorphic art. Associating mirrors and skewed images to a gallery room is appropriate since, as Jurgis Baltrušaitis explains, catoptric anamorphoses were introduced even into architectural decor: "They could be constructed in marquetry or mosaic, on floors around columnar mirrors incorporated in the building." More relevant to Marvell's changing views of Clora, Baltrušaitis describes images designed to change as the spectator moves around one cylinder: "Since the place of reflection is modified according to the spectator's viewing-point, several images can be depicted round the same cylinder. Frameworks which fit together, each of which contains an independent representation, project different figures in succession as the spectator advances." Fr. Du Breuil comments in his 1649 La Perspective pratique, "[I]n this way one can make 6, 7, 8 different portraits which to the person who gradually approaches will appear to rise in the mirror one after the other and disappear out of the top." A spectator of such an anamorphic display shares the same experience as does Marvell's speaker who looks into his soul: "The man who expects to see himself in the polished surface finds himself confronting a procession of strange faces."60

And the poem does open with a direct reference to the soul and mind as mirror since, in viewing the speaker's soul, Clora sees images of herself. As seen above, the original reflexive concept explained man as image of God, and therefore by knowing oneself in mind and soul, one can know God. The implication that Clora's several perspectives, not God's or even the speaker's image, bedeck the speaker's soul and mind bodes ill, recalling Narcissus's self-fixation and the several emblems showing women viewing themselves in a glass of vanity, including Henry Peachum's emblem of Philautea or self-love and "superbia" in Ripa's Iconologia.61 As in "A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure," Marvell acknowledges the dangers of self-love: in "The Gallery," Pleasure judges the strongest temptation to be one's own reflection:

Everything does seem to vie

Which should first attract thine eye:

But since none deserves that grace,

In this crystal view thy face. ("Resolved Soul," lines 31–34)

The ambiguity of the mirror's power to reflect accurately and therefore warn and correct, but also to reflect anamorphically and therefore skew and deceive, is demonstrated by the five diverse images of Clora that the speaker describes in tour-guide fashion. Clora, it seems, is many Cloras, and each blurs expected precedents, placing her in a liminal realm. In our first view, Clora is "painted in the dress / Of an inhuman murderess" (9–10), making the reader wonder exactly what type of clothing identifies a bloodthirsty killer, until the final bathotic listing of those torturous devices she utilizes to perform her "cruel arts": "Black eyes, red lips, and curlèd hair" (16). Even with only the description of her actions, however, the reader recalls images of other early femme fatales—Circe, Armida, Medea, and the Witch of Endor. The second image, located "on the other side" (17) of this first, can be imagined in a panel attached to the "inhuman murderess" like a hinged altarpiece, but perhaps more appropriately on the wall opposite the first picture, like a catoptric anamorphic image, reflecting yet changing the original view from negative to positive, like the post-1649 catoptric anamorphic image of the portrait of Charles I composed around a skull (figure 6.3). As Nicéron describes in his 1638 Curious Perspective, the intended purpose of these pictures was so that "one can make certain drawings which, according to where they are viewed from, represent two or three quite different things. . . . [S]een from the front, they will represent a human face, and seen from the right, a death's head." Thus the true nature of the image disappears and reality becomes relative. Instead of the single-point perspective, which creates "a clear-cut caesura between the appearance of reality and the reality of appearance," these changing images blur any lines of validity into the liminal area of personal relativity.62

Compared in this second image to Aurora, goddess of the dawn, Clora is described like sleeping Venus rather than goddess of the dawn, notes Hinnant, "stretch[ing] out her milky thighs" as birds sing, "manna falls" (22), "roses spring" (22), and "wooing doves" (23) sit at her feet instead of flying before Apollo's chariot, "dispelling the night with her flowers." This popular portrayal of a sitter as a mythological deity was a hybrid genre, explains Hinnant, "bridging the individual likeness and the work devoted to mythological, or allegorical subjects" and seen in the various portraits of Queen Elizabeth as Diana or Astraea or a pagan goddess, or van Dyck's Lady Digby as Prudence (c. 1633).63 Yet here, Marvell includes manna, recalling this image in "On a Drop of Dew." Does he intend a relationship between the two poems or, combined with the "morning choir" of birds (21), is he attempting to add a spiritual aspect to the "milky thighs" of Aurora/Venus? Are we expecting to hear doves coo instead of seeing them woo in line 23? And why specify doves, which are iconographically associated with Venus? Is this a new Clora or a different perspective of the old?

Angling the mirror back to a more negative image of Clora, the speaker points out her "enchantress" side in a chiaroscuro cave scene, as she pores over her helpless lover's "entrails" (28) to "divin[e]" how long she will "continue fair" (29–30). Again we see expectations of a mirror image but skewed, since lovers should find their image in a beloved's heart, not in his or her intestines, and generally that heart is not discarded as offal for "greedy vultures" (31).64 In her ability to view her own future image in her lover's body, Clora recalls the early scryers with purported powers to divine the future or even contact the dead in mirrors or other glass objects. An obvious use of the mirror for this purpose is after the third apparition in Macbeth: eight kings, the last being Banquo, "with a glass in his hand." Though some interpret the use of the mirror here is to catch the reflection of theater audience member James I as the ninth in the line of kings, the probable meaning, suggests Clark, was "to continue the sense of the line of kings as a vision of the future, seen in a magic crystal or mirror."65

In great contrast to the gory enchantress of stanza 4, "against that" (33)—so probably situated on the opposite wall to reflect this dismal scene—is the image of Clora "afloat / Like Venus in her pearly boat" (33–34). As in the first three portraits, we have a preconceived view of Venus arising from the sea foam as in Botticelli's Birth of Venus and await the descriptions of the scene—the swirling foam, the marine deities and cupids, and Venus's loveliness. However, again we face a skewed view: no real description of Clora other than her position on the boat, no deities or porpoises, just the legendary halcyons, "birds believed to build their nests at sea, so calming the winds and waves." As the speaker offered us the sight of doves wooing rather than the sound of doves cooing in the picture of Aurora in stanza 3, here the speaker gives us the smell of ambergris and its calm wafting on the wind rather than the expected excitement of Venus rising from the waves. As Spinrad laments, "This is not Giorgione's Venus, or the Venus rising from Botticellian foam, . . . but a featureless, recumbent, and passive Venus who is merely named and never described."66

In his claim to have "a thousand more" such images of Clora in his soul-gallery, the speaker outdoes even the most opulent owners of great houses, which could contain from fifty to a hundred portraits. However, utilizing the self-reflecting catoptric paintings of the speaker's soul, as in the final apparition of kings in Macbeth, the speaker can exponentially multiply Clora's images, both those experienced already and those she has yet to "invent" (line 43), until she has "people[d] (45) his "collection" (47) into a "colony" (46). The speaker proves his knowledge of truly admirable collections in his judging her portraits "a collection choicer far / Than or Whitehall's or Mantua's were" (47–48), a reference to the Duke of Mantua's opulent collection, which Charles I purchased in 1629 and added to the royal collection at Whitehall.67

Yet, in the final reflection of Clora, the speaker takes us spatially and chronologically back to the beginning—of the hallway gallery of his soul, of the progress of their relationship—to a seemingly innocent, "natural" portrait of a "tender shepherdess" with hair "loosely playing in the air" (54), "Transplanting flow'rs" to her own head and bosom (55–56). In its very setting, the picture implies artificial contrivance since, as we saw in the Mower poems, its poised and artful rejection of unnaturalness makes pastoral the most artificial genre of all. The speaker indicates this in his description: he admires the "posture" and the "look" of Clora in the painting (51), both terms indicating artfulness. "Posture" indicates "a pose" (OED n. 1. a.), so poised appearance, while "look" denotes "Appearance, aspect" (OED n. 2) so an outward impression, not necessarily revealing the inner motives. Perhaps more appropriately, "posture" also indicates "The position of a thing (or person) relative to another," emphasizing the individualized views of Clora in these various pictures—as in an anamorphic painting, the image depends on the position of the viewer, and, in the speaker's sense, Clora's relationship to him. Even in her actions portrayed in this final description, Clora is not idly tending sheep and writing frivolous love songs as is the pastoral ideal but is "Transplanting flow'rs from the green hill, / To crown her head, and bosom fill" (55–56). Rather than gather rosebuds while she may, Clora manipulates nature, moving and replanting, adorning and even crowning herself in the process.68

The active/passive confusion is enacted in the verbs thoughout the poem, changing as Clora's images change: in the first two pictures, Clora is "painted" (9) and is "drawn" (17), so a passive participant in the tour; she "show'st" (25) herself as enchantress, so more actively participates in her own image; she "sit'st afloat" (33) as Venus, actually enacting the portrait; and finally, the action really stays in between, since the picture of the tender shepherdess "likes" the speaker best (50), and the speaker "was took" (52) with this early image's "posture" and "look" (51), leaving us uncertain of the doer of the action, reflecting control back and forth from speaker to Clora, leaving us in between. As Spinrad comments, "Appearance and reality have become hopelessly confused in the artist's maze of mirrors. . . . [L]ike Pygmalion—or Frankenstein—he has created a reality which must now take full responsibility for the qualities that it has received from the artist."69

Noticeably, this last and favorite image of Clora is "at the entrance" (line 50) so our tour guide has brought us through the gallery backwards. Besides a possible desire to "save the best for last," the speaker may have waited for this picture to indicate the anamorphic qualities of all these portraits. Jean-François Nicéron (1613–1646), who was the first to devote an entire work to what he called "curious perspective" (La perspective curieuse ou magie artificiele des effets merveilleuxs, 1638), created anamorphic murals of Sainte Madeleine and of Saint John in the Minim cloister of the Place-Royale in Paris, though they were later destroyed. According to Grootenboer, the murals "were constructed so that one caught a glance of the proper image solely upon entering the room. The viewpoint thus lay on the threshold, in the doorway, where one would see the image literally in passing." Thus the mural's focused picture cannot actually be contemplated "since one always crosses rather than remains on a threshold." 70 Like Nicéron's murals, like the liminality of pastoral, Clora's shepherdess image remains unfixed, in between.

As anamorphosis reveals the lack of definite identity and perspective, implying that all images depend on the individual perspective of the viewer, "The Gallery" indicates a lack of true identity for Clora, just "These pictures and a thousand more" (line 41) stored in the mirror of the speaker's soul. And because the speaker sees only Clora when he should see a reflection of himself and God in his soul, he, too, lacks a real mirror image. Like Bram Stoker's Dracula and the character in E. T. A. Hoffman's Story of the Lost Reflection, both Clora and the speaker no longer have stable reflections, no longer have souls, and the speaker, in "peopl[ing]" (45) himself with likenesses of Clora instead of reflections of self-knowledge and of God, has himself been "took" (52).

Notes

1. John Carey, "Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell's Imagination," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 141; and E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon, 1971), 155. Besides the sources discussed here, other commentators exploring the reflecting aspects of Marvell's images (often blending into the pictorial aspects) include Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Hamdon: Archon Books, 1976), 282–84, 286–87, and 291–92; and Colie, "My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 106–17, and 192–219; Barbara Estrin, "The Nymph and the Revenge of Silence," in On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 10; Donald M. Friedman, "Sight and Insight in Marvell's Poetry," in Patrides, Approaches, passim; Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), chap. 3; and R. I. V. Hodge, Foreshortened Time: Andrew Marvell and the Seventeenth-Century Revolutions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978), 41.

2. Christopher Ricks, "'Its own resemblance,'" 115 and 108; Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 105. Enterline perhaps most specifically notes Marvell's manipulation of mirror images:

[Marvell] stages and restages, frames and reframes his many voices to draw attention to what it is to be a subject or to have a voice. And his enactments of and ironic reflections on what it is to be such a subject produce a seemingly endless proliferation of mirrors. Either by glancing in a mirror or turning inward to discover yet another mode of likeness, self-reflection spans both the erotic poems and the poems uttered by ostensibly unattached speakers.

See Enterline, Tears, 152.

3. See Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), xi and 3.

4. Anna Torti, The Glass of Form: Mirroring Structures from Chaucer to Skelton (Rochester NY: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 6; and Dosia Reichardt, "Marvell's 'Interior Paramour': Clora Meets the Cavaliers in 'The Gallery,'" Paragone 23, no. 2 (2006): 101.

5. See B. Goldberg, Mirror, 3, 240–241, and 11–14; and Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 125.

6. B. Goldberg, Mirror, 108, 135, and 145–46; and The Authorized King James Version of the Bible, ed. Robert P. Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. E-book.

7. B. Goldberg, Mirror, 144; and Paul Hammond, "Marvell's Sexuality," The Seventeenth Century 11 (1996): 102.

8. John D. Lyons, "Speaking in Pictures, Speaking of Pictures: Problems of Representation in the Seventeenth Century," in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, eds. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), 166–67.

9. Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 207; and Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, ed. and trans. John R. Spenser, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 83.

10. B. Goldberg, Mirror, 142.

11.

As one descending ray of light will cause

a second one to rise up back again,

just as a pilgrim yearns to go back home,

So, like a ray, her act poured through my eyes

into my mind and gave rise to my own:

I stared straight at the sun as no man could.

Dante, Paradiso. In The Portable Dante, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1995), Bk. 1, lines 49–50, 52–53.

12. Torti, Glass of Form, 11; and Heinrich Schwarz, "The Mirror of the Artist and the Mirror of the Devout," in Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E. Suida on his Eightieth Birthday (London: Phaidon, 1959), 99. Ernest Cushing Richardson recounts a sermon by Jacopo da Varagine that gives four reasons to relate Mary to a mirror:

[F]irst, on account of the composition of the mirror which is of glass and lead, glass for her virginity, lead for its ductility and ashen color, which signify humility. . . . In the third place, she is called a mirror because of her representation of things, "for as all things are reflected from a mirror, so in the Blessed Virgin, as in the mirror of God, ought all to see their impurities and spots, and purify and correct them, for the proud, beholding her humility see their blemishes, the avaricious see theirs in her poverty, the lovers of pleasure theirs in her virginity."

Quoted in Ernest Cushing Richardson, ed., Materials for a Life of Jocopo da Varagine (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1935), Pt. 2, 66.

13. Thomas Clayton, "'It is Marvell. He Outdwells His Hour': Some Perspectives on Marvell's Medium" in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 59. Hanneke Grootenboer attributes the term "anamorphism" to German Jesuit priest Gaspar Schott, pupil of scholar and anamorphic artist Athanasius Kircher. Schott coined the term in his 1657 Magia universalis naturae et artis, and even in its etymology, the term demonstrates liminality:

In classical Greek, anamorphosis literally translates as "distortion," while in modern Greek ana- functions both as the English prefex dis-, as in "distorion," and re-, as in "reformation." Anamorphosis can thus be understood as "that which lacks a proper shape," and as simultaneously signifying the "restoring of that which has been out of shape." Its meaning creates a double bind, pointing to the product, the actual image, as well as to the process of its reshaping, that is, the viewer's search for the right point of view.

See Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 101.

14. Clayton, "It is Marvell," 60–61; and Milena Romero Allué, "'Glazing with Blinding Tears': New Modes of Perception in the Late Renaissance," Paper Bullets of the Brain: Experiments with Shakespeare, ed. Shaul Bassi and Roberta Cimarosti (Venice, Italy: Università Ca' Foscari, 2006), 92. For more implications on anamorphic art and how artists go about creating such images, see Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1977), passim. For more exploration of anamorphic art and its effect on literature and worldview, see Alberto Pérez-Gomez, and Louise Pelletier, Anamorphosis: An Annotated Bibliography (Montreal: McGill University Libraries, 1995); Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); K. H. Veltman, "Perspective, Anamorphosis, and Vision," Marburger Jahbuch für Kunstrwissenschaft 21 (1986): 93–117; Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes, and Marina Warner, Eyes, Lies, and Illusion (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004), 88–97; Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking through Language (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). Some works contemporary with Marvell include Salomon de Caus, La Perspective, avec la raison des ombres et miroirs (London: Richard Field; Brussels: J. Mommart for Robert Barker, 1611), EEBO, Ch. 28–29; Jean François Nicéron, Perspective curieuse ou magie artificiele des effets merveilleux (Paris: Chez Pierre Billaine, 1638), Bks. 2–3; and Joseph Moxon, Practical perspective: or, Perspective made easie (London: Joseph Moxon, 1670), EEBO. Interestingly, the very first anamorphic sketch is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and it included an eye. The sketch, estimated to be from 1483–1518, is in his Codex Atlanticus, Fol. 35, verso A, in Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, and reproduced in Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective, plate 14.

15. Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective, 102; Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, 131; and Allué, "'Glazing,'" 95–96.

16. Grabes, Mutable, 225; Colie, Paradoxia, 6; and Manuel Aguirre, "Austin's Cat, and Other Observations: Towards a Theory of Thresholds," in Mapping the Threshold: Essays in Liminal Analysis, ed. Nancy Bredendick (Madrid: Gateway Press, 2004), 15.

17. Elizabeth Cook, Seeing through Words: The Scope of Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 149; and Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2007), 39. Smith admits uncertainty in the order of composition of the two poems, though Ormerod and Wortham contend that the Latin poem was composed first, since the English poem indicates a tighter control and more concise expression. See David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham, eds., Andrew Marvell: Pastoral and Lyric Poems, 1681 (Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2000), 122. Haan speculates the two poems may be connected to pedagogical exercises of "double translation" that Marvell assigned to his young student Mary Fairfax when he served as her tutor at Nunappleton. See Estelle A. Haan, Marvell's Latin Poetry: From Text to Context (Bruxelles: Latomus, 2003), 57–94.

18. See N. Smith, Poems, 39; and Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 64–65. Ormerod and Wortham explain that Marvell and his contemporaries still believed dew was a type of precipitation, not condensation, likened in the Middle Ages to the grace God bestowed on the Israelites in the form of manna, explaining Marvell's reference in line 37. See Ormerod and Wortham, Pastoral and Lyric, 136, note 1. The ancient Romans believed dew resulted from the daily tears of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, as she mourned the death of her son Memnon (an interesting connection with Clora's portrayal as Aurora in Marvell's "The Gallery," discussed in this chapter). Aurora then appears as a liminal deity, with tears always "becoming," as Hansen comments: "In this mythologem the aetiology of dew is presented as an ongoing process rather than a single event in the past." See William Hansen, Handbook of Classical Mythology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC/CLIO, 2004), 97; and Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd ed., rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2.13.621–22.

19. Gombrich describes a similar type of optical illusion created when an artist places a figure on top of a ground image, as in the famous "rabbit or duck?" image—the effect depends on whether the viewer sees the figure or the ground. Psychologists note our initial interpretation is the figure; we ignore the ground at first, but once we do notice it, it is impossible to keep both readings present in our mind. Like Gombrich's description of Escher's drawings, images like these "compel us to adopt an initial assumption that cannot be sustained as we try to follow it through," a statement that relates to much of Marvell's poetry. See Gombrich, Meditations, 153 and 155. Whichever view the reader takes, Marvell's dewdrop accomplishes the "diminution" Colie sees as a persistent technique in Marvell's poetry. See Colie, "Ecchoing," 118–23.

20. N. Smith, Poems, 40; B. Goldberg, Mirror, 157–58.

21. N. Smith, Poems, 39; Schwarz, "Mirror of the Artist," 94; and Fred Leeman, Hidden Images: Games of Perspective, Anamorphic Art, and Illusions from the Renaissance to the Present, trans. Ellyn Childs Allison and Margaret L. Kaplan (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976), 22 and 25.

22. See Gloria Kury, "'Glancing Surfaces': Hilliard, Armour, and the Italian Model," in Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660, ed. Lucy Gent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 396, note 6.

23. B. Goldberg, Mirror, 139; Schwarz, "Mirror of the Artist," 102.

24. Because of the ability of mirrors to reflect and compress, the mirror metaphor was appropriately used to title writings intended as abbreviated but comprehensive presentations of larger, often philosophical subjects. Encyclopedias, extensive compendia, handbooks, and manuals were termed "mirrors" or specula so that, as Grabes explains, "[R]eflection and reduction, (re)presentation and compression formed here a double analogy between mirror and book." See Grabes, Mutable, 43. Some of the better known of these writings are Albertus Magnus's Speculum astronomiae (c. 1260), Roger Bacon's Speculum Alchimiae (1277), and A Mirror for Magistrates (1559).

25. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto & Winders, 1930; 2nd rev. ed., 1947), 160–61; Ricks, "'Its own resemblance,'" in Patrides, Approaches, 109–10; and Mary Ann Caws, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perspective, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 100.

26. Hodge, Foreshortened, 41. Nigel Smith adds an additional application of the term in mystical discourse, meaning "to concentrate in meditation" (OED v2 4). See N. Smith, Poems, 41.

27. Kemp, ed., Leonardo, 15. Smith interprets line 33 as an unpreparedness on the part of the soul to leave the body, with "loose" meaning "'undressed,' as opposed to 'girt'" and "easy" as "not hard pressed" ("easy" OED a. 5). See N. Smith, Poems, 42. However, the terms more convincingly indicate a readiness to leave the body: "loose" as "unbound, unattached" (OED a. 1), "Freed from an engagement, obligation, etc.; at liberty" (OED a. 1. C), supporting the next line, "How girt and ready to ascend" (34).

28. In New Jerusalem Bible, 1985, quoted in "manna" OED n. I. 1. a.

29. For other implications of manna and a possible pun on sun/Son, see Richard F. Giles, "Marvell's 'On a Drop of Dew,'" The Explicator 93, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 14–18; and Alfred L. Rosa, "Andrew Marvell's 'On a Drop of Dew': A Reading and Possible Source," Concerning Poetry 5, no. 1 (1972): 57–58, note 5.

30. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 23.

31. Edward MacCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: G. Braziller, 1954), 857 and 75.

32. N. Smith, Poems, 50. Leishman believes the title of "Eyes and Tears" can be attributed to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis: "O how her eyes and tears did lend and borrow! / Her eye seen in the tears, tears in her eye, / Both crystals, where they view'd each other's sorrow. . . ." (lines 961–63). See J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 245. Other poems assumed to have influenced Marvell include Richard Crashaw's "The Weeper" (1646), Richard Alabaster's "Sonnet 21" and "Sonnet 71," Thomas Carew's "Lips and Eyes" (1640), and John Donne's "A Valediction: of Weeping." See N. Smith, Poems, 50–51.

33. The six poems Leishman classifies as religious are "The Coronet," "On a Drop of Dew," "A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure," "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," "Bermudas," and "Musicks Empire." See Art, 193. Smith does acknowledge that "stanza VIII, with the attached Latin version, is religious and certainly may be regarded as part of the English tradition inaugurated by the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Southwell." He speculates that Marvell may not have written that Latin stanza, or that perhaps the stanza began as a separate Latin epigram later incorporated into the longer poem. See N. Smith, Poems, 50.

34. See Barbara Lewalski, "Marvell as Religious Poet," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 251; and Gary Kucher, "Andrew Marvell's Anamorphic Tears," Studies in Philology 103, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 345–46, note 2.

35. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 124; Averroes, quoted in Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 17.

36. See Crooke's Mikrokosmographia (1618), quoted in Norman K. Farmer Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 78; and Grabes, Mutable, 83.

37. Margaret Miles, "Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine's De trinitate and Confessions," Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 127–28; Augustine, On the Trinity: Books 8–15, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Bk. 10, Ch. 5 and Bk. 11, Ch. 2; and Ernest Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 167.

38. Kemp, Leonardo, 18 and 21.

39. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 121; and Grabes, Mutable, 83. Thomas Carew's "On his Mistress looking in a glass" provides a good example of the use of tears as mirrors, with the speaker's cruel mistress viewing her face in his tears. See Carew, Poems (London: J. D. for Thomas Walkley, 1640), no. 30, EEBO.

40. Kemp, Leonardo, 18 and 21; and Douglas, Purity and Danger, 125. As Clark admits, "If the senses were windows on the soul they were also doors, allowing entrance to temptation, vice, and evil spirits. The human moral citadel was continually under assault." See Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 24.

41. See Gregory Wilson, The Problem in the Middle: Liminal Space and the Court Masque (Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2007), 4; and V. Turner, From Ritual, 26.

42. Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 91. Several commentators note the similarity of Marvell's tears that blur material confusion for spiritual clarity to Bushy's advice to the queen in Shakespeare's Richard II (The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 6th ed. [New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009]), 2.2.14–24. Unlike Marvell's praising of clarifying tears, Bushy suggests the queen's griefs have been inaccurately multiplied and skewed by her "blinding tears" (2.2.16) and "Show nothing but confusion" (2.2.19). See Allué, "'Glazing,'" 91; Clayton, "'It is Marvell,'" 64–65; Kucher, "Anamorphic Tears," 354–57; and Murray Roston, Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 254–56.

43. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Chaffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 114. Kucher notes that incense is itself a mediator, "normally associated with the Catholic tendency to mediate the eternal through the carnal," while Allué sees incense as an in-between substance, "liquid, solid, and aerial at the same time." See Kucher, "Anamorphic Tears," 366; and Allué, "'Glazing,'" 90.

44. Julie Kristiva, "Stabat Mater." In The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 115; and Manuel Aguirre, Roberta Quance, and Philip Sutton, Margins and Thresholds: An Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in Text Studies (Madrid: Gateway Press, 2000), 41.

45. V. Turner, From Ritual, 26. Carey comments on the multiplying mirrors in this last line: "Since both tears and eyes mirror, what each mirrors is an infinite series of images, endlessly receding, in which tears and eyes interminably reverse and re-reverse their roles." See Cary, "Reversals," 150.

46. N. Smith, Poems, 98; Paul Delany, "Marvell's 'Mourning,'" Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972): 30; and L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (London: Associated University Press, 1998), 202. For examples of other poems questioning the sincerity of tears, see N. Smith, Poems, 98–99.

47. Ormerod and Wortham, Pastoral and Lyric, 40.

48. See N. Smith, Poems, 100, note 4; Delany, "Marvell's 'Mourning,'" 31, note 4; and Ormerod and Wortham, Pastoral and Lyric, 40. Elsie Duncan-Jones suggests that the Chlora of the Villiers elegy was Mary Kirke, the daughter of poet Aurelian Townsend. See her "Notes on Marvell," Notes and Queries 198 (1953): 102. To review some of the many possible meanings of "green" in Marvell, see Frank Kermode, "Green in Marvell," Notes and Queries 197, no. 7 (1952): 137–38.

49. N. Smith, Poems, 100, note 1; and Grabes, Mutable, 88 and 131. Grabes recounts that the English used mirrors to capture birds, and that the French called the lure employed for capturing larks a miroir anglais. Naturally, the myth of Narcissus emphasizes the deceptive aspects of the mirror. This is why the mirror became the "symbol of deception in European literature from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century." See Grabes, Mutable, 131–32 and note 2.

50. Ovid, The Art of Love, and Other Poems, 2nd ed., ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), I: 659–60; and Marjorie Garber, "The Insincerity of Women," in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 28, 33–34. Tom Lutz reviews the causes, interpretations, physiology, and portrayal in literature of tears through the ages. See Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: Norton, 1999), passim.

51. N. Smith, Poems, 100 and note 9.

52. N. Smith, Poems, 99 and 100, note 13; Empson, Seven Types, 160–61. For a recap of the Zeus-Danaë myth, see Smith, Poems, 100, note 20, and Hansen, Handbook, 261. The obvious comparison of tears to coins is Donne's "A Valediction of Weeping":

Let me powre forth

My teares before thy face, whil'st I stay here,

For thy face coines them, and thy stampe they beare,

And by this Mintage they are something worth.

See The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor, 1967), 125, lines 1–4. Of course, unlike the implication with Chlora, Donne's coins are not counterfeit.

Less convincing is Delany's interpretation of the Danaë reference as an implication of "autoeroticism," as Chlora's "eyes' moisture flows into ('is confused with') the genital moisture of Chlora's loins." See Delany, "Marvell's 'Mourning,'" 33.

53. Clayton notes that the title, by these lines, takes on a new ambiguity—is she "mourning" or is it the "morning" of a new day and new lover? See "'It is Marvell,'" 72.

54. See Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 2nd ed., ed. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968–1983), 9:54; Neil H. Landman et al., Pearls: A Natural History (New York: Harry N. Adams and the American Museum of Natural History, 2001), 9 and 47. Pliny adds that because pearls are "conceived from the sky," they enjoy a greater connection to the sky than to the sea, relating to Chlora's tears "bending upwards" (line 7) to return her grief to the heavens from which it came. See Pliny, Natural History, 9:54.

55. Reichardt, "Marvell's 'Interior,'" 114.

56. Ecphrasis as a literary device has been traced back to Homer's description of Achilles's shield and is seen in dialogue form in Lucian's Eikones. See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1990), 18.565ff.; and Lucian of Samosata, Eikones, in Lucian in Eight Volumes, Loeb Classical Library, trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 4.255–335. For possible influences of Marino on Marvell's poem, see Charles H. Hinnant, "Marvell's Gallery of Art," Renaissance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 29; and Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 114 and 238.

Donne's speaker describes an anatomical experience similar to that of the speaker of "The Gallery":

When I am dead, and Doctors know not why,

And my friends curiositie

Will have me cut up to survay each part,

When they shall finde your Picture in my heart.

See Donne, "The Dampe," in Shawcross, Complete Poetry, 143, lines 1–4. As Wilcher comments, Marvell's multiple paintings of the same woman demonstrates his tendency of "taking the metaphorical to absurdly literal lengths: if the lover's heart can contain one likeness of his lady, why not a whole portrait gallery?" See Wilcher, Andrew Marvell, 25.

57. Colie, "Ecchoing," 107; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 1–3, 27–30, and 326; Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter, 1989), 116, note 56; and Reichardt, "Marvell's 'Interior,'" 98.

58. The self-reflecting aspect of Clora's images in the speaker's soul is appreciated by Barbara Estrin:

As spectator, [Clora] objectifies him. Her gaze controls his soul. But, if what she sees there is herself, then her objectivity is his subjectivity. With the woman as the viewer of his soul, the narrator renders himself as the specular object. But if she is his soul, then he simply turns the lens into a mirror. . . . Her gaze controls him in the painting, even as his gaze controls her in the gallery.

See Barbara Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 241.

59. See David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 17; Ormerod and Wortham, Pastoral and Lyric, 62, note 4; and Thomas Proctor, A gorgeous gallery of gallant inventions (London: [By W. How] for Richard Iones, 1578), title page, EEBO. For a historical background of the origins of galleries in English manors and their changing purposes, see Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 100–103.

60. Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, 150 and 153; and de Brueil, III. Pl. 12, quoted in Baltrušaitis, 153.

61. Torti, Glass of Form, 6; and Hinnant, "Marvell's Gallery," 30.

62. Jean François Nicéron, Perspective curieuse, 50–51, quoted in Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, 105; and Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective, 3. Baltrušaitis relates an even more relevant anamorphosis from Giambattista della Porta's Magia naturalis (Antwerp, 1561) that describes half-mirrors "which make one's face uglier the nearer one comes to them and which finally transform it into a horse's head." See Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, 149.

63. Hinnant, "Marvell's Gallery," 28 and 31–32; see also Renée Hannaford Ramsey, "The Poet as Art Critic: Identity and Representation in Marvell's 'The Gallery,'" Studies in Iconography 15 (1993): 220. For the symbolism of doves, see Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 41; and Hansen, Handbook, 108. Hinnant believes Marvell might have seen Titian's version of the Sleeping Venus, which was in Lord Arundel's collection by 1655, and that "doves and springing roses are attributes appropriate for Venus and, indeed, are found in many versions of the subject." See Hinnant, "Marvell's Gallery," 32.

64. As Erwin Panofsky explains, the mythical sufferings of Tityrus, tortured in Hades by a vulture perpetually devouring his liver (the organ considered "the seat of physical passions") made him a symbol of the agonies of the lover. A vulture is also featured in Caesar Riba's Iconologia, with an image of a man "with his breast open and lacerated by a vulture." See Panofsky's Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 216–17. For other symbolic significances of vultures, see Rowland, Birds, 177–80.

65. B. Goldberg, Mirror, 11–14; Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.1, Stage directions between 111 and 112; and Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 250.

66. N. Smith, Poems, 95, note 35; and Phoebe Spinrad, "Marvell's Gallery of Distorted Mirrors," Interpretations 3 (1983): 1–12.

67. See Girouard, Life, 101; Louis Martz, "Marvell and Herrick: The Masks of Mannerism," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 206; and N. Smith, Poems, 95, note to 47–48. For a listing of some of the best of Charles I's collection, see Philip P. Fehl, "Poetry and the Entry of Fine Arts into England: Ut Pictura Poesis," in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1980), 298.

68. Hinnant sees this last image as reminiscent of the goddess Flora, usually painted with a crown of flowers and carrying flowers, as in Botticelli's Primavera. If Marvell does intend an association with Flora, we are again in the contradictory realm of the two interpretations of that goddess. See Julius Held, "Flora, Goddess and Courtesan," in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erving Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 1:201–18.

69. Spinrad, "Marvell's Gallery," 6.

70. Grootenboer, Rhetoric of Perspective, 105–6. Grootenboer informs us that an extant mural, St. Francis of Paola by Emmanuel Maignan, is similarly painted on a long wall of a corridor, so also in a liminal position of passageway. See his Rhetoric of Perspective, 106.
Chapter Seven

In Between Concept and Understanding: "The Definition of Love"

An analysis of "The Definition of Love" definitely places one in between contexts. The poem combines astrology, astronomy, cartography, geometry, and possibly psychology, etymology, and Deuteronomy to describe a perfect but impossible love. Little wonder the poem has perplexed scholars for centuries. Yet its enigmatic qualities have not prevented Legouis from judging "Definition of Love" as "the second greatest of Marvell's love poems" (though he fails to reveal his choice for number one), and commentators have sought far and wide for possible influences and sources for the Marvell's striking imagery.1

Marvell is certainly not the first poet to attempt a "definition," though his method of defining proves unique.2 For Marvell's poem, the issue of interpretation begins right with the title—is this poem really a "definition" of love? Frank Kermode thinks the title is a mistake, added by another after the poem was written, and he disagrees with the assumption that Marvell's "Definition of Love" is actually a definition poem—it "has not the distinctive characteristics of the Definition," he argues, since it does not express "la sustance . . . et le naturel fond" of love in the abstract; instead it stresses the "rarity, the unusual qualities" of the speaker's particular love. Therefore it "distinguishes but it does not define." Likewise, Anne Ferry argues that the title is misleading since it predicts a "philosophical argument designed to establish a general proposition" but begins "as the complaint of a Petrarchan poet-lover whose song publishes his 'despair' to readers of love poetry." In fact, she adds, the first stanza seems to contradict the impersonal "definition" promised by the title since it proclaims the uniqueness of his situation—"My love" (line 1)—making his language "suspect" from the beginning. Rees believes "the title begs more questions than it answers," while Smith admits that "the poem begins with confusion rather than definition." Bruce King and Ann Berthoff believe that the poem has more in common with Old English riddles than with a formal definition. This is why Berthoff compares the poem to "The Unfortunate Lover" and "On a Drop of Dew"—the same theme emerges: "Man's war with Fate is the cause of his despair and the source of his joy."3 So is this poem a "definition"? In the same spirit of the 1998 explanation by that other master quibbler, former president Bill Clinton, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."4 In Marvell's case, it depends on how we define "definition" and in what context—linguistic, cosmographical, or mathematical.

As commentators note, the OED offers some help, if only to indicate the diversity of contexts possible for the term. If Marvell refers to a rhetorical definition, then we might consider "The action of defining or stating exactly what a thing is, or what a word means" (OED 3). John Carey prefers to focus on the Latin root definire, to restrict or limit: "The setting of bounds or limits; limitation, restriction" (OED 1). This definition, argues Carey, explains Marvell's presentation of Love in the poem as, by definition, thwarted: "Frustration is thus inherent in the nature of reality, for the thwarting thing in the poem is not so much that their love is thwarted, as that it must be thwarted, or it would not be love." Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas instead assume Marvell intends "A precise statement of the essential nature of a thing" (OED 4. a.) and judge the title a paradox since the unruly passion of love cannot be subjected to the rational process of definition. With the geometric imagery in stanza 7, many assume the title refers to a formal geometric definition, the basis and starting point of each concept in Euclid's Elements (though Euclid never actually defines the term "definition"). Dennis Davison suggests that the word "definition" was probably used "in its geometrical sense as early as 1571," over seventy years earlier than Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas's estimated first use of the term in a rhetorical sense by Milton in 1645.5

However, the ambiguity of the poem's title is the very "Axle-tree" upon which this poem turns.6 In his use of the multifaceted term "Definition" to title such a poem and in the diverse imagery and metaphor he utilizes to "define" definition, Marvell acknowledges the inevitable gap between concept and its portrayal, whether the context of this concept is linguistic, spatial, mathematical, or emotional. To illustrate possible ways of translating one sphere of existence to another, Marvell explores humankind's primary attempts at understanding the liminal area between the idea and its explanation, the abstract and the concrete portrayal of that abstract, the ideal and the real, through three seemingly unrelated, so parallel, contexts: logical rhetoric, cartography, and mathematics. By the end of the poem, the reader concludes that, like the space between parallel lines, the gulf between concept and understanding, between idea and representation, is often unbridgeable and thus, "infinite" ("Definition of Love," line 28), though there is richness in the space between.

The poem's title immediately posits us in the context of language, so we naturally assume we will receive in these first stanzas a rhetorical "definition" of love. Placing "The Definition of Love" in a rhetorical context is certainly not revolutionary, but many of the objections commentators raise in rejecting Marvell's poem as a "definition" are put to rest with an analysis of Marvell's techniques in light of the English handbooks of logic and rhetoric popular at Cambridge during Marvell's sojourn. As Tuve explains, "The relationship is close between what poets learned about 'defining ' and 'dividing' in logic and relearned in rhetoric, and what they did in their poems," and she thinks they were "conscious of this close relation," so any deviation from expected definition form by Marvell would have to be intentional. Peter Mack describes the most popular Elizabethan rhetorics, all of which "correspond to the type of textbook employed in school and university teaching" and which "are mostly derivatives of continental renaissance Latin originals."7 Three in particular prove useful in dealing with definition as an important part of rhetoric: Thomas Wilson's The Rule of Reason (1552), John Case's Summa in dialecticam (1592), and Thomas Blundeville's The Arte of Logicke (1619). Examining Marvell's "The Definition of Love" in light of the discussion of definition by Wilson, Case, and Blundeville, we see that Marvell's poem does adhere to the rhetorical figure of definition as was taught and practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not only in its opening stanzas but even in its final images. However, as these rhetorical treatises themselves demonstrate, definition itself cannot totally close the space between idea and its portrayal.

Ironically, the concept of definition has never admitted ambiguity. Wilson's 1580 edition of The Rule of Reason, a text that Mack believes "recalls Melanchthon on method," leaves no doubt about the importance of definition in clear writing:

There is nothyng in all this whole Arte of Logike more necessarie for man to knowe, then to learne diligently the definition and division of every matter, that by reason maie be comprehended. For he that firste understandeth what he doeth goe about (knowing fullie the Nature of every cause propouned) shall lesse erre in the whole discourse followyng, and easie shall it be for him to avoide false arguments, if he can learne firste to see the verie Nature, and substantiall propertie of every thyng.8

Wilson clarifies that the definition should "expresse the very Nature and substaunce of the thing defined, or els it is no good definition." John Case's textbook Summa in dialecticam includes an entire chapter on definition that demonstrates the components and organization necessary for a valid definition—essential since he considers definition a fundamental tool of dialectic. Mack summarizes Case's requirements for a valid definition:

Definition consists of

Parts

The thing defined, for example, man

The copula, is

Genus, which is like the matter, animal

Differentia, which is like the form, rational

Species

Description, consisting of genus and property

Notation, consisting of accidents

Interpretation, expressed by synonyms

Laws

Equality of definition with thing defined

Truth, that the whole essence of the thing is explained

Perspicuity, that everything obscure is cleared up by the definition9

And Marvell's poem does begin with what seems to be a statement of definition, "My love is" (line 1)—giving us "the thing defined" and the "copula" or connecting predicate, "is"—but the statement continues, as many critics note, not with a "genus" and "differentia" but with an abstract description of his Love's rarity, inapproachability, and mode of generation. Thus this "Love," "begotten by Despair / Upon Impossibility" (3–4) could be animal, vegetable, mineral, or pure emotion itself. The uncertainty makes for a variety of suggestions for Love's genus, from a lady, in Colie's words, "so abstracted . . . that she relinquishes all claim to flesh and blood" to Barnaby's "the gulf between two different and opposed aspects of [the speaker's] own psyche" to Shawcross's homosexual lover and even to E. P. Hood's interpretation of Love as Mary Fairfax.10 Stanza 2 does little to clarify, continuing to employ abstract terms, adding a bit of concreteness for "Hope" (line 7) by giving it a useless "tinsel wing" (8). We know only that, as "object," this "love" is "rare," "strange and high" (2), and "divine" (6), all variable terms able to be interpreted in various ways.11

However, this uncertainty must be interpreted as intentional, not only because Marvell was steeped in rhetorical studies at Cambridge but also evidenced by his own "definition" of definition, included in his prose work, Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678): a definition "alwaies consists, as being a Dialectick Animal, of a Body, which is the Genus, and a Difference, which is the Soul of the thing defined."12 Therefore, Marvell is perfectly aware of the requirements of a rhetorical definition, and a look at the rhetorical handbooks proves Marvell is well within the standards for written definition.

In answer to the criticism that the poem begins with a more personal view of Love rather than a universal "definition," the third of Blundeville's three "precepts to be observed in Definition" specifies that a definition "bee not common to many things, but proper to that thing only which is defined, so as it may make it to differ from all other things."13 The speaker's focus on "My love" simply demonstrates that the concept of Love means too many things to too many people to attempt a universal definition for the word. The OED has four separate listings for the word "love," and a total of nineteen major definitions for the term, with dozens of compound words and phrases containing "love." Even, then, a supposedly universal definition for a concept can only define one aspect. Also, supporting Marvell's tactic, Blundeville acknowledges that description can be a viable aspect of definition. In The Arte of Logicke, he offers ten components to the "definition of a name," including the following:

3. Definition metaphoricall, or by figures, as, Adolescence is the flower of mans age.

9. Definition by similitude; as, The Sunne is the eye of the World; a Citie without a Magistrate, is as a Ship without a Governour.

And under "definition of a thing," Blundeville offers six divisions, including "causall definition," which gives "the proper causes of the thing defined."14 In both his explanation of the "parents" of his Love and in his use of personification and simile, the definition of Marvell's speaker does fall within the rhetorical guidelines for definition.

However, Marvell has never been known simply to "stay within the lines" but rather to blur them, and this is evident even from stanzas 1 and 2 of the poem. Marvell manipulates our expectations to prove that no concept can ever be universally and unambiguously "defined" or transferred from imagination to understanding, either linguistically, geographically, or geometrically, since all definitions rely on a common concept that must be intuitively understood before any transfer of context can take place. In typical Marvellian self-mirroring fashion, seen in the Drop of Dew shining "Like its own tear" ("On a Drop of Dew," line 13) or the Soul "manacled in hands" ("A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," 4), the poem attempts to define a term ("definition") using the very technique ("definition") one is defining, resulting in a type of Möbius strip that turns back upon itself or imaged in Escher's Drawing Hands (figure 6.1). Thus, any attempt to define Love, to transfer the idea (which can be interpreted as emotion, person, or deity) into a concrete medium (language or image) that everyone can interpret identically, necessitates a leap across an unbridgeable abyss between the two.

René Descartes goes to great lengths to explain the desire and need for universality in definition, but he also acknowledges the necessity for a common conception upon which to build a definition, as he explains in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind:

For example if a man has been blind from his birth it is not to be expected that we shall be able by any train of reasoning to make him perceive the true ideas of the colours which we have derived from our senses. But if a man has indeed once perceived the primary colours, though he has never seen the intermediate or mixed tints, it is possible for him to construct the images of those which he has not seen from their likenesses to the others, by a sort of deduction.15

Similarly, Montaigne saw the inadequacy of words to bring understanding:

Our disputes are purely verbal. I ask what is "nature," "pleasure," "circle," "substitution." The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way. "A stone is a body." But if you pressed on: "And what is a body?"—"Substance."—"And what is substance?" and so on, you would finally drive the respondent to the end of his lexicon. We exchange one word for another word, often more unknown.16

Even in Marvell's own definition from Remarks quoted above, the reader is left with a rhetorical description using metaphor and personification rather than a clear statement of meaning. Blundeville attempts his own definition of definition in The Arte of Logicke: "Definition is a speech, whereby either some name or thing is declared: and it is twofold, that is, of a name, and of a thing."17 But does each reader interpret "speech," "name," and "thing" in the same way? John Case appears to deal with that very problem in his recommendations for the species aspect of definition seen above: if a term cannot be understood by a classification of genus, then descriptions and metaphor may help the reader toward a common conception, based on visual, though perhaps totally unrelated, comparisons.

Marvell follows Case's and Blundeville's recommendations by stanza 3, as the speaker attempts to give form to these vague terms with personification and spatial imagery, introducing a female "Fate" driving "iron wedges" (line 11) between the speaker and his Love (described as his "extended soul," 10), since, as the speaker explains in stanza 4, the union of perfect loves would depose "tyrannic" (16) Fate and destroy her power over lovers. With the figure Fate, readers can begin to form a mental picture, though not necessarily the same picture, since the figure can recall the three goddesses who control destiny in classical mythology (the Greek Moirai or the Roman Parcae or Fata); the figure Necessitá in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1593), described as "a young Woman, holding in her right Hand a Hammer, and in her left a Handful of Nails"; or even the Horatian "Necessity," "grim goddess, with spikes and wedges in her brazen hand; the stout clamp and molten lead are also there." 18 Even the term "iron wedges" (11) brings in a variety of contexts for possible visual depictions. Christopher Hill believes the image comes from industry, while Davison sees it as a military instrument (using Herbert's "The Search" as evidence) or even a lumberjack's tool in tree-felling.19 If Marvell is attempting to present a universally understood visual image in stanzas 3 and 4, he must keep trying.

In stanza 5, the speaker attempts yet another method of "definition," or translating the concept of his own experience of Love to a graphic representation: he geographically (or celestially) pictures the speaker and his Love on antipodal points between which "Love's whole world" (line 19) rotates—points that can only converge, the speaker speculates in stanza 6, if "Love's whole world" be flattened, "cramped into a planisphere" (24). Marvell's turning to cartography for metaphor is not unusual in early modern literature, as Victor Morgan so ably demonstrates, and Marvell's usage of map images as an elucidation of an abstract concept in this time of English history is also understandable, since the mid-seventeenth century saw great strides in mapping the world and a corresponding confidence in the accuracy of concrete representation. According to D. K. Smith, the English lagged far behind other nations in producing and utilizing accurate maps; in fact, as late as 1520, "only a small fraction of the population had ever seen a map, much less used one." Even English sailors had no sea charts produced by fellow Englishmen but had to rely on maps drawn by foreigners. Yet with the English translation of Euclid's Geometry in 1570 and the mathematization of surveying that followed, England advanced by great strides, taking its place at the forefront of geography. By 1579, with the publication of the Western world's first national atlas by Englishman Christopher Saxton, England was "producing maps as detailed and accurate as any in the world," according to Smith.20 Thus, Marvell's reference to opposing poles and a flat planisphere would have more relevance to his contemporaries at this time than at any previous time in English history.

In addition, Marvell himself in all probability enjoyed a greater interest in and knowledge of geography than most of his contemporaries. Marvell attended Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1633 to 1641, taking a B.A. degree in 1639. Leslie B. Cormack reports that Trinity and St. John's Colleges in Cambridge, and Christ Church and New College at Oxford, "stand out as centers of geographical interest" in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, "taking into account the careers of the large numbers of geographers and students of geography present within their walls and the books owned by their students, fellows, and libraries." She singles out Trinity College, "clearly the most geographical of the Cambridge colleges," with fourteen of its students owning geographical books and seventeen "having pursued active geographical careers."21

Marvell's own experiences after leaving Trinity also indicate his fascination with foreign lands. According to Nigel Smith, following his father's drowning death in January 1641, Marvell sold a parcel of his inherited land to finance a six-year trip to Holland, France, Italy, and Spain. After his return to England in 1647, he left for a political mission to Holland in 1662, then from 1663 to 1665 accompanied the Earl of Carlisle on an embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. D. K. Smith concludes that "with so many miles and countries under his belt, he was a man with a personal appreciation for the practicalities of geography" and certainly "one of the most well-traveled writers of the seventeenth century."22

Even given Marvell's familiarity with rhetorical definition and his knowledge of geography, his comparison of the speaker and his Love to opposite poles leaves us in the space between geography and rhetoric. The use of the geographic image does follow Case's requirements for an effective rhetorical definition by employing his recommendations for "Species:" "Description, consisting of genus and property" (described by the OED as "a characteristic which is peculiar to a particular kind of thing but is not part of its essence or definition" [n. 1. c.]); "Notation" (defined rhetorically as "A form of periphrasis in which a quality or thing is described in terms of its distinctive characteristics" [OED n. 1]), "consisting of accidents" ("A property or quality not essential to our conception of a substance; an attribute" [OED n. 6. a.]); and "Interpretation, expressed by synonyms."23 However, even the geographic reference to a planisphere, seemingly universal and effective in visualizing the impossibility of the speaker and his love ever joining, proves uncertain and has elicited vehement disagreement as to the type of concrete representation Marvell intends, whether a terrestrial or a cosmic planisphere.24 Though he admits that the most "common" meaning of "planisphere" in the OED is the celestial one, D. M. Schmitter prefers to consider the image "a planispheric representation of the earth with 'parallel' lines of latitude and 'oblique' lines of longitude" since it provides "a simple but moving image to symbolize the natures of the pure love and the common love." The collapsing of the earth would then leave "either the northern or the southern hemisphere as a full circle with the pole at the centre, the parallel lines of latitude forming circles, and the meridians all crossing at the poles." Legouis counters that crushing celestial poles together works just as well as terrestrial. Besides, he adds, down to the nineteenth century, people were more interested in the celestial poles than in the terrestrial ones, from utilitarian motives: besides astrology, "navigation had a use for maps of the northern and southern hemispheres of the sky rather than of the earth."25 The OED acknowledges both possibilities in its definition: a planisphere can be "a representation of a hemisphere of the earth, the sky, or the solar system, on a flat surface, usually as a circle" ("planisphere" n.).

Assuming the planisphere is terrestrial, we have a broad choice of just how the "planisphere" that will result from the crushing of the earth will appear. As explained, England had made great strides in cartography in the last decades of the sixteenth century, but, as Smith mentions, newer maps were often not available to the general populace, and a certain amount of inertia kept outdated maps in use well after they had been proven incorrect. In fact, allegorical, emblematic, and totally inaccurate medieval maps were still being produced and used in England well into the sixteenth century. Thus, contemporary maps could picture Marvell's planisphere in widely differing styles. Snyder explains that early maps often had nothing to do with geographic reality but "had bases that were philosophical rather than mathematical," neatly fitted into a circle whether the cartographer had in mind a round globe or a flat earth.26 This earliest printed map in Western Europe by Isidore of Seville (1472) has very little to do with reality, featuring a T-O structure, with land divided into Europe, Asia, and Africa; separated by the Tanais River, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea; and encircled by the ocean (figure 7.1). Even later maps differed as to their shapes and representations (figures 7.2 and 7.3).

Figure 7.1. Royal 12 F.IV, f.135v Diagrammatic world map, c.1175 (vellum) by British Library, London, UK/Copyright © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality/copyright status: out of copyright.

The upheaval created by the change from the Ptolemaic to Copernican arrangement of the cosmos certainly destroyed any faith in cosmological schema, only exacerbated with the discovery of the New World, verifying that maps, more than ever, could only be accepted as one man's estimation of reality. Thus, once again, the techniques of "Species" recommended by Case help us to visualize, but they do not specifically define, the speaker's concept.

Figure 7.2. Globe Gores Map, 1507. Martin Waldseemuller (c. 1470–1522). Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota. Minneapolis, Minnesota.

However, most of Marvell's contemporaries agreed that the earth turned upon opposing poles in an image consistent with Marvell's poem. The term "axeltree" that describes the line connecting the poles referenced in Marvell's The Rehearsal Transpros'd, The Second Part is noted in several writers on cosmography. Blundeville himself offers the following description in answer to "Whereupon is this Spheare or great round frame turned?":

Upon two most firm and immovable hookes called in Latin Cardines mundi, and in Greek Poli; derived of the verbe Polo, which is as much to say, as to turn. For as a doore turneth upon his hookes, so the world turneth upon his two Poles, whereof the one is fixed in the North, and the other in the South, and the North Pole is called in Latin Polus arcticus, and the South Pole is called Antarcticus, through which Poles from the one to the other passeth a right imaginative line, called of the Astronomers the Axletree of the world, about the which the world continually turneth like a cart-wheel, which you may see lively expressed in a materiall Spheare made for the purpose, for in Plano it cannot be so well described.

Henry Hawkins describes the universe similarly: "This great Bowle of the Heavens, roules and turns about an Axeltree, fixt in a certain place."27 But even if we have a common notion of a central axle, we remain in the gap between concept and its concrete portrayal.

Figure 7.3. Octant World map c. 1514. Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Courtesy of Nordenskiöld, Facsimile Atlas. Dover Publications, Inc., 1973. 77.

In his attempt to come closer to, if not a definition, at least a representation, of the speaker's Love, Marvell turns to the one mode of representation that purports to represent the ideal and the permanent: geometry, which Thomas Hobbes named "the mother of all natural science" and "the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind," and which Descartes deemed "free from any taint of falsity or uncertainty."28 In stanza 7, the speaker moves from points on a globe to lines on a plane: he contrasts the "oblique lines" of inferior love, that "Themselves in every angle greet" (lines 25–26) with the "parallel" lines of the speaker's Love, which, "Though infinite, can never meet" (27–28). Can this geometric image offer the right context to define love and succeed in concluding the poem with a Q.E.D.?

If Marvell is seeking a representation of an ideal love, he could seek no better than geometry which, as Hartshorne explains, draws "a distinction between the real world with all its imperfections, and some kind of abstract or ideal existence that people in this world strive to attain." In his Republic, Plato, born about a hundred years before Euclid, already recognized the focus of geometers: "[A]lthough they make use of the visible forms and reason about them, they are thinking not of these, but of the ideals which they resemble; not of the figures which they draw, but of the absolute square and the absolute diameter, and so on." But perhaps more relevant to those seeking in Marvell's "Definition" a universal meaning, Plato continues that "the knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient." Even Descartes's The Passions of the Soul is developed, in Stempel's description, "through a series of geometric analogies" and carries a theme that "is . . . in a sense, 'geometric.'"29

Theories of astronomy, cartography, and geometry fit together well: according to Snyder, from 1470 to 1669, when interest in mapping the earth and cosmos began to expand, cartographers turned to mathematics for more accurate representations. In fact, he adds that "the development of appropriate mathematics was often contemporary with the development of map projections both during and after the Renaissance." Cormack explains that from 1580 to 1620, "geography grew from a relatively undifferentiated field into three separate subdisciplines, each with its own literature, practitioners, and particular contribution to the ideology of empire." One subdiscipline, mathematical geography, was developed as a branch of mathematics: "It allowed scholars to reconstruct the globe as an abstract, geometrical grid on which they could situate England and the rest of the known world." Obviously, then, the area of mathematics most useful to astronomers and cartographers was geometry, which Hyman judges as the most highly developed branch of mathematics in the seventeenth century: "[I]n no field was geometry more important than in dealing with the heavenly bodies." Edwin Burtt believes astronomy "was the geometry of the heavens."30

Because of their close alignment, the fields of astronomy, cartography, and mathematics tended to attract the same people. A striking example is Thomas Blundeville, whose Arte of Logick, referenced above, was a standard rhetoric text for college students like Marvell. Blundeville connected his own rhetorical studies to geometry and astronomy/cartography. His Plaine Treatise of the first principles of Cosmography and specially of the Spheare is one of eight treatises he wrote on related subjects including astronomy, cartography, navigation, and mathematics. A Plaine Treatise prefaces its discussion on the structure of the cosmos, as does Euclid in his Elements, with several pages of geometric definitions to clarify terms to be used in the astronomy section, "without the which the unlearned shall hardly understand the Contents of this Treatise."31 One particular definition he stresses is that of parallel lines, of which he gives several possible types, even "serpentine" parallel lines, in his Plaine Treatise. Blundeville also describes several drawings of the world, including a figure "shewing the Equinotiall Line, the two Poles, and the Axeltree of the World." Marvell almost certainly had experience with both geometry and geography, since both Ptolemy's Geographia and Euclid's Elements are among the texts listed in the collection at Trinity College.32

Demonstrating the interrelatedness of these subjects, when Henry Savile founded the Savilian chairs of Geometry and Astronomy at Oxford in 1619, he specified that "land measurement be taught as part of the duties of the Professor of Geometry and that the Professor of Astronomy teach geography and navigation as part of the application of astronomical theory." The 1556 statutes of Oxford's Trinity College mandated that every morning during the term, the lecturer in logic was to include in his reading arithmetic, logic, philosophy, and geometry to the members of the college, "while three times a week during the long vacation, he was to deliver lectures in astronomy and geography." At Marvell's own Trinity College at Cambridge, the 1560 statutes specified engaging mathematical lecturers at the undergraduate level and required geometry and astronomy (which included geography) for the M.A.33 Even a popular printed commonplace book, John Foxe's 1572 Pandectae. Locorum communium, used the same title page illustration as did Dee and Billingsley in their 1570 English translation of Euclid's Elements (see figure 7.4).

Among the figures at the bottom are the female personifications of the four mathematical arts holding their symbolic instruments, including Arithmetica, Musica, Geometria (holding a ruler, L square, and compass) and Astronomia (holding a globe on a type of "axletree"). The fact that Foxe chose this mathematically and geographically oriented illustration for the title page of a commonplace book emphasized the importance of these areas "for all students of the commonplace."34 More relevant to Marvell's "Definition of Love" are the female personifications of Geometry and especially Geography, relating to the female image of Fate placing the speaker and his Love on "distant poles" with the world "wheel[ing]" between them (lines 18–19).

If Marvell looked to this "mother of all natural science" geometry in desperation, he is not alone in his direction—Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Pascal, and other philosophers turned to Euclid's Elements (c. 300 BCE) for universal truths at a time fraught with uncertainty, as Hobbes makes clear:

Seeing then that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what ever name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime twigs; the more he struggles, the more belimed. And therefore in geometry, (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind,) men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions; and place them at the beginning of their reckoning.

Figure 7.4. Title Page. John Foxe, Pandectae Locorum (1572). Courtesy of British Library.

And, of course, Hobbes is correct—in the thirteen books of his Elements, Euclid proceeds methodically first by giving "Definitions" of any terms used in the book; then "Postulates" or simple operations whose possibility is self-evident or taken for granted, like the drawing of a straight line between two points in space (OED 3); any "Common Notions" or generally accepted assumptions necessary for acceptance; then "Propositions," formal statements of a truth to be demonstrated (OED 1. b.). However, since geometry depends upon the accuracy of linguistic definition, even this "gift from God" is dependent upon human interpretation and shared context. For example, in Euclid's Book 1, the basic concepts upon which we must build the entire realm of geometry depends upon rather enigmatic, nonconcrete definitions:

  1. A point is that which has no part.
  2. A line is breadthless length.
  3. The extremities of a line are points.
  4. A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
  5. A surface is that which has length and breadth only.
  6. The extremities of a surface are lines.
  7. A plane surface is a surface which lies evenly with the straight lines on itself.

And, most relevant to Marvell's image is Euclid's final definition of Book 1:

23. Parallel straight lines are straight lines which, being in the same plane and being produced indefinitely in both directions, do not meet one another in either direction.35

The list goes on for each book, each definition totally dependent upon the reader's understanding of the preceding definition, so that if one does not comprehend a "plane surface," one could never understand "parallel straight lines." As in Descartes's example of the impossibility of defining color for a person blind from birth, can Euclid really be confident that his propositions in Book 13 of the Elements are understood by a person who cannot grasp the concept of "that which has no part" in Book 1? Mathematician Robin Hartshorne agrees: "It seems that Euclid, instead of giving a precise meaning to these terms, is appealing to our intuition, and alluding to some concept we may already have in our own minds of what a point or a line is." We all may think we agree on what points and lines are, but we may actually have very different concepts. Hartshorne explains, "So the modern approach is to say these notions are undefined, that is, they can be anything at all, provided that they satisfy whatever postulates or axioms may be imposed on them later."36 True, Euclid illustrates all propositions so that readers have a visual image, but is that any better than Marvell comparing "My Love" to beings placed on "distant poles" (lines 1 and 18)? Again, even in the exact science of geometry, we are faced with the space between concept and its concrete representation.

As he concludes in stanza 8, the speaker and his Love are left in impasse, their minds joined by "love" (29) but their union "debar[red]" (30) by the "stars" of Fate (32). In differentiating his love from others, the speaker uses the rhetorical definition technique of contrast, an important aspect of a good definition, according to both Thomas Wilson in The Rule of Reason and Blundeville in his Arte of Logick. Wilson clearly describes that in a good definition, the term must not only be defined by what it is but also by what it is not: "[E]very perfecte definition is made perfecte by the generall woorde, and his difference ioyned together. So that whatever is defined, it is alwaies the kynde of sorte of some one thyng." Likewise the second of Blundeville's ten recommendations for proper "Definition of a name" supports Marvell's contrast: "Definition by differences, as, He is a King, which ruleth by Law; but he that ruleth by force, is a Tyrant."37

In these last two stanzas of "The Definition of Love," the terms "parallel" (line 27), "conjunction" (31), and "opposition" (32) are brilliant choices on Marvell's part to join all spheres of knowledge previously referenced and reemphasize the space between idea and representation of any definition. Though commentators assume that the first, "parallel," only refers to geometric lines and that the last two terms ("conjunction" and "opposition") are to be taken in the astronomical sense, all three words refer to logical rhetoric, cosmology, and mathematics, drawing the diverse images in the poem together. "Parallel" not only geometrically defines lines that never meet (as in Euclid above), but its adjective form also describes an object geographically ("in the same parallel of latitude as") and, in its noun form, it refers to the "imaginary circles of constant latitude on the earth's surface, or corresponding lines drawn on a map or globe" (OED a. 1. b.; n. 1. a). In the context of rhetoric, as our freshman composition students learn too well, parallelism is the "[s]imilarity of grammatical form between two or more coordinated elements."38 Thus though the mental image of parallel lines in space comes to our minds, we cannot ignore the other possibilities of meaning.

And, ironically or not, Marvell's final two lines finally do offer a clear rhetorical definition as outlined by Case above, with the term, "the Love which us doth bind" (line 29), a copulative, "is" (31), and two genuses: "conjunction" (31) and "opposition" (32). However, the meanings of these two words themselves differ according to context. True, "conjunction" most obviously pertains to the field of astronomy and astrology, in the context of the "distant poles" (18) image, meaning "An apparent proximity of two planets or other heavenly bodies; the position of these when they are in the same, or nearly the same, direction as viewed from the earth" (OED 3.). However, this term also has a place in grammar and logic, the context attempted in the beginning of the poem to define "My Love" (1). "Conjunction" can refer to "One of the Parts of Speech; an uninflected word used to connect clauses or sentences, or to co-ordinate words in the same clause" (OED 6.). In its associated form "conjunct," the term draws together logical rhetoric and mathematics: "conjunct" can be "A conjoined term or proposition" in an argument (OED 5.) and, as in the phrase "conjunct proportion," the term also refers to a geometrical progression, interestingly illustrated in the OED with a quote by Thomas Blundeville himself (conjunct a. [n.] 5.). Finally, the general definition of conjunction as "the fact or condition of being conjoined" (OED 1.) can more specifically be defined as "union in marriage" (OED 2.), the very goal thwarted in the poem.

"Opposition" can also be used in rhetorical, astrological, and mathematical contexts. In rhetoric, the term refers to "The relation between two propositions which have the same subject and predicate but differ in quantity or quality, or both" and can also refer to a rhetorical argument: "A formal oral examination or disputation" (OED 8. and 6. b.). In the field of astrology, the term means "The apparent position of two celestial objects when they differ in ecliptic longitude by 180°; esp. the position of a superior planet when in this relation to the sun" (OED 1.). And "opposition" is a significant term in geometry, paired with "transverseness," and simply described thus:

Two directions are opposed to each other when distance in the one, in the determination of position, exactly nullifies the same amount of distance in the other; that is to say, when the spectator having advanced in the one direction, is brought back by the same distance in the other to the position originally occupied.39

The geometric concept of opposition, then, implies a movement, a process, supporting Socrates's definition of Eros in Plato's Symposium as the desire, not the attainment of what one lacks and Plotinus's description of love as the space between: "Love who has come into existence as a reality always ordered toward something else beautiful, . . . is a kind of intermediary between desiring and desired."40 It is the liminal area of becoming, of possibility, not of unity. Thus the "opposition of the stars" actually refers to Love itself—it is the space between the speaker and his object, the unbridgeable gap between idea and reality, desire and fulfillment, that actually "defines" love.

In Marvell's final image of parallel lines, he seems to have succeeded in attaining an image that is truly universal, true for all in all times, though it does not necessarily "define" the abstract term "Love" for us all. The picture of parallel lines also certainly does not solve the problem of the speaker's impossible love, but, after all, as geometry attempts not to change the arrangement of bodies in space but to define them in the two dimensions of written word and illustration, Marvell's poem does not seek to join the speaker and his Love but to portray the perfection of his despair. Marvell's embracing of despair simply indicates his acceptance of, as Rajan describes, "a world the nature of which is that the ideal cannot be completed in the actual."41 But this is true because to express the ideal, it must be translated into a system of signification understandable to all, and the space between intrudes.

And maybe for Marvell, for his speaker, the poem does define Love; we just cannot ourselves bridge the gap between our concept and his rendition. Like the twirling globe on the Axeltree connecting the poles, we are left in the liminal area of uncertainty, of desire, of interpretation. Ultimately, the definition of Love, the definition of anything, must be, like Herbert's "Prayer," "something understood."42

Notes

1. Pierre Legouis, "Marvell and Massinger: A Source for 'The Definition of Love.'" Renaissance English Studies 23, no. 89 (January 1947): 63. Commentators vary in their opinion of influences on "The Definition of Love." For Philip Massinger's influence, see Pierre Legouis, "Marvell and Massinger," 63–65; for Abraham Cowley's influence, see H. M. Margoliouth, "Marvell and Cowley," Saturday Review 127 (June 7, 1919): 550–51; and Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter, 1989), 130–31. Others have found links to Horace (see M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961], 45, note 1), Hobbes (see Andrew Barnaby, "Affecting the Metaphysics: Marvell's 'Definition of Love' and the Seventeenth-Century Trial of Experience," Genre 28 [1995]: 506–10); Euclid (see Rosalie Colie, "My Ecchoing Song": Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970], 45; and Robin Hartshorne, Geometry: Euclid and Beyond [New York: Springer, 2000], 6); Plato (see Lawrence Hyman, Andrew Marvell [New York: Twayne, 1964], 57–58); Donne (see Colie, Ecchoing, 76; Louis Martz, The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969], 165–66; Balachandra Rajan, "The Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978], 164; and Anne Ferry, All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975], 243–45); Thomas Carew; Robert Herrick; Richard Lovelace; Robert Heath (see Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell [Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2007], 107–8); Descartes; Locke (see Barnaby, "Affecting," 503 and 505); Plotinus (see Hyman, Andrew Marvell, 54–58); and George Herbert (see Dennis Davison, "Marvell's 'The Definition of Love,'" Review of English Studies, n.s. 6, no. 22 [April 1955], 141–43).

2. Contemporary poems suggested to have influenced Marvell include Ralegh's "Now what is Love, I praie thee tell," Lodge's "I'll teach thee, lovely Phillis, what love is," Daniel's "Love is a sickness full of woes," Cowley's "Impossibilities" and "The vain Love," Sidney's Arcadia (2. 4), Herbert's "Virtue," Vaughan's "Quickness," and Greene's "Ah, what is love?" See Rosamond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 302–3; and Rees, Judgment, 131.

3. Frank Kermode, "Definitions of Love," Review of English Studies n.s. 7, no. 26 (April 1956): 184; Ferry, All in War, 240–41; Rees. Judgment, 128; N. Smith, Poems, 109, note 1; Bruce King, Marvell's Allegorical Poetry (New York: Oleander, 1979), 89; and Ann E. Berthoff, "The Allegorical Metaphor: Marvell's 'The Definition of Love,'" Review of English Studies 17, no. 65 (February 1966): 18 and 16. Ironically, Lynn Enterline argues that most of Marvell's poems can be seen as attempts to forge a link between differences and similarities, between the inner and outer world. This link "is brought into conjunction with linguistic differences—the differences, and correspondences, between signifier and signified or between literal and figural meaning." Thus she sees most of Marvell's poems as definitions. See Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 152.

4. Clinton's famous comment can be found in "September 21, 1998," BBC News, www.bbc.co.uk/onthisday.

5. John Carey, "Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell's Imagination," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 138; Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell, 45; Davison, "Marvell's 'Definition,'" 141; and Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell, 45, n. 1. Commentators who explore Marvell's use of geometry include Colie, Ecchoing; Rajan, "Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness"; Lawrence Hyman, "'Ideas' in Marvell's Poetry," History of Ideas Newsletter 2 (1956): 29–31 and his Andrew Marvell; E. B. Greenwood, "Marvell's Impossible Love," Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 27 (1977): 100–109; and Angela C. Dorenkamp, "Marvell's Geometry of Love," English Language Notes 9, no. 2 (December 1971): 111–15.

6. Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd, The Second Part, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Annabel Patterson, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelainis, N. H. Keeble, and Nicholas von Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:321.

7. Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical, 299; and Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 78.

8. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 83; and Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logike (London: Thom Kyngston, 1580), 14a., EEBO.

9. Wilson, Rule of Reason, 14; and John Case, Summa in dialecticam, sig. B3r, quoted in Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 62.

10. Colie, "Ecchoing," 51; Barnaby, "Affecting," 502; John Shawcross, Intentionality and the New Traditionalism: Some Liminal Means to Literary Revisionism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 182–83; and E. P. Hood, Andrew Marvell: The Wit, Statesman, and Poet, 1853, quoted in John Carey, "Introduction: Contemporaneous Criticism," in Andrew Marvell: A Critical Anthology, ed. John Carey (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969), 28.

11. Marvell obviously intends the more negative interpretation of "tinsel" as indicated in a. 6 of the OED: "Of deceptively brilliant or valuable appearance; showy with little real worth; cheaply gaudy, tawdry." Marvell's other adjectives can be interpreted a myriad of ways: the OED lists seven possible interpretations of "rare," eighteen for "strange" (including one from particle physics), over forty-one for "high" (not counting its use in phrases), and eight for "divine."

12. Marvell, Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse, ed. N. H. Keeble, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelainis, N. H. Keeble, and Nicholas von Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2:429.

13. Thomas Blundeville, The Arte of Logicke (London: William Stansby, 1619), 57, EEBO.

14. Blundeville, Arte, 54 and 55.

15. René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. T. R. Ross (London: Cambridge University Press, 1911–12; reprinted 1972), 1:54–55.

16. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, in The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Knopf, 2003), 3.13.818.

17. See Blundeville, Arte, 53. Descartes attempts his own definition of love in The Passions of the Soul: "Love is an emotion of the soul caused by the movement of the spirits which incites it to join itself willingly to objects which appear to it to be agreeable." See his Philosophical Works, 1:366. Daniel Stempel thinks Marvell was familiar with Descartes, since two of his treatises, The Discourse on Method (1649) and The Passions of the Soul (1650), had been translated and published in England shortly before Marvell went to the Fairfax household at Nun Appleton. See Stempel, "'The Garden': Marvell's Cartesian Ecstasy," Journal of the History of Ideas 28, no. 1 (1967): 101.

18. Caesar Ripa, Iconologia, or, Moral Emblems (London: Printed by Benj. Motte, 1709), fig. 224, pages 55–56; and Horace, Odes, in The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1.35.16–20. Marvell employs an even more direct reference to these images and to the concept of the "Axle-tree" (which will be discussed below) as an image in cosmology in his prose ridicule of Bishop Parker in The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part (1673):

There is first of all a necessity, that some have talk'd of, and which I mention'd you in my former Book, that was pre-eternal to all things, and exercised dominion not only over all humane things, but over Jupiter himself and the rest of the Deities, and drove the great Iron nail thorough the Axle-tree of Nature. I have some suspition that you would have men understand it of your self, and that you are that Necessity.

See Marvell, Rehearsal, in Patterson et al., Prose Works, 1:321–2. Prose editors Dzelzainis and Patterson explain that Marvell may be referring to the figure "Necessitas," who, "in Orphic theology, the personification of absolute necessity, appears as the mother of the Moirai (Fates), as the wife of Demiurges (Fashioner of the world), and mother of Heimarmene (Destiny). Her power is greater than the gods, and the world revolves around the spindle she holds in her lap." See Marvell, Rehearsal, in Patterson et al. 1:321–22, note 534.

19. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 344; and Davison, "Marvell's 'Definition,'" 142.

20. Victor Morgan, "The Literary Image of Globes and Maps in Early Modern England," in English Map-Making 1500–1650, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: British Library, 1983), 46–56; and D. K. Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England (Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008), 41.

21. Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53 and 54. The success of the interdependent patronage system in Elizabethan and Stuart England depended on a shared ideology coming from a common education, and, according to Cormack, "Geography, studied at the universities, became part of that common background of ideas and beliefs about the world." The lessons of geography, studied as part of the Arts curriculum, "were especially timely and useful" during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, "a period of great social, economic, and political change." See Cormack, Charting, 14.

22. N. Smith, Poems, xxiv–xxv; and D. K. Smith, Cartographic, 165.

23. See Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 62.

24. Those who argue Marvell is using celestial poles include Earl J. Schulze, "The Reach of Wit: Marvell's 'The Definition of Love,'" Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 50 (1965): 563–74; King, Marvell's Allegorical Poetry; Berthoff, "Allegorical Metaphor," 24–25; and Pierre Legouis in D. M. Schmitter and Pierre Legouis, "The Cartography of 'The Definition of Love,'" Review of English Studies n.s. 12 (1961): 49–54.

25. Schmitter in Schmitter and Legouis "Cartography," 49–50; and Legouis in Schmitter and Legouis, "Cartography," 52. Norman J. W. Thrower offers a history of the advancement of mapmaking, including the various shapes of planispheres. See his Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). John Parr Snyder also offers an excellent history of planisphere portrayals. See his Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

26. D. K. Smith, Cartographic, 21.

27. Thomas Blundeville, A Plaine Treatise of the First Principles of Cosmography and specially of the Spheare representing the shape of the whole world. In Mr. Bluendeville his Exercises Contayning Eight Treatises, 7th ed., corrected and enlarged by Ro. Hartwell Philomathematicus (London: Richard Bishop, 1638), 279–80, EEBO; and Henry Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra (Rouen: John Cousturier, 1633), 85.

28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 444 and 23, NetLibrary; Descartes, Philosophical Works, 1:4. Descartes goes one step further in dismissing any uncertain method of study: "[I]n our search for the direct road towards truth we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstrations of Arithmetic and Geometry." See his Philosophical Works, 1:5.

29. Hartshorne, Geometry, 9; Plato, Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, intro. and notes Elizabeth Watson Scharffenberger (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 6.221 and 7.239; and Stempel, "'The Garden,'" 101. Besides his recommendation of geography as a subject every statesman and courtier should master, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury also advised the study of mathematics, and for very practical reasons:

It will be fit also to learne Arithmatick and Geometry in some good measure but especially Arithmaticke as being most usefull for many purposes and among the rest for keeping of Accompt, where there is much use; As for the knowledge of Lynes superficies and bodyes though it bee a science of much Certainty and demonstration it is not much usefull for a Gentleman unless it bee to understand Fortification, The knowledge whereof is worthy of those who intend the warres.

See Edward Herbert, The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, written by himself, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 20.

30. J. P. Snyder, Flattening, 3; Cormack, Charting, 14; Hyman, Andrew Marvell, 33; and Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 44.

31. See J. P. Snyder, Flattening, 3; and Blundeville, Plaine Treatise, 270.

32. See Blundeville, Plaine Treatise, 276 and 264. For the collection of geography and geometry texts at Trinity College, see Cormack, Charting, 110.

33. See Cormack, Charting, 28–31; and Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford, 4:44–45, quoted in Cormack, Charting, 29–30.

34. John Foxe, Pandectae. Locorum communium, praecipua rerum capita & titulos, justa ordin em eleme[n]tum complectentes. . . . (Londini: Excudebat Johannes Dayus, 1572). EEBO; Cormack, Charting, 33.

35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 23, par. 12; and Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements; The Works of Archimedes, including the Method; Introduction to Arithmetic by Nichomachus, 2nd ed., Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1990), 10:1–2.

36. Hartshorne, Geometry, 27.

37. T. Wilson, Rule of Reason, 14b; and Blundeville, Arte, 54.

38. H. Ramsey Fowler and Jane E. Aaron, The Little, Brown Handbook, 10th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 896.

39. Hensleigh Wedgewood, The Geometry of the First Three Books of Euclid, by Direct Proof from Definitions Alone (London: Walton and Maberly, 1856), 33, books.google.com/books.

40. Plato, Symposium, trans. Tom Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 200 a–b; and Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 3:5.2, page 177.

41. Rajan, "Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness," 164.

42. George Herbert, "Prayer [1]," in The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 2004), 46.
Chapter Eight

Marvell's "Soul" and "Body": The Dialogue Continues

If there were ever a group of poems supporting Andrew Marvell's reputation of "slipperiness," it is the dialogue poems, a group perhaps composed (or in one case, rewritten) by Marvell anywhere from 1644 to the early 1650s, a group including "A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure," "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," "A Dialogue between Thrysis and Dorinda," and possibly the eclogue "Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-Ropes."1 And, as is natural, since each poem depicts a debate on a particular issue, frustrated readers seek clear evidence of which voice Marvell intends to win the day. This is never clearer than in the maddening impasse of accusations of blame for human and spiritual suffering portrayed in "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," in which the Body is given the last word but not necessarily the prize.

Naturally, critical commentary on the poem centers on which entity, Body or Soul, better defends its position as victim of the other—exactly which entity is responsible for the downfall of man. As Kitty Scoular Datta explains, commentators on the poem differ, with moralists emphasizing the soul's purpose in preserving the body's health and its efforts to keep the body free from disease. However, instead, Marvell has both Body and Soul accuse each other of causing disease, pain, and death. The Soul "warms" the Body's frame only as does a "fever" (lines 15–16), teaching it psychological "maladies" (32) that the Body can feel physically: the "cramp of Hope" (33), the "pestilence of Love" (35), "Hatred's hidden ulcer" (36), and Joy and Sorrow's "madness" (37), resulting in a temporary and miserable preservation of life inevitably ending in death (18). The Body, in turn, forces the Soul "to preserve" it (26) not only to have the Soul "feel, which cannot feel, the pain" (24) of "Diseases" (28), but worse, to prevent the Soul's release in death with the "cure" of "health" (28, 30). Datta correctly believes that by blurring the line of the physicality of disease, Marvell leaves us in between, in "the ambiguous area between flesh and spirit where physical, mental, and moral qualities run together."2

Friedman thinks the theme of man's dual nature "absorbed" Marvell in his later poems, and what better format to explore duality but the dialogue?3 A dialogue is, after all, a liminal experience, a "[v]erbal interchange of thought between two or more persons" (OED n.1. b.), so it actually takes place in between. As in any liminal state, the dialogue is not a static entity but must continually "become," enact itself, in order to exist, evidenced by its identical verb form "dialogue": "[t]o hold a dialogue or conversation" (OED v. 1.). One might hear one side of a dialogue (too often, near a person with a cell phone in his ear), but one can only truly experience a dialogue in the middle of two participants. The role of author in the dialogue also fits Marvell, since it seems to allow him to explore significant issues while remaining totally noncommittal, disappearing behind the voices of his speakers. Yet this supposition fails to give Marvell the credit he deserves since it focuses on a lack of effort rather than an intentional purpose. Marvell does not disappear behind his poetic personae but purposely constructs his poems to portray a process, not a product. An examination of his most enigmatic of dialogues, "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," reveals that the poet has no intention of naming a "winner" in this poetic debate but instead successfully guides his speakers and his readers to a carefully constructed state of possibility, engaging poet, speakers, and readers within the liminal realm of exchange.

Marvell's poem contributes to a long history of the genre. Dialogue or debate, a long-established literary convention, "is held by the Hindus to be as old as Creation itself," reports Thomas Reed, "when the paired gods of Conscience and Creativity argued the world into being." The related formal poetic contest appears in the early Greek comedy of Aristophanes, while the more bucolic debate, explains Friedman, is seen in pastoral poetry as early as that of Theocritus.4 The philosophical dialogue was reportedly invented by Plato to represent the test methods of Socrates. Piehler judges dialogue as "a method of representing thought that has shown itself permanently attractive to the human mind" since it "represents dramatically the process by which truth is elicited." In fact, the stranger in the Sophist supports the view of a dialogue as an activity—an approach to truth—defining thought as "a silent inner conversation of the soul with itself." In his Essay on Man, Ernst Cassirer argues that Plato's creation of dialogue intended to imitate Socrates's view of man as a "creature who is constantly in search of himself—a creature who in every moment of his existence must examine and scrutinize the conditions of his existence."5

And a major issue of scrutiny was the often uneasy relationship of Body and Soul. The very uncertainty of whether the body and soul are separate entities begins the philosophical, religious, and literary conflict. An obvious Biblical support of the conflict between the Body and Soul is found in Galatians 5:17: "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other." In An Exposition of the Creed (1595), William Perkins concludes that the two are independent creations:

As for the soul, it is no accidentarie qualitie, but a spirituall and invisible essence or nature, subsisting by itself. Which plainely appears in that the soules of men have beeing and continuance as well forth of the bodies of men as in the same; and are as wel subject to torments as the bodie is. And whereas we can and doe put in practice sundry actions of life, sense, motion, understanding, we doe it onely by the power and vertue of the soule.

Thus the soul is represented visually in illuminated manuscripts and emblem books as a separate being, according to Rosalie Osmond, usually a naked, sexless, rather childlike figure, described by Robert Ackerman as a "homunculus" in paintings of the Last Judgment. 6 However, the body did not share this ability to exist separately. Jonathan Sawday explains that in Western thought, before the "new science" of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the body could not be considered as a separate physical entity apart from the soul: "To consider the body in isolation was not merely difficult but, strictly speaking, impossible, since the body's primary function, it was held, was to act as a vessel of containment for the more significant feature of the soul."7

The one constant in the question of body and soul, then, is that humans were made of both body and soul, placing them in the liminal position between pure matter and pure spirit, as Paul Kocher describes, "the sole battleground of spirit with flesh and therefore the bearer of a burden known to no other creature." But how exactly the body and soul are joined and which is the primary source of human suffering are the issues fueling many literary body-soul debates. Plato in his Timaeus specifies three parts of the soul and assigns each to a specific part of the body, a concept that survived into the seventeenth century. He places the rational part of the soul to the head, the soul's emotional faculty (anger and courage) to the area around the heart, and appetite to the lower part of the body around the stomach. He compares the neck to an isthmus, separating the rational part of the soul from contamination by the lower faculties:

Wherefore, since they scrupled to pollute the divine, unless through absolute necessity, they planted the mortal kind apart therefrom in another chamber of the body, building an isthmus and boundary for the head and chest by setting between them the neck, to the end that they might remain apart.8

But does the body cause the soul to suffer or vice versa? Aristotle presents a mutually dependent relationship between body and soul in which the soul actually benefits from the union since it is only through the body that the soul can function: "[T]here seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body." Even the act of thinking, Aristotle determines, requires imagination, and imagination "requires a body as a condition of its existence." However, the majority of treatises emphasize the incompatibility of soul and body, only differing on which entity suffers the most from the union. The body as a prison for the soul is found in countless poems ranging from Quarles's direct statement, "My Soul is like a bird, my flesh the cage" to Herbert's less extreme view in "Home":

O loose this frame, this knot of men untie!

That my free soul may use her wing,

Which now is pinioned with mortality,

As an entangled, hampered thing. (lines 54–57)

Donne echoes the position of the Body as a prison of the Soul in his Sermon at Lincoln's Inn, delivered during the spring of 1618:

I have not body enough for my body, and I have too much body for my soul; not body enough, not bloud enough, not strength enough to sustain my self in health, and yet body enough to destroy my soul, and frustrate the grace of God in that miserable, perplexed, riddling condition of man; sin makes the body of man miserable, and the remedy of sin, mortification, makes it miserable too; If we enjoy the good things of this world. . . wee doe but carry an other wall about our prison, an other story of unwieldy flesh about our souls; and if wee give our selves as much mortification as our body needs, we live a life of Fridays, and see no Sabbath, we make up our years of Lents and see no other Easters.9

Supporting the view of the Soul as trapped within the body, Hermann Hugo's Pia Desideria (1624) pictures the soul trapped within a human skeleton both in Book 3, no. xxxviii and no. iv. In his 1686 "Englished" edition of Hugo, Pia Desideria: or, Divine Addresses, Edmund Arwaker offers two similar illustrations: the soul trapped within the skeleton on page 218 with the motto, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Rom. 7.24"; and on page 230, an illustration of the Soul trapped in a cage with the motto, "Bring my Soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name. Psal. 142.9." On the facing page, Arwaker translates the Latin couplets in Hugo's 1624 edition, indicating an obvious source of Marvell's images in his "Dialogue between the Soul and Body":

Who did once thro th'airs wide Regions rove,

Free Denizon of the vast Realm above;

Now to a narrow Dungeon am confin'd,

A hole that darkens and restrains my mind.

When first my Soul put on its fleshly load,

It was imprison'd in the dark abode;

My feet were fetters, my hands manacles,

My sinews chains, and all confinements else;

My bones the bars of my loath'd Prison-grate;

My tongue the turnkey, and my mouth the gate.10

But writings from Plotinus (204–270 CE) to Burton (1577–1640) acknowledge, as does Marvell's portrayal of mutual suffering in "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," that the necessary linking of body and soul brings suffering to both. Plotinus actually sees the unity of body and soul as a liminal state, so the cause of pain in both:

Pleasure and pain and the like must not be attributed to the Soul alone, but to the modified body and to something intermediary between soul and body and made up of both. A unity is independent; thus body alone, a lifeless thing, can suffer no hurt—in its dissolution there is no damage to the body, but merely to its unity—and soul in similar isolation cannot even suffer dissolution, and by its very nature is immune from evil. But when two distinct things become one in an artificial unity, there is a probable source of pain to them in the mere fact that they were inapt to partnership. This does not of course, refer to two bodies; that is a question of one nature, and I am speaking of two natures. When one distinct nature seeks to associate itself with another, a different, order of being . . . then the essential duality becomes also a unity but a unity standing midway between what the lower was and what it cannot absorb, and therefore a troubled unity.

Though Robert Burton does acknowledge the mutual suffering imposed by the union of body and soul, he tends to support the body's side in Marvell's dialogue:

[A]s the body works upon the mind by his bad humours, troubling the spirits, sending gross fumes into the brain and so per consequens disturbing the soul, and all the faculties of it, . . . so, on the other side, the mind most effectually works upon the body producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, as melancholy, despair, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself; insomuch, that it is most true which Plato saith in his Charmides, . . . all the mischiefs of the body proceed from the soul.11

Part of the interpretation of culpability hinges on the gender of Body and of Soul, which fluctuated from classical times to the seventeenth century. Considered independently, the most common visual and linguistic concept of the soul is feminine, anima, inspired by the Greek myth of Psyche. Boethius's likewise presents a feminine-related figure Philosophia in Consolations of Philosophy. Aristotle complicates things with his account of the process of reproduction, attributing the "matter" of a child to the woman, but the "form" or "soul" of the new life to the man. From there, Osmond explains, Church Fathers had an easy leap to connect the corrupting Body with woman, following the biblical account of Eve's fault in the fall of Man: "Thus it was that the initial temptation to sin comes from the body (Eve) while the soul (Adam) has right to assent or refuse." Jeremy Taylor's sermon "The Marriage Ring" stresses this relationship, though indicates it as loving and mutually beneficial:

The dominion of a Man over his Wife is no other than as the soul rules the body, for which it takes a mighty care, and uses it with delicate tendernesse, and cares for it in all contingencies, and watches to keep it from all evils, and studies to make for it fair provisions, and very often is led by its inclinations and desires, and does never contradict its appetites, but when they are evill, and then not without some trouble and sorrow; and its government comes only to this, it furnishes the body with light and understanding, and the body furnishes the soul with hands and feet.

Yet Saint Augustine proves that even this issue is irresolvable, blaming the Soul as the damning influence: "For the corruption of the body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of the first sin; and it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful, but the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible."12

What better characters to oppose in a formal dialogue? With precedents in ancient literatures, including Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian examples, poetic versions of the debate between the Body and Soul proved "an inexhaustibly popular" subgenre of medieval debate literature, with examples surviving in Old and Middle English, Latin, Greek, French, Provençal-Catalan, Italian, Czech, White Russian, Polish, Armenian, and Syriac. Prose examples also survive in Latin, Old Norwegian, Old Icelandic, Old Castilian, and Hungarian literature. The literary debate or dialogue is the perfect format to explore an issue in a noncommittal manner because it is an in-between genre, if a genre at all. It has enjoyed an ambiguous position, not only between narrative and drama, but also, as K. J. Wilson contends, "in between conceptions, purposes, moods, feelings—in between traditions or institutions and their times." Reed finds in medieval dialogue poems "curious but marked formal and ideological irresolution":

[T]hese poems—from their choice of subject matter to the highly particularized interest they take in each of their characters and those characters' arguments—often seem less interested in settling on a winner than in the apprehension or appreciation (in the multiple senses of the words) of the differences that give rise to the debates.13

Aristotle excluded dialogues in his writings, admitting, "We have no term to denote the class that includes the farces of Sophron and Xenarchus, and Socratic dialogues." Aristotle judged Socratic dialogues as insufficiently dramatic yet overly didactic. A main reason why dialogues are sometimes not treated as a genre, Virginia Cox explains, is "the sheer variety of different 'kinds' of writing encompassed by this most slippery of terms": "A Renaissance work which calls itself a dialogue may be anything from a language-teaching primer to a comic verse exchange between animals; anything from a primitive catechism to Ciceronian debate on the immortality of the soul." It is a form of metacommunication, a type of interaction, as explained in chapter 2, in which the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. As Cox comments, all dialogues are concerned in some way with communication itself:

The dialogue is unique among the familiar genres of argument and exposition in that, at the same time as presenting a body of information or opinion, it also represents the process by which that information or opinion is transmitted to a particular audience at a particular place and time.

Piehler also believes this format represents not an end result but a process, "a method of representing thought which has shown itself permanently attractive to the human mind" that "represents dramatically the process by which truth is elucidated."14 Therefore, it is a liminal genre, in between performance and interpretation, enacting the action of thought and communication not only between characters portrayed but between poet and characters, poet and reader, and characters and reader.

Dialogues can differ in author intent and audience reception, from a carefully crafted persuasive drama like Plato's dialogues, in which the conversation inevitably leads speakers and audience to clear conclusion, to an open-ended, inconclusive exchange that, in its uncertain conclusion, engages the author, speakers, and audience into an in-between realm of possibility. Reed describes two extremes of dialogues (though few fit totally into either): "vertical" debates and "horizontal" debates or dialogue. Vertical debates (which constituted the majority of medieval debates) involve an exchange between a naive persona and an authority with the obvious claim to moral superiority. A popular example is Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Normally, these debates culminate with the naive character converting to the authority's side. Marvell's "Dialogue between the Soul and Body" better fits the horizontal debate or dialogue, in which the conversation is between two voices who hold relatively equal status, like Reason against Passion: "Although Reason may enjoy a privileged position in the hierarchy of traditional faculty psychology, it is by no means guaranteed victory in the dispute," Reed explains. In the intent to omit clear lines of superiority in a horizontal or inconclusive dialogue, the author produces a liminal realm akin to the shadowy sfumato of visual arts, drawing the reader within the uncertain area of dispute. Hauser agrees that all art, literary and well as visual, is, in some way, dialectical: "A work of art is a dialectical structure not only as content that has been formed, . . . but also—and indeed, primarily—as an utterance which develops by continued interaction between author and audience. . . . The persons addressed by the artist are not merely recipients, mute and passive listeners, or spectators, but partners in a dialogue."15

Cox agrees with the visual image of uncertainty, commenting, "The oral exchange depicted in a dialogue acts as a kind of fictional shadow to the literary transaction" between the reader and the text, conveying at least some of the same information, with a similar intent. Thus, "each word, each argument in a written dialogue is simultaneously part of a fictional conversation and an actual literary exchange." David Simpson adds that reader involvement in the piece changes: "Instead of adopting a posture of passive reception embellished by delight, we have to involve ourselves actively in sorting out the claims of the rivals. . . . [W]e have to add up the points scored on all sides." Since the reader is not given clear criteria to judge, he has to decide on the "rules" and create a sense of the strengths and weaknesses in the arguments, which will naturally be affected by the reader's own disposition and interests, all of which are also called into question. Thus the reader, according to Simpson, "becomes actively involved in the production of meaning" and the author virtually disappears.16

Marvell's contributions to the dialogue genre join many at the time. Wilson reports that the number of dialogues almost quadrupled in the second half of the sixteenth century, from 56 recorded from 1500–1558 to 206 dialogues recorded from 1558–1603. Why the increasing popularity? It may simply be passing fashion, but Cox believes that the popularity of a form like the dialogue that "stages" the act of communication indicates that the age perceives this act as "problematic." Some possible problem areas include "the breakdown of traditional certainties, a failure of confidence in the concept of certainty itself, a major shift in the medium or audience of literary discourse." The dialogue format may, then, be seen as "a symptom of an unease with the conventions which govern the transmission of knowledge within a society, and a desire to reform them by returning to a study of the roots of persuasion."17 If a writer no longer feels comfortable as the conventional author of a monologue form of literary discourse, he or she might choose to bring the voices of contention together and allow them to work out for themselves a new level of discourse. One would be hard pressed to find a century of more "unease with convention" from religious, civil, and scientific upheavals than the seventeenth century, and Marvell's grammar school and university training provided the perfect background for debate.

Though, as discussed in chapter 2, Marvell's attendance at Hull grammar school is uncertain, Joel B. Altman explains that records do confirm that the dialogue was "deliberately cultivated by the humanists" in Tudor-Stuart grammar schools, for the purpose of producing "men of firm moral conviction whose rhetorical skills would equip them for responsible public life." At the same time they were immersed in Christian ethics, schoolboys were taught to consider at least two sides of every question in subjects drawn from history to proverbs. Erasmus offers an example topic in his concept of the curriculum for St. Paul's: "Which of the two shows less wisdom, Crates who cast his gold into the sea, or Midas who cherished it as his supreme good?" As the student moved on to the epistle, he again was taught to imagine himself "in circumstances utterly unlike his own," fostering an awareness of possible situations. In still later exercises, the student was required to analyze a subject more deeply, approaching it from different points of view in the paired exercises of destructio (proving the weaknesses of a position) and confirmatio (supporting a position).18

Emphasis on dialogue and debate continued in the university curriculum. Marvell matriculated from 1633 to 1641 at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the first four years of study were devoted to rhetoric and with set texts including Quintilian, Hermogenes, and any of Cicero's speeches. Two out of the four years for the B.A. degree concentrated specifically on dialectic, particularly Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations and Cicero's Topica. In reviewing the classical and ecclesiastical authors and works Marvell probably studied, John Klause lists Seneca's Consolationes and De providentia (which Klause believes directly influenced "A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure"), Augustine, Lucretius, Lucan, Cicero's De natura decorum, Horace's Odes, Julian the Apostate, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Nectarius, and Cyril of Alexandria.19 Marvell himself admits in The Rehearsal Transpros'd that these studies taught one "how to erect a Thesis, and to defend it Pro or Con with a serviceable distinction."20 But perhaps more influential in Marvell's inconclusive dialogue poems is the general environment of Cambridge during Marvell's studies. Hunt describes Trinity College as "a miniature version of the religious disputes at large in the country," in between the more Puritan Emmanuel College and the more "ritualist" Peterhouse. More than Oxford, Cambridge resisted reforms proposed by Laud, the chancellor at Oxford who, at the time of Marvell's matriculation in 1633, was named archbishop of Canterbury. Marvell was also influenced by Roman Catholicism since it was believed Jesuits were infiltrating Cambridge, and Marvell himself reportedly converted to Roman Catholicism briefly in 1639; in any case, he and Catholic Richard Crashaw did publish in the same 1637 university volume of congratulatory verse on the birth of a daughter to King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria.21

As a Trinity candidate, Marvell would have been required to undergo two disputations in the public schools and two formal responses in college in the four years of residence. Though Marvell was not awarded the M.A., he did stay in residence at Trinity after the bachelor's degree, obviously planning to continue to the master's. For the M.A., the bachelors were required to respond to a master three times, to respond twice in disputations in hall, and to declaim once.22 Sister Miriam Joseph, Henry Peacham, and Thomas Wilson detail the types of rhetorical devices one might utilize in a formal early modern disputation, and we see several in this "Dialogue": metaphor, described by Joseph as "a trope based on similitude" (the Body as "this dungeon," line 1); paradox and puns, called by Peacham antanaclasis, "a figure which repeateth a word that hath two significations, and the one of them contrary, or at least, unlike to the other" (the self-reflexive "manacled in hands" [line 4], "blinded with an eye" [5], "Deaf with the drumming of an ear" [6], and several other paradoxical and pun-based images); martyria, which Peacham defines as a "forme of speech by which a Speaker or Orator confirmith some thing by his own experience" (the personal lament of each speech); interrogatio, defined by Peacham as a type of rhetorical question, "when we aske not with intent or desire to receive an answer, but onely because we would thereby make our speech more sharpe and vehement, and much better further our purpose" (the question that begins each of the first three speeches: "O who shall, from this dungeon, raise. . . ?" [line 1], "O who shall me deliver whole. . . ?" [11], and "What magic could me thus confine. . . ?" [21]) or percontatio, a rhetorical question which Thomas Wilson describes as asking "because we would chide, and set forth our griefe with more vehemencie" (also fitting the first three speeches); categoria, in which an opponent, in Peacham's words, "openeth and detecteth some secret wickednesse of his adversary, and laieth it open before his face" (describing all parts of the poem); and finally, ara, "a form of speech by which the Orator detesteth, and curseth some person or thing, for the evils which they bring with them or for the wickednesse which is in them" (again, the entire poem fits this category).23

In fact, by structure, one could place "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body" in the early modern university disputation model. The disputation exercise began as a question, generally a specific proposition, posed by the moderator. Here with the dialogue itself, Marvell implies the unstated question, "Who pays the greater price in the union of Soul and Body that makes us human?" Donald J. Millus judges the premise as a "striking example of the impact of Renaissance science upon the poetic imagination," since traditional medieval debates of soul and body take place at the time of death, but Marvell's dialogue captures the tedious sufferings during life, as the body and soul struggle to endure life together. The second part of the disputation is the position held by the first response, here given to the Soul, who describes his agonies of being imprisoned within the body's confining bones, feet, and hands, limiting eye and deafening ear; chained by the connecting nerves, arteries, and veins; and tormented by the vanity and inconstancy of the body's physicality:24

Soul

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise

A soul enslaved in so many ways?

With bolts of bones, that fettered stands

In feet; and manacled in hands.

Here blinded with any eye; and there

Deaf with the drumming of an ear.

A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains

Of nerves, and arteries, and veins.

Tortured, besides each other part,

In a vain head, and double heart. (lines 1–10)

John Carey sees this restriction, this "condition of being thwarted, confined, or enmeshed," as a "constant irritant" in Marvell's poetry. And because Marvell creates restrictions out of what they restrict, they, in essence, disappear so one cannot escape. In "Eyes and Tears," how can one dissolve "liquid chains" that "fetter" the Redeemer's feet" (lines 31–32)? In "The Fair Singer," how can one cut "fetters" created from "the very air" one breathes (12)? As many have remarked, in "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," Marvell outdoes himself in the self-reflecting aspects of this imagery, a tendency, as discussed, that Christopher Ricks compares to Escher's Drawing Hands (figure 6.1). Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) offers striking anatomical illustrations that support the imprisoning and self-torturing aspects of the Body's and Soul's sufferings. In Vesalius's monumental work De humani corpus fabrica, we see the results of postmedieval anatomy studies that also illustrate Marvell's tortured images (figures 8.1 and 8.2). As Millus comments, "It was only during Marvell's lifetime . . . that the discoveries of William Harvey regarding circulation were brought to light," allowing the poet to employ such novel and striking images as "bolts of bones" (line 3); chains "Of nerves, and arteries, and veins" (8); and a "double" chambered heart (10).25

Figure 8.1. On the Fabric of the Human Body. Vol 2: Ligaments & Muscles. By Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Translated by William F. Richardson and John B. Carman. San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1999, 49.

Figure 8.2. On the Fabric of the Human Body. Vol 4: The Organs of Nutrition and Generation. By Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Translated by William F. Richardson and John B. Carman. Novato: Norman Publishing, 2007, 206.

These dramatic images, then, heighten the Soul's introductory first response in the formal disputation, after which the opponent (Body) offers his introductory statement, then his first argument directed against the respondent's conclusion.26 In the Body's balanced ten-line response, we see a similar complaint of the terrifying and ever-enduring "possession" endured by the Body, the Soul's racking and impaling of the helpless figure, offering only in return the warmth and movement of life, but simultaneously condemning it to restlessness and death:

Body

O who shall me deliver whole,

From bonds of this tyrannic soul?

Which, stretched upright, impales me so,

That my own precipice I go;

And warms and moves this needless frame:

(A fever could but do the same).

And, wanting where its spite to try,

Has made me live to let me die.

A body that could never rest,

Since this ill spirit it possessed. (lines 11–20).

Ricks's entangled comments on these images mirror their convolutedness:

The Body is both what falls and what it falls down, by a nightmare of self-division such as induces a vertigo in the mere thought. . . and 'impales' even adds some fear that the Body, 'stretcht upright', is not only that which falls and that which it falls down, but also that which it falls upon.27

Like "all things" in the meadow of "Appleton House," we "doubt / If [the Body] be in it or without" ("Appleton," lines 637–38).

Fulfilling the next (fourth) step in the formal disputation model, the respondent (Soul) repeats the opponent's argument, both for the audience's benefit and to clarify that they are both addressing the same point. Then he denies the opponent's argument, perhaps giving reasons.28 Here, in stanza 3, the Soul acknowledges the affliction detailed by the Body but retorts that any suffering the Body experiences pains the intertwined Soul as well: the Soul is "confine[d]" (line 21) within the "grief" (22) of the Body, and every "complain[t]" (23) voiced by the Body is vicariously felt by the Soul ("I feel, that cannot feel, the pain" [24]). In his denial of the Body's argument, the Soul stresses its efforts to preserve the Body—"all my care itself employs, / That to preserve, which me destroys" (25–26), even though those efforts keep the Soul trapped within an earthly prison, suffering not only from the Body's "Diseases" but, far worse, the "cure" (28) that heals the Body and so prevents the Soul's release from physical bondage. Instead of gaining the "port" (29) of heaven, the Soul finds itself "shipwracked" (30) into a life on earth.

In the fifth step of the formal disputation, the opponent either presses the respondent for a fuller reply or makes another argument, perhaps establishing a weak spot upon which to renew his attack on the respondent's main point.29 Here, the Body refers back to the Soul's image of disease, stressing that the Soul's lessons in sin far outweigh any physical ailment and cure the Soul must endure with the Body: "But physic could never reach / The maladies thou me doth teach" (lines 31–32). Because the point is that the Soul intentionally inflicts the Body with these spiritual maladies, the Body succeeds in arguing that the Soul's attacks are worse since calculated, not like the unavoidable experience of physical affliction experienced by the Body and therefore imposed on the Soul. In intensifying its accusations, the Body identifies the nonphysical and perhaps worse "maladies" it would never know if not for the Soul's vindictiveness: dashed Hope (33), palsied Fear (34), Love's pestilence (35), ulcerous Hate (36), unfounded Joy (37), maddening Sorrow (38).

Marvell ends the poem by extending the Body's rebuttal, omitting the normal remaining four steps: sixth, the respondent's reply of repeating the argument and denying it; seventh, the opponent's pressing for a better response or declaring that the respondent's argument is absurd or self-contradictory; eighth, a clarification of the argument by the respondent and a repetition of the new argument, to confirm or deny it; and finally the ninth, a clarification of the argument by the opponent, and a final assertion by the respondent that "the premises are wrong, the argument is ill-formed or that a distinction needs to be made in the use of terms."30 The four extra lines are an item of contention about the transmission and meaning of the poem as well as Marvell's intention of who wins the debate. Leishman assures us, "The poem as we have it is almost certainly incomplete," citing not only the additional four lines but also the impression that the poem "seems rather to stop than to conclude." More textual evidence appears to confirm his hypothesis in "Thompson's second manuscript book," an imperfect copy of the 1681 folio, now in the Bodleian Library (MS Eng. poet. d. 49). An anonymous corrector drew his pen through the last four lines of the fourth stanza and wrote, "Desunt multa" ("much is missing"). Though Leishman believes Marvell continued his dialogue for several more ten-line stanzas and these last four lines were simply a remnant, Nigel Smith acknowledges that the anonymous corrector might or might not have known for sure that the poem was incomplete.31 In several ways, these last four lines do differ from the rest of this stanza and seem to serve as an end-framing device, similar to the first stanza and last two stanzas in "Damon the Mower." After addressing the Soul as "thou" in line 33, the Body switches to third person, lumping his personal Soul with any generic soul, a "what" and not a "who," and seeming to ignore the Soul in a direct appeal to the reader ("What but a soul could have the wit / To build me up for sin so fit?" [41–42]). The analogy of the Soul and an architect, "squar[ing] and hew[ing]" (43) the natural Body from nature into art/artifice links the Body's plight to the Renaissance commonplace of nature vs. art (best illustrated by Marvell in "The Mower against Gardens"), generally critical of art so supporting the Body's case.

But does the last word mean the Body wins? Summers thinks so, with the Body ironically resolving the argument with the final four lines: "Without the soul the body would be truly a part of nature and could not sin." Likewise Sean McDowell contends that if we focus on the "logistics of human embodiment, as these were understood in seventeenth-century English culture," the Body "score[s] the most points." Taking the opposite side on the issue, Freidman thinks the Soul wins, as does Joseph Pequigney, who notes that at Cambridge, the defendant gave his speech first, so Marvell intends the Soul to be the defendant. He sees the "implicit thesis" in all four parts of the "Dialogue" to be "In the human compound of body and soul, the body inflicts greater evil than the soul." Craze, however, advocates the Body's argument that it suffers the worse from the Soul's tyranny, and Datta agrees, admitting that, though there is nothing particularly attractive in a Body as a tree, "every reader of Marvell's poem feels the attractiveness of the Body's last word. . . . The spiritual voyage of the precipice or house-building may suit the Soul, but the Body prefers lying prone on growing green in the forest."32 Laurence Lerner, Michel-André Bossy, Rees, and Frank J. Warnke see the balance of the couplet as a draw, indicative of the balance of creative/destructive results of man's attempts to shape nature. The comparison of the Soul to architects rather blurs the religious and cultural concerns, indicating the Soul's spiritual efforts of shaping the Body might be a kind of "subtle worldliness," since sophistication and artifice are normally associated with sin.33

And here is another point to consider. If readers agree with Peter Berek that the "Soul and Body present themselves as a comic duo," they should also acknowledge that these passionate speakers are not necessarily telling the truth about their plights. Reed explains that in university disputations, a debater was not bound to adhere to the truth and accuracy in arguments, but must "simply observe the rules of what could almost be called a game, conducted for its own simple end—the defeat of the opponent"; thus readers cannot simply judge the strength of each side, since the Body's/Soul's complaints may be contrived. Cox puts the issue of verity much more politely: using Castiglione as a focus, she argues that in issues in which error is too possible, dialogues help get as close to the truth as possible by combining rational reasons and not committing to error. Training in this kind of thought could be seen, according to Jean Dunbabin, as "a means to an end, as a training in mental discipline which could be turned to profit in 'worldly business,'" giving both Oxford and Cambridge graduates the ability "to see two sides of a problem, to apply authority flexibly in solving it, and to defend his action articulately." Marvell himself could have used this ability in Parliament, since debate played a big role in its work, and Parliament members' conduct was overseen, explains Reed, by clerks and judges formally trained in declamations by the universities and Inns of Court. Thus, Marvell probably had ample experience in weighing sides.34

Normally, the judgment of which side wins the university declamation exercise falls to the master, who concludes with the "determination," in which he specifies the weaknesses and strengths of both sides, resolves any conflicting points of view, and offers a definitive resolution to the issue. Of course, as earlier mentioned, early modern university debates did not all resolve definitively. Dialogues differed in author intent and audience reception, from a carefully crafted persuasive "vertical debate" like Plato's dialogues, in which the conversation inevitably leads speakers and audience to a clear conclusion, to the "horizontal debate," which Northrop Frye defines as those "in which two sides of a question are argued at length and then submitted to an umpire, who often postpones or puts off the decision."35 Yet, Marvell leaves us with no umpire, no promise of a later decision—an open-ended, inconclusive exchange that, in its uncertain conclusion, engages the author, speakers, and audience into an in-between realm of possibility.

Marvell not only recognized the inconclusiveness of his ending but intended it, creating what Rajan terms a "do-it-yourself" poem, one that is "inconclusive because it solicits completion by the reader," creating a liminal space of intrigue. The silencing of the Soul before finishing all parts of the classical disputation reiterates the interdependence of the two indivisible parts of man and therefore indicates an impasse of culpability. Osmond interprets the uncertainty of the images of architects and green trees in the final couplet as evidencing the impasse:

The soul will not allow the body to fulfill itself simply as a part of inanimate nature like the 'Green Tree' but must square and hew it to its own designs; the body will always be unmalleable material and will cramp and hinder the soul. It will never be able to be a fitting and concrete expression of the soul's vision.36

Marvell's poem is inconclusive because his objective is inconclusiveness. Only in a noncommittal conclusion can readers continue to be engaged in the "Beholder's Share," continue the omitted parts of the disputation in their own minds.

Thus the real dialogue is not between the Soul and Body but between Marvell and ourselves. W. J. T. Mitchell thinks we as humans "can not live without dialectic, at least at the human level of dialogue," judging the world to be made up of two kinds of people: "those who believe in binary opposition and those who do not." This is especially true if one agrees with Hauser that all literature—all art itself—is a dialogue "between the productive and the receptive subject":

A work of art is a dialectical structure not only as content that has been formed, . . . but also—and, indeed, primarily—as an utterance which develops by continued interaction between author and audience. . . . The persons addressed by the artist are not merely recipients, mute and passive listeners, or spectators, but partners in a dialogue. . . . The public plays an anonymous and concealed role as a partner in the developing dialogue.37

By leaving us in the liminal realm of uncertainty in "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body," as in all his lyrics, Marvell succeeds in continuing the conversation.

Notes

1. "Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-Ropes" is generally classified as a "simple pastoral eclogue." See Nigel Smith, ed., The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2007), 146. Smith summarizes the theories about the composition of "A Dialogue between Thrysis and Dorinda" in Poems, 243–44.

2. Kitty Scoular Datta, "New Light on Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body,'" Renaissance Quarterly 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1969): 246–50.

3. Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 48.

4. Thomas L. Reed Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 98; and Friedman, Pastoral Art, 48. Reed gives an excellent historical background of Middle English debates. See his Middle English, 98–105.

5. Paul Piehler, The Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Allegory (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), 31; Plato, The Sophist, in Theaetelus and Sophist, trans. Harold North Fowler, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), 7:441; and Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 5–6.

6. William Perkins, The Works of that Famous and Worthie Minister of Christ, in The Universitie of Cambridge, M. W. Perkins (London: Iohn Legatt, 1626), 152–53, EEBO; Rosalie Osmond, Mutual Accusations: Seventeenth-Century Body and Soul Dialogues in their Literary and Theological Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 127; and Robert W. Ackerman, "The Debate of the Body and the Soul and Parochial Christianity," Speculum 37 (1962): 549. Because of this belief in a viable Soul, and also because of the concept that, at death, the corpse briefly retained "an independent will" and ability to "reason and speak," most Body-Soul dialogues were set at the moment of death and the separation of the two parts of man, so Marvell's presentation of the dialogue in the midst of the tribulations of life is rather unique. See Ackerman, "Debate," 549.

7. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 16.

8. Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1953), 225; and Plato, The Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1949), 69c.

9. Aristotle, On the Soul, in On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2; Francis Quarles, Emblemes (Cambridge: Printed by R.D. for Francis Englesfeild, 1643), 5.x, page 285; Herbert, "Home," 100; and John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 2:63.

10. Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria, or Divine Addresses in three books, Englished by Edm. Arwaker (London: Printed by J. L. for Henry Bonwicke, 1686), 231, lines 1–10, EEBO. Rees believes that Marvell's "supposed Catholic conversion" could have influenced his visual images. The striking similarities in Jesuit Hugo's graphic descriptions and those of Marvell in "A Dialogue" certainly support that view. See Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter, 1989), 11.

11. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 4.4.18, page 301; and Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Arthur Richard Shilleto and Arthur Henry Bullen (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), 1:288.

12. For Plotinus and the Church Fathers, see Rosalie Osmond, "Body, Soul, and the Marriage Relationship: The History of an Analogy," Journal of the History of Ideas, 34, no. 2 (April–June, 1973): 283–84, 286; Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, revised Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1134; Jeremy Taylor, "The Marriage Ring," in Eniautos: A Course of Sermons for All the Sundaies of the Year (London: Printed for Richard Roysten at the Angel in Ivie-Lane, 1653), 233, EEBO; and Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 14.444.

13. Ackerman, "Debate," 542; J. K. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of the English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 4; and Reed, Middle English, 1–2.

14. Aristotle, On the Art of Fiction: An English Translation of Aristotle's Poetics, ed. L. J. Potts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 18; Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4–5; Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 178; Cox, Renaissance Dialogue, 4–5; and Piehler, Visionary Landscape, 31.

15. Reed, Middle English, 3; and Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 437.

16. Cox, Renaissance Dialogue, 5; and David Simpson, "Hume's Intimate Voices and the Method of Dialogue," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21, no. 1 (1979): 71.

17. J. K. Wilson, Incomplete, ix; and Cox, Renaissance Dialogue, 7.

18. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 43–47; Erasmus quoted in Altman, Tudor Play, 44.

19. For the Trinity College curriculum, see Cambridge University Commission, Documents Relating to the University and Colleges of Cambridge (London: Printed by G. Eyre and W. Spottiswood for H.M.S.O., 1852), 1:457; and also John Klause, The Unfortunate Fall: Theodicy and the Moral Imagination of Andrew Marvell (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 129 and 185, note 23.

20. Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelainis, N. H. Keeble, and Nicholas von Maltzahn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:75. Of course, this quote is part of Marvell's ridicule of Samuel Parker's disdain for education, since after his training in rhetoric "he therefore exchanged the narrowness of the University for the Town." See Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros'd, in Patterson et al., Prose Works, 1:75–76.

21. John Dixon Hunt, Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 21, 24, 200.

22. Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58. William T. Costello describes a disputation as "a debate between students on the matter learned in the lectures or privately from tutors," which often revolved around syllogisms. The aim was to force the opponent to acknowledge parts of his argument as wrong. A declamation, on the other hand, was "a set speech, designed to show rhetorical and literary proficiency." See Costello's The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 14, 20, and 32.

23. See Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 328; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: Printed by R[ichard] F[ield] for H. Iackson, 1593), 56, 85, and 105, EEBO; Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logike (London: Thom Kyngston, 1580), 184, EEBO; and Peacham, Garden, 64 and 80.

24. Donald J. Millus, "Andrew Marvell, Andreas Vesalius, and a Medieval Tradition," Yale University Library Gazette 47 (1973): 216; and Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 58.

25. John Carey, "Reversals Transposed: An Aspect of Marvell's Imagination," in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 138; Christopher Ricks, "'Its own resemblance,'" in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 114; Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body. A Translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, ed. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman (Novato, CA: Norman Publishing, 2002); and Millus, "Andrew Marvell," 217.

26. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 58.

27. Ricks, ""Its own resemblance,'" in Patrides, Approaches, 115.

28. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 58.

29. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 58.

30. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 58–59.

31. J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 216; and Smith, Poems, 61.

32. Joseph Summers, "Marvell's Nature," English Literary History 20 (1953): 128; Sean McDowell, "Lived Experience in Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body,'" paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the South-Central Renaissance Conference, Houston, Texas, March 2006; Friedman, Pastoral Art, 73; Joseph Pequigney, "Marvell's 'Soul' Poetry," in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 91; Michael Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell (London: Macmillan, 1979), 292; and Datta, "New Light," 254.

33. Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 186; Michel-André Bossy, "Medieval Debates of Body and Soul," Comparative Literature 28, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 162; Rees, Judgment, 70; and Frank J. Warnke, "Play and Metamorphosis in Marvell's Poetry," Studies in English Literature 5, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 29.

34. Peter Berek, "The Voices of Marvell's Lyrics," Modern Language Quarterly 32, no. 3 (June 1974): 143; Reed, Middle English, 46; Cox, Renaissance Dialogue, 49; Jean Dunbabin, "Careers and Vocations," in The History of the University of Oxford , ed. J. I. Catto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2000), 1:573; and Reed, Middle English, 88–90.

35. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism . . . Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 299.

36. Rajan, "Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness," 160; and Osmond, Mutual Accusations, 100.

37. W. J. T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory," in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 298; and Hauser, Sociology of Art, 436–37.

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About the Author

Joan Faust is a professor of English and Undergraduate Coordinator at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. She is executive secretary of the Andrew Marvell Society and represents the Andrew Marvell Society on the executive board of the South-Central Renaissance Conference. She serves as local chair for the annual John Donne Conference and also serves on the editorial board of the journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture. She has presented and published on Marvell, Donne, Milton, Dante, and other medieval and early modern topics.

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