SOURCE: "The Actor and the Man of Action: Marveil's Horatian Ode," in The Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3, Winter, 1967, pp. 145-50.

I

It is difficult to recover one's first impression of the Ode but probably for most readers the following description would cover it: The poem celebrates Cromwell's victory in Ireland and looks forward to future greatness for England, but in passing pays a beautiful tribute to the dignity of Charles, whose death was the necessary and unfortunate precursor of the present happy state of affairs.

Very quickly, however, as we give more attention to the poem, we discover an undertone qualifying this first impression. The tribute to Charles remains static; but Charles is not the subject of the poem. Cromwell is its subject, and Cromwell alters as our focus narrows on him. He has ruined 'the great Work of time'. He is 'Fate' over-ruling 'Justice' and 'the antient Rights'. His government is 'the forced Pow'r', achieved by the destruction of the 'helpless Right' of Charles. There can be no reasonable argument which denies that these aspects qualify the celebration; but it will be relevant to the latter part of my discussion to describe at this point how, some years ago, I misread the poem by giving my attention exclusively to them. 'And, if we would speak true,/Much to the Man is due.' Yes, much indeed!—the ruining of the great Work of time, the ultimate vandalism. That was the tone of voice I concluded belonged to the poem, and I was able to extend it even into lines 73 to 112, in which Cromwell's recent and forthcoming triumphs are presented. The lines on the Irish were no obstacle.

It was easy (though wrong) to read as sarcasm this tribute put into the mouths of a people who still speak of'the Curse of Cromwell'. And with a little ingenuity I was able to extend that sarcasm into the passages that follow. I had soon persuaded myself (and my class) that the Ode was a strongly Royalist poem thinly veiled (probably for the extra pleasure friends of that persuasion would have in seeing through it) as a tribute to Cromwell. Mr. Cleanth Brooks¹ was right, but he had not gone far enough.

Returning to the Ode some years later, having recovered from the exercise, I was surprised (and chastened) to find it the poem I had first read: a celebration of Cromwell. Further readings restored many (not all) of what Mr. Brooks likes to call 'dissenting ambiguities'. But the sarcasm, the veiled Royalist assault on Cromwell, were not there. I was left with two problems: Why had I so misread the poem? And why has it occasioned so much argument among scholars and critics who yet do not seem in any fundamental sense to disagree?

II

A poem addressing the Cavalier Lovelace as 'His Noble Friend'; an elegy on a young nobleman, Francis Villiers, killed in a skirmish with Parliamentary forces; an elegy on 'My Lord General Hastings'; and finally 'Tom May's Death', a virulent attack on the reputation of the poet and translator who had gone over from the Royalist to the Parliamentary side—'turned chronicler to Spartacus': four poems during the years 1647 to 1650 indicating in one way or another Royalist connexions or Royalist sympathy. Cromwell returned from Ireland in May 1650 and marched on Scotland in July. Tom May died in November. If we are to date the poems by the events which occasioned them (and there is no likely alternative) it seems necessary to conclude that six months after writing the Ode Marvell still had no intention of putting his poetic gifts to the service of the Parliamentarians, and no sense of already having done so. I might, therefore, at the time when I read the Ode as a veiled attack on Cromwell, have adduced these poems in support of my reading and called it 'scholarship'. (Worse has been done to this poem in that name.)

I am not sure how far it has helped our reading of the Ode that it should have been the ground over which the academic empires of LIT CRIT and LIT HIST have made charge and countercharge.² But whatever we decide about the poem Mr. Brooks is right in the general terms of the argument. Whether we conceive of ourselves as 'critics' or as 'historians', it is the same poem. The critic's 'text' must also be the historian's primary 'document'. The historian no less than the critic must prove that he can read it and (more difficult) write about it. Only the text can determine the relevance of any information we may choose to import from outside it; and the recognition of relevance is itself a critical discrimination. To demonstrate (if, indeed, anything so positive as a demonstration were possible) that Marvell was in some degree 'Royalist' and 'anti-Cromwell' before and after writing the Ode, is not at all the same as demonstrating that the Ode is Royalist and anti-Cromwell. Yet again, if the Ode is a celebration of Cromwell, 'Tom May's Death' coming six months later is a problem to be borne in mind.

III

Marvell came of the middle class and from Hull. There was something in him of the tough-minded, hard-working, no nonsense provincial, the man of action, capable at times of a certain crudeness and brutality. (It is not surprising to learn the author of the satires engaged in fist-fights.) Yet his best-known poetry reveals a mind as sophisticated and subtle, capable of as much delicacy of thought and feeling, as that of any poet in English. Such a conjunction is not uncommon, and is frequently productive given the right circumstances. Probably he discovered himself as a poet among men of superior rank; certainly in the early years of his life poetry was an art that seemed in the possession of Royalists, whether of Lovelace's class or of Cleveland's.

It is clear that Marvell regretted the execution and pitied Charles. But he nowhere reveals that mystical faith in kingship that belongs to the true Royalist. His background, his personality, and his later life, all suggest a man who—whatever his reservations and regrets—might have found something exhilarating in the triumph of the Parliamentary side. I am suggesting that Marvell's Royalist sympathies were literary rather than political.

The occasion of the Ode is important. The reported success of Cromwell's armies in Ireland was something which seemed to many Englishmen to ratify the victory of Parliament over King. God was not displeased. Success was evidence of His approval. Anxieties about the consequences of regicide were allayed and patriotism satisfied. England could look forward to power, perhaps even to an Empire. This feeling is part of the Ode's texture. I anticipate at this point to say it was Marvell's intention to express that feeling. He set out to celebrate Cromwell, and by accident found himself celebrating (and lamenting) the triumph in himself of the man of action over the poet.

IV

Early in 1651 he is established at Nunappleton House as tutor to Mary Fairfax, daughter of the Parliamentary General whose death 'Fame' hopes for in the Francis Villiers elegy, and of the Lady who shouted 'Oliver Cromwell is a traitor' during the trial of Charles. (Mary was later to marry Francis Villiers' brother George, second Duke of Buckingham, a marriage which protected Buckingham before the Restoration and Fairfax after it.) Fairfax had resigned his Parliamentary Generalship because he would not sanction the campaign against Scotland which Cromwell returned from Ireland to conduct—the same campaign that is enthusiastically heralded in the Ode. The affiliations could scarcely be more complicated. If Nunappleton was the 'garden state' it nonetheless reflected all the significant elements of the civil conflict. There, it seems, Marvell wrote a good deal of the poetry for which he is remembered. But already in 1652 the 'forward' 29 year-old was ready to 'forsake his Muses dear'. At the same time that he was praising Fairfax for weeding ambition and tilling conscience he was seeking to attach himself to Cromwell's government. Milton's support failed to secure him the secretaryship he sought, but in 1653 he went to Eton as tutor to Cromwell's ward. From this time on he is unequivocally Cromwellian. The brief flowering of that metaphysical talent most of us mean when we speak of 'Marvell' belongs almost certainly to the period when (I am assuming) his political and literary personalities were in conflict. Once that element of contradiction within himself is dispelled, the poetry declines. Marvell's later celebrations of Cromwell (though the poem on the Protector's death is a moving personal tribute) lack the conflict in which his best poetry was generated. In the post-Restoration satires there is conflict, but conflict of the will with external circumstances. 'We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric; of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.' Yeats's dictum may not fit every kind of poet, but it fits Marvell.

V

The will destroying the sensibility. The sensibility coming to perfection as it dies. That may be Marvell's literary biography in brief, but it is not what he intended when he set out to write his Ode. It is, nevertheless, the vision contained in the first 72 lines. Not intending it, Marvell did not recognize what he had done. Lines 73 to 112 do not accord with the vision on which the Ode's greatness depends. They do not because, unlike the first 72 lines, they simply fulfil the original intention.

How can one speak with confidence of Marvell's intention? There is one large clue to it—it amounts to a declaration by no less an authority than the poet himself. This is 'An Horatian Ode'. Scholars have busied themselves pursuing echoes. They report none of significance from Horace, but some from Lucan, or from May's translation of Lucan. I am not persuaded that these reports have proved of much use, nor that the conclusions drawn from them are valid.³

There is perhaps one characteristic of Marvell's lyric poetry that above all others helps us to think of him in conjunction with Donne rather than with Milton or Dryden. He could cast himself in a role. He could adopt in one poem the voice of the puritan soul, in another the voice of the frustrated lover urging a sexual need, in a third that of the voluptuary yet disembodied imagination. It does not occur to us to say that he is being 'inconsistent' in these poems. Each implies a dramatic situation and is governed by that. Milton could write only in accordance with what he believed, or held it right to believe. Marvell could write according to what it was possible to feel—and the possibilities were wide and conflicting.

In the Ode he casts himself in the role of Horace celebrating the victories of Augustus Caesar. We do not need to consider—though Marvell must have thought of it—that Horace had taken Brutus's side against Caesar at Philippi, and had later come to accept and praise him. What is important is that Marvell is experimenting with a point of view. 'Let us suppose that I am Horace and Cromwell is Augustus. How should I celebrate him on the occasion of this victory?' It is not unlike Yeats's 'mask'—a way of distancing oneself from one's subject. It helps to explain why another and more personal of Marvell's voices—that of the satirist—could castigate Tom May six months later as 'chronicler to Spartacus'.

Charles need not have entered the poem. Nor need the various 'arts of peace' that seem to attach themselves to his side of the argument. That they do, and in the way in which they do, indicates that to take up the Horatian role a certain violence had to be done within Marvell himself. It is expressed in the violence done to Charles. There is a 'Cromwell' in Marvell as there is a 'Charles'. The first 72 lines act out the victory of 'Cromwell' over 'Charles' which was necessary if the victory in Ireland were to be celebrated. The sensibility is working against the will, and that internal conflict is projected out on to society and made to represent it, because it does represent it. The intended heroic poem begins at line 73. But by that time we are already in possession of another—the tragic poem we value.

Cromwell triumphs at home. If he embodies 'inevitable Fate', if his freedom is only 'the consciousness of Necessity', the freedom to 'urge' his 'active Star' in the direction it will take without urging, then there can be no return to the gardens where he onced 'liv'd reserved and austere'. He must triumph abroad. Ireland is only a beginning. Next there will be victory in Scotland, and beyond—

A Caesar he ere long to Gaul
To Italy an Hannibal.

Marvell is in part experiencing, with relish and alarm, the triumph of the will to action in himself. That is what gives the poem its extra dimension and urgency. If the 'forward youth' should forsake his books and his 'Muses dear', whatever drives him to it will not relent. 'The same Arts that did gain/A Pow'r must it maintain'.

VI

Active and passive principles are set in opposition, the Active eroding and destroying the Passive. Energy becomes self-sufficient. Form is destroyed. The 'forward youth', wishing to 'appear', must oil his armour and go forth. The 'inglorious arts of peace'—poetry, learning, gardening, acting—are abandoned. The Muses are forsaken, Numbers anguish in the shadows, the books lie in dust, planting ceases. Rest, contemplation, reservation and austerity are replaced by restlessness, industry and valour. Mars commands, Venus is neglected. The laurel goes, not to the poet but to the warrior. The 'plot' is no longer the garden plot but the political intrigue, the military manoeuvre, even the plot of the play in which the 'Royal Actor' is to die. Lightning has broken from the cloud, cutting through the soft side that nurtured it to burn and rend 'Pallaces and Temples', to 'ruine the great Work of Time'. 'Justice' and the 'antient Rights' 'complain' and 'plead', but Fate rules. The weak are broken, the strong hold; lesser spirits give way to greater.

Cromwell represents this release of new energy, and neither justice nor blame is attached to him. He is as much a part of an inevitable process as Charles is. Cromwell's 'art' is that of the hunter; Charles's is that of the tragic actor whose role is to die with good grace. Charles too knows 'Tis Madness to resist or blame'. He dies passively and beautifully. He does nothing mean, common, or vulgar—

But bow'd his comely Head,
Down as upon a Bed

He accepts his unjust fate as Cromwell urges his. The actor is swept aside by the man of action. As the king who read from Sidney's Arcadia on the night before his execution dies, so symbolically do decorum, style, and hence poetry itself. Poetry too is a kind of 'acting', unreal compared with the energy that can transform the world. But the Muses were 'dear'; Charles's head was 'comely'. The Ode is a celebration of Energy, and a lament for the dignity and decorum that are lost when it achieves its full freedom.

VII

To see the lines on the Irish as sarcasm was an instructive error. Mr. Brooks denies the possibility of sarcasm, but finds in them 'grim irony'. Mr. Toliver concedes of Cromwell as Marvell depicts him that 'the hints of dispraise which Cleanth Brooks points out are clear enough' but remarks that the lines on the Irish 'cannot be taken ironically without totally inverting the eulogy'.⁴ He means, I take it, that they must be either sarcasm or eulogy—and I agree. They do not admit of the middle possibility proposed by Mr. Brooks. Either Marvell means what he says (that the Irish have conceded Cromwell's fitness for highest trust) or he means the opposite (that the Irish response to Cromwell proves his unfitness for it). To read these lines as sarcasm one must assume first that Marvell would have known precisely what Cromwell's armies had done in Ireland; and second (as Mr. Bush points out) that Marvell was in possession of a modern liberal conscience that could extend its humane concerns to the traditional enemies of his own country. Worse, one must lose sight of the poem as a whole, and of its primary rhetorical force.

I can now answer, at least to my own satisfaction, the questions proposed. First, why did I see sarcasm here, and extend it into the lines that follow? Because the first 72 lines are full of a rich duality of vision. Expecting duality of some kind to continue, I invented it where it was lacking. Second, why has the poem occasioned so much argument among writers who yet do not seem to disagree? Part of the confusion, I believe, arises from an element of contradiction in the poem itself which has gone unnoticed. We have been so charmed by the richness of the poem—a richness maintained without lapse for 72 lines—that when it does lapse we are unprepared to notice the decline. And the decline is further concealed by the quality of the verse which, simply as verse, does not lapse at all, and continues to be served by Marvell's wit:

The verse continues admirably, the wit operates, and yet the decline is real. It can be shown most simply by the fact that the poem begins to contradict itself. The man whom it was worse to 'inclose' than to 'oppose' is now one who 'can so well obey'. He is the falcon who always returns to the falconer's wrist. His victories are no longer the work of pure energy, 'angry Heavens flame', but duties meekly carried out by the servant of the English 'Publick'. The instrument of Fate is now the reasonable mortal 'That does both act and know'.

I have suggested that these lines fulfil Marvell's original intention and if this is accepted it suggests that he was working (as poets so often do) without full consciousness of the way in which feelings outside the scope of that intention had entered and modified the poem. The delicate balance of attributes represented by Charles and Cromwell had achieved a tragic rather than a heroic quality. With the death of Charles, tragic duality is lost. Lines 73 to 112 represent a decline, not because the heroic mode is in itself unworthy, but because it cannot accord with, or measure up to, the tragic vision which precedes it.

But the poem recovers. It has taken into its texture a number of references to the various arts that must have been at this time MarvelPs principal preoccupation. It has described the breath-taking political circumstances which are (in effect) destroying these arts by rendering them irrelevant, 'inglorious'. That theme returns in the final lines, and with it the tragic duality. The tone of unqualified excitement in which Cromwell's future victories were described gives way to something more measured. Cromwell is once again the embodiment of violence and fate:

Whatever Marvell intended by that 'last effect', it cannot avoid the suggestion of death. There must be an end even to Cromwell's marching. In our final view of him he is once again Energy, but Energy lacking an object. There is no longer a decorum for him to work against. All has been swept aside. He moves away from us, seeming now more urged than urging, advancing against nameless shadows, maintaining his old direction and posture because he cannot do otherwise. And so the final couplet, intended perhaps only to encourage Cromwell in his campaign against Scotland, regains all the power and duality of the tragic vision. The poem which began with the 'forward youth' (in effect) casting aside his pen, concludes with the ageing warrior still bearing up the sword. The sword is undoubtedly 'mightier', but

The same Arts that did gain
A Pow'r must it maintain.

I have argued that the Ode is less than perfect. But greatness is not perfection, and the Ode is a very great poem.

Notes

¹ 'Criticism and Literary History; Marvell's Horatian Ode', Cleanth Brooks, Sewanee Review, LV, 1947.

² The article by Mr. Brooks cited above, and 'Marvell's Horatian Ode', Douglas Bush, Sewanee Review, LX, 1952 (an answer to Mr. Brooks). Mr. Brooks answers Mr. Bush in the same journal, LXI, 1953. Also relevant is Pierre Legouis' 'Marvell and The New Critics', Review of English Studies, 1957, viii.

³ The lines describing the three-forked lightning are particularly seen as an echo from May's translation of Lucan's Pharsalia. They may be, but I do not see that the pursuit of echoes is profitable because they need indicate no more than a poet's response to and memory of a form of words or an image that has struck him. To conclude, because certain verbal echoes are present, that Lucan's attitude to his characters will help us determine Marvell's to his (see 'Marvell's Horatian Ode', R. H. Syfret, Review of English Studies XII, 1961) is fallacious. I have not, incidentally, seen anyone suggest that Marvell had in mind the lines from Cleveland's 'Elegy on Charles the First, Murdered publicly by his Subjects':

And thus his soul, of this her triumph proud,
Broke like a flash of lightning through the cloud
Of flesh and blood.

—yet this is quite as likely a source. Marvell elsewhere echoes, indeed steals from, Cleveland. Are we to conclude that he shared Cleveland's point of view?

⁴Marvell's Ironic Vision, Harold H. Toliver, Yale, 1965, pp. 183-91. Mr. Toliver's seems to me the most balanced of the longer discussions of the poem. But his phrase 'hints of dispraise' is hardly adequate. Cromwell is less a man than a Force of Nature. If it is 'Madness to resist or blame' it is pointless to 'dispraise' by 'hints'. The Force is celebrated, but the celebration is qualified by the intrusion of another kind of Force calling for and dividing our admiration. One may remark here that academic writers have been content often to set down their conclusions about this extremely subtle poem in makeshift phrases. Mr. Bush's summary that the poem is a portrait of Cromwell 'warts and all' seems to me a breezy evasion of all the problems.