[In the following essay, Markel discusses poetry by Andrew Marvell that engages the Cavalier mode while at the same time exploring its conventions and limitations.]

As Marvell's major lyrics have become better understood, commentators have turned their attention to his later, satirical poetry, in search of the balance and paradox that characterize his more famous works.¹ In his curious evolution from encomiast of Lovelace to Restoration satirist, Marvell is the greatest enigma of all English poets. Finding a private man who makes sense as Marvell the poet is likely to pose the ultimate scholarly riddle; his bloodless newsletters from Parliament to his constituents in Hull are as bizarre, in their own way, as the unbridled invective of the satires. In response to the current tendency to categorize the poet, Elizabeth Story Donno argues that he was not a Cavalier, a Puritan, or a satirist, but “the ultimate Renaissance poet,” that is, a poet interested in literary traditions and uninterested in justifying his work on any but aesthetic grounds.² In a more Marvellian statement that makes essentially the same point, William Empson writes that, around 1650, Marvell “immediately stopped being in love with dead Cavalier heroes; he fell in love with Nature and mixed farming.”³

In discussing his Cavalier poetry I take for granted that Marvell was familiar with his contemporaries. Margoliouth's edition makes clear that he was an avid reader who freely incorporated echoes of lines and ideas he admired.⁴ And J. B. Leishman comprehensively traces Marvell's literary antecedents.⁵ It is time now to analyze not whether, but in what ways and to what end, he read such contemporaries as Suckling, Waller, Cowley, Lovelace, and Carew.

Modern readers have rightly suggested that Marvell's interest in the Cavaliers was not simple and enthusiastic. Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, for example, writes that “The Unfortunate Lover” is a “mocking answer to the flocks of dilute Petrarchanists of his day who strained hard to express the torments of their passion.”⁶ To John Dixon Hunt, the conclusion of Marvell's commendatory poem to Lovelace's Lucasta demonstrates the poet's “not entire identification with the Cavalier mode in either costume or verse.”⁷ Most readers would probably agree about the difficulty of finding any mode of verse with which Marvell entirely identifies. Indeed, one of the poet's chief characteristics is his ability to freeze a moment in time and then casually stroll through his fictional world, pointing out inherent paradoxes, conflicts, and ambiguities, without ever denying its beauty. Louis L. Martz writes accurately that Marvell “looks back upon the remains of courtly culture with attraction and regret.”⁸ Barbara Everett, discussing pastorals such as “Daphnis and Chloe,” comments that the poet makes the conventions “seem dated beyond belief … yet these same conventions still exert power over the mind.”⁹

Four of Marvell's poems about love—“The Gallery,” “Mourning,” “Daphnis and Chloe,” and “The Fair Singer”—analyze Cavalier poetic conventions by focusing on the twin issues of perception and expression. In the four poems, Marvell investigates the extent to which a poet's awareness of multiple perspectives affects his ability to define his subject accurately. These Cavalier exercises constitute Marvell's playful definition of the limitations inherent in contemporary social poetry.

A favorite Cavalier topic—the relationship between natural beauty and artifice in women—is the subject of “The Gallery,” a poem based on the conceit of a lover's envisioning his beloved in various pictures that make up a gallery in his mind. The lover depicts Clora in alternately benign and malignant poses, as “an Inhumane Murtheress,” “Aurora in the Dawn,” a cannibalistic “Enchantress,” and “Venus in her pearly Boat.” The final stanza describes the favorite pose:

Where the same Posture, and the Look
Remains, with which I first was took.
A tender Shepherdess, whose Hair
Hangs loosely playing in the Air,
Transplanting Flow'rs from the green Hill,
To crown her Head, and Bosome fill.

Critical attention given this poem has focused on the relationship between the woman and the pictures, especially the one described in the last stanza. Bradbrook and Thomas, for example, refer to the “last and natural picture of the ‘tender Shepherdess’ which she was at first.”¹⁰ Such readers as Rosalie L. Colie see even this last picture as only another affected pose: “She is artificial, and she is his artifice.”¹¹ Both explanations are plausible, but Clora's essence remains enigmatic. As A. J. Smith points out, the poem does not allow us to decide what she is.¹² In fact, the reader cannot tell even if Clora “exists” within the fictional confines of the poem. Colie writes that “The Gallery” has about it “a curiously aseptic quality …, as if the situation were in fact only mental, as if there were no real lady, no real love affair.”¹³ Nothing in the poem rules out this list of “as if's.” On the contrary, Marvell's extraordinary subtlety makes the idea of an imaginary Clora just as persuasive as any other reading of the poem. But this equivocation is merely the beginning; the performance culminates when the reader realizes that the speaker too remains unknowable. The wit of “The Gallery” is that Marvell invites us to ask one question as we read the poem—What is Clora?—and then quietly suggests that we might reexamine whether we are inquiring about the right character.

In one deft stroke, Marvell has raised an interesting and troubling point about a common Cavalier strategy. Carew's excellent poem “Ingratefull Beauty Threatned,” about a poet whose verse has turned the common beauty Celia into something of a celebrity, offers a characteristic instance. In threatening to destroy her fame if she does not remain faithful, the speaker reminds her that “Wise Poets that wrap't Truth in tales, / Knew her themselves, through all her vailes.”¹⁴ Marvell's “The Gallery” poses two simple questions: What is the truth? How do we know? Carew's truth might be that he created her through his artistry; Celia's truth might be that she created the poet.

In “Mourning,” Marvell complicates the issue of nature and artifice by adding an uninvolved speaker, a poet whose task is to evaluate the relationship between the lamenting woman and those with whom she interacts. His poem about Chlora and her response to the death of her lover, Strephon, is probably based on Cowley's “Weeping.” Cowley's four-stanza poem elaborates the idea he introduces in his first thought: “See where she sits, and in what comely wise, / Drops Tears more fair then others Eyes!”¹⁵ In the first three stanzas of the poem, he elaborates the idea of her beauty. In the last stanza, we see what Cowley has been leading up to: her tears are so cold “that I admire they fall not Hail.” We suspect that the highly embellished praise in the first three-quarters of the poem has been mere scaffolding for his final witticism. Clearly, the poem conveys no emotion beyond the speaker's admiration of her beauty, and it completely ignores the question of context. Why is the woman weeping? We do not know; the speaker apparently does not know. He certainly does not care.

The first stanza of Marvell's poem immediately demonstrates what interests him about the kind of situation developed by Cowley:

You, that decipher out the Fate
Of humane Off-springs from the Skies,
What mean these Infants which of late
Spring from the Starrs of Chlora's Eyes?

Asking what Chlora's tears mean, Marvell asks several questions at once: What caused the tears? What are the speculations of the observers? What, if anything, can we know by watching the interplay between Chlora's behavior and public reaction to it? Adding a speaker who is completely uninvolved with the situation he is viewing enables Marvell to isolate and portray that situation effectively. Each of the poet's character groups is assigned a different mode of communication. The woman does not speak; she merely acts. The onlookers self-confidently interpret her actions. The speaker, through his use of ambivalent phrases and metaphors, only suggests possible meanings.

The woman weeps over the death of Strephon; her role is simple. One group of onlookers is sure that she is weeping “Only to soften near her Heart / A place to fix another Wound.” Another group has a more cynical explanation for her tears: “That whatsoever does but seem / Like Grief, is from her Windows thrown.” The last two stanzas of the poem are the speaker's:

How wide they dream! The Indian Slaves
That sink for Pearl through Seas profound,
Would find her Tears yet deeper Waves
And not of one the bottom sound.
I yet my silent Judgment keep,
Disputing not what they believe
But sure as oft as Women weep,
It is to be suppos'd they grieve.

The first of these two stanzas contains one of Marvell's finest word plays. If “sound” is a verb, her behavior reflects a profound grief; if it is a predicate adjective, she is an actress. In an excellent essay about “Mourning,” Paul Delany points to the ambiguity of the final couplet of the poem: it can mean either that gentlemen respect women's tears, or that women's grief is artful dissimulation.¹⁶

What do Chlora's tears mean? We cannot know, and that, again, is Marvell's whole point. One group of onlookers might be correct; perhaps neither is correct. It is logically possible, as well, that Chlora genuinely grieves at the loss of Strephon. The closest we can come to the ultimate meaning of Chlora's tears is a careful articulation of the possible meanings, and, beyond that, we must preserve a wise reticence. As A. J. Smith describes the poet's tactic at the end of the poem, Marvell “will coolly leave the conflicting possibilities unresolved in the interest of a more wisely perceived equivocalness.”¹⁷ Marvell's “Mourning” is thus a brief epistemological essay.¹⁸

By raising these simple but fundamental questions about the nature of perception, Marvell suggests the limitations of the Cavalier compliment poem and, by implication, of any work which assumes that perceptions are necessarily accurate. In “Daphnis and Chloe” and “The Fair Singer,” he goes one step further in his analysis of the complexity of artistic expression by investigating the dangers inherent in trying to describe what we think we see.

In “Daphnis and Chloe,” Marvell's mode—and subject—is the seduction poem typified by “Love turn'd to Hatred,” a comic sonnet attributed to Suckling.¹⁹ That poem comprises thirteen and a half lines of exquisite raillery against women, men who love women, even the minuscule element of goodness that—not to their credit, of course—women possess. The remaining half-line—“what, wilt thou love me yet?”—economically demonstrates the Cavalier mating dance. The lady's ritualistic surrender must be delayed until the gentleman has wooed her long and well. The words are a prerequisite to the action. In “Daphnis and Chloe,” Marvell orchestrates a similar encounter between two dull-witted sophisticates.

Chloe “neither knew t'enjoy, / Nor yet let her Lover go.” And Daphnis

                    came so full possest
With the Grief of Parting thence,
That he had not so much Sence
As to see he might be blest.

This is Marvell's beautiful irony: Daphnis does not realize that he is only supposed to threaten to leave Chloe, that a skillfully delivered threat will prevent his having to leave. But he has worked himself into such a frenzy that he cannot deal with her acquiescence. Instead of enjoying her favors, Daphnis runs on for thirteen stanzas filled with frantic and sometimes incoherent references to executions, cannibalism, necrophilia, the wandering Hebrew tribes, and the magical properties of ferns.

The last two stanzas, by contrast, are the speaker's:

But hence Virgins all beware.
Last night he with Phlogis slept;
This night for Dorinda kept;
And but rid to take the Air.
Yet he does himself excuse;
Nor indeed without a Cause.
For, according to the Lawes,
Why did Chloe once refuse?

Like the poet-persona in “Mourning,” the speaker here simply repeats Daphnis's understanding—or, rather, misunderstanding—of “the Lawes.” It is illogical for Chloe's cavalier to leave now. Daphnis's real confusion is suggested by his hectic promiscuity after the debacle with Chloe. For any self-respecting cavalier, such behavior would be infra dig. And the speaker's warning to “Virgins all” is of course ironic, for it is unlikely that the clumsy Daphnis could pose a threat to any real fort. Phlogis and Dorinda are not innocent victims; they just capitulate quickly.

The irony of the poem is reinforced by its title. Marvell chose not to call the female character Chlora only because he wanted to allude to Longus's Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe. In the original, Daphnis receives instruction in the art of love from a libidinous woman who takes an interest in him; he then goes on happily to consummate his marriage to Chloe. Marvell's allusion to the romance reinforces his witty comment on the relationship between words and action. The poem does not stretch the pastoral “quite out of shape,” as Rosalie L. Colie suggests; instead, it simply parodies big talkers. To assert that “Daphnis and Chloe” is “emotionally anti-pastoral and anti-love”²⁰ is to overburden the poem with excess philosophical baggage. Games shouldn't be taken so seriously.

Suckling would have enjoyed this poem, for he knew that the game whose rules he codified requires a good deal of native intelligence and verbal dexterity. An unintelligent cavalier confuses the thing and its expression and, consequently, cannot achieve the goal for which he has been preparing so earnestly.

Perhaps Marvell's most interesting examination of the relationship between perception and expression is “The Fair Singer,” which demonstrates that, in the process of describing something, one can learn that it is in fact quite different from what he had thought it to be. Whereas in “Daphnis and Chloe” Marvell explores the idea that words can forestall action, in “The Fair Singer” he suggests that words can actually engender action, for they lead his speaker to a new and disquieting understanding of his situation.

The speaker seems initially to seek a rather innocent goal: he wants to join the large group of poets who have immortalized their ladies through hyperbolic and ingenious verse. Rather than settle for the most tired metaphor of all—the man ensnared by the woman's physical beauty—he decides to fuse to it a second idea—the man captivated by her beautiful voice. One close parallel to this strategy of combined metaphor is Waller's “Of Mrs. Arden”:

Behold, and listen, while the fair
Breaks in sweet sounds the willing air,
And with her own breath fans the fire
Which her bright eyes do first inspire.
What reason can that love control,
Which more than one way courts the soul?
          So when a flash of lightning falls
On our abodes, the danger calls
For human aid, which hopes the flame
To conquer, though from Heaven it came;
But, if the winds with that conspire,
Men strive not, but deplore the fire.(21)

Another close parallel is Carew's “Song. Celia Singing”:

You that thinke Love can convey,
                              No other way,
But through the eyes, into the heart,
                              His fatall Dart:
Close up those casements, and but heare
                              This Syren sing;
                              And on the wing
Of her sweet voyce, it shall appeare
That Love can enter at the eare:
                    Then unvaile your eyes, behold
                              The curious mould
Where that voyce dwels, and as we know,
                              When the Cocks crow,
                              We freely may
                              Gaze on the day;
So may you, when the Musique's done
Awake and see the rising Sun.

Despite their superficial differences, these two poems share the same graceful artificiality. Waller's conceit of the wind conspiring with heavenly lightning is decorously imaginative: it praises the lady by assigning her divine powers. Carew's version, with Cupid's darts entering the lady's ear, is less felicitous; still, it directs its praises toward the lady, especially in the final image of the rising sun.

“The Fair Singer” is by far the best of the three poems:

To make a final conquest of all me,
Love did compose so sweet an Enemy,
In whom both Beauties to my death agree,
Joyning themselves in fatal Harmony;
That while she with her Eyes my Heart does bind,
She with her Voice might captivate my Mind.
I could have fled from One but singly fair:
My dis-intangled Soul it self might save,
Breaking the curled trammels of her hair.
But how should I avoid to be her Slave,
Whose subtile Art invisibly can wreath
My Fetters of the very Air I breath?
It had been easie fighting in some plain,
Where Victory might hang in equal choice,
But all resistance against her is vain,
Who has th' advantage both of Eyes and Voice,
And all my Forces needs must be undone,
She having gained both the Wind and Sun.

The traditional reading holds that the poem is “a well calculated mixture of gallantry and wit.”²² Certainly, it has an intellectual unity that Waller's and Carew's similar poems lack; the sea battle logically extends the traditional idea of the battle between the sexes. Compared to this conception, the ideas of heavenly lightning and Cupid tie for a weak second place.

Marvell's strategy in “The Fair Singer” exploits his metaphor-referent cluster to suggest the possibility that love is in fact a battle, that the figure of speech tells literal truth. Whereas the metaphors in the first stanza are used in a traditional way, as hyperbolic expressions of the lady's ability to keep the speaker enthralled, the imagery in the second stanza establishes a distinctly different mood. Gone are the musical terms that gave balance to such phrases as “fatal Harmony.” In their place are such terms as “subtile Art,” whose ambivalent connotations suggest the woman's contrived, even covert tactics. When we finish reading the second stanza's relentless images of entrapment—“dis-intangled,” “trammels,” “fetters”—we share the speaker's feelings of claustrophobia; the first stanza's “bind” and “captivate” begin to take on their more ominous connotations. This in turn contributes to the almost realistic tone of the second stanza, which now clearly opposes the more hyperbolic first stanza.

The speaker's tired resignation in the final stanza further reinforces our impression of his uncertainty. When he finally admits that “all resistance against her is vain,” he seems to surrender not to a lovely lady with beautiful eyes and voice but to a deliberate and calculating military force. The speaker's concluding the poem with references to the military metaphor rather than to the lady herself implies that, on one level at least, he has begun to understand the ironic aspect—or at least the possibility of an ironic aspect—of his relationship with the woman: despite her great beauties, she might not be fair. The poem concludes without a definite statement. Marvell will not say that love is sweet surrender, or that it is literally a kind of warfare. What he has demonstrated, however, is the process by which his speaker has grown to realize the complexities of poetry and the integral relationship between an idea and its articulation.

The phenomenon traced in “The Fair Singer” relates to what William Empson has called a self-inwoven simile or a short-circuited comparison. Using Empson's terminology, Christopher Ricks has written of Marvell's characteristic use of the figure of speech “which goes beyond saying of something that it finds its own resemblance, and says instead, more wittily and mysteriously, that something is its own resemblance.”²³ Ricks concludes his essay by demonstrating Lovelace's successful use of this figure of speech in his snail poems, and by implying that Marvell, who admired him, might have learned this technique from him.

Whether this is so cannot, of course, be determined. Balachandra Rajan writes that “The Garden” is “another one of those poems which must be resignedly described as ‘elusive’. That word in Marvell criticism has come to connote exasperation as well as admiration.”²⁴ But Rajan argues convincingly that, in Marvell, “controlled uncertainty is the objective of the poem rather than its enmeshment.”²⁵ The Cavalier world that Marvell explored in some of his early lyrics was rife with simple truths that he saw as neither simple nor true: that lovers act consciously and meaningfully, that they send clear signals which are received and interpreted accurately, that in describing these lovers poets say what they mean and are never entrapped by their own words. The Cavalier social ritual was a perfect subject for Marvell's exercises because it enabled him to explore the behavior of art while chronicling the art of behavior. The phrase “controlled uncertainty” might be revised to “controlled, limited certainty.” In his Cavalier poems, Marvell was absolutely precise in defining the limits of human perception and expression. Unlike the Cavaliers, he frequently insisted on the right to keep his silent judgment.

Notes

1. See, for example, Warren L. Chernaik's “Marvell's Satires: The Artist as Puritan,” in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977); Barbara Everett's “The Shooting of the Bears: Poetry and Politics in Andrew Marvell,” in Andrew Marvell: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Death, ed. R. L. Brett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Annabel M. Patterson's Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

2. “The Unhoopable Marvell,” in Tercentenary Essays, ed. Friedenreich, p. 44.

3. “Natural Magic and Populism in Marvell's Poetry,” in Andrew Marvell: Essays, ed. Brett, p. 40.

4. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., comp. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. 1. All quotations follow this edition.

5. The Art of Marvell's Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1966).

6. Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), p. 214.

7. Andrew Marvell: His Life and Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 57.

8. The Wit of Love (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), p. 153.

9. “The Shooting of the Bears,” in Andrew Marvell: Essays, ed. Brett, p. 97.

10. M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 30.

11. “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 109.

12. “Marvell's Metaphysical Wit,” in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Essays, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 58.

13. “My Ecchoing Song,” p. 108.

14. The Poems of Thomas Carew with His Masque “Coelum Britannicum,” ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1949; rpt. 1970), p. 18. All other quotations in the text derive from this edition.

15. Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), p. 136.

16. “Marvell's ‘Mourning,’” Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1971), 35.

17. “Marvell's Metaphysical Wit,” p. 58.

18. Thomas Clayton, in “‘It is Marvel He Outdwells His Hour’: Some Perspectives on Marvell's Medium,” in Tercentenary Essays, ed. Friedenreich, p. 68, calls “Mourning” “an anamorphic study in poetical epistemology.”

19. In his edition of The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), Thomas Clayton writes that the poem is “probably not by Suckling” (p. lxxxix).

20. “My Ecchoing Song,” p. 48.

21. The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G. Thorn Drury (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), vol. 1, p. 91.

22. Michael Craze, The Life and Lyrics of Andrew Marvell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), p. 51.

23. Ricks, “‘Its own Resemblance,’” in Approaches to Marvell, ed. Patrides, p. 108. Empson created the phrase in Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930; 2nd rev. ed., 1947), pp. 160-61.

24. “Andrew Marvell: The Aesthetics of Inconclusiveness,” in Approaches to Marvell, ed. Patrides, p. 168.

25. Ibid., pp. 160-61.