Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), English poet and satirist, one of the Metaphysical poets. He was born in Winestead, Yorkshire, and educated at Hull Grammar School and at the University of Cambridge. His early publications link him with royalists such as the poet Richard Lovelace, but he was tutor to the daughter of the parliamentary general Lord Fairfax from 1650 to 1652, and assistant to John Milton as Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth’s Council of State from 1657 to 1659. He is thought to have played a part in saving the life of Milton, a staunch republican, after the Restoration. He became Member of Parliament for Hull in 1659 and his correspondence remains a valuable source of information on the period while also demonstrating his energy as a working politician. His possible marriage to Mary Palmer remains much in doubt.

Marvell’s epitaph in St Giles, London, marks him as a man of “wit and learning, with a singular penetration, and strength of judgment”. It seems appropriate for the poetry by which he is now known, but in his own day he was thought of as a politician and satirist. Recent critical work suggest his importance as an anonymous voice of opposition satire, including “The Last Instructions to a Painter” (1667), yet in much of the poetry, both lyric and overtly political, allusive ambiguity makes difficult any neat interpretation. “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650) is recognized as one of Marvell’s great political poems, but also as one of his most enigmatic works. Ostensibly concerned with the return of Oliver Cromwell, the poem contains at its centre a long and possibly sympathetic account of the departing king, Charles I. Though his prose works are now little read, his contemporaries valued his satires for their wit. The Rehearsal Transprosed (1672) attacks religious intolerance and contains a famous passage that looks back on the Civil War and on a cause “too good to have been fought for”. In his last years, Marvell is though to have been under government surveillance for his opposition politics, and when he died there were rumours that he had been poisoned by the Jesuits for his recent anti-Catholic writings.

The lyric poetry appeared in Miscellaneous Poems (1681), but was little read until the 19th century, notably by an important tercentenary essay on Marvell (1921) by T. S. Eliot, which helped to rehabilitate the “metaphysical” poetry of elaborate conceits (see Figures of Speech). “To his Coy Mistress”, “The Garden”, “The Definition of Love”, and “Bermudas” are among his well-known and much-anthologized lyrics. During his time as tutor to Mary Fairfax, Marvell wrote the important “Upon Appleton House”. Like many of his poems, it contains a series of binary oppositions which cannot be easily resolved. There are sudden changes of mental and visual perspective and a repeated questioning of the relationship between the mind and the body, and the individual and the world that they inhabit. Human perceptions not only of the physical but also of the moral, political, and spiritual world are central concerns of the poem. In only a single day, the seasons change, universal history is rehearsed—from the Fall of Man to the Flood and beyond—and the recent English Civil War is re-enacted in the garden’s world of flowers. Characteristically, Marvell offers elaborate conceits, here playing particularly on the geometry of square and circle as metaphors of body and soul—the vaulted brain, the hollow palace, the tortoise shell, and hemisphere—boundaries that mark the limitations of human nature. In the tradition of “country house poetry” usually thought to begin in England with Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (1616), Marvell praises Appleton House, the home of his patron Lord Fairfax, as a miniature paradise in a chaotic world:

However, the constant shifting of perspective, the ambiguity of allusion, and the uncertain distinction between the apparent and the real make confidence in a single “truth” difficult to sustain. As in many of his political poems of the 1650s, Marvell’s own stance remains ambiguous. In the late 20th century, with his poetic eminence firmly established, Marvell’s reputation as a political writer grew once again as critics increasingly explored the political nuances of the lyric works.