Classic Poem of the Month
This month's Classic Poem was suggested by Simon Currie.
"Thinking of the unfairness of Fate when in June my wife Jane died at 64 after twenty years of Parkinson’s Disease, I kept saying to myself Andrew Marvell’s line “what luckless apple did we taste”. The context is the section (reproduced above) of his post-Civil War poem, 776 lines in 97 stanzas, dedicated to “My Lord Fairfax”, the Parliamentary General also a Yorkshireman and Parliamentarian like Marvell himself. Marvell tutored Mary Fairfax at Nun Appleton Hall, near Selby, for eighteen months from 1650. The more famous poem “The Garden” with its “green thought in a green shade” also comes from that idyllic time.
Each of us has an unspoilt garden or island, real or imaginary, that stands for a prelapsarian Edenic garden. The garden where aged ten I played Miranda for me represents Prospero’s island before it was invaded by the survivors of shipwreck.
My real island is Raasay,
to which Jane and I went in May. Raasay House, where I stayed fifty
years ago (two centuries after Boswell and Johnson had done) was a burnt-out
shell. A new pier was being built at the point. The idyllic place has
gone but still comes to mind, as in Wallace Stevens’ “…Pleased
that the irrational is rational/Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered
street,/I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.” (from “Notes
toward a Supreme Fiction”).
Marvell was not alone in seeking Edenic garden/islands, as painted in “The Garden and “The Bermoothes” (Bermudas). For instance, his contemporary Edmund Waller wrote similar if less robust poems. But in the above passage, Marvell manages to control the extended metaphor of the garden as a “sweet militia” displacing the original subject, the garden, as civil war had displaced the peace of Albion, safe from invasion but not from internal strife. There is a parallel in Shakespeare: “this sceptred isle…This other Eden, demi-paradise/ This precious stone set in the silver sea/Which serves it in the office of a wall” in Richard II. The capricious king in 1399 was deposed by his cousin Henry, son of John of Gaunt, civil war having ravaged the country. Shakespeare’s imagery is not, though, of a garden, being largely military or marine. After Marvell, the search for Edenic unspoilt garden islands went on, St Helena, then Mauritius and other Indian Ocean islands being hailed and in turn wrecked by European man. (Richard H. Grove Green Imperialism” Cambridge UP, 1992).
The Civil War comprised land battles and castle sieges. Marvell in the passage regrets the replacing of belvederes, flowers and garlands by garrisons and arms. While a Republican, he felt that “whether it be a war of religion or of liberty…I think the cause was too great to have been fought for.” He kept from the fray, on the Continent in the 1640s, and was careful in his more political poems to praise Charles, by 1649 the late King, as well as Cromwell. Aubrey says that “In conversation he was very modest and of very few words…(though) he would drink liberally by himself…to refresh his muse.” Should modern poets adopt such a lifestyle? He survived the Restoration, becoming MP for Hull until his death, which was a natural if unexpected one (unlike his lyrical poems, his political pamphlets were polemical, making some think he might have been poisoned).
Marvell’s lyric poems
play with ambivalence, leaving things in the air; as Paul Valéry said,
“a lyric is never finished, just left behind,” (quoted by Stephen
Yenser in “Green Thoughts, Green Shades” U California P,
2002). Marvell in this passage twists and turns between the horticultural
and the military; the sleeping bee will sting without asking “Who
goes there?” while the tulips are barred in the colours of the Swiss
papal guard. Despite this wordplay, there is overriding dismay at the
Civil War and the luckless apple, tasting which has ruined the Eden
of Albion."
– Simon Currie
UPON APPLETON HOUSE (part of)
(Andrew Marvell 1621-78)
39
………………………………..
See how the flowers, as at parade,
Under their colours stand displayed:
Each regiment in order grows,
That of the tulip, pink, and rose.
40
But when the vigilant patrol
Of stars walks round about the pole,
Their leaves, that to the stalks are curled,
Seem to their staves the ensigns furled.
Then in some flower’s belovèd hut
Each bee, as sentinel, is shut,
And sleeps so too; but if once stirred,
She runs you through, nor asks the word.
41
Oh thou, that dear and happy Isle,
The garden of the world erewhile,
Thou Paradise of the four seas
Which Heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With watery, if not flaming, sword;
What luckless apple did we taste
To make us mortal and thee waste!
42
Unhappy! shall we never more
That sweet militia restore,
When gardens only had their towers,
And all the garrisons were flowers;
When roses only arms might bear,
And men did rosy garlands wear?
Tulips, in several colours barred,
Were then the Switzers of our Guard.
43
The gardener had the soldier’s place
And his more gentle forts did trace,
The nursery of all things green
Was then the only magazine.
The winter quarters were the stoves,
Where he the tender plants removes.
But war all this doth overgrow;
We ordnance plant and powder sow.
The Poetry Business receives financial assistance from Arts Council England.
