O brambles, chain me too

Letters

Vol. 21 No. 24 · 9 December 1999

From Christopher Small

In his far-ranging comments on Marvell, Tom Paulin (LRB, 25 November) might have found room for William Blake – a successor who might be granted rival celebrity as a political poet. You could see a direct response to 'Appleton House' when Blake wrote in his Notebook:

I went to the garden of love,
And I saw what I never had seen,
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not writ over the door;
So I turned to the garden of love
That so many sweet flowers bore,
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be -
And priests in black gounds were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

'Gounds', incidentally, was in common – vulgar – usage in the 18th and early 19th centuries: Cockney pronunciation made it a true rhyme with 'rounds'.

Christopher Small
Isle of Lismore

Vol. 22 No. 1 · 6 January 2000

From Paul Mountain

At several places in his close reading of Andrew Marvell's poetry (LRB, 25 November 1999) Tom Paulin opts (as he admits) for an over-simple formalism and creates meanings which in some cases seem clearly at odds with a straight, full reading of the text. Thus when he describes the comic metempsychosis of verse 7 of 'The Garden', he skips a stanza so as to yoke to verse 7 the closing couplet of verse 8:

Two paradises twere in one
To live in Paradise alone

He then ventures that Marvell is 'masking' a 'dangerous pantheism' – dangerous to whom? – 'behind Christian piety and a jokey light-verse tone'. This is hardly likely: if one reads the whole of verse 8, the couplet can be seen as an aphoristic conclusion to a conventional account of Adam's solitary, unfallen state. The two paradises are the external, tangible Garden of Eden and the internal garden as Adam sees and interprets it. Cartesian maybe, but nothing to do with pantheism.

The problem with the way Paulin sees Marvell is that because Marvell was a friend of Milton, a supporter of the Republic and a wonderful poet, Paulin wants to include him in a sacred canon of Nonconformist, left-libertarian English writers. However, he neglects to point out that Marvell's three long verse tributes to Cromwell – the 'Horatian Ode', 'The First Anniversary' and 'Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector' – amount to a remarkable triptych of political sycophancy. I cannot see how Paulin can take a passage like

Thou in a pitch how far beyond the sphere
Of human glory tower'st and reigning there
Despoiled of mortal robes, in seas of bliss,
Plunging does bathe, and tread the bright
abyss

and argue that this is a metaphor for the 'chaotic void at the heart of political action which turns the world upside down'. When the passage is read in full, it is immediately recognisable as Marvell's own version of the vulgar apotheosis of absolute monarchy. It is reminiscent of the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall Palace, commissioned by Charles I and painted in the 1630s by Rubens, in which the father of the king whom Cromwell later had executed is portrayed soaring through the firmament surrounded by bouncing cherubs.

Marvell's public poetry reveals a politician who hedged his bets and backed different parties at different times. Paulin concedes that in his youth, Marvell was a Royalist. He converted briefly to Roman Catholicism between 1639 and 1640, and 'Flecknoe' (c.1645), though a satire, is an affectionate one. However, once radical Protestantism won the war, Marvell didn't, unlike Winstanley, defend the rights of Catholics to religious freedom within the Republic. Instead, he spouted the usual propaganda, and addressed the first and perhaps only case of English-managed genocide with the merry couplet: 'And now the Irish are ashamed/To see themselves in one year tamed.'

The common thread running through the political poems is not Marvell's prototypical love of democracy or freedom of belief and conscience, but the glorification of military conquest and subjugation. We are treated to a series of portraits of Cromwell confronting destiny, forging with fire and sword sublime order out of grubby chaos, and taming the Irish, the Scots, the Jews, the French, the Whore of Babylon and all the rest of the rabble. In 'The First Anniversary' Marvell devotes 60 lines to a story of how the sins of his subjects caused Cromwell to crash his chariot in Hyde Park with near-fatal consequences; but somehow the demigod managed to resurrect himself and carry on ministering to his people for a good few years. Perhaps Marvell was only pursuing the conventions of the time, but if the whole point of Cromwell was his self-effacing humanitarianism, as Christopher Hill and others have made out, I hope he was suitably embarrassed by the tedious excesses of his laureate.

Paul Mountain
Worcester

Vol. 22 No. 6 · 16 March 2000

From Nicholas Murray

While I agree with Paul Mountain (Letters, 6 January) that Marvell was to a sometimes worrying extent 'a politician who hedged his bets', the first of his three Cromwellian poems, the 'Horatian Ode', cannot be dismissed quite so easily as 'political sycophancy'. But at least this argument concentrates on the politics of the 'Ode' and its historical moment – the immediate aftermath of Cromwell's genocidal excursion to Ireland. What makes the 'Ode' so much more satisfying than the later two Cromwell poems is precisely the way in which it shows the pros and cons of granting admiration to the political strongman. Its greatness as a political poem lies in the way it deals with issues of power, political morality and leadership, which are treated in a fashion far too robust for today's Common Room radicals. Marvell's anti-Catholic bigotry, his political mobility, his celebration of the crushing of political dissent (the 'accursed locusts' of 'The First Anniversary') are inconvenient warts on the republican portrait, but they do not invalidate the force of this poem.

Nicholas Murray
London WC1