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The Obscure Script of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls
in Marvell's Pastorals
Victoria Silver
ELH, Volume 68, Number 1, Spring 2001, pp. 29-55 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of California @ Irvine (3 Aug 2018 21:44 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2001.0010
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/11518
29Victoria SilverELH 68 (2001) 29–55 © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
THE OBSCURE SCRIPT OF REGICIDE: AMBIVALENCE
AND LITTLE GIRLS IN MARVELL’S PASTORALS
BY VICTORIA SILVER
I.
Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when
his day’s work was done, went out together to fly the great kite. Every
day of his life he had a long sitting at the Memorial, which never made
the least progress, however hard he laboured, for King Charles the First
always strayed into it, sooner or later, and then it was thrown aside, and
another one begun. The patience and hope with which he bore these
perpetual disappointments, the mild perception he had that there was
something wrong about King Charles the First, the feeble efforts he
made to keep him out, and the certainty with which he came in, and
tumbled the Memorial out of all shape, made a deep impression on me.1
Like Mr. Dick’s Memorial, King Charles’s head keeps intruding upon
the pastorals of Andrew Marvell, not always as the event itself—
although there is talk of beheading, lopping off and such—but as some
peculiar violence that compromises and even (dare I say it?) incapaci-
tates the world of the pleasaunce, the green world or, as Harry Berger
calls it, the second world of poetic imagination and desire.2 In Theocritus’s
Idylls, long before Virgil made politics of shepherds, it is always
afternoon: everyone has retreated from the heat into the shade, all
enterprise has come to a halt, the landscape is emptied of action and
effort, except that entailed in contemplating (usually unrequited) love.3
But the energy devoted to this perpetual problem of human being is not
devoted to its solution, only to its meditation, in which there is a certain
langorous, sometimes elegiac but always articulate pleasure. Desire is
handled by Theocritus as the ordinary predicament of pastoral people,
its vicissitudes inspiring nothing desperate in his speakers and nothing
profound—no attempt, that is, by human ingenuity and artifice to
bridge the gap between what we have and what we wish for.4
Indeed, Thomas Rosenmeyer has observed that, for the critic, there
is an impenetrable simplicity to the Idylls which defies our presump-
tion, our desire for deeper meanings, especially since a patent disjunc-
tion or incoherence to pastoral utterance obtains in these poems, which
30 The Obscure Script of Regicide
would seem to intimate the presence of more and other ideas.5 It is as
if not only his speakers but Theocritus himself cannot be bothered to
think the pastoral order of things quite through—to give it an adequate
rationale, a principle of meaning that can assuage these incongruities, or
at least placate the interpretive urge they tend to provoke in us. The
situation puts one forcibly in mind of Erich Auerbach’s perplexity in the
face of another sort of pastoral world, the one inhabited by Don
Quixote, which while it seemingly begs the most serious social commen-
tary, refuses to engage in any more explicit or consecutive criticism than
literary parody.6 Like Rosenmeyer with Theocritus, Auerbach confronts
in Cervantes what looks like an incorrigible blankness of intent, leaving
even that great avatar of continuity nonplussed.
Part of the reason Auerbach wants to make a more profound or at
least more acute sense of Cervantes, like that Rosenmeyer wistfully
denies Theocritus, is that the pastoral has always stood over against the
world of negotium or business in which we ordinarily strive: I refer to
that realm of longing and reckoning, toil and vexation, from whose
effortful interpretation we cannot desist. It is precisely because the
pastoral appears oblivious to the claims of business—claims which we
ourselves experience as necessary and ineluctable—that we expect it to
reflect upon this different world: we want Theocritus’s amorous shep-
herd folk, nymphs, and cyclopes to comment on the preoccupation they
outwardly ignore, even as we wait for Quixote to indict the Spain that in
his romantic madness he invariably encounters yet also invariably
eludes. We expect our obsession somehow to be theirs, and with it, a
certain doubleness of reference in the blandishments of pastoral leisure
or otium, transforming its flocks and fields into allegory, and perhaps
utopia. So even if Virgil in the Eclogues had not succumbed to this
interpretive expectation and translated the pastoral into politics, we
would have been bound to invent such a significance for it anyway.7 The
need to explain our own predicament demands such a meaning.
But in Marvell’s pastorals, the allegory and its tacit criticism of the
first world (again, Berger’s phrase) have been curiously deflected, not
least because the valences of his landscapes are themselves so confused.
It isn’t that, in the Renaissance complication of pastoral, the semantic
and moral turbulence of business have invaded Arden or Arcadia,
threatening to overwhelm their fragile artifice, and with it, the power of
the second world to transfigure our attitude towards our own.8 Rather,
the difficulty lies in Marvell’s ironic refusal to distinguish the two
economies, and so to admit the possibility of transformation in either.
His pleasaunce is like Mr. Dick’s Memorial, where recollection does not
31Victoria Silver
bring about new order or progress, but instead their opposite, namely, a
repetition or pattern of meaning that, in the manner of King Charles’s
straying into the Memorial, has something at once errant and inevitable
about it.
So where Berger and Donald Friedman, to take two expert readers,
envision the speaker’s retreat to the green world as a means of
recommitting himself to negotium, I am inclined to argue that some-
thing else transpires from this enactment of conflict.9 For one thing,
Harold Toliver seems almost uniquely to have observed that not
everyone emerges intact from Marvell’s pastoral: as he points out, some
people don’t emerge at all but pursue a sort of “symbolic self-annihila-
tion” there.10 For another, the notoriously detached or indifferent tone
of the mind entertaining such nihilism hardly exhibits the invigorated,
engaged attitude we associate with renewed conviction. Instead, it has
the ambience of cynical resignation or even pessimism that not infre-
quently attends the acknowledgement of human fatedness—of our
inability to transcend our condition, or at least the meanings we give it.
What I am trying to distinguish in my reading of Marvell is something
like the difference between Hobbes and Rousseau in the way they each
imagine and use the state of nature. Like the pastoral, the state of nature
is an artificial landscape, a speculative fiction which equally stands to
present society as a sort of negative or opposite. It is an instrumental
image, a theoretical device by which we try to understand and in some
cases authorize, in others revise, our current social and political prac-
tices. It was Rousseau’s felicity to recognize that what passes for primal
nature in moral and political philosophy is really a species of second
nature. As he complains in the Second Discourse, “all of [these philoso-
phers], continually speaking of need, greed, oppression, desires, and
pride transferred to the state of Nature ideas they had taken from
society”: “They spoke of Savage Man and depicted Civil man.”11
He then singles out Hobbes as the most egregious exponent of this
fallacy, “because he improperly includes in Savage man’s care for his
preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions that are the
product of Society and have made Laws necessary.”12 Thus to Rousseau,
Hobbesian illogic consists not only in a methodological faux pas, but
equally in a kind of political naïveté and failure of imagination, as
though Hobbes were unable to conceive of a condition authentically
removed from his own—a condition which might then provide the
grounds (at least in Rousseau’s eyes) for a new and improved social
order. So when Rousseau himself undertakes properly to represent the
state of nature, he begins by “setting aside all the facts, for they do not
32 The Obscure Script of Regicide
affect the question,” which is “what Mankind might have become if it
had remained abandoned to itself.”13 And what he comes up with isn’t
what he calls Hobbes’s “sturdy Child” but humanity “fierce rather than
wicked,” living a life that is solitary, literally brutish or animalistic,
diffident, and dull—except, that is, for what he believes to be the
universal sensation of pity, imagined as the single, great motive force
behind sociability.14 (Hobbes, of course, thinks no such thing.) In
Rousseau’s primordiality, there is no impetus to activity, much less
violence, beyond the claims of sheer survival, since there is relatively
little passion and no knowledge of things that might provoke desire and
a demand for its fulfillment.
Thus despite, or rather owing to the paradox of human “perfectibil-
ity” (which, as he himself admits, leaves “man alone liable to become an
imbecile”—to relapse “lower than the Beast itself”), Rousseau’s state of
nature enjoys the peculiar distinction of seeming both inert and strange,
since the intelligibility, the profundity, of human desire and conception
has been evacuated from it.15 The picture he gives is more an anthropo-
logical than a rhetorical success, where Hobbes’s version by contrast is
infamously vital and familiar, because it dwells on the simple negation of
every acknowledged desideratum:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every
man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time,
wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength,
and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such a condition,
there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and
consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the
commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no
Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much
force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time, no
Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare,
and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty,
brutish, and short.16
The difference between the two accounts of primordial nature isn’t just
that Hobbes, as Rousseau charges, is representing the status quo as the
status quo ante. It is rather that Rousseau wants for the moment to resist
a genetic argument, while Hobbes is shrewd enough to make and
exploit one; Rousseau wants experimentally to imagine a humanity
unlike the one he knows, while Hobbes experiments by imagining the
humanity he knows under certain salient conditions; Rousseau wants to
believe that human nature is capable of another character and outcome
altogether, while Hobbes holds that the species would reproduce the
33Victoria Silver
same character then that it does now. Rousseau’s intent is tacitly
utopian, Hobbes’s ruthlessly pragmatic, and their different accounts of
prima natura reflect this divergence in temperament and outlook. But
there is more to it: Rousseau also gives us an image of human nature
that—unlike its vulgarization, the noble savage—is without psychologi-
cal resonance, a mere blank not least because this humanity is inarticu-
late, infans in a new and alien way, since it has nothing to speak for, no
need to capture its desires in words. Yet the image of humanity in
Hobbes’s state of nature, that robust child fathering our present
passionate complexity, is intimately recognizable as the very worst of us,
and in that recognition lies its proven utility for him.
Now the opposed effects of the state of nature in Rousseau and
Hobbes can describe the gap in meaningfulness between the pastorals
of a Theocritan idyll and a Virgilian eclogue. We find ourselves
confounded by Theocritus’s intransigent simplicity because, in the
fashion of Rousseau’s state of nature, it withstands extrapolation to our
own state of affairs, beyond the vacant universality of loving and
complaining. But Virgil’s allegorical otium we find perpetually rich and
responsive because it is already pregnant with the comparison on which
we build sympathy and meaning—to those moral and political predica-
ments from which its pastoral denizens are only ostensibly free. Again,
like Hobbes’s “sturdy Child,” their passions are peculiarly our own. But
this Virgilian fluency and likeness of desire between the pleasaunce and
business presages a political problem for Marvell’s green world, since it
is finally what prohibits just that psychological change on which his
readers have premised the variously redemptive dynamic of retreat and
reemergence into the world of negotium. If neither the active nor the
contemplative lives are capable of effecting a transformation in human
being, if their different therapies do not transfigure the speaker’s desires
in either domain, if the reciprocity between what Berger calls the first
and second worlds is not dialectical but closed by the ineluctable
sameness of human passion, then the pastoral is doomed to repeat the
pattern of the larger world, which does not so much impinge upon as
weirdly predict its outcome.
In short, the difference between the realms of leisure and business in
Marvell is more ostensible than real precisely because of the reflexive
allegory of pastoral. This is hardly surprising, given the Virgilian motives
and origins of most Renaissance pastoral; but it poses a problem for our
reading of this poetry just because we tend to insist upon some
transfigurative power for the green world, some poetical capacity not
only to escape but to redeem the conditions of the first world. For Harry
34 The Obscure Script of Regicide
Berger, the green world exists in delectable tension with the actual, as
that place from which all the shuddering horrors of adult life are
excluded, especially its kind of sexuality; where there is a gratifying
simplicity, a sensual absoluteness in which the speaker can fully sub-
merge himself as a “happy vegetable” in his own right—an absoluteness
of the body sharing every exclusive impulse ascribed to the ecstatic or
transcendental absoluteness of soul in poems like “On a Drop of Dew”
or “A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure.”17
This transcendental turn explains the critical propensity to see the
effects of Marvell’s green world as having an affinity with platonism of
some sort, as the pursuit of the ideal—the position taken by Toliver and
Friedman but also Frank Kermode and, to a lesser extent, Rosalie Colie,
who catches the “tautological mutuality” in such philosophical allu-
sions.18 Indeed, the consistent thesis adopted by Marvell’s critics is that
there is some productive exchange between the ideality of the pastoral
and the antipathetic world of sheer phenomena that the green world so
conspicuously seeks to shun, striving especially to evade the terrors of
that temporal aspect of things that impels us towards creaturely
compromise and away from integrity or perfection of self, towards guilt
and remorse and away from tranquility. Moreover, since the Marvellian
pastoral is so entirely a poet’s artifact, a virtual reality to compensate
somehow for this one, it is also thought severally to oppose the liberties
of imagination to the constraints of our actual condition. By retreating to
where things are automatically responsive, to a world which more
completely configures if it does not satisfy our desires, the speaker can
reassert a sense of self by its sheerly indulgent expression (Berger
speaks of narcissistic orgies). Yet this recreation of the soul does not
ensure the speaker’s embrace of business and the first world: again, as
Toliver points out, in Marvell to an unusual extent the green world of art
can fail to reconcile nature and history, mind and world, desire and fact.
In his reading, this happens whenever the disaffections and dislocations
of desire or history intrude upon the pastoral’s complacent humanity.
And given that such ruptures all too frequently occur, so Toliver
observes that the green world becomes the scene of struggle, division,
and ambivalence, of dubious battle over the disposition of the self. Even
so, his description makes Marvell’s pleasaunce sound very much like
everyone else’s, where the precipitate of crisis is always love or death,
and its resolution, art.
Like Colie’s, it seems to me that Toliver’s vexed version of the
Marvellian green world is remarkably apt in every respect but one. Even
his explanation does not account, except in the most diffident because
35Victoria Silver
intellectual terms, for a landscape so oddly circumstanced: with preco-
cious, tyrannical little girls warily adored by timid men; with erotic
betrayal accompanied programatically by some political-style execution
or onslaught; with greenery both animated and figurative swallowing up
the speaker in a sort of regressive binge of pleasure and pain (“dendo-
eroticism,” Toliver calls it); with a populace that keeps on pondering a
dissolution of self into utter and complete oblivion, in excess of the usual
sentiment of pastoral repletion.19 In short, Marvell’s is a perverse and
symptomatically assembled landscape like that imagined by a Lewis
Carroll or a Charles Kingsley, a fact which tends retroactively to affirm
Empson’s own inclusion of the Alice books into pastoral. For as Empson
himself very nearly remarks, Carroll’s “child-become-judge” is no more
bogus a noble savage than any shepherd.20
II.
Let me first observe that the love of little girls or sexual neuters in
Marvell is prophylactic, since in every instance they are represented as
a kind of magical bulwark against the depradations of time and sex upon
the speaker, who anticipates suffering at the hands of both: they must
fend off time because in the pastorals it presages the elegiac sensations
of disappointment and loss, and sex because women’s erotic complexity
or “coyness”—their sexual reluctance in the face of men’s sexual
urgency—hastens just those eventualities. After all, suffering in the
pastoral is erotic perforce, the failure of human desire to achieve its
fulfillment, and so is suffering’s curious remediation here. I refer to the
speaker’s remote and passive love of a child, whose sexuality is not so
much unformed as it is inscrutable, because displaced by his projection
of its future tyranny.
Thus in “Young Love,” his premature, erotically implausible desire
for a “little infant” of fifteen—a “snowy lamb” or “wanton kid” of
amorphous gender (as against a “lusty bull or ram”)—is first imagined to
preserve them from the constraints of paternal suspicion and social
stigma: “Our sportings are as free / As the nurse’s with the child.”21 But
swiftly it is also understood to liberate them from the enforced effects
on lovers of time and overt sexuality, in the form of eventual alienation
from each other by loss of love or even life:
Now then love me: time may take
Thee before thy time away:
Of this need we’ll virtue make,
And learn love before we may.
So we win of doubtful fate;
36 The Obscure Script of Regicide
And if good she to us meant,
We that good shall antedate,
Or, if ill, that ill prevent.
Thus as kingdoms, frustrating
Other titles to their crown,
In the cradle crown their king,
So all foreign claims to drown,
So, to make all rivals vain,
Now I crown thee with my love;
Crown me with thy love again,
And we both shall monarchs prove.22
There is a peculiar relationship between the anomalous, proleptic love of
the speaker for his infant, and the figure of a covenant between the two,
which by binding the as-yet-speechless beloved prematurely to him,
allows them both to escape future betrayal—to “antedate good and ill
prevent.” By the instrument of contract, a representation obligating them
each to fulfill this wholly presumptive bond, the speaker hopes to shape
a discordant experience to his own private desire, not to the hostile and
public imperatives of nature or convention. But stranger still is his
immediately extending the conceit of this precocious lovers’ pact to a
kingdom’s avoidance of interregnum by crowning its monarch “in the
cradle.” In either case, there is a notion that such devices of proleptic
representation will predict the adult person, that the infant will indeed
grow up to be and do what the covenant imagines for it. Thus the
speaker’s beloved will eschew all competitors for its love in favor of
himself, just as the infant monarch will cut out all rivals for its kingdom.
Needless to say, like the dynastic model of kingship on which this figure
depends, the attempt to master the future by a palpable fiction of the
present—to treat the sexually inchoate and inarticulate child as though
it were the fully-formed and consenting person in ovo—is perverse.
For time and all the circumstances that intervene to form individual
character and will are what ensure its autonomy from adult predictions.
The infant may not grow up to love the speaker, much less to secure a
kingdom; and since this discrepancy that time generates in the world—
between desire and fact, the wish and the reality—is what the speaker
would evade, so he tries to outface time by the preemptive artifice of the
poem itself. If the beloved will only believe it too, then they “both shall
monarchs prove” of the green world where such desires are neither
perverse nor impossible. Reciprocally, there is also the suggestion that
monarchy itself is an instrumental fiction like the pastoral, whose
efficacy at ordering the world requires that it too stand outside of time
and the actual contingency of things.
37Victoria Silver
As it happens, little girls usually tend to be monarchs in Marvell; for
their latent sexuality lends them present power and even a threatening
aggressiveness—power figured as the imperious ordering of pastoral
nature to which the speaker gladly subjugates himself. For none of
Marvell’s children are innocent even in the somewhat ruthlessly natural-
istic sense Empson applies to Alice. Rather, like Freud’s hysterics, they
are made politic (that is to say, preternaturally knowing and formal and
terrible) precisely because the speaker’s desire renders them sexually
precocious; their intelligence is itself a sublimation. Take little T. C.,
who rules her prospect of flowers with an iron hand:
1
See with what simplicity
This nymph begins her golden days!
In the green grass she loves to lie,
And there with her fair aspect tames
The wilder flowers, and gives them names:
But only with the roses plays;
And them does tell
What colour best becomes them, and what smell.
2
Who can foretell for what high cause
This Darling of the Gods was born!
Yet this is she whose chaster laws
The wanton Love shall one day fear,
And, under her command severe,
See his bow broke and ensigns torn.
Happy, who can
Appease this virtuous enemy of man!
3
O, then let me in time compound,
And parley with those conquering eyes;
Ere they have tried their force to wound,
Ere, with their glancing wheels, they drive
In triumph over hearts that strive,
And them that yield but more despise.
Let me be laid,
Where I may see thy glories from some shade.23
Between T. C.’s “fair aspect” and the green world, there is an original
sympathy from which both eros and mankind are summarily excluded
by the very condition of sexual desire. For erotic “wantonness” would
disorder the flowery dominion over which the child now rules with a
sway so absolute and entire that it is imaged as primal naming, and a
38 The Obscure Script of Regicide
judgment so nice that it does the ordinary world one better by
improving upon nature’s decorum—relegislating the color and smell of
those roses with which she only plays. The latter is a sumptuary act, an
expression of hierarchy and exclusivity that reflects the mana, the virtus
of the lawgiver. And T. C. has this imperial power because she is
“virtuous” in another sense, chaste or rather without desire for anyone
but herself and her kingdom. For in Marvell’s green world, the
extension of desire beyond oneself always brings with it disappointment
and alienation: desire makes one vulnerable, exposing the person to
others and their conflicting demands, and so the pastoral ideal incul-
cates its avoidance. T. C. of course contains all her desire in herself, in a
consummate feminine withholding like that maintained by the Homeric
Demeter against humanity and the deceiving gods when her girl-child is
ravished by death from the midst of pastoral sorority—another flowery
and sexually laden prospect.24 And to the extent that T. C. remains
impervious to any relationship but one, with the landscape that is her
reflex, so she maintains her sovereign power. Unsurprisingly, the roses
must be reformed since they are the symbol not only of beauty’s
transcience but love’s—of a lost bond or harmony between people
which the speaker obsessively anticipates when he calls T. C “the
virtuous enemy of man” in her proleptic womanhood, breaking Love’s
bow and tearing his ensigns, riding roughshod over her conquests and
despising them for yielding. He himself wants to fend off such oblivious
enmity; and so he negotiates with T. C. to love her not intimately but at
a distance and passively, admiringly, reverentially, fearfully, as though
making the little girl his god: “Let me be laid / Where I may see thy
glories from some shade.” In exchange for his subjection in love, he then
asks T. C. to continue this reformation of nature, eliminating from it the
very possibility he fears: loss, the dissolution of human as well as natural
bonds, incoherence, and an always untimely death:
4
Meantime, whilst every verdant thing
Itself does at thy beauty charm,
Reform the errors of the spring;
Make that the tulips may have share
Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;
And roses of their thorns disarm:
But most procure
That violets may a longer age endure.
39Victoria Silver
5
But, O young beauty of the woods,
Whom Nature courts with fruits and flowers,
Gather the flowers, but spare the buds;
Let Flora angry at thy crime,
To kill her infants in their prime,
Do quickly make the example yours;
And, ere we see,
Nip in the blossom all our hopes and thee.
(P, 25-40)
“The errors of the spring”—the discrepancy between a tulip’s beauty
and its essence; the discord of seduction and aggression in the nature of
a rose; the fragile life of violets, that emblem of fidelity in love but also
of retirement because “it groweth low near the ground and commonly
under covert of other herbs or flowers”—evoke the ambivalence and
discontinuity intrinsic to the human condition, the mature world of
negotium.25 And of course, this pastoral incoherence is itself an intima-
tion of the greater world’s ineluctable mortality, which strangely excites
the speaker’s fears for little T.C. He grows apprehensive not because the
child is bound by the gendered nature of things to grow up womanly and
coy, but because she herself, in enjoying the preternatural power with
which his love has endued her, may commit a kind of suicide by killing
off her own likeness or image—those flowery buds, Flora’s “infants in
their prime.” It seems that little T. C. must reciprocally observe the
same interpretive law, the same poetic logic, perversely making child-
hood her own prime. And that law consists in “making the example
yours” even as Flora might do: I refer to the elective power of images to
defy and change discordant actualities when we believe in them. An
aptly regal example would be “the mask of youth” exquisitely and
implausibly realized in the Rainbow portrait of Elizabeth I, the image
Nicholas Hilliard was commissioned to devise so that the regime could
project an eternal beauty for its aging if (notionally at least) virgin
queen.26 T. C.’s “crime” would be not to acknowledge the instrumental-
ity of likeness in upholding her own flowery polity; not to recognize the
effect of the speaker’s nursery magic, his wishful idea of erotic order and
value embodied in the picture of her green world; not to respect the
suasive role of images in sustaining her own regime. In other words, the
very imperiousness, the megalomania of little T. C.’s rule, subsuming in
herself the life and identity of every other flower in her prospect, may
incite Flora’s retribution and her own mortality, and with them the
extinction of the speaker’s hopes for a new Astrea and a perpetual
spring.
40 The Obscure Script of Regicide
So there is a danger in succumbing to the pastoral fiction, the green
world’s seeming identity with desire; for by believing so completely, one
can extinguish self in the mere idea of utter pleasure—which is to die in
more than one sense. Thus when the nymph Dorinda inquires into the
afterlife, understood as the moment when death parts her from her
sheep, Thyrsis tells her that Elysium looks something like this:
Oh, there’s neither hope nor fear,
There’s no wolf, no fox, no bear.
No need of dog to fetch our stray,
Our Lightfoot we may give away
No oat-pipe’s needful; there thy ears
May sleep with music of the spheres
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . There sheep are full
Of sweetest grass and softest wool;
There birds sing consorts, garlands grow,
Cool winds do whisper, springs do flow.
There always is a rising sun,
And day is ever but begun.
Shepherds there bear equal sway,
And every nymph’s a Queen of May.27
What Thyrsis represents is the pastoral as an epitome of art itself: a
world always complete and perfect; an aesthetic world where birds sing
not notes but “consorts,” where greenery grows not leaves but “gar-
lands”; a world of natural nobility, without struggle or extremity, always
beginning, never declining, perpetually the same. Dorinda responds to
this image with an immediate tedium vitae—“I’m sick, I’m sick and fain
would die” (D, 40)—and with Thyrsis determining not to be parted from
her, they propose to go
. . . pick poppies, and them steep
In wine, and drink on’t even till we weep,
So shall we smoothly pass away in sleep.
(D, 46-48)
Of course the ironical thing is that the condition they pursue in opiated
sleep is not altogether unlike their present pastoral state. The inescap-
able implication is that in Marvell, pastoral otium itself curiously, even
satirically resembles the oblivion of death, with the ultimate pleasure his
shepherds can conceive being freedom from the tense pursuit of
pleasure—the equivalent of Freud’s nirvana. Furthermore, these states
correspond strangely to the purely projected, conceptual animation of
41Victoria Silver
art. Thus when Damon meets and converses transcendentally with the
god Pan in the wood, he abruptly loses interest in what “had been
enticing things / Clorinda, pastures, caves, and springs,” suffering an
ennui that empties his desires of their former vitality: “That den? Love’s
Shrine. But virtue’s grave.”28 As the attainment of the absolute or the
perfection of nature, art would seem to bring with it a revulsion towards
human being, even the wishful green world variety. Indeed, in Marvell’s
pastorals, the artistic works not to incite or fulfill but rather to extinguish
desire, as the driving problematic of the human condition. For once
things become artificial, they become peculiarly quiescent, memorial,
and anaesthetized (drugged in Dorinda’s fashion) in the sense of dead to
the pain of living in this world.
III.
At first glance, the orgiastic encounters of Marvell’s speakers with
vegetation may not seem to fit this model of pastoral entelechy; but
really they do because they occur in the artificial realm of gardens, the
pastoral’s economic or domestic dimension, where vegetable life is
animated by the reciprocal desire of the self to sink into quiescent
pleasure:
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarene, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.29
Thus the speaker of “The Garden” subsides into copious, infantile
luxury—embraced, fondled, and fed by greenery, which services him
with a distinctly erotic enthusiasm, dropping its apples, crushing its
grapes, reaching its peaches and melons and flowers around, into, and
about his body. He is obliged to do nothing but simply be a “happy
vegetable” himself, without any need to cultivate his pleasure since all of
it urgently descends upon him. In this version of the Marvellian
pastoral, the speaker’s sensations are the center of its world, and his
desires motivate and order his garden just as little T.C.’s do in her less
voluptuous (because feminine) prospect of flowers. Harry Berger ob-
serves from his own tacitly psychoanalytic position that Marvell has
given us a neurotic epitome in this poem, where the “am’rous” (G, 18)
42 The Obscure Script of Regicide
green forthrightly rescues the speaker from the conflicts of business and
love, and plunges him into narcissism.30 That the garden itself conspires
in his regression from desire’s anxious pursuit is of course part and
parcel of pastoral pathology. The speaker doesn’t have to do that for
himself either, but instead and memorably
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
(G, 41-48)
It is fairly common to see the moment when the soul “casts the body’s
vest aside” and “into the boughs does glide” as a kind of ecstasis that
disdains the very sensual abundance in which the speaker had just been
so thoroughly submerged. But I am inclined to regard this ecstatic
pleasure as being of the same order as the voluptuous one, since
delectation in either case involves the suppressing of difference be-
tween self and world and thus the obstacle between desire and its
fulfillment: “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green
shade.” For the speaker’s imaginary transcendence of his body allows
him merely to make absolute his sense that everything is an extension of
himself. Indeed, one is bound to recall that, pace Rousseau, Freud
himself associates the “oceanic feeling” of religion—that is, its charac-
teristic sense of human communion or universality—with the regres-
sive, antipathetic sensations of narcissism.31 Moreover, without this
garden-variety of nursery magic the speaker’s ego could hardly indulge
its megalomania, for it is the fond perfecting art of the pastoral that
makes nature so utterly and congenially responsive to his desires. This I
think is the gist of that closing commendation of the gardener’s skill in
creating that ephemeral and so unstable instrument of calculation, an
herbaceous sundial: “How could such sweet and wholesome hours / Be
reckoned but with herbs and flowers!” (G, 71-72). For art’s capacity to
regenerate the self entails here a denial of just those differences and
discrepancies which are time’s concomitant in the “busy companies of
men,” the sexual realm of “red and white” (G, 12, 17). Yet the ultimate
difference expunged from the speaker’s “happy garden-state” (G, 57),
his “delicious solitude” (G, 16), is not really the sexual complication of
womankind, but what that presence figures: the reality of other minds
with whose desires and necessities he might have to compete.
43Victoria Silver
One of the most famous examples of this narcissistic slide simulta-
neously into quiescence and pastoral art is the statue of herself with her
dead fawn that Marvell’s Nymph contemplates, along with her own
death. For all that she would make its sepulchral image “White as I can,
though not as thee,” the Nymph has nonetheless been translating her
pet into a virtual icon throughout the poem.32 Thus by her quaint and
tender care, the fawn grows ever more “white and sweet,” more
precious or more bijou “on those little silver feet” with their “pretty
skipping grace,” so that it outdoes all other natural beauties, including
her own (N, 58, 64-65). The fawn is no simple compensation for the
inconstancy of its giver, Sylvio; it is not his nature which is perfected by
this artful love but hers, whose white skin and feminine delicacy of body
the fawn exceeds. What the Nymph’s gentle narcissism cherishes in the
fawn is a self neutered of sexual desire just like little T. C. and the
speaker of “The Garden,” and accordingly, a self putatively free from the
conflicts entailed by relationship with actual as against interpretive or
imaginary persons. This regressive simplicity is pictured by the fawn in
spring gorging itself on roses in the Nymph’s garden, its whiteness so
complete that it appears indistinguishable from the banks of lilies on
which it lies, at least until the little beast rises up to kiss her:
But all its chief delight was still
On roses thus itself to fill:
And its pure virgin limbs to fold
In whitest sheets of lilies cold.
Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.
O help! O help! I see it faint:
And die as calmly as a saint.
See how it weeps. The tears do come
Sad, slowly dropping like a gum.
So weeps the wounded balsam: so
The holy frankincense doth flow.
The brotherless Heliades
Melt in such amber tears as these.
(N, 87-100)
The repulsive sight the Nymph describes here—“this warm life-
blood which doth part / from thine,” the “purple grain” of its wound
upon the fawn’s white skin—is disguised by the egregiously emblematic
character of her language, which separates red from white, heterosexual
from infantile eros, into a perfectly simple polarity (N, 19-22). The gore
is no less aestheticized here than in the icons of those martyred saints to
whom she compares her pet in death. As a result, whatever horror
44 The Obscure Script of Regicide
Nymph or reader might feel at this sight is ameliorated in the very act of
imaging. Indeed, the actuality of the fawn’s suffering and hers is made
pleasurable by the truisms of elegy: the animal’s painful weeping is given
duly lugubrious pace and allegorical loveliness by its mistress—effects
conspicuously at odds with the incidental, arbitrary, and of course
topical manner of the fawn’s death at the hands of the troopers. So by the
time the Nymph determines to die comparably to her fawn, she has
converted suicide away from despair at life into melancholy sentiment: the
monologue ends in her imagining her own graceful, magical subsidence
into sculpture—the static condition of art—her tears neatly engraving the
legend of her grief upon her marble if not entirely impervious breast.
What we might reasonably find repugnant about this seventeenth-
century version of the Loved One—the metamorphosis of death into
sentimental art—would seem to be expressed by the Mower in his
diatribe against gardens:
Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,
Did after him the world seduce,
And from the fields the flower and plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclosed within the garden’s square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupified them while it fed.
The pink grew then as double as his mind;
The nutriment did change the kind.
With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,
And flowers themselves were taught to paint.
The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,
And learned to interline its cheek.33
His speech is easily taken as a criticism of the pastoral itself, where
nature has been more corrupted than perfected by art. But such a
reading overlooks the fact that the Mower is himself a pastoral figure in
Marvell, and that the conflict lies between understandings of the same
world, not between different landscapes. What the Mower celebrates
only seems to be distinct in kind from what delights the speaker of “The
Garden”; for the Mower regards the pastoral as prima natura, as the
gods made it, while Marvell’s polymorphous speaker approaches it as
second nature, the work of human desire. One sees the green world as
the original condition of things to which all art must inevitably return;
the other understands it as a needful artifice, designed to improve upon
nature where nature itself has failed us. The “dead and standing pool of
air,” the “more luscious earth,” the cosmetic enhancing of the flowers
45Victoria Silver
and their inordinant shape and size, all of which so repel the Mower,
seen from another angle yet describe the “sweet fields” he adores (M,
32). For he himself acknowledges that the garden strains to be the very
image of his meadows, whose nature if not egregiously artful is still
magically responsive and pleasurable:
Where willing nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence:
And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howsoe’er the figures do excel,
The gods themselves with us do dwell.
(M, 33-39)
The Mower’s delusion then (and all Marvell’s mowers are deluded,
usually by passion) is that there is some essential difference between
meadow and garden, wild and tame, in the pastoral, a difference which
consists in the impositions of art from which first nature can be
redeemed like the sinful humanity perpetrating them. For him as well,
art is a pathology, expressed in the “enforced” (M, 31) nature of the
garden—the extravagant enhancements, the grafting, the hybrids which
aggressively distort and complicate the primal order that he says yet
obtains outside “the gardens square” (M, 5). What the Mower implies is
that, could the garden greenery just recollect the original, now-forgot-
ten pattern from which it has been falsely, artificially diverted, then it
might be reclaimed and pastoral humanity with it. Yet it seems to me
that all the inhabitants of Marvell’s green world, both meadow and
garden, strive to recollect a primitive simplicity of being seemingly lost
to them by a similar enforcement: namely, the intrusive, recurrent
inadequacy of human nature to human desire. In the case of the
Nymph, this failure takes the violent shape of Silvio’s infidelity and the
troopers’ killing of her fawn; for Dorinda, Thyrsis, and Damon, it is the
impossibility of perfect fulfillment in this life; for the lovers of little
infants and gardens, it is the petit mort of love’s betrayal and the
intractable difficulty of human being more largely. The Mower in his
meadow is no different from them. For the gardener’s dissimulating art
with its “forbidden mixtures” (M, 22), “uncertain and adulterate fruit”
(M, 25), “green seraglio” (M, 27), and hermaphroditic cherry, works the
same order of erotic perplexity, the same betrayal of his hopes. And like
T. C.’s flowery prospect, the Nymph’s little wilderness, Dorinda’s
Elysium of poppies, or the delicious solitude of the speaker’s garden, the
46 The Obscure Script of Regicide
Mower’s sweet fields purport to offer a retreat from the suffering desire
itself brings upon humanity—retreat itself being the temptation, or
rather the grand delusion, of the pastoral.
Even in putative retirement, these figures still share this belief that
they can withdraw yet further into some timeless because primal
simplicity of nature that will more readily, intimately, and painlessly
gratify their desires. But since the complication of desire by heterosexu-
ality—I use this term etymologically, as I think Toliver does, to signify
the desire for a person other than the self or its reflections—is the
invariable fact around which pastoral life turns, no such retreat is viable.
Indeed, the only escape from the inevitability of suffering is death,
quiescence, or the sublimation of desire into voyeurism or art—briefly,
reactions, not innovations. That is why in the Marvellian green world,
the thwarting or betrayal of love regularly summons up images of self-
execution. Confounded by the artful and recalcitrant Juliana, Damon
the clown (who may or may not be the other mowers in Marvell’s
pastoral canon) is reciprocally alienated from the pastoral world, which
grows strange and hostile in direct proportion to the keenness of his
desire for the imperious Juliana:
‘Oh what unusual heats are here,
Which thus our sunburned meadows sear!
The grasshopper its pipe gives o’er;
And hamstringed frogs can dance no more.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This heat the sun could never raise,
Nor Dog Star so inflame the days.
It from an higher beauty grow’th,
Which burns the fields and mower both:
Which mads the dog, and makes the sun
Hotter than his own Phaeton.
Not July causeth these extremes,
But Juliana’s scorching beams.’34
Thus “The Mower to the Glowworms” on Juliana: “she my mind hath so
displaced / That I shall never find my home.”35 Thus the refrain to “The
Mower’s Song”: “When Juliana came, and she / What I do to the grass,
does to my thoughts and me.”36 The pathetic fallacy in which Damon
indulges is itself a figure of this pastoral delusion, a consummate
narcissism expressed in terms of a nature fatally responsive to the
vicissitudes of the self’s desires. So the little death of alienation that love
causes him to suffer is epitomized and predicted by his own mowing and
its farcical finale, when Damon scythes not the grass but his own ankle
47Victoria Silver
and is moved to compare his wound to the terrible effects of “love’s
despite,” whose only cure is death proper.37
IV.
But there is a grimmer, more disturbing aspect to this enactment of
erotic narcissism and despair in Marvell’s pastorals, which appears
flagrantly if still comically in the tale of “Daphnis and Chloe.” It is the
usual green world story: the expression of woman’s sexuality as enjoined
by nature itself—“coy” and “nice,” which is to say ever so complicated—
thwarts the man’s seemingly simple, forthright love, driving him to
distraction and finally death (although that death is revealed to be a
gratefully recurrent petit mort of the sexual kind).38 Here Daphnis takes
leave of the astounded Chloe:
23
“Farewell, therefore, all the fruit
Which I could from love receive:
Joy will not with sorrow weave,
Nor will I this grief pollute.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
At these words away he broke;
As who long has praying li’n,
To his headsman makes the sign,
And receives the parting stroke.
26
But hence, virgins, all beware:
Last night he with Phlogis slept;
This night for Dorinda kept;
And but rid to take the air.
27
Yet he does himself excuse;
Nor indeed without a cause:
For, according to the laws,
Why did Chloe once refuse?39
In likening a lover’s farewell to the ritual spectacle of beheading, the
speaker evokes more than Daphnis’s own morbid theatrics of sexual
disappointment: that is to say, Chloe or himself as foe, executioner,
cannibal, necrophiliac, madman, ghost, condemned prisoner, hunger
striker, erring Hebrew gourmand, or witch. He is alluding to a failure of
erotic relationship at once current and historical which persists in
48 The Obscure Script of Regicide
haunting Marvell’s green world, namely, the judicial execution of an
anointed king. For King Charles’s head keeps straying into this equally
inadvertent memorial even as it does Mr. Dick’s, provoking the same
sense of inexorability, disappointment, and indecorum.
It reappears in the too-particular choice of troopers (variously the
Scotish Covenanting or New Model armies) to massacre the Nymph’s
pet, as well as in her interesting vocabulary of its martyrdom; in the
recurring threat not of an ultimate death but mortal betrayal and
violence to both lovers and beloveds, the idea embodied in the mower’s
distinctly singular figure. It makes its presence felt in the comet that the
Mower construes as signaling Juliana’s ominous advent yet “no war, nor
prince’s funeral”; in the speakers’ so clearly overdetermined use of the
topoi likening gardens to kingdoms, lovers to monarchs, infant beloveds
to tyrants; in the Mower’s differently topical concern with grafting and
hybrids which disrupt the proper identity, hierarchy, and continuity of
stock—what amounts to nature’s own divinely-instituted dynasty.40 And
in Marvell’s great poems, it underlies the simultaneous civil and
perceptual disorder of the meadows at Nunappleton House (not just
that garden’s degenerate oak), as well as the images of Cromwell as
gardener and Charles as royal actor in “An Horatian Ode.” In these
ways, King Charles’s head invades the ostensible tranquility and erotic
dominion of Marvell’s pastorals; nor is it out of place there, since the
event of regicide that such calculated incongruities remember is what
motivates and orders the whole green world scene.
In itself, the recognition of this pervasive allusion to the Civil War is
hardly unprecedented; for most critics, Marvell’s flashbacks to the
conflict and its aftermath epitomize the turmoil conventionally obtain-
ing in the world of negotium, inciting the move to pastoral retirement in
the first place. But as I mentioned before, these readers then go on to
argue for the transfiguring power of such retreat and of the poetic art it
exemplifies, whereas I would contend that Marvell’s topos of retirement
is too ambivalent and cynical to allow for such an outcome. We do well
to remember that when Shakespeare gives us the gardener’s allegory of
good governance in Richard II, it is difficult to tell whether that speech
is intended as diatribe or as elegy for Richard, as justifying Bolingbroke’s
usurpation or as indicting it. Certainly, as that speech applied to
contemporary politics, we do not have Elizabeth’s, or for that matter
Essex’s assurance that she herself is Richard, if only because we cannot
be sure what “being Richard” means. This is of course the difficulty that
attends all such applications of pastoral to politics, for the thrust of the
allegory at least since Virgil has been notoriously difficult to pin down.
49Victoria Silver
And well it might be, since poets may pick the pastoral as their cipher to
ensure that they are not too exactly understood (as otherwise none
might escape hanging).
But not in Marvell’s case, where our discovering some parallactic
view or vestigial trace of Charles’s bloody head in the garden makes
interpretively clear just how the poet understands our political motives
and possibilities. For politics, like pastoral itself, has to do with the
available means we have of seeking human wellbeing, of achieving our
desires. If Marvell intends the Shakespearean comparison of a garden to
a kingdom, then his pastoral cannot but raise the same issue that
confronts the reader there and has consumed criticism of his own
“Horatian Ode”: with whom does the poet associate good governance,
Charles or Cromwell? But the comparison also invites the question
preoccupying the Nymph, Damon, his speakers in retirement, Dorinda,
and the whole pastoral crew: what do we do when we experience a
conflict or failure in the very character of our desire, when we are
betrayed by or betray what we love? It is not my intention here to plot
in Marvell’s pastorals the primal romance of Britain’s political family in
the seventeenth century. An allegorical scheme along the lines of Totem
and Taboo is too blatantly available, to wit the killing of the despotic
father by his sons in the pursuit of their burgeoning desires, followed by
the attempt to recreate the infantile conditions of simple and utter,
because polymorphous, pleasure—the memory of that delectable and
entirely responsive universe of the undifferentiated self. The inevitable
failure of this attempt follows, because the sons have already admitted
the distinction between self and world, the dissociating force of indi-
viduality which not only foments and subtends parricide but also the
subsequent conflict among themselves. Guilt then ensues, that singular
passion of remembrance in Freud, transforming the dead father into the
ultimate loved one, the resurrected god to reunify their group. And with
this fraught conversion of their attitude towards the father begins the
dynamic of psychic repression—the fearsome, perverse superfluity of
emotion that keeps intruding upon present experience in the form of
incontinent memory. At last, under the now transcendental domination
of the father and guilt together, they agree to renounce gratification and
begin society as we know it. I would prefer instead to talk about the
interpretive position that allows this supposedly obscure script for the
state of nature to be thus peremptorily disclosed in Marvell’s green
world. For so handsomely exact an allegory is what ensures that
transfiguration cannot take place there: in a sense, the interpretive
closure itself confines the therapeutic scope of its art.
50 The Obscure Script of Regicide
Let us assume, for example, that to divide Marvell’s political from his
other poems is a false discrimination, and that the roughly simultaneous
composition of the pastorals and the Cromwell eulogies (the late 1640s
to 1650s) argues rather their likely affinities. Let us then suppose that
those much adored infants, from T. C. and the Nymph with her pet to
the superlative Maria Fairfax of “Upon Appleton House,” who exert
near-tyrannical yet always precarious sway over their pastoral kingdoms
as well as the speaker, are King Charles in disguise—but Charles
effeminized or rather sublimated by his death, in the form of that
nostalgic or sentimental art in which every pastoral person, however
immature of body or mind, is strangely proficient like every royalist.
(One need only recall the frontispiece to Eikon Basilike, not to mention
the panoply of Stuart martyrologies.) Let us also say that the Marvellian
green world, the pastoral per se, represents a false because artificial
narcissism, into which the subject-speaker guiltily regresses—guiltily,
because the memory of that once-and-future father can only be sup-
pressed for a time, never blotted out altogether. Let it be allowed, then,
that the residue of parricide and that event’s concomitant of civil war
keep on invading the pleasaunce, in the shape of those incongruously
topical images of violence, erotic domination, and betrayal which
disrupt the impression of the pastoral’s facile and egalitarian pleasures.
Then let us also say that the effect of these ruptures in such pleasure,
real or threatened, is to make the Marvellian speaker claim the pastoral
as somehow an authentic state: not so much to deny its character as
second nature, although in the person of the Mower he does that too,
but to assimilate this discrepancy or conflict to a superior fiction of the
past—namely, to an original nature that serves as pattern or prototype
for the present version. For it is this original that not only authorizes but
enables his retreat from intrusive memory, from historical fact, into the
mythic realm of pastoral, which it does by asserting the genetic
relationship, and so the merely submerged analogy, between past and
present. But the symbolic possibility of retreat is itself an illusion of
desire, inasmuch as the pastoral landscape still recollects, albeit con-
fusedly, the motives and events of the history that brought it into
being—its true if repugnant original. Indeed, one could argue that the
meanings of the pleasaunce are organized something along the lines of
that famous passage from Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud
pictures the simultaneity of past and present in psychic life:
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a
human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and
51Victoria Silver
copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once
come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of
development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would
mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of
Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the
Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its
battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege of the
Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the
Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo having
to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in
its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its
earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented
with terracotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at
the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of
the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon today, as it was
bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice
erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be
supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient
temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only
have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call
up the one view or the other.41
As Freud concludes, this image “leads to things that are unimaginable
and even absurd”; yet it is just such a genetic proximity of meaning that
incites the real ambivalence of the Marvellian green world, where after
the fashion of psychoanalytic parapraxis, errant incongruities are actual
and meaningful but apparent oppositions merely specious.42 All the
present anomalies of his pastorals—the acquiescence of inert adults in
the tenuous yet despotic rule of beloved infants; the gleeful exchange of
animation and intelligence between human beings and garden greenery;
the peculiar entelechy of pastoral life, which is to say the propensity not
just of sentient but of intelligent things to seek perfection and oblivion
at once as objets d’art; the ritual frequency with which heterosexuality is
accompanied by an abrupt or violent death: these are the estranged,
allegorized recollections of that political parricide, from whose memory
and his own complicitous past the speaker strives to escape, yet cannot.
For they are in a manner his interpretive fate.
Understood this way, the intrusion of the incongruous exposes the
facticity of the difference between the worlds of pleasure and business,
otium and negotium, which Virgil’s allegorizing of pastoral had already
compromised. For as much as human things seem apparently to change,
even turn upside down by pastoral retirement, so, with Dickensian or
Freudian inexorability, the more they remain the same. Or to put the
absurdity another way, the more the historical past intrudes, the more
52 The Obscure Script of Regicide
insistent is the pastoral desire to recede to some still previous state of
nature, whose claim to originality is a mythic claim in another sense,
having to do with the essential likeness and recurrence of human
meanings. And it is this expressive circumstance that belies the speaker’s
elaborate attempts at innovation, at changing the conditions of his life.
Such an order of ambivalence, which is a repression as against a true
refusal, is why no personal or political transformation can be effected by
Marvell’s pastoral retreat. Its difference from the world of business is
really a form of pseudonymity which inhibits effective criticism, because
the very likeness on which the political allegory depends, to the point of
a shared telos of terms, militates against any new imagination of human
being. So Marvell’s state of nature is more like Hobbes’s version than
Rousseau’s, a picture whose appeal lies in its negative or inverse
resemblance to what we already assume and desire. In that sense, it is
also more like Freud’s human nature, where the invariability of the
psychic order ensures that all meanings but one are ostensible, however
manifestly confused or deviant—where we are fated to perform inel-
egant if perhaps more cognizant variations on a single theme.
It remains to be seen whether a critical consciousness of the kind
Hobbes or Freud extend to this order is enough to precipitate the
emergence of a new human possibility—the projects of a Locke or
Rousseau, a Herbert Marcuse or Juliet Mitchell. But in Marvell’s
pastorals, the poet’s mordant irony notwithstanding, such innovations
whether figurative or political seem circumvented by the very nature of
the allegory. So even if Marvell’s more optimistic readers were to
understand transformation as the speaker’s reconciling himself to the
status quo, as I think Berger and Toliver both do, that reconciliation is
inadvertent, since it takes the shape of his arguing the pastoral claim to
be the status quo ante. In this sense, destiny is indeed the speaker’s
choice. For it has been acutely observed that, at the time of the
commonwealth, Marvell was no republican, but rather a Cromwellian.43
If I may put this remark to the service of my own argument here, it
would certainly follow that his loyalty to the Lord Protector would be of
the same order as his previous royalism—authoritarian and erotic. As
such, Marvell’s faithful adherence to Cromwell would entail no real
change in his political disposition, since it expresses the same atavistic
desire for personal rule. Indeed, the state of nature with which
Cromwell is identified in “An Horatian Ode” is no less pseudonymous
than Damon the Mower’s, an illusion of precedence or originality
comparably created by the artfulness, the sentimental decorum, of the
royal actor’s death. Moreover, when Cromwell himself departs the
53Victoria Silver
political stage, it is Marvell’s familiar conceit that he dies because he is
linked in fate and memory to another erstwhile infant—“Doubling that
knot which destiny had tied”—to his grown daughter Eliza whose death
shortly precedes his own:
A secret cause does sure those signs ordain
Foreboding prince’s falls, and seldom vain.
Whether some kinder powers that wish us well,
What they above cannot prevent foretell.44
Finally, for the Marvellian pastoral to foment revolution and not simply
rebellion would require the psychological refusal of a Dora to play
imaginative accomplice; or the iconographical resistance of an Algernon
Sidney to royalist propaganda; or the repudiation of sentimentality, if
not the aesthetic altogether, by Marvell the future parliamentarian and
satirist.
University of California, Irvine
NOTES
1 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966),
272.
2 Harry Berger, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-
Making, ed. John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 3-40.
3 See for example the serenade to Amaryllis and of course the Cyclops’s complaint
(Idylls 3 and 11).
4 I rely heavily on Thomas Rosenmeyer for this summary account of Theocritus and
his characteristic differences from Virgil (The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the
European Pastoral Lyric [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969], esp. 65-97). For
the peculiar tension between the simplifications of pastoral and urban complexity, a
tension implicit in Theocritus and express in Virgil, see Charles Segal’s collected essays,
Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral: Essays on Theocritus and Virgil (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), esp. 3-24.
5 Rosenmeyer, 45-64, esp. 60-61. This simplicity pertains to the intransitiveness of
rhetorical effect, and is very different from the philosophical sort Empson calls “very
Far-Eastern” in his essay on Marvell in Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New
Directions, 1960), 113-39.
6 See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), 334-58, esp. 353-54.
7 Political allegory is especially prominent in Eclogues V and IX; and in IV, of course, its
presence seems indisputable but its meaning indefinite. For a sensitive account of Virgilian
pastoral and its modes of expression, especially the political-historical, see Paul Alpers,
The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study in Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1979). See also Bruno Snell on Arcadia and its Virgilian version, in The Discovery
of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (1953;
rpt. Dover, 1982), 281-309; and on the strategies of Roman poetry more generally,
Gordon Williams, The Nature of Roman Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).
54 The Obscure Script of Regicide
8 See for example Petrarch’s Eclogues VI and VII, whose transparent and vulgar satire
of the papacy contrasts tellingly with Virgil’s allegorical tact.
9 See Donald Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1970); or more economically, the excerpt of that argument published as “Knowledge
and the World of Change: Marvell’s ‘The Garden,’” in Modern Critical Views: Andrew
Marvell, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 77-100.
10 Harold Toliver, Marvell’s Ironic Vision (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 88-
151, esp. 95.
11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755), in The First and Second
Discourses together with Replies to Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and
trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper Torchbooks/Harper & Row, 1990), 139.
12 Rousseau, 160.
13 Rousseau, 139-40.
14 Rousseau, 160, 163.
15 Rousseau, 149.
16 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968), 186.
17 Berger, 278.
18 See Frank Kermode, “The Argument of Marvell’s Garden,” in Andrew Marvell: A
Critical Anthology, ed. John Carey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 250-65; and
Rosalie Colie, “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), esp. 120 (“tautological mutuality”), but also her discussion
of “The Garden,” 141-77.
19 Toliver, 123.
20 Empson, 242.
21 Andrew Marvell, “Young Love” (1681), in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story
Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 64-65, ll. 1, 13-15, 7.
22 Marvell, “Young Love,” ll. 17-32.
23 Marvell, “The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers” (1681), in Poems, 63-
64, ll. 1-24. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by line number and abbreviated P.
24 Compare the increasingly ominous sexuality of the flora, comparably presaging the
violent change in her own virginal state, which are used to entice Persephone to her rape:
Away from her mother of the golden sword and the splendid fruit
she played with the full-bosomed daughters of Okeanos,
gathering flowers, roses, crocuses, and beautiful violets
all over a soft meadow; irises, too, and hyacinths she picked,
and narcissus, which Gaia, pleasing the All-receiver,
made blossom there, by the will of Zeus, for a girl with a
flower’s beauty.
A lure it was, wondrous and radiant, and a marvel to be seen
by immortal gods and mortal men.
A hundred stems of sweet-smelling blossoms
grew from its roots. The wide sky above
and the whole earth and the briny swell of the sea laughed.
She was dazzled and reached out with both hands at once
to take the pretty bauble; Earth with its wide raod gaped
and then over the Nysian field the lord and All-receiver,
the many-named son of Kronos, sprang out upon her with his
immortal horses.
55Victoria Silver
Like T. C., Persephone is moved to pick her own likeness (a flower “for a girl with a
flower’s beauty”), and in that moment is herself caught up into the heterosexual realm,
understood as a kind of half-death. (“To Demeter,” in The Homeric Hymns, trans.
Apostolos N. Athanassakis [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976], 1-2, ll. 4-
18).
25 H. Goldingham, “The Garden Plot” (1578), quoted in John Donne, The Complete
English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 368 n. 3.
26 See The Treasure Houses of Britain, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press/National Gallery of Art, 1985), 122. For an account of the whole imagistic
apparatus of Elizabethan propaganda, see Roy Strong’s The Cult of Elizabeth (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1977).
27 Marvell, “A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda” (1659), in Poems, 21-23, ll. 21-
38. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by line number and abbreviated D.
28 Marvell, “Clorinda and Damon” (1681), in Poems, 23-24, ll. 17-18, 10.
29 Marvell, “The Garden” (1681), in Poems, 100-2, ll. 33-40. Hereafter cited paren-
thetically in the text by line number and abbreviated G.
30 Berger, 281-85.
31 See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), ed. and trans. James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1961), 11.
32 Marvell, “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn” (1681), in Poems,
67-70, l. 122. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by line number and abbreviated
N.
33 Marvell, “The Mower against Gardens” (1681), in Poems, 105-6, ll. 1-14. Hereafter
cited parenthetically in the text by line number and abbreviated M.
34 Marvell, “Damon the Mower” (1681), in Poems, 108, ll. 9-24.
35 Marvell, “The Mower to the Glowworms” (1681), in Poems, 109, ll. 15-16.
36 Marvell, “The Mower’s Song” (1681), in Poems, 109-10, ll. 5-6.
37 Marvell, “Damon the Mower,” l. 83.
38 Marvell, “Daphnis and Chloe” (1681), in Poems, 44-47, ll. 6, 10.
39 Marvell, “Daphnis and Chloe,” ll. 89-108.
40 Marvell, “The Mower to the Glowworms,” l. 6 (“no war, nor prince’s funeral”).
41 Freud, 17.
42 Freud, 17.
43 I refer to Christopher Wortham’s comment in “Marvell’s Cromwell Poems: An
Accidental Triptych”: “There is little indication in Marvell’s poetry before the ‘Horatian
Ode’ to suggest that he had reached any sense of commitment to ideas or to ideas above
personality. That came much later, in the relatively quiet waters of his membership of
Parliament after the Restoration of the monarchy” (in The Political Identity of Andrew
Marvell, ed. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins [Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990], 22-23).
44 Marvell, “A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector” (1681),
in Poems, 148, ll. 44 (“Doubling that knot”), 101-4 (“A secret cause”).
