“To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 1

Transcript: 5.02 Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 1

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Key Terms:

• Carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More
• Metaphysical poets
• polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More
• sfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More

 

then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Wow, dude. That;s pretty grim.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if someone tried to seduce me with a bunch of pickup lines about dying and worms, I’d have to think:

He’s just not that into you! 

Welcome to Literary Nomads, where we’ll wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today we’re settling if for a series of episodes on Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” 

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Introduction

A quick injection here.

This episode, as I mentioned last week, is almost a repeat of an older episode from the original podcast. I’m bringing it back here because I do not expect new listeners to know about it, because older listeners may not remember, and I want to complete a discussion that I left hanging back then. 

But that also doesn’t mean I’m completely happy with the old episode. So while I offer it here again, I may jump in with a comment, an observation, a question, or something just odd. Who knows? 

But here it is, the first of a four-episode series doing a close look at Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the place from which we begin our wandering!~

You know I’ve been teaching  Andrew Marvell and his poetry for the last 20 maybe 25 years, and not once have I had a chance to really dig into the man’s work, his thinking, and all the arguments around his poems.  In that same amount of time, there’s been renewed interest in Marvell in the academic world. There is even an Andrew Marvell Society which formed and now publishes a newsletter on this single poet from the 1600s. In his lifetime he was known more for his politics than his poetry, and most of that was  published anonymously, because oh, you know, it was pretty harsh. No, Andrew Marvell is not without his controversies. But as I said, until recently, we didn’t give him much extra thought.

I think the guy that changed all this was another favorite of mine, Mister TS Eliot. Back about a hundred years ago now, and by the way that’s about two hundred fifty years after Andrew Marvel,  In a brief essay, Elliot claimed that Marvell was one of the greatest poets of human imagination.  And actually, the poem To His Coy Mistress is a perfect exemplar.

 That’s the poem we’re going to be talking about over the next few episodes, of all of his poetry, one of the easiest to get into. It’s famous because it was controversial, because of its misogyny, and somehow, because of its complex and elusive meanings.  As usual, though, the poem is the means for us to talk about some larger ideas in meaning making, in how literature works, in what we can do with it.

You may know the poem already, but if you don’t, don’t worry. I’m going to share it with you today. You’ll find a copy of it in the show notes, and there are plenty of resources about it on the Waywords website.  After we go through the poem, we’ll talk about what the text is up to, but we’re also going to investigate a little bit of the context, the history of Andrew Marvell, his life,  the politics and schooling that shaped him, the traditions of poetry, and the like. But we also talked about his misogyny, the obvious idea that he is not merely a lover or seducer of women. but something perhaps far worse. We’ll talk about the nature of audiences. In other words who is a poem written for, who is it written to, and how does that matter? Finally, we’ll end our little series with a discussion of whether or not a poem like this is even worth reading, worth talking about, worth teaching. Or is this a poem which is better left to the dust of History?

So let’s settle in. We have a lot before us. And I don’t even know everywhere we’re yet going to travel.

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Metaphysical Poetry

“To His Coy Mistress” is a metaphysical poem in which the speaker attempts to persuade his supposedly resistant lover that they should have sexual intercourse. He explains that if they had all the time in the world, he would have no problem with their relationship moving this slowly. However, he goes on to explain, they are mortal, and once they die they will be unable to be intimate together. The poem appears to serve 2 purposes: first, to persuade the mistress to love, and second, to comment on mortality in its inevitability and grotesqueness. It is this 2nd objective which Eliot tells us adds to the philosophical aspect to this love poem. 

The poem is famous for its metaphysical imagery. It’s what???

The metaphysical poets (and there was a whole flock of them–we call them that now, by the way.  They didn’t all think of themselves as a “club,” but metaphysical poetry is a tendency or a trend in poetry at the time, kind of like how historians will call the narcissism we have around selfies an obsession with fictional self-image, the metaphysical poets did a few things mostly the same way:

1. They loved metaphor, especially metaphors that were extended through several lines or an entire poem.
2. These metaphors were used to philosophically link their big ideas to the physical world and small objects. John Donne, for instance, talked about spiritual communion and sex through a mere flea.
3. They were willing to take big risks to accomplish all of this, trying out different experiments in poetic form. 
4. Metaphysical poetry is about this philosophical conceitIn literature, allowing a metaphor or unexpected comparison ... More, not the mere surface topic or real world subject, and it is about expressing a philosophical paradox. In other words, when we bring together all of these ideas, we end with thoughts which seemingly contradict each other without either being exactly wrong.

Most all of these guys–and yes, nearly all were men–were writing in Europe in the mid-1600s, and Andrew Marvell was among them.

Marvell fulfilled all of these qualities of metaphysical poetry. When we look at his larger collection of works, his lifetime of poetry and political writing, we see both an ambiguity and an unwillingness to be read simply.  Andrew Marvell was not a superficial writer. T.S. Eliot in his essay said that Marvell is ambiguous, elusive, which makes him great.

One of the best descriptions of Andrew Marvell poems I’ve seen says that Marvell employs a kind of verbal sfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More, an uncertainty of line that creates intrigue and prompts the reader to be more curious. SfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More. That’s a crazy word and it’s spelled s-f-u-m-a-t-o. SfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More is actually a painting technique where light, tone, color blur together, shading into one another, and producing an uncertainty where one ends and the other begins. This is how I want us to think about Andrew Marvell’s poetry, and in particular this poem before us.

I want us to see the poem not only for what its subject is– its story–but for its metaphysical nature, the politics of the Reformation around it, the slippage of authority, and even perhaps its queerness. We are going to explore the poem as they say “through a glass Darkly,” And unfortunately, if you have come to this podcast hoping to find out what the poem means, I can only disappoint you. Instead we are going to walk away with some genuine feeling of discomfiture.  In other words, of a frustrating uncertainty which leaves us wanting more.  If I didn’t know any better, I would say that is one of the qualities of Desire.

But enough introduction.  Let’s give the poem a listen. And if you are listening to the podcast right now, you will find the entire poem in the show notes. Here it is: 

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Reading of Poem

To His Coy Mistress
                        Andrew Marvell, 1681

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side,
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

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Whew. 

Okay. There’s a lot there, and I certainly don’t expect you to remember all of it right now. 

But let’s start with an overview.

Marvell’s speaker essentially makes this point:

1. Lady, you’re awesome, and you deserve nothing except being worshiped and adored for thousands of years. 
2. But we don’t have that long. We’re going to get old and die, and nobody is finding love in the grave.
3. Therefore, while we’re young (and you, of course, are still attractive), we should make love right now. 

Um, yeah.  It’s a giant pick-up line, this poem, and while it’s flowery and has some lovely images (and some not very lovely at all), he’s basically telling her, Quit playing hard to get, because you’re only young and hot like this right now. We can see, can’t we, why this poem is so offensive to so many? (We’ll get to all of that, for certain, but first let’s break it down.)

 

Basic Meaning

We don’t know who this Coy Lady is, do we? But our speaker calls her coy, which means that she is somehow and somewhy resisting his advances. He even understands it. He says if we had time enough, this game of resistance would be perfectly fine, no crime.

Then he goes on with a long series of things he would do if they had all the time in the world. She would be on the other side of the world and India finding rubies. He would be at home in England in his hometown of Humber complaining, waiting.  But it doesn’t matter. He would still love her from the time of the Old Testament,  Before the Flood, until the conversion of the Jews, a phrase I guess meaning till the end of time, because the Jewish people are unlikely to convert to Christianity anytime soon.

Then we come upon an unusual image, one that has been read and misread across the years. He describes his love as a vegetable love. Now, before you start thinking of some giant ball of lettuce that grows across Europe as a metaphor for his love, you should know that this is a metaphor that was somewhat common in Marvel’s time. The soul had three components: the first was the rational soul, a quality possessed only by humans; the second was the sensitive soul, a quality that we shared with animals; and the final part of the Soul which is the vegetable soul, shared by all living things and had neither mind nor speed, it was the slowest growing most organic part of us, The part of slow growth and decay, very natural.

He shows this of course by starting to adore each part of her with centuries. and, as she says, she deserves this slow love, and he would not want to love her faster. That is, if they had all the world and time.

Now we get to the second stanza though where he makes his argument a little more clearly. 

“But at my back I always hear / time’s winged Chariot hurrying near.” Yes, time and death are coming up the rear, and soon it will catch up with us. We will age and we will die. “Deserts of vast eternity.”

So let’s be clear. Thy Beauty, her beauty, shall never more be  found, nor while she is lying in The Marble vault, her tomb, will he be there to sing to her. But even more disgusting, the only thing that will be seducing her are the worms if she rots. And so that quaint honor, her coyness, becomes dust, and of course, so does his Love.

Nobody wants that. Nobody finds Love in Death.

And so this leads our speaker to his conclusion:

So, while your skin is young and glowing, and while your pores are on fire, let us sport us while we may; in other words, let’s make love.

But he isn’t satisfied, it seems, with a gentle love. He wants the kind of physical relationship of “Amorous Birds of Prey”.  He wants to “tear our Pleasures with rough Strife.”  

No, I don’t want to get super explicit here yet, but I do need to point out that our speaker is pretty graphic with his metaphors. I described the lady’s marble vault as a tomb a moment ago, but it also does sound like a pelvis  where those worms are doing their business, and so the phrase quaint honor sounds very much like virginity. This 3rd stanza has imagery of heat, fire, of sweat, of eating or biting …

And the Poem gets weird here, talking about time and iron gates of life and making the sun run, and we’ll get to all of that.  But for now, let’s say that our speaker believes that their sex act will somehow affect their idea of time.

If you want to find out more on the textual imagery in this poem, I have placed an annotated copy of the poem on the website that breaks all this down even further. The link to the website is in the show notes.

Now, that’s the basics of this poem. Nobody really disagrees with this basic meaning. And it’s enough to say, Whoa, this guy is messed up, leave the girl alone, and why are you being all creepy and death-like about this, anyway?

These are good questions. But as I said at the beginning, we’re going to have to dig a bit, travel a bit, in order to see what Marvell might be up to. 

Carpe DiemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More

It’s at this point that we need to introduce one of the philosophical ideas of this poem: the philosophy of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More.

Everyone  who has lived in the twentieth century or before knows this phrase. 

Keating: Mr Pitts, if you would open the hymnal to page 542. Read the first stanza of the poem you find there.

Pitts: “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”?

Keating: Yes. Somewhat appropriate, isn’t it?

Pitts: Gather ye Rosebuds, while ye may,
Old time is still a flying
And this same flower that smiles to day
Tomorrow will be dying.

Keating: Thank you, Mr. Pitts. “Gather ye Rosebuds while ye May.” Latin term for that sentiment is carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More. Now who knows what that means?

Meeks: Carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More. That’s seize the day.

Keating:  Very good. Mr…

Meeks:   Meeks.

Keating:  Meeks, another unusual name. Seize the day. “Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may.” Why does the writer use these lines?

Student:  Because he’s in a hurry.

Keating:  No, ding!  Thanks for playing anyway. Because we are food for worms, lads. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.

That was from The Dead Poet’s Society with Robin Williams. He talks about a contemporary of Marvell’s, Robert Herrick. No, I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Robert Herrick just now, but his poem, “To The Virgins to make much of time”  is one of the more famous carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poems. As Peter Keating or Robin Williams says, we should live our lives like there is no tomorrow, for we shall soon be food for worms.

Let’s listen to all of Herrick’s poem so we can see the similarities:

Um, let me interrupt just a bit here. Before we hear the poem, I want to answer a question eleven of you out there are bound to ask: Did Marvell know about this “Gather ye rosebuds guy?”  Well, yeah, probably. Herrick was fairly well known in his day as a “Cavalier Poet,” one of a group of poets who wrote for the Royalists during the English Civil War. “To the Virgins” was written in 1648 and Marvell’s poem in 1681. 

Now some folks will tell you that Marvell is also part of the Cavalier Poetry club (my name for it), but that isn’t exactly true. What is true is that Marvell was also quite involved in politics during this time, but rather than fall with the King during the War, he took up with the Parliamentarians under Cromwell. When the King returned to power, Herrick came back, too. They may well have crossed paths here and there. 

But as we’ll see, I’m getting ahead of myself again, and this political connection between these two writers is hardly the point that Old Steve is making here is reading Herrick’s poem; and this was supposed to be a brief interjection, so why are you still asking me questions about it? Let’s listen to the poem: 

 

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (1648)

Robert Herrick

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

Now my point here is not so much that these two poets wrote the same ideas at the same time (or even that they used the same imagery: racing the sun, warm blood and youth, be not coy), but that, as we’ve learned in earlier episodes, authors built upon each other all the time, and still do. Andrew Marvell did not invent seduction; he did not invent the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poem. Nor did he invent the idea of using it to seduce women. This has in fact, been done for thousands of years before Andrew Marvell.  

So carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More is a philosophy which is well-known, well understood, and much argued. Camille Paglia described Marvell’s carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poem as “a brazenly pagan message.”   Why pagan?  Well, to seize the day and make as much of Life as we can because we will soon die, implies that there is nothing after death to look forward to. In other words, carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More suggests that there is no afterlife, Heavenly or otherwise, for which we might be morally accountable.  

So somehow in this poem is a philosophical argument about Christianity is, the soul, and what we’re supposed to do with our lives.

Let’s dip just a bit into that philosophy.

 Deeper In: New Criticism - Christian and Pagan

Okay. 

The speaker, some kind of courtier, has apparently urged an unsuccessful proposition on a younger lady. We presume the lady is younger because she is youthful, and our male speaker has some degree of education behind him, which suggests he is older. We call her a mistress not because she is already his lover, that is a more modern definition of the word, but because a young unmarried woman, especially one of some status, would have this as title. You know, as in mistress and master.

Thus writing a poem like this is an educated art of nobility, how a proper gentleman makes love in the classic sense. Finding her reluctant, he is, as the poem opens, making use of his most eloquent line.  But it is a line that reveals him to be, as I said, no common lover.  All this imagery about time and death and racing suns (which we still have not talked about) show off his cleverness, his creativity, his imagination. After all, he says, we know nothing about any future life and have only the grimmest observations about the effects of death.  We might as well enjoy today.

But this poem is, as a matter of fact, a specious argument, viewed from the standpoint of formal logic.  The fallacy is called denying the antecedent, in this case the first part of the conditional statement beginning with “if.”  IF we have all the time and space in the world, your coyness is innocent (not criminal).  We do not have all the time and space in the world. Therefore your coyness is not innocent. Both premises are true, and the conclusion is still false. The lady‟s coyness may not be innocent for reasons other than the lovers not having all the time and space in the world. 

New Steve here again. Now, Old Steve is doing pretty well, I guess, but let’s help him out on this logical fallacy thing a bit. This “denying the antecedent” makes more sense, maybe, if we 

think of, oh, just a few reasons why she may be coy other than thinking she has all the time in the world and isn’t staring into some kind of apocalypse::  

1. She has another lover
2. She is not interested in a relationship, with or regardless of his proposal
3. She wishes to protect her reputation
4. She is not interested in men
5. The speaker smells bad
6. The speaker is too old
7. The speaker has-any-three-bad-qualities you can name that cause her to reject him

Significantly, our speaker doesn’t consider any of these! Or if he does, they are irrelevant to his goal.  Okay, now quit interrupting. We were talking about how the speaker doesn’t really care about logic, anyway:

The male arguer obviously does not care whether his argument is valid or not as long as it achieves its purpose. As Pope so well said in The Rape of the Lock: 

For when success a Lover’s toil attends, Few ask, if fraud or force attained its ends. (2:33-34)

Is the seduction Marvell’s only purpose? It may or may not be the speaker’s, but remember that there is a difference between the author of a poem and its speaker. Sure, the speaker wants to seduce, but what is it with all these extra images?

The opening line of the poem—“Had we but world enough and time”—introduces us to the space-time continuum. “Had we,” the speaker says, knowing that they do not.  From that point on, the hyperbole, the playfulness, the grim fear of annihilation, are all based on the feeling of the speaker that he is bound by the dimensions of space and time. This poem is a proposition made by the eternal male to the eternal female, that is: Marvell understands that he is writing the archetypal, the typical, the traditional love poem. The motif of space and time shows this poem to be a philosophical consideration of time, of eternity, of man‟s pleasure (hedonism), and of salvation in an afterlife (traditional Christianity). If we look through the poem, we find not a few, but dozens of words and images that relate to time and eternity. 

The last two lines of the poem are also about time:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Further, it may extend time backward to suggest Old Testament days and classical mythology:  Joshua stopped the sun so that the Israelites could win a battle, and, even better, Zeus lengthened the night he spent with Amphitryon‟s wife. Ah, so we DO have a Christian image and a pagan image together here, both stopping time to “accomplish” more. 

But the Zeus parallel is still important: For the poem is also a love poem, both in its traditional context of the courtly love complaint and in the simple fact of its subject matter: fearing that the afterlife may be a vast space without time, the speaker looks for a means of enjoying whatever he can. This carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More theme is not uncommon, nor is the theme of seduction. What gives the poem some unusual power, however, is the overbearing sense of a cold, calculated drive (with this bad logic!) to use the pleasures of sex to counterbalance the threats of empty eternity. 

Let’s take a moment and rethink these three stanzas in terms of the philosophy of time.

–Stanza one is an ironic presentation of the “escape from time” to some paradise state where the lovers may dally for eternity.  But such a state is a foolish delusion as the speaker suggests in the “Had we but time” and his metaphor of a vegetable growing to infinite size in some archetypal garden? Please. 

–Stanza two then reverses the idea and discusses time in terms of the desert archetype, governed by the inexorable laws of nature (note the Sun symbol in “Time‟s winged Chariot”), the laws of decay and death.  Stanza two is as extreme in its philosophical realism as Stanza one is in its idealism. So we begin in idealism then move to extreme realism.

–The third part presents a third kind of time, then, an escape into cyclical time and thereby a chance for immortality.  Again the sun archetype appears, but this is a sun of “soul” and “instant fires”—images not of death but of creative energy, fused with the sphere (“Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball”), the archetype of primal wholeness and fulfillment.

Marvell’s poet-lover seems to offer the alchemy of love as a way of defeating the laws of natural time; love is a means of participating in, even intensifying, the mysterious rhythms of nature’s eternal cycle.  If life is to be judged not by duration but by intensity, then Marvell‟s lovers, at least during the act of love, will achieve a kind of immortality by “devouring” time or by transcending the laws of clock time (“Time‟s winged Chariot”).  And if this alchemical transformation requires a fire hot enough to melt them into one primordial ball, then it is perhaps also hot enough to melt the sun and “make him run.” 

Closing and Preview

Now:

Is this a poem about a manipulative seduction OR a poem philosophizing about time and perhaps contrary to Christian thinking? Yes, both.

Is this a poem mocking other love poetry OR a poem that sincerely wants to seduce a woman?  Well, maybe yes. Both.

 Is this a poem which “talks back” to other carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poetry, arguing a point, or is it perhaps an exercise for Marvell to work out these questions on his own?  Also yes, perhaps.

In the metaphysical tradition, is the seduction a metaphor for his philosophizing about time, or does he use time images as a metaphor for how he must love? Huh. Yes.

Okay. I’ve offered you some quick takes on the poem and what it might mean, but we’ve hardly explored any at length.

All of that work is ahead. We have some questions still to deal with:

• The nature of this sexual game Marvell is playing in the poem is itself hardly innocent.  We need to take a look  at the consequences of this kind of seduction and what it means for the male psychology, what it means for women’s social and political conditions,  and whether a poem like this should be given a public platform.
• We need to address a question you might have right now, and that is, haven’t we already gone too far in interpreting this poem?  How do we know that Andrew Marvell was doing any of this, that he intended any of this, that he is not the dude in the poem seducing women?  This is especially important when we recognize that this poem was likely written at the same time Marvell was living on a private estate tutoring a young girl.
• We still need to look at who this poem was intended for. Is Marvell writing to other poets in the past, is he writing to other poets and thinkers around him, or is he writing to himself? And regardless of how we answer that question, we today are none of those audiences. What are we supposed to do with it?
• We also need to talk earnestly and honestly not only about other readings and interpretations of this poem– like, why is this the worst pick-up line ever?- But also, what is the value of looking at these old poems, anyway? Couldn’t I more easily read some philosophy about time and the afterlife if I wanted to learn about it? why did I need to do it super-misogynistic quasi-rape poem I like this one?

All of these issues are in the episodes ahead.  All we’ve done so far is raise some questions and offer some quick interpretations, much like you would find from any classroom or any SparkNotes site. Think of this episode perhaps then, as an introduction to the poem “To His Coy Mistress.”

We still have to look backward a few thousand years, look more carefully at what Marvell knew and when he knew it, and make some arguments for a concept called polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More.

We’ve talked around this word before, but never used it. PolysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More basically means that many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literature are possible, all at the same time, even if they contradict each other, and that those contradictions and simultaneous meanings are themselves the meaning of the work.

All this is still ahead, and I hope you’ll join us. The works of literature we’ve discussed already and the ones we will discuss afterward revolve in some ways around poems like this: poems out of traditional European white male history, poems we have called the CanonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More of literature, poems we have chosen across our tradition because they teach what we want to have taught.

But enough for now. Join us next week for more, and in the meantime, go read something.  

Follow me wherever you listen to podcasts and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, and other surprises at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find us at Waywords Studio .com

 

Sources: 

Complete list of sources: https://waywordsstudio.com/project/marvell/.