“To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 2

Transcript: 5.03 Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 2

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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

 

Okay. So let’s continue our examination of Andrew Marvell’s famous poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” But to do so, let’s take a moment for a quick recap of where we’ve already been:

First, since the poem was written in the middle 1600s and Marvell fulfills many of its practices, we are labeling him a Metaphysical PoetThe metaphysical poets were generally Europeans from the 160... More.

Metaphysical poets share a lot of similar qualities, but chief among them is a love of philosophy or spiritual questions which are difficult to answer; in order to answer them, they typically choose simple real-world topics to use as metaphors. 

They often, of course, don’t resolve the questions they pose, but instead create some kind of philosophical paradox, a new and unexpected contradiction which creates uncertainty. 

At the time, I described this uncertainty, this blurring of meanings and questions as a kind of sfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More, a term from painting where colors are blurred, but it seems to work here.

We read the poem, too, and we discovered–no surprise–that the speaker is trying to seduce a younger woman through a philosophical argument called carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More: seize the day. Dozens and dozens of writers and thinkers through history have made this argument, often even as justifications for sex. So Marvell is doing little original here, it seems, on that front.  Marvell’s version of the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More argument goes like this: She is certainly worthy of years of chaste love, but we are all mortal–no one will want her when she’s rotting in a grave–so now, she should have sex with him in order to make the most of (or even somehow defeat) the advance of time.

A couple of things about this argument:

• One, it’s not very Christian on its face: for it to make sense, we must suppose there is no sin and no afterlife of judgment. All we have is today, so we need suffer no moral guilt but use the time as quickly (and hedonistically) as possible.
• Second, it’s not exactly logical. It assumes that the only reason our mistress is resisting is because she believes they have time. But since they do not have time, the speaker says, there is no need to resist. Ah, but she may, of course, be resisting for other reasons–one of the most likely is that he is, um, undesirable.

I made a point, too, that Marvell is well aware of all these issues: he was well-educated, well-read, and makes several references in the poem to Christian (and non-Christian) themes.

This all suggests that the seduction in the poem is not the topic of the poem–or at least, not its only topic–, but that our metaphysical poetThe metaphysical poets were generally Europeans from the 160... More has something larger on his mind, and the seduction is his metaphor or real-world subject to get us there. 

But are these ideas worth the sexist, even misogynistic attitude of the subject of the poem?  In order to consider this, we need to look at two issues today: how terrible is the sexism in question–what exactly are the objections? And some background on Marvell which may help us see what else he is doing with that sexism.

Feminism

So to begin today, let’s be absolutely clear:  You don’t have to be a feminist to be offended by this poem! The coarse, ugly pick-up line used by Marvell’s speaker is offensive, and not merely to today’s moral sensibilities. It is quite easy to imagine the circumstances of the young woman cornered by such an argument. 

Well, I think it is.

I should point out at this point that what follows over the next few minutes might be a bit graphic, but not much more than Marvell’s poem itself is.

I mentioned last time that she is young. This is true at the very least in relation to our older speaker: He is clearly playing as the more experienced in matters of love, she is named as a virgin in stanza two, and in the final argument he claims that her skin is young (“while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew,”), he doesn’t say a thing about his own. It isn’t “our skin” that he describes: she is the object of his lust; there is little to nothing in this poem about their having anything in common. 

The objectification of our young woman is absolute. Even in the supposedly adoring first stanza, he takes years and even centuries to admire each part of her. Well, each physical part of her. Notice how the order of adoration proceeds: 

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 then, almost as an afterthought. One might imagine his smile . . . 

And the last age should show your heart.

This proceeding down the length of her body shows fairly plainly where his mind is and what “the rest” is: he is interested in her parts, and little else.

Of course, once this is settled, it’s not difficult to find that this verbal dismemberment and use of her body pervades the rest of the poem, as well. 

In the second part of the poem we already know that her marble vault is not only the tomb but a place where a different sort of worm will try that virginity. 

then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honor turn to dust,

And while we don’t need to spend a lot of time on it, the “quaint honor” here is obviously her propriety, her good manners, her Christian moral decency; but it is also a terrible pun: the word quaint, also spelled “queynt,” was historically a word referring to the female genitals; we find it, for instance, in the myths of Sir Gawain and also in Chaucer. To underscore this a bit, the word spelled this way shifted in its pronunciation to become our modern “c” word, as our longer vowels sank in the throat: way → uh.  Okay, so like I said, it’s a terrible moment in the poem when Marvell’s speaker refers to her “quaint honor.” Does he emphasize it when he says it? Does he expect she understands the innuendo? With what has gone before, how could she not?

And, of course, the final stanza of the poem is the most aggressive: his desire for sex finds its way with some savage imagery:

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.

To “sport” here means little different than as now; this is fun, leisure, recreation, not love. And they are to feast on each other (and time, oddly–we’ll look at that later) as birds of prey. He offers an image of them together: 

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:

Some have suggested that the “iron gates of life” is another play on her virginity. I won’t deny the possibility (as if we needed still more to describe this poem as a verbal assault), but there may be more going on with this line, as well.

I should point out, significantly, that we do not know the lady’s response, but we can guess. She is “off stage” in the poem, verbally absent; for Marvell and his speaker, her response is unimportant, insignificant. The only thing which is important for this poem? The clever vulgarity of his argument, the assault on the woman.

If our speaker is older than she, he is also, likely, more educated. The boldness of the poem likely stems from two historical truisms of the day: first, that males had greater access to higher learning and literature, and that they are male, in a much more privileged space than women. They were–as Marvell, a key advisor to politicians was–more powerful. The speaker’s power over this woman is fairly absolute, it seems: he can speak to her this way without apology for his lewdness; he can seduce her without worry of the consequence; he can boast of his literary cleverness like it’s some game. How can she possibly respond? I used the word “assault” earlier, and it’s a handy reminder that most definitions of the term place it in the realm of intentional intimidation. Marvell’s speaker is not interested in making love to this young woman; he is, instead playfully using a love poem as a weapon of intimidation. 

A word must also be said about the title word “coy.” In French, coi means “silent” or “reserved.” Such coyness is not bad behavior at all, then, but more an expectation of good Christian women. The title of Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” might well have come from an older poem by Thomas Randolph. In this poem, the speaker asks Cupid to send him a coy mistress whose delays will allow him to write beautiful poems of proper courtship:

Give me a mistress in whose looks to joy,

And such a mistress as will be coy,

Not easily won, though to be won in time;

That from her niceness I may store my rhyme.

But it’s also a common meaning for “coy” to mean flirtatious or playing hard to get. In this case, then, Marvell’s speaker is simply done with her playing games. They’ve been doing this for a while, and so he finally comes out with an argument to break her of it. 

In this case, coyness (the “flirtatiousness” kind) delivers two opposing messages from the woman: you have intrigued me, I am indifferent; I encourage you, I discourage you: yes and no. Being coy is center-stage behavior, says critic William Kerrigan, a way of continually exhibiting one’s sexual temperature as well as one’s moral fibre. (“And while thy willing soul transpires at every pore with instant fires.”) Kerrigan asks us to consider many historical women in this light, like the figure of Eve.

While I appreciate the politic Kerrigan offers, I’m not convinced I buy the interpretation. We have to remember the social politic of the time, as well. As I have asked three times now, what choice does our mistress have? Subjugated as she must be (by the patriarchal conditions, by class status, by education, by sheer physicality, by the verbal imagery), women sought any number of behaviors which attempted to negotiate power, and what males called “coyness” might well be an outcome of such a strategy: seemingly agree but maintain propriety, do not displease but instead defer, compliment but do not encourage. You see, Kerrigan? Just because the behavior of “coyness” as a man labels it might deliver two opposing meanings, they might not be the mere flirtation you and Marvell’s speaker imagine. 

This may not be so easy to understand, of course, since we do not live in Marvell’s time. Most women today, to some degree or other, do not require the same sorts of negotiations of power. And there are any number of writers who have since responded precisely to this speaker’s insinuations with creativity and strength. I like most Annie Finch’s 1997 poem “Coy Mistress.” The link to that work is in the show notes. 

One might suppose, even after all of this, that the poem remains relatively innocent. After all, this is a fictional poem, and Marvell’s speaker is a character, not Marvell. So too, then, is the woman a fictional character, and we have–if you like–a fictional and therefore inconsequential scene. Ah, we’ve dealt with this question in earlier episodes, however, and we will address it here, too. 

What value is there in normalizing the vulgarity of male seduction and power, especially in a contemporary environment where we continue to have disparaging acts of verbal and physical violence against women?  The more we unreflectively present these narratives, the more likely they encode themselves in our culture.

It’s not, therefore, that all acts of violence and injustice be stricken from our literary discourse, but it is the message they send which we should carefully consider: are the acts employed to forward meaning that enriches or supports a more just and healthy community? Or do they glorify and encourage the perpetuation of atrocity? Now, I know that this position is problematic because communities divide over what is healthy and what is not. However, here I make this claim–at least for now–only for us as individuals. Each of us must decide how this meaning works on us. The real problem at work, then, is not necessarily the literature before us, but in what manner we read it. 

But I am getting ahead of myself. We will spend an entire podcast on this very question near the end of our discussion of Marvell. But at work on us, for now, is the question of what we are reading and what it means. And we must know as fully as we can what this vulgarity means. The worst parts of the censorship battles past and present are when the offended have failed to even engage the text they oppose.

(*sigh*) But we were talking about the work as a fiction, and to this I must add that the poem, potentially, is not a fiction. It is entirely possible that what we are reading from Marvell’s speaker is also an extension of the circumstances and psychology of Andrew Marvell himself. And now we come to a deeper problem: Should we present or read literature or art where the artist himself is problematic? 

Fortunately for us, we are not here wading into the current debate over “canceling” or ostracizing living artists. Our discussion is a bit more hygienic than that. Marvell is no longer with us, neither he nor some estate of his are making a livelihood over the art–it’s all in the public domain now–and so we also don’t have to deal with intellectual property disputes around publication. We are in a place where we can freely decide–without real consequence to anyone–what to do with Andrew Marvell. Instead, what we are going to address is the argument made a hundred years ago by T. S. Eliot, who called Marvell a genius and thus brought him back from the dustbins of history into modern popularity. Is Eliot right? Does Marvell–and especially this current poem of brazen sexual assault–deserve our attention?

In order to decide, we have to ask: what did Marvell know, and how did he use it?

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Historicism

There are a ton of reasons I (and Eliot, too) am suspect of historical looks at literature. It’s very easy to make mistakes, very easy to draw connections that (from our great timely distance) are not connections at all. It’s easy to over-simplify the motivations of authors and their contemporary audiences. In short, we are adding new layers of uncertainty–new interpretations–on top of the interpretations of the text itself. 

Eliot himself made something of a career on this very point: the Modernist (and later) New Criticism sensibility towards literature was to look at the art alone, to let the text speak for itself and end the discussion there. For this reason, Eliot’s essay on Andrew Marvell virtually ignored what up to then we had known Marvell for best: his political writings. Eliot reversed this, setting aside the man and his politics to focus on the brilliance of his poetic language. And his poetry is wonderful to read: “The Unfortunate Lover,” “Upon Appleton House,” “The Mower Song,” “The Garden,” “A Dialog Between the Soul and Body,” all of these are works worthy of engaging. But then what do we do with “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”?

Marvell was a man of the world, a man of diverse experiences, and it’s possible that some of his background can give us a sense of what “To His Coy Mistress” might also be about. Remember, the metaphysical poetThe metaphysical poets were generally Europeans from the 160... More makes a metaphor of the worldly experience to reflect upon a larger philosophical idea. So far, we have discovered that the seduction poem–however vulgar and repugnant–is not itself the point of the poem but the worldly metaphor for some kind of reverie on time and mortality. We need to explore that a bit now, and to begin with, I’d like to take a look at Marvell’s education: what did Marvell know?

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Some Schooling

If Marvell had wished to, he could have taken his entire poem and written it as a bald and bawdy limerick, like M. DiGenova did with Marvell in 2010:

On “To His Coy Mistress”

                         by Andrew Marvell

Past poets and I both know how

To write elegant verse to your brow,

But we don’t have time

For that kind of rhyme?

Let’s go at it like buzzards right now!

But Marvell was not quite so coarse as all that. The rest of his work comes from his own learning–about the classics, about philosophy, etc.  

Last time, I talked a bit about how carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More (Seize the day) was a pagan philosophy, set in opposition to the Christian ideal of an afterlife. In other words,the only way a carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy makes sense is if we do not have any expectation of life or salvation after death. If this mortal life is all we have, one might reason that we should make the most of it. This is exactly what Peter Keating in Dead Poets Society says about Robert Herrick and other poets: it is an argument to live life at its most full, and that, inherently, means living life feeling our physical mortal senses completely.

To add to that now, I want to add a new philosophy that was enormous in the curriculum of Marvell’s time. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who taught that a person should only rely upon his senses. The goal of the EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More philosophy was to reduce men’s natural anxiety by eliminating superstition and the dread of death. It is a common misunderstanding of the philosophy of Epicurus to conclude that the EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More is one who is devoted to sensual pleasures only. This is how epicureanism is often defined by quick dictionaries and unreflective thinkers. Marvell understood the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy underlying epicureanism in that sense of working against the anxiety over death. In this light, we see the argument of “To His Coy Mistress” as some kind of response to this classical EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More idea.

Writer Saul  Frampton noted that there was a Renaissance of Roman ideas in the seventeenth Century curriculum. The Studio Humanitatis–that is grammar, rhetoric, literature, moral philosophy) was rising against the Studio Divinitatus – that is Theology and what was then Natural Science. In other words, what we were seeing in Marvell’s day was an argument of how language and literature and philosophy lead to our understanding of morality instead of mere Christian idealism. To make this plain, we see in the poem a reflection: if Christian thinking is incorrect, that there is no afterlife, then is Epicurus right? Or we can ask the question another way: which better defines Humanities morality, that which distinguishes us from animals: is it our obedience to God or our facility to reason? The speaker of “To His Coy Mistress” seems to be arguing against the Christian idea and for epicureanism … but if he is, he is doing so in order to avoid his own dread of death. Does his argument work?

Now this seems to all be getting fairly complicated already, but I want to emphasize that Andrew Marvell was classically educated. Greek and Latin were his curriculum. And this was the education of most of his classmates. They knew what he was up to. From earlier episodes we have already identified that one of the key goals of an author is impersonation and extension. In other words the goal of writers of the time is to imitate the classical or traditional canonical arguments and then to expand upon them in some creative or original way. Thus we see Andrew Marvel’s friend, John Milton, expanding in an enormous way upon biblical CanonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More in his work Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. We discussed this idea at some length in the episode “Fowls in the Frith.”  A related idea to this one is the idea of ekphrasisArt responds to art. Originally, the Greek term meant a leng... More or ekphrastic poetry. Marvel’s education similarly taught him to respond directly to earlier forms, to reference them, to embellish them. It was common to one’s education in poetry to use allusion to mythology, religion, and classic works. This was an idea we discussed in the 4th episode on Van Gogh’s exhibitions. 

Finally, for now, I want to discuss a particular method that was popular during Andrew Marvell’s schooling. Part of his education was practice in what was known as the vulgaria, school exercises which took the form of plays, word dialog. Marvell was expected to be a writer of many characters, assuming the voice or speech or reasoning of others. The professor might ask, What might X say of Y? What might Plato say of Cicero?

I describe all of these– the studia humanitatis, the role of author, ekphrasisArt responds to art. Originally, the Greek term meant a leng... More, allusion, the vulgaria– to note that evidence of these can be found in nearly all of Marvell’s poetry, not just “To His Coy Mistress.” What does this mean for our understanding of the poem? Well, it is now more likely that Marvell’s poem built upon and reflected upon classical arguments that thinkers before him had done, and that Marvell may well have been conducting an exercise in philosophical thinking as much as–if not more so–than a simple seduction.

In order to better understand this, let’s go back and take a look at some of the writers Marvell undoubtedly studied.

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Predecessors

We have to begin with Catullus: who Marvell undoubtedly knew well, and who seems a key influence on the poem before us.  Here it is:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love,

and the rumors of rather stern old men

let us value all at just one penny!

Suns may set and rise again;

for us, when once the brief light has set,

an eternal night must be slept.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

then another thousand, then a second hundred,

then yet another thousand, then a hundred;

then, when we have performed many thousands,

we shall shake them into confusion, in order for us to lose the count,

and in order not to let any evil person envy us,

as no one will be aware of how many kisses have there been.

So yeah. Don’t listen to those men who disapprove of our love, my lady. We would waste the days, then, until night or death finally takes us. So let’s kiss so much (nudge nudge wink wink) that no one knows how much we have loved and we won’t care. Catullus’ work here was so popular that Walter Raleigh referred to it, as did Ben Jonson, and Thomas Campion, and Thomas Randolph, all in the same years that Marvell was writing. No surprise–they all studied Catullus and the other Greek and Roman poets, and it was common practice to work with them, respond to them, and even to use them to allude to contemporary issues.  

But wait, I’m not nearly done with the very real dialogue of these carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More issues during Marvell’s age. Here’s Ovid in brief: [Why do you hurry, jealous creature? … Run slowly, horses of the night].”  By now you don’t need my help understanding why he wants his night delayed.

Here a little bit of Sir Walter Raleigh:

 

Now Serena bee not coy;

Since wee freely may enjoy

Sweete imbraces: such delights,

As will shorten tedious nightes.

Thinke that beauty will not stay

With you allwaies; but away;

And that tyrannizing face

That now holdes such perfect grace,

Will both chaing’d and ruined bee;

So fraile is all thinges as wee see,

So subject unto conquering Time.

Then gather Flowers in theire prime,

Let them not fall and perish so;

Nature her bountyes did bestow

On us that wee might use them:

 

And Ben Jonson:

 

Come my Celia, let us prove,

While wee may, the sports of love;

Time will not be ours, for’ever:

He, at length, our good will fever.

Spend not then his gifts in vaine.

Sunnes, that set, may rise againe:

But, if once wee lose this light,

‘Tis, with us, perpetuall night.

Why should we deferre our joyes?

 

And Thomas Campion:

 

Come, you pretty false-ey’d wanton,

    Leaue your crafty smiling :

Thinke you to escape me now

    With slipp’ry words beguiling ?

No ;  you mockt me th’other day ;

    When you got loose, you fled away ;

But, since I haue caught you now,

    Ile clip your wings for flying :

Smothring kisses fast Ile heape,

    And keepe you so from crying.            

 

And Thomas Randolph:

 

Now let us kisse, would you be gone?

Manners at least allows me one.

Blush you at this, pretty one stay,

And I will take that kisse away.

Thus with a second, and that too

A third wipes off; so will we goe

To numbers that the starrs out run,

And all the Atoms in the Sun.

For though we kisse till Phoebus ray

Sink in the seas, and kissing stay

Till his bright beams return again

There can of all but one remain:

 

And Alexander Brome:

 

My Lesbia, let us live and love,

 Let crabbed Age talk what it will.

The sun when down, returns above,

 But we, once dead, must be so still.

 

Or John Donne:

 

For the first twenty years since yesterday

                 I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;

           For forty more I fed on favors past,

              And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last.

                   Tears drowned one hundred, and sighs blew out two,

              A thousand, I did neither think nor do,

              Or not divide, all being one thought of you,

              Or in a thousand more forgot that too.

 

Or Abraham Cowley:

 

On’a Sigh of Pity I a year can live,

 One Tear will keep me twenty’at least,

 Fifty a gentle Look will give;

An hundred years on one kind word I’ll feast:

 A thousand more will added be,

If you an Inclination have for me;

And all beyond is vast Eternity .

 

And don’t forget Bill Shakespeare:

 

Then of thy beauty do I question make, 

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow; 

   And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

   Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. 

 

And still I’m not nearly done. And these were all contemporaries of Marvell. If you’d like to read or hear the entirety of any of these works, I am placing them all in the Resources for this episode on WaywordsStudio.com, and on our YouTube channel in a special carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More playlist. Links to all in the show notes.

My point, clearly, is that by the contemporary situation alone, Marvell was not a singularly misogynistic villain. He had friends. And they were all using Catullus and other classical thinkers to pose questions of time, of mortality, of love and sensuality, of what makes us human apart from the will of the gods themselves. In some sense, every one of these poems resists (and thus perhaps fears) that mortal boundary of life. Can nothing, really, hold it off?

If it cannot be held off in reality, can it be held off in . . . perception? If all we have is our senses (there is no afterlife), then can we deceive our senses into believing that we can cheat death? If, for instance, our love-making were long enough, strong enough, powerful enough, intense enough to overwhelm the senses, perhaps . . . perhaps. . . we could “not make our sun stand still, but yet we will make him run.” 

Is this what Marvell is up to, then? Stuck in a dread of death, his speaker seeks the succor–the comfort–of the EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More idea of sensuality.  He is rewriting Catullus, but his speaker finds a hope where most of Marvell’s friends here are more cynical. Even Shakespeare says we have little to do but “breed” in order to beat death. Is Marvell here arguing a means for filling all of existence with physicality? Or is that only what his speaker is doing? A speaker, who, to be absolutely fair, is a manipulative and chauvinist predator, a manipulative, chauvinist, and illogical predator. 

Here’s what we know: in his own contribution to the 17th century vulgaria (the dialogue) on carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poetry, Andrew Marvell advances an unusual and extreme argument to accompany this repulsive speaker. Andrew Marvell knows his speaker is repulsive and illogical. Andrew Marvell certainly also knows that his speaker is using traditional courtship poetry and making a mockery of it. 

So if Marvell is offering us a broken love poem, a perverse manipulation of women and of time, what is he up to? What is the argument he is making here? Or is he precisely making any argument at all? 

There are a few ways to go about answering this, and we’re going to look at them next.  One question we need to explore is if Marvell’s own experiences may yet give us some clue (we need to dig more into what T. S. Eliot intentionally ignored), and we also need to ask: Who is the intended recipient of this poem? Could this also give us some inkling on where to find meaning?  

To foreshadow that for next time, I offer this. In his lifetime, “To His Coy Mistress” was never published, nor did Marvell intend it to be. Instead, some years after his death, a woman claiming to be his wife produced his journals and published them. What could this mean, and really, after all, to what just and meaningful use might Marvell then be offering in this twisted love poem? 

We come at these questions even more explicitly in the third part of our examination of Marvell. Perhaps, as we wrestle with the distance between Marvell’s mind and that of the perverse speaker he has created, we will discover a new dialogue.

Join us then. But for now, 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/.