“To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 3

Transcript: 5.04 Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 3

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Key Terms:

• discomfiture
• Cavalier poets

 

Part Three

Where Were We?

So, where were we?

Ah, yes. We were trying to decide what Andrew Marvell was up to in his poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” 

We’re about half-way through this thicker discussion now, and I’ve realized already that in some ways, I don’t feel any clearer about that. I mean, sure, we’ve been through the poem in some detail, found a lot of its layers and vulgarities, discussed its classical tradition and even some of Andy Marvell’s own schooling–I mean, we’ve encountered a lot of stuff–but I don’t know yet what the TLDR is. . . .  Um, this is a podcast, so that must be TLDL (Too Long Didn’t Listen). Where the heck are my three take-aways, the upshot, the gist, the meat, the bottom line. . . ?

Shouldn’t I just skip ahead or click on the headline: “Six Hot Takes on ‘Coy Mistresses’ They Don’t Want You To Know About?’ 

Feeling a little like this? Dare I suggest that this is a “you problem” and not a “Marvell problem?” 

And without going off on a rant about 21st century attention spans or TikTok addiction or The-Platform-Formerly-Known-as-Twitter, I’ll instead remind us all that I already told you our ending way back in the beginning: discomfiture.  

Now, you might have heard that and thought, Ooh, cool foreshadowing and suspense-building, weird-sounding word for that introductory hook-the-listener strategy. More likely you just twitched a bit semi-consciously at it and passed on to what you hoped was that “Marvell meat.”

Dis-com-fit-ure. This isn’t exactly the word “discomfort,” is it?  And make no mistake, as a teacher myself, I somewhat enjoyed finding places of uncomfortability for my students as new or unexpected ideas settled amongst them. No, discomfiture is a bit different. It’s a confusion, an unease, a perplexity, to be sure. But more than this, discomfiture is about a personal feeling of awkwardness, of embarrassment for that position, about an inwardly-felt frustration of hope, and the subsequent desire to conceal it from others. As in Chaucer’s Queen Anelida who says of her embarrassment of pure devotion to a deceitful man: “For in this world nys creature Wakyng in more discumfiture Than I.”  Or Salman Rushdie: “At this point, to my great discomfiture, I begin to cry.”

Rhyming Rushdie and Chaucer there was a fortuitous bonus for both of us, but I was talking about the “you problem,” and sorry, frankly, I wasn’t kidding. 

We are so busy these days. We want the tidy endings, or at least the clever twists and cliffhangers, but we do not want indeterminacy. But far worse than even this, we don’t want to feel that this “lack of definition” is our own, that somehow our feeling of precariousness is on us. 

In poetry, in some of the best art and literature, though, we must accept that the “answer” to a work is not an answer at all, and it’s definitely not B or C or even D, “all of the above.” That way lies the finished package, the denouement, the “Project Closed” label so we can go on to the next thing. Other words I’ve used–ambiguity, polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, slippage–all of these work against the school exam, the closed book, the easy satisfaction of settled thought. 

You’re not the first to desire this tidy package. Practically all of the folks that Marvell built his poetic tradition upon– Catullus, Ben Jonson, Abraham Cowley, those guys–offer us a kind of straightforward dualistic choice: is the best life one of Christian hope or pagan hedonism? Spirit or flesh? Love or misogyny? Is Marvell’s poem sincerity or ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More? Is it an internal exercise or an external offense? An exhortation or a persuasion?  

Instead of answering these, Marvell instead offers us this verbal sfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More. You remember that one: this uncertainty of line which itself forms the question: Exactly where? Where is the exact spot that red shades to yellow? That shadow yields to light? 

At this point, you may be thinking something like, “Well, that’s just fancy talk and empty praise for someone who couldn’t decide, or someone gutless who won’t say what he means.” You might think, You’re just making excuses for a writer who is clever in words, but ultimately just not worth the time to study. And to this I respond, Ah, there it is. That feeling. That discomfiture. Our dismissal of uncertainty and refusal to step too deeply into spaces that might personally embarrass us. 

And this is why I said, too, back in that first episode of this series, we will look at Marvell “through a glass darkly.” No, I didn’t misspeak: That little phrase from First Corinthians suggests that it is our own vision which is dim, clouded, obscured, not the reality that may be out there, which may eventually be revealed. 

In other words, among the ironic perceivers in Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” are those brought to discomfiture. And it’s a discomfiture which itself leads to desire. He’s pointing at us. 

 

[[Waywords Theme/Intro]]

Recap & New Readings

Still with us? Excellent. 

Now, I’ll say that all of this was an eye-opener for me, too, this discomfiture idea. It’s a word I heard applied to Marvell first by Steven Zwicker and Derek Hurst in their book Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane. It’s a great book, but fairly expensive, so get yourself a library copy if you want to dig into this even more.

We’re going to go quite a bit further down into these spaces as we move forward today and in our next episode. First, though, I think we should take a few minutes to see what we’ve learned so far in brief, then launch into these questions. I’m going to review the poem for us again, but with a few different takes or ideas than we’ve looked at before, and then we’ll take a bit of a turn and examine some of those history lessons I promised you last time. This might help us better understand that “D” word I’ve been talking about (chuckles beneath).

Let’s start with the overall outline of the poem again, but this time I want to describe it as a poem of juxtapositions. Juxtaposition is that placing of two or more objects next to each other, then learning what we might from the relationship between them, most often one of contrast. I juxtapose a Valentines card and a raw human heart and we are suddenly compelled to address the gulf between idealism and biology, perhaps. Or maybe just the sfumatoI refer to this metaphorically in a verbal context: an uncer... More between Hallmark and horror.

Marvell’s poem is built upon juxtapositions in all directions, it seems. In the stanzas themselves, for instance, we have a first stanza where he begins in idealism, the imagery of the impossible: Had we all the time in the world . . . and then goes on with seductive descriptions of the lady’s body, and heart. It is beautiful and patient and refined, but it’s a foolish delusion, of course (vast vegetable love?), and the speaker’s purpose of seduction never waivers. The second stanza, though, makes a sudden shift to a brutal and grim reality: death and dusts and deserts that consume lifetimes, and love. The lady’s “marble vault” is the tomb, is her now stiff flesh, is now her skeletal pelvis with worms. Whatever she decides, chastity or lust, this is the inevitable result. So in the final stanza he offers us this carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, seize the moment sort of passion. With openly sexual imagery (not the idealism of stanza one–a fire smoldering–or the morbid threats of stanza two–a fire turned to ashes), the stanza three fires blaze. Their love-making will be desperate and consuming: we have eating and biting imagery, flying birds of prey, the devouring of Time. And for those really into structure and rhythm (*cough cough* me), the meter of stanza three is full of spondee. Rather than the gentler iambic (tuh dum, tuh dum, tuh dum) we get dum-dum, dum-dum with phrases like “Thus though” and “Stand still”). Heck of a seduction.

That spondee appears somewhere else, though, too. The poem begins with “Had we:” “Had we but world enough and time.” Now, those of you counting syllables and such might claim that this is all still perfect iambic tetrameter. The tuh-dum rhythm has four tuh-dums in it: “Had We but WORLD eNOUGH and TIME.” But I can’t bring myself to read it just this way, especially when the entire poem’s seduction is based upon those first two words. “HAD WE.” Everything we talk about in this poem, the entire seduction, the cosmic argument, is immediately introduced, and our speaker knows it, depends upon it. We can’t read “Had” as an unstressed syllable. It’s the most important word in the poem: “HAD WE but WORLD eNOUGH and TIME.”  

Wrapped in those words is the idyllic of stanza 1, the mortality of 2, the fleshly action of 3. Working in partnership are the opening words of Stanzas 2 and 3, “BUT” and “NOW,” all suggesting that our arguments, our virtues, our romanticism and deaths, our witherings and legacies, our pleasures and desperations, sex and philosophy, faith and failure, are wrapped together, rolled up “into one ball.” 

Let’s add another term in here, and that’s mythic. Marvell’s imagery operates at a level of flesh and of myth. He makes much use of both Christian and classical imagery here, but also of images that resonate archetypally, symbols which themselves carry layers of meaning. The sun in the poem, for instance, appears first as a “long day,” an almost eternal Eden of waiting; it then becomes the Winged Chariot of Time which creates deserts. But in the third stanza, it becomes a ball of creative energy, of primal wholeness and fulfillment, the energy of “soul” and “instant fires” that might spur a kind of alchemical fire to keep death at bay. This “alchemy of love” will defeat the cycle of time and nature only if it is intense enough, hot enough, to melt them into one primordial ball, to melt the sun. Two birds in flight, lovers entwined, space and time, body and soul, philosophy and theology.

Whew. …The only thing, I’ve by now said a few times before, is the blatant failure of logic in all of that philosophical wrapping. Marvell’s speaker, abandoning any expectation for an afterlife, wants to balance the imminent threat of mortality with a cold and assaultive argument for sexual pleasure. Marvell’s speaker wants to do this. But the poet himself? He’s sitting back from the page, playing with these balls and gates and vegetables and juxtapositions, and staging this entire drama for us. 

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Textual History

Now I’ve described metaphysical poetry earlier as using an earthly or physical idea as a metaphor to articulate or explore a larger idea. The conceitIn literature, allowing a metaphor or unexpected comparison ... More, or premise, of metaphysical poetry is always about expressing a philosophical paradox; it is not about the mere surface topic. If we look at Marvell’s other works–well, no time for all of that, take my word for it–none of them offer a simple reading. These, too, offer ambiguity and uncertainty, a kind of stubbornness against clarity, a refusal. 

T. S. Eliot, the guy responsible for bringing Marvell’s poetry back to popularity, said that this ambiguity and elusiveness is what made him great. Cool. But couldn’t we just as easily have said, Marvell’s ambiguity and contradictions make him a human with fallibility? Someone who changes his mind? Or even, as I am about to argue, someone who understands the delicate art of navigating politics and social situations? 

Now, I’m a real fan of T. S. Eliot. Huge. And not for reasons which are entirely rational. (Heck, I even made him my main NPC in an online literary philosophy game I made for my classes. And don’t write me: it’s too primitive to download and too embarrassing to share. Maybe some day . . . no matter.) My point is, I’m a ridiculous fanboy for a problematic poet and critic of a century ago. But on his explanation of Marvell’s genius, he’s wro- wr- wron– wrong. It’s just that the ambiguity and elusiveness that Eliot praises so much can sometimes be accounted for through examining areas that Eliot refused to.

His modernist criticism, later emerging as the New Criticism in the United States, claimed that we can only look at the text itself to determine the ideas and their greatness. We should not look at the author, certainly not at a poorly-educated reader, or the history of the text, to understand it. Now we’ll have plenty of time in fifty-three other episodes down the road sometime to examine this claim, but my point here is that Eliot brought us Marvell on the merit of the texts alone, and he did very little examination of what our poet might have been going through or what happened to his poems out in the wild to make his decision. As a consequence, it’s possible (er, likely) that he misread some images where a historical or philosophical framing of them might have been more likely.

I discussed this a bit last week, and I cautioned that historical research itself is uncertain, that it adds uncertainty to uncertainty, but I then demonstrated how understanding the kind of schooling Marvell went through really offers us a better understanding of the curriculum which created his arguments and poetic paths. 

For instance, “To His Coy Mistress” is clearly also ridiculing traditional courtly love poetry. The opening stanza does this openly: we have already seen how he imitates the imagery, the listings of the lady’s features, the years of waiting, the chaste and religious admiration for virtue, as dozens of poets before him. He grabs just about every stereotype of his day for satire, and so offers and ridicules this entire Platonic love concept. He’s far from alone, I know. Many poets would do this through the Renaissance. Think, too, of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 180 which is an outright parody of it all: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Without seeing this broader context, it can sometimes be harder to see our poet’s motives. 

And while we’re talking about this historical examination stuff, it seems a good moment to let you know that the version of the poem you are probably reading (and the one I offer in the Show Notes), is not what Marvell’s poem originally said.

Take the first two lines of the third stanza: “Now therefore, while the youthful hue / Sits on thy skin like morning dew.” The first edition of the poem read, “Sits on thy skin like morning glew.” If you are hearing and reading that like I am, this image really doesn’t make any sense at all. She’s, um, young and sticky? Our best guess through the history of its being printed is that an 18th century editor somewhere suggested that “dew” would still rhyme and made far more sense, so everybody was happy and textbooks have printed “dew” ever since, often without explaining it. Some other editor also suggested “lew” which means a kind of warmth. Anyway, that’s what got printed. We know now, though, that the original “glew” is a variation of the word “glow.” Yes, her skin is young and glowing like the morning sun, which of course is the most unifying image and we should be changing the poem back. My “Glew Protest March” will be staged on March 31, Marvell’s birthday. Get your signs ready.

But let’s quickly note, too, the next two lines, “And while thy willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires.” This is a little easier for us, but the definitions of transpire and instant here have changed for us in the past 350 years. Transpire means literally to “breathe forth,” and “instant” means “now” or “urgently.” So we should understand those two lines to mean “While your eager soul, your desire, breathes through your skin with urgency.”

All this just to say, history matters, too. Let’s look at the text, certainly, but let’s not allow ourselves an ignorant misreading. 

 

Marvell’s History

Ah, that history! It’s time, at last, to offer a better understanding of our poet. It’s possible that this “What Marvell Is Up To” question can be better addressed if we also understand who he was and the circumstances around this poem. Unfortunately, to do this, we need to risk sounding like the history class you skipped and talk a bit about the chaos of the English Civil War, the years 1639 to about 1653, when Marvell was between the ages of 18 and 32, making his career. Yes, Marvell, too, lived in interesting times, and “To His Coy Mistress” was written near the end of this period. 

Andrew Marvell was born in 1621 in Yorkshire, England to Rev. Andrew Marvell and his wife Anne. It was a–

Nope. No Wikipedia articles, I promised. You can read that stuff on your own if you’re really that interested. Instead, I want to focus in on the history that matters to his poetry. 

The first point I want to make is that over his lifetime, young and then old Andrew The Poet Marvell supported a wide range of political causes. First, he supported the Crown of Charles I in the Civil War, but then found his way to supporting the Parliament(s) of Oliver P Cromwell (P stands for Protector). But THEN, when Cromwell dies of disease probably because he refused to take a medicine invented by a Catholic–one has standards, you know–Marvell became re-allied to the Crown under Charles II (though, to be fair, he wasn’t entirely happy about it). And through all of that time, Marvell rose in political power and influence. In short, Marvell had the facility with language to play all these sides, even when people remembered what he said “last week” was seemingly wholly different. As I said a couple of weeks ago, Marvell was most famous for his political writings; his poetry was published later, after his death. 

As a fun side note: A friend of his, some guy named John Milton, was not quite so talented at it. John got himself in trouble by calling for the execution of that first King, Charles I (and that’s something Cromwell did). But then the Royalists said he was a traitor and the Cromwell folk weren’t completely online with his devotion either, so Andrew Marvell helped him write something called the Second Defense, which defended Milton’s position and reputation from both sides of the warring political aisles. All this to say again, that if Marvell was less talented at this multi-faceted language play, we might literally have never had a Paradise Lost poem for Humanities class. Executions of the suspicious at the time were in vogue. 

Marvell himself, though, was absent for much of the Civil War. After all, he was young, studying in college, the son of a minister, and he had other plans than throwing himself into the bloody very very bloody fray that he saw on the schedule in 1642. He did what any good-looking young Englishman would: he went to Europe and became a tutor. And now I’ll gloss a bit and skip to 1650–Marvell is 29–and find him brought on to tutor the daughter of General Lord Fairfax of England, the man most responsible for leading Cromwell’s military to defeat Charles I, but who retired from service because Cromwell’s folks had rudely executed Charles I and then asked Fairfax to invade that Royalist devil land of Scotland, “Just in case” Charles’s son had any ideas. 

But the war is over, Cromwell is in charge (well, mostly–it was a bit of a mess), and side note, every time I talk about this period, I keep picturing Richard Harris squaring off with Alec Guinness in a 1970s melodrama. Forgive me, England! 

Anyway, the war is over, and our Man Marvell is hired by Lord Fairfax. Marvell’s politics of restraint and maneuvering among extremists aligned with the retired general’s: Fairfax made room during this retirement for a number of marginalized political refugees. Marvell could stay here and quietly wait out the political storm, tutoring a 13-year-old girl in a gorgeous and isolated retreat: rich homes, gardens, even a nunnery on site. Idyllic. The place is called Appleton House (which has that little hint of biblical temptation to it); or it was sometimes called Nunappleton, probably because of the convent. 

I want to leave Andy there with his young student for a little bit, now, and talk about some other poets who were also making their way through the turbulent era. And if you take this next side story as an encouragement or cautionary tale about the role of artists in politics, be my guest.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when we listened to Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time?” It was a carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poem, too, and it sounded a whole lot like Marvell’s: flying time, dying flowers, racing suns and warm young blood, . .  and a coy virgin who should use her time better. I mentioned that Herrick was part of a tradition of poets who we call the Cavalier Poets. At the time, this was a bit of an insult, intended to mock the poets who had joined King Charles in court and celebrated the virtues of the monarchy. Charles was a lover of the arts, and so he expensively surrounded himself with artists who he admired (or who admired him–you know, who can tell anymore?)

But that’s cart before the horse. First, before Charles was around filling his castles with paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens and Da Vinci (They called him a Connoisseur King), the poets of the time were writing about joy and celebrating tradition. They wanted to write verse where both pleasure and virtue thrived. Like Marvell, their schooling also included Horace and Ovid and Cicero: they wrote about beauty, love, nature, honor, good fellowship, drinking: basically, living large and full, seizing the day. And that obviously included sex and making money. No different from now, I guess. But, oddly, they also believed in Platonic love, where a man would show his admiration for a woman’s beauty from afar, worshipping her as a near divine, a creature of perfection. Ah, long live tradition and these good old-boy days! Yup, no hypocrisy or problematic ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—... More here. 

Little wonder, then, that Charles I was drawn to this sort of thinking. Love poetry worthy of the best knights! Nobility living large.Tradition (and the crown of monarchy) revered! Patronage assured. After all, how else would an artist eat? They needed money. (Remember, our hero Andrew Marvell also had very little; it was the patronage of Fairfax and Appleton House which sustained him. But back to our story.)

By the time the Civil War erupted, these Cavalier poets defined themselves by aligning their words to the cash cow of Charles, now openly supporting the monarchy. The Royalist ideals must be defended alongside tradition. The principles of the Classical good life were being attacked, philosophically and now quite literally. And also the values of common sense and duty, propriety and moderation, which were not so much classical as English. Briefly, the problem in describing them this way, is that not all of the Cavaliers knew themselves to be cavaliers; many we now clump in this group died before any of this happened; others never saw the court or paychecks of Charles, but–since we now see them all writing in the same general “hold the status quo” of gentlemanly and romantic traditions–we historically call them all Cavalier poets. Even poor Robert Herrick who, while writing in support of these values, apparently never had a chance to meet the king. 

But we can see where this is going, can’t we? When Charles loses to Cromwell (when Richard Harris becomes Lord Protector, in other words), these poets lose, too. They are imprisoned, some killed, or they are driven to remote places to die in obscurity. At least until some of the survivors found their way back to court under Charles II. 

But the lesson we learn, for us, is that Marvell was not a fan. True, Marvell originally supported the Crown in his earlier life; and some careless sources out there in internet land will call him a Cavalier poet, too, but this is simply not the case. He spends most of his time from Appleton House largely on the side of parliament, where he will soon become a member and serve for the rest of his days. On the surface of “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell’s speaker seems to echo every single value that we just talked about as cavalier. But this speaker is arrogantly dismissive of our lady’s opinion, indifferent to his broken logic, even uninterested in the gross death metaphors he uses to seduce. The speaker is . . . cavalier. Marvell, as we said earlier, is sitting back and presenting the drama for us.  

Youch. Is “To His Coy Mistress” also a political poem?  Along with everything else we have said about it, at least partly. At the very least, Marvell’s satirizing of idyllic court poetry is philosophically opposed to the cavalier traditions, and since the poem was written at Appleton or soon afterwards, Marvell was hardly heedless of what this meant politically. 

Now let me double-down on that political interest a bit more. We left Andy at Appleton before this long cavalier tale, and we will go back, I promise, because I know you have some questions about young Mary and all that won’t wait overlong. 

But to the politics a bit, Marvell only stays at Appleton a few years. Cromwell sets up his government (well, it takes him a few tries), and the Reformation has begun. By 1653, at age 32, Marvell leaves Appleton and is hired by Cromwell himself to tutor one of his sons. From there, it is a short step into government proper, and he is supporting his friend John Milton, traveling Europe as a diplomat. It was surely a dicey affair at every step. We don’t have time to dig into Cromwell and his work, but Cromwell’s England was, we’ll just say, full of drama, sudden downsizings of government, and a Lord Protector looking the part of a King while not being one. It was an age of censorship, book burnings, and prosecutions for scandal and libel.

Marvell becomes a member of parliament. At Parliament in his career, he was often misread, misunderstood, attacked. He often disrupted the House of Commons with provocative questions or discomforting claims. Later, in the 1670s, he may well have been a spy for the Dutch. We can’t know everything, but there are scholars out there still sorting it out. We have his epitaphs, his letters, his speeches, his polemics, his political verse . . . all negotiations through difficult shifts in power where missteps could lead to prison or worse. 

We don’t know exactly when “To His Coy Mistress” was written, but it was very likely somewhere between Appleton and this early period of politics. We can’t know exactly when, we can’t know precisely what was on his mind, we just have this milieu of careful political navigations, and this poem written and unpublished. 

How do you survive an era like this? (How do we?) Incongruity, unease, discomfort, hypocrisy, dialectics, negotiation, stepping carefully, writing ironically, layering our meanings, disguising . . . 

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Plague

But this is the problem with history, isn’t it? I can offer you this compelling case about Marvell’s response to the Royalist cavalier poets because I can frame it this way. Is it true? Well, it’s not untrue. It’s what I said earlier about interpretation. You can offer an idea which is not wrong, but that is perhaps only some-of-the-distance right.

While we’re chatting about history, then, let me offer another (and I promise that we will get back to that Mary Fairfax thing, really): Another idea that so much writing about Marvell ignores, but I just can’t help but bring up:

Marvell’s grotesque second stanza of death and tombs and worms is absolutely bizarre to us, and it was likely so to Marvell’s readers, at least in terms of a tool for seduction. But death? Hardly absent from Marvell’s time, and I’m not talking about the English Civil War.

I implied earlier that Marvell left England to tutor abroad, perhaps to avoid the political problems brewing. True. But it’s also true that by this time, the late 1630s/early 1640s, another plague had swept England. Nearly half of Marvell’s hometown of Hull died in this time, possibly including his mother Anne. In London, 70,000 died. This was that era of plague where quarantines, lockdowns, and isolation were enforced by guards; doors were padlocked on plague houses for as long as a month or more. Marvell’s home was locked this way at least once. More than twice during this period, Marvell fled his home to hide from plague. 

More, over a quarter of England and continental Europe were suffering from poverty and disease. Syphilis and other STDS, most completely untreatable, were just as prominent as they are today. By the 1650s, when Marvell is writing his poetry from Appleton and later, London is ravaged by the Black Death, the same that wrecked Europe in the 6th and 14th centuries. Had we but world enough, and time, we could trace the details, but they’re available to us, just as they were to Marvell.

Who is this speaker–and even this Lady–who must also have known all this? Is this why the first stanza’s ideal fantasy world is so brutally brought home in the second stanza? Is this partly responsible for the fatalistic call in the third? “Let us sport us while we may.” 

 

And In Conclusion?

You might well imagine that we are, at last, moving to a finale on the poem, and you’d be partly right. I’ve saved some real fun stuff for the next episode: Mary Fairfax, who Marvell wrote this poem for or to, what we might know psychologically about him, and the value of an old poem like this, among other things.

But you might also have begun to recognize that, as far as we’ve traveled with this poem, we’ve still barely scratched it. I’ll have something to say about this, too, a bit later.

But by now, this much is obvious: You can read and, well, “enjoy” “To His Coy Mistress,” but if you simply read it as a gross pickup line made prettier, you’ve not really understood it. And we’re still not done discussing that controversy: that sexist surface which provokes so many, that surface which is intended to provoke, to unbalance, to offend. Yes, today we’ve learned that this offensive speaker may be an accusing parody of the cavalier Royalist poets, but such a reading does not answer the philosophical questions of time and faith, of mortality and epicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More answers to angst. 

We may also recognize that all of these questions we’ve raised are, indeed, rolled together into an inseparable mess of contradictions, where Marvell refuses to say cleanly what “side” he is on in any of it. For myself, I prefer to think of contradiction as a human condition, ambivalence as much a reality check as a fault. We’re not any of us simple or clear or even self-aware, are we?

But if you listened this far today, you’ve also been struck by the ridiculous number of parallels between Marvell’s time and situation and our own. And I opened this episode with a little speech on the nature of discomfiture, which I described as a personal feeling of awkwardness or embarrassment. 

This poem makes readers uncomfortable. We might have thought the source of this was just the sexist attitude and dark imagery. That’s certainly enough reason. But now that we get into it–now, that discomfiture may come at other levels. Do we live our lives in a carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More fear of mortality, aligning ourselves with the speaker and the cavalier attitudes of wealth and privilege? Where do we fall when we ask those same questions of our faith? Our sexual preferences? Our current political position and how we speak about it? Are we capable of affecting anything? Are we capable of creating anything new? Will anything outlast us? Or is there some act we can commit, fleshly or otherwise, which may mark us here at last? On what grounds, exactly, is our morality based? What virtues or principles will we compromise to mark ourselves against inevitable time? Or are we merely animals who forego philosophy entirely when making our choices? 

I am reminded of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “To Helen,” which leaps from hyperbole to hyperbole praising the virtues of Helen of Troy. Such idealized and divine imagery! And then he writes, “Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche /  How statue-like I see thee stand” – yes, he isn’t speaking of a real woman at all, but an artistic image of one, itself an illusion on a pedestal. How desperate we are to hang on to a fantasy against any reality of flesh. And admiration of art too, then, is a privilege afforded not to just anyone. Marvell strips this all away to an unsubtle desire. 

Desire, of course, is the word hovering around all of this. It is desire which often leads to discomfiture, that embarrassment and covering up, and it is discomfiture which allows us the chance to recognize our desires. Please, we might say, just don’t say what I really feel out loud, not in public, because I am not certain that I am ready to speak it, let alone understand where I fall on all of these questions. Of course we defend this way, even while some of us are frustrated that I have yet to spell out the details of Marvell’s poem in relationship to a young teen girl he tutors at Appleton. 

Oh, I don’t mean to end this on such a dark note today! But I want to bring us to this point in order to argue for the power of a poem that T. S. Eliot said was genius for its elusiveness. Eliot says that Marvell’s poem goes into far greater depth than any of the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More classics before it, that its images are “structural decoration of a serious idea,” a cynical wisdom which “is only completed by the religious comprehension.” Yeah, he’s a bit heavy. I’ve made a copy of the whole essay in the Resources section on the Waywords website, if you’re interested..

But I’m not expecting us to necessarily discover a “religious comprehension” by the end of our time with Marvell’s poem. I am expecting us to make a decision, though. After we’re done (and I’ll be chatting and exploring ideas from here even after we leave the poem), it will be time for each of us to be accountable. We will need to decide who this poem is for today, if anyone, and why. And frankly, I don’t know that we can make this decision until we’ve understood all of the dynamics at work here. 

But, these choices in the end are largely personal, and I want us to understand that Marvell–whose times parallel our own in troubling ways–may well be talking about us, after all. 

Quite enough for now. Ahead, we expose still more. In the meantime, go find some literature light and guiltless; go read something.