Friday
I found utterly dispiriting this past week’s Democratic debates in which candidates lasered in on tiny differences while a fire rages all around us. I haven’t wanted to relax my vigilance regarding Donald Trump since autocrats win when we become so worn down that we stop paying attention. Nevertheless, these two wretched debates made me want to retreat into Andrew Marvell’s “Garden.”
It’s a good poem for this time year, focusing as it does on ripening fruit. For instance, check out stanza five:
What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
There’s evidence that the poem was written by a man weary of the war between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. In the first stanza, the poet wants to escape civic, military and poetic ambition (“the palm, the oak, or bays”) and opt instead for the variety of trees and flowers that make up a garden.
He wishes to flee not only the tempests of war and ambition but tempestuous relationships as well. In his garden he will find Fair Quiet and her sister Innocence, who stand in marked contrast to those lovers who cruelly cut their names into trees. Turning a couple of mythological stories on their heads, he claims that Apollo and Pan, when they chased after virginal maidens, did so not to rape them but to gather the plants that they turned into (Daphne into laurel, Syrinx into reeds).
It sounds like the poet rejected by his coy mistress wants him some down time to lick his wounds. What need had Adam of Eve, he asks, when he had the garden itself, with its “delicious solitude”? Or in his words, “Two paradises ’twere in one/ To live in paradise alone.” Any tree carving this lover undertakes will be “oak” or “beech,” not Chloe or Amaryllis.
If the poem has a few acerbic barbs from a jilted lover, however, it also features some absolutely transcendent moments. Take, for instance, the moment when the speaker imagines “casting the body’s vest aside” so that his soul can glide into the branches of a tree. Although death is mentioned (“longer flight”), the present moment is so gorgeous that anything else feels irrelevant:
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
In this state, the mind itself becomes like a garden, “a green thought in a green shade.”
The final stanza has the poet writing of the garden functioning as a sundial (thus my picture above), which stands in marked contrast to the final stanza of “Coy Mistress.” In the latter, Marvell talks about roughly seizing the present since time is running fast. Here time is still moving, but doing so far more gently since it is “reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs.” The industrious bee that dives into flowers differs from the ardent lover or (returning to the first stanza) those busy souls who frantically quest for the leaves that symbolize fame:
How well the skillful gard’ner drew
Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!
It’s a theme taken up later by John Keats in “Ode to Autumn” when he imagines sleeping beneath a haystack or lazily watching cider ooze from a press. Keats’s own bees “think warm days will never cease,/ For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells,” and for a moment the poet shares this illusion. Although the gathering swallows signal that the approach of winter and death, the poet is absorbed by the present moment.
Ascending a tree to escape life’s travails, meanwhile, is an image that will show up in Robert Frost’s “Birches.” When life feels too much like a “pathless wood,” he’d “like to get away from earth awhile” by climbing to the top branches.
Marvell too seeks to escape from the world for awhile. In this, he resembles all those who use summer to flock to rural retreats. Their goal: to enjoy many “sweet and wholesome hours.”
The Garden
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
And their uncessant labours see
Crown’d from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flow’rs and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name;
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walk’d without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in paradise alone.
How well the skillful gard’ner drew
Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new,
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th’ industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!