Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, and the son of an Anglican clergyman. As a metaphysical, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert. He was the first assistant of John Milton.

Quotes

For though the whole world cannot show such another,
Yet we’d better by far have him than his brother.
- The Statue in Stocks-Market, line 59 (1689)

Popery is such a thing as cannot, but for want of a word to express it, be called a religion; nor is it to be mentioned with that civility which is otherwise decent to be used in speaking about the differences of human opinion about divine matters...There has now for divers years a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant religion into downright Popery...If under his present Majesty we have as yet seen no more visible effects of the same spirit than the firing of London...it is not to be attributed to the good nature or better principles of that sect, but to the wisdom of his Holiness, who observes that we are not of late so dangerous Protestants as to deserve any special mark of his indignation, but that we may be made better use of to the wrecking of those that are of our religion, and that if he do not disturb us, there are those amongst ourselves that are leading us into a fair way of reconciliation with him.
- An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England [1677] (reprinted in State Tracts: Volume I (1692), pp. 69 ff.)

Art indeed is long, but life is short.
- Upon the Death of Lord Hastings (1649), last line^{[citation needed]}
- Variant: "Art is long, and time is fleeting." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (1839)

The world in all doth but two nations bear —
The good, the bad; and these mixed everywhere.
- The Loyal Scot (1650-1652)^{[citation needed]}

Miscellaneous Poems (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.
- To His Coy Mistress, line 1 (1650-1652)

An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
- To His Coy Mistress, line 17

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.
- To His Coy Mistress, line 21

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.
- To His Coy Mistress, line 33

Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
- To His Coy Mistress, line 37

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.
- To His Coy Mistress, line 41

Gather the flowers, but spare the buds.
- The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers

She with her eyes my heart does bind,
She with her voice might captivate my mind.
- The Fair Singer, stanza 1

How should I avoid to be her slave,
Whose subtle art invisibly can wreath
My fetters of the very air I breath?
- The Fair Singer, stanza 2

While thus he threw his Elbow round,
Depopulating all the Ground,
And, with his whistling Sythe, does cut
Each stroke between the Earth and Root,
The edged Stele by careless chance
Did into his own Ankle glance;
And there among the Grass fell down,
By his own Sythe, the Mower mown.
Alas! said He, these hurts are slight
To those that dye by Loves despight.
- Damon the Mower, stanzas 10 and 11

The inglorious arts of peace.
- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, line 10 (1650)

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try:
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head,
Down as upon a bed.
- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, line 57

And now the Irish are ashamed
To see themselves in one year tamed:
So much one man can do,
That does both act and know.
- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, line 75

How fit is he to sway
That can so well obey.
- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, line 83

To make a bank was a great plot of state;
Invent a shovel, and be a magistrate.
- The Character of Holland (c. 1653)

This indigested vomit of the Sea,
Fell to the Dutch by Just Propriety.
- The Character of Holland

Among the blind the one-eye'd blinkard reigns.
- The Character of Holland

My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
- The Definition of Love, stanzas 1 and 2 (1650-1652)

But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.
- The Definition of Love, stanza 3

Love's whole world on us doth wheel.
- The Definition of Love, stanza 5

As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.
- The Definition of Love, stanzas 7 and 8

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
And their uncessant labours see
Crowned from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow vergéd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid,
While all flowers and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.
- The Garden, stanza 1 (1650-1652)

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear.
- The Garden, stanza 2

In busy companies of men.
- The Garden, stanza 2

Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
- The Garden, stanza 2

What wondrous 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,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
- The Garden, stanza 5

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.
- The Garden, stanza 6

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.
- The Garden, stanza 7

Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked without a mate.
- The Garden, stanza 8

But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in paradise alone.
- The Garden, stanza 8

How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!
- The Garden, stanza 9

Music, the mosaic of the air.
- Music's Empire, stanza 5

Where the remote Bermudas ride,
In th' ocean's bosom unespied.
- Bermudas, line 1 (1657)

He hangs in shades the Orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.
- Bermudas, line 17; variant: 'light' for 'night'

And makes the hollow seas, that roar,
Proclaim the ambergris on shore.
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The gospel’s pearl upon our coast.
- Bermudas, line 27

Oh let our voice his praise exalt,
Till it arrive at heaven’s vault:
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.
- Bermudas, line 33

And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
- Bermudas, line 39

'Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,
While the sweet fields do lie forgot,
Where willing Nature does to all dispense
A wild and fragrant innocence.
- The Mower, against Gardens, line 31

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late
And studying all the summer night
Her matchless songs does meditate;
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grasses' fall;
Ye glow-worms whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.
- The Mower to the Glow-worms

For Juliana comes, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
- The Mower's Song, stanza 4

Like the vain curlings of the watery maze,
Which in smooth streams a sinking weight does raise,
So Man, declining always, disappears
In the weak circles of increasing years;
And his short tumults of themselves compose,
While flowing Time above his head does close.
- The First Anniversary of the Government under O. C., line 1

If these the Times, then this must be the Man.
- The First Anniversary of the Government under O. C., line 144

Choosing each stone, and poising every weight,
Trying the measures of the breadth and height;
Here pulling down, and there erecting new,
Founding a firm state by proportions true.
- The First Anniversary of the Government under O. C., line 245

It is a wondrous thing, how fleet
’Twas on those little silver feet.
With what a pretty skipping grace,
It oft would challenge me the race:
And when ’t had left me far away,
’Twould stay, and run again, and stay.
For it was nimbler much than hinds;
And trod, as on the four winds.
- The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, line 63

I have a garden of my own
But so with roses overgrown,
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness.
- The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, line 71

Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.
- The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn, line 91

He is translation’s thief that addeth more,
As much as he that taketh from the store
Of the first author.
- To His Worthy Friend Dr. Witty (1651)

No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 2 (1651)

What need of all this marble crust
T’impark the wanton mote of dust.
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 3

A stately frontispiece of poor
Adorns without the open door:
Nor less the rooms within commends
Daily new furniture of friends.
The House was built upon the place
Only as for a mark of grace;
And for an inn to entertain
Its lord a while, but not remain.
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 9

Oh thou, that dear and happy isle
The garden of the world ere while,
Thou paradise of four seas,
Which heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With watery if not flaming sword;
What luckless apple did we taste,
To make us mortal, and thee waste?
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 41

For he did, with his utmost skill,
Ambition weed, but conscience till:
Conscience, that heaven-nursèd plant,
Which most our earthy gardens want.
A prickling leaf it bears, and such
As that which shrinks at every touch;
But flowers eternal, and divine,
That in the crowns of saints do shine.
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 45

And now to the abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass,
Where men like grasshoppers appear,
But grasshoppers are giants there:
They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low than them:
And, from the precipices tall
Of the green spires, to us do call.
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 47

Unhappy birds! what does it boot
To build below the grass’s root,
When lowness is unsafe as height,
And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite?
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 52

’Tis not what once it was, the world,
But a rude heap together hurled.
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 96

But now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but not so slow,
These rational amphibii go!
- Upon Appleton House, stanza 97

O, who shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart?
- A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body

Quotes about Marvell

Marvell is the most enigmatic, unclassifiable, and unaffiliated major poet in the language. It is finally unhelpful to call his poetry Metaphysical, Mannerist, Epicurean, Platonist, or Puritan, though all of those terms somehow are applicable.
- Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Frost (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 170

The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What is meant is some quality which is common to the songs in Comus and Cowley's "Anacreontics" and Marvell's "Horatian Ode." It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight Iyric grace.
- T. S. Eliot, "Andrew Marvell", in The Times Literary Supplement (31 March 1921); republished in Eliot's Selected Essays (1932), p. 252

The life and work of Andrew Marvell are both marked by extraordinary variety and range. Gifted with a most subtle and introspective imagination, he turned his talents in mid-career from incomparable lyric explorations of the inner life to panegyric and satiric poems on the men and issues involved in one of England's most crucial political epochs. The century which followed Marvell's death remembered him almost exclusively as a politician and pamphleteer. Succeeding periods, on the other hand, have all but lost the public figure in the haunting recesses of his lyric poems.
- George deForest Lord, "Introduction", Andrew Marvell: Complete Poetry (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. ix

External links

Encyclopedic article on Andrew Marvell on Wikipedia
Works related to Andrew Marvell on Wikisource