"Forward Youth" and Marvell's "An Horatian Ode"

MARVELL'S "AN HORATIAN ODE" opens with that unquiet figure, the "forward youth"; and yet, despite his prominence, we have never properly understood that figure. Many readings have nodded to him in passing; those who have more closely examined the youth explore buried meanings in Roman poetry to argue that Horace's verse or Lucan's Pharsalia sufficiently explain his mysteries. ¹ This essay contends that sources and analogues have led us astray: Marvell's "forward youth" may gesture to classical precedents, but his presence alludes, more importantly, to the poet's preoccupation with youth and the culturally contested role of the young at a particular historical moment. By identifying the forward youth as a recognized social figure we can better grasp his mysteries and the broad political argument about age, authority, and precedent that Marvell's poem offered its audience. ²

In mid-seventeenth-century England, "youth" carried specific cultural weight; and so too the adjective "forward." Together they must have provoked—and have power still to provoke—strong responses. In their famous debate, Cleanth Brooks and Douglas Bush touched this issue when Bush claimed that Brooks had misidentified the historical resonance of "forward," and continued debate over the proper seventeenth-century definitions of these two words might have given us a deeper understanding of the poem. ³ And yet, no one has properly historicized Marvell's idiom and the work of historicizing this crucial phrase has largely been abandoned. ⁴ My essay aims to remedy this neglect by showing how a reading responsive to the historical meanings of the "forward youth" offers crucial insight into the poem's temper, allegiances, and occasion. In choosing to begin his poem with this figure, Marvell consciously deploys a contested cultural archetype as a lens through which the reader might observe and then more deeply comprehend England's political troubles, and in ways that are both comfortingly and strangely familiar.

With our own knowledge of Marvell's oeuvre, the poet's strategy of focusing "An Horatian Ode" around the forward youth should come as no surprise, for the questions youth face and decisions they make shape much of Marvell's poetry. This preoccupation stems from the poet's insistence on framing youth as a site of contemplation separate from and yet proximate to a politically active adulthood. Of course, contrasting the contemplative life to the vita activa is hardly a Marvellian innovation, but Marvell's explorations of this topos regularly turn to youth with an intensity seldom matched by his contemporaries. Retirement offers a similarly distanced perspective on the vita activa, a perspective Marvell examines through the narrator in "The Garden" and Lord Fairfax in Upon Appleton House. Yet even in these two works the poet's attention returns to youth, through the pre-marital "happy garden state" shaping the close of the first poem or the meditations on the youthful tutor and his pupil closing the second.

But Marvell's focus on youth reflects more than a personal interest; it reflects a larger cultural anxiety about youth's status and character. In "An Horatian Ode," Marvell opens his deliberations into Cromwell's qualities through "the forward youth," a figure whose particular position allows the poet a vantage point from which to assess Cromwell's "forwardness." The difficulty of controlling the forwardness of youths had long been a concern in early modern England. Marvell's ode masterfully incorporates this concern within a larger discussion of the political crisis England faced in 1650. In essence, Marvell uses a cultural debate about the proper transfer of power between generations to present Cromwell as less threatening and transgressive than many saw him in 1650. In imagining Cromwell as a forward youth, Marvell anticipates those who might have wished to criticize the general as dangerously forward; the analogy allows the poet to defuse such criticism and present Cromwell's troubling behavior as a natural complement to the vigor and zeal of youth.

But further to understand the "forward youth...