Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’: Doubleness, Conversion, and Meditation

Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Coronet’ is a meditation on conversion. It is also a poem where artistic self-consciousness and self-display at once convey and conflict with celebration or exploration of the sacred. A will to authorial power is inseparable from a will to reverence. In its knowing self-division and contrarieties the poem offers a revealing window onto Marvell’s poems of religious dialogue.