Marvell’s Infinite Parallels

MARVELL'S INFINITE PARALLELS JAMES CARSCALLEN In Marvell's beautiful and enigmatic poem Mourning we find the nymph Chlora weeping for the death of her lover Strephon. Her behaviour has eVidently aroused a good deal of curiosity, and those who "pretend art" offer various far-fetched explanations for it, all to her discredit: her tears are a way of softening a place near her heart for another wound; or she is courting herself during her enforced seclusion like Danae in a shower; or she is throwing grief from her windows because joy has now become her master. The speaker reports and then rejects all these explanations: an Indian pearl-diver, he says, might sink to the depths of the ocean, but never reach the bottom of one of Chlora's tears. The poem concludes with a very guarded observation: I yet my silent Judgment keep, Disputing not what they believe But sure as oft as Women weep, It is to be suppos'd they grieve. The last two lines are utterly ambiguous - either we are to understand that a weeping woman is sincerely grieved or just the opposite, that she is assuming a role.' At the same time these lines tell us quite simply that weeping stands for grief; and they suggest that the truth about Chlora is simple in spite of whatever strangeness and complexity it may hold within it. In the present paper I am going to offer another handling of a much handled subject, the interplay of contraries in Marvell's writing, and I am going to argue that the world of his poetry, seen as such an interplay and seen as a whole, has both a complexity and a simplicity like those of Chlora's mourning. It is thus a structure in Marvell's world that I shall be considering - not something that he will have put together deliberately, but a way of seeing things projected in a configuration of the things seen; and in order to relate the parts of this structure to one another it will be necessary to produce various matters that have already been well treated by Marvell scholars, such as his themes of action and retirement. On the other hand I shall have no occasion to consider the many political and philosophical and literary topics that Marvell's poetry gathers from outside itself, except as they enter into its own constitution; Volume XXXIX, Number 2, January 1970 MARVEI:;L'S INPINITE PARALLELS 145 and in dealing with that constitution I can do nothing to emphasize the Protean .variety of ' Marvell's world, although this variety will reveal itself all the more plainly in any attempt to see a unity underlying it. To return to the 'question of Simplicity and complexity - since they themselves make one of the pairs of contraries that I propose to examine -let us begin by remembering that Marvell often speaks, or has a character ·speak, as simply as in the last stanza of Mourning, and also that he can be very intricate when he wants to be, as the preceding stanzas show. Any of his poems will exhibit both qualities, but The Nymph Complaining and the mower poems impress one primarily by a kind of sentiment and expression in which nothing is "enforc'd," whereas poems like The Definition of L017e and The Unfortunate L017er are as tortuous as the experiences they present. They are also couched in terms of things artificial or abstract or in other ways contrasted with the "vegetable" nature of living things. The Definition uses mechanical and geometric metaphors, The Unfortunate L017er formal emblems; and we can bring together with these all the associations in Marvell of the forces that "square and hew." In contrasting the simple with the complex, we are dealing moreover with two types of character. On the one hand there is the gentleness of the nymph with her fawn, of the mower, the Bermudian settlers, and the unambitious tutor of Appleton House; on the other there is what I shall call assertion, the quality that we find, for example, in the hero of The Resol11ed Soul, and Created Pleasure. The resolved soul, in refusing the attractions of a created...