"Lillies Without, Roses Within": Marvell's Poetics of Indeterminacy and "The Nymph Complaining"

As in so many things, contemporary students of Andrew Marvell have been tutored by the New Critics to appreciate and interpret the formal hallmarks of his work: its ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes; its ingenious deployments and deformations of genre; its tonal mastery and linguistic poise. Yet as surely as New Critical approaches to Marvell's poetry unlocked many of its meanings and secrets, such approaches also distorted and misrepresented his verse, and to an unusual degree. In part, and as others have argued, that is because the New Critics and their followers assumed for Marvell and for his poetry the model of an approximately modern heterosexuality that may have far less purchase on the poet of "vegetable love" than it seems to have for, say, John Donne.¹ Of course, new generations of readers who are more attuned to social history, and who are specifically interested in the libelous pamphlet literature directed against Marvell, have discovered the lineaments of another story, not one of formal design, but of sexual ambiguities and paradoxes.² To be sure, it was entirely conventional in early modernity to write political deviance as sexual aberrance, but the persistence and odd particularity of the pamphlet attacks that accuse Marvell of sexual deformity and secret perversion suggest something beyond mere convention. And so, in the context of a broad and recent social, political, and literary interest in the body, and specifically in issues of gender and sexuality, students of Marvell have revealed in his poetry strains of homosocial and homoerotic desire that had been occluded by the standard tropes of heterosexuality.

But at least two major poems have resisted easy assimilation into this regime: "The Unfortunate Lover" and "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun." These poems seem in some strange but obvious ways to be love poems, and surely they are written in a highly coded language of desire, but they do not yield to Paul Hammond's formula of "sex between men." More broadly, although the discovery of the homoerotic has opened certain interpretive doors, others have remained shut, for insofar as homoerotic and heterosexual models of desire assume a genitally organized libido and a coherent and conventional erotic attraction to the desired body, whether male or female, they are not so structurally different. A few of the most daring and original Marvell scholars, however, have begun to extend and complicate the revisionist notion of Marvell's sexuality. Michael Long's Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia some years ago brought into view the appeals that pedophilia seems to have held for Marvell's imagination.³ More recently, and perhaps even more troublingly, Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker have deciphered in "The Unfortunate Lover" "a dramatic and determining story of eros and abuse, and of wounding and incapacity, for which the transcendence of poetry was his counter and his solace."⁴ Building on their earlier exploration of Marvell's relation to patriarchy, Hirst and Zwicker's narrative for the Unfortunate Lover of child abuse, of guilty longing, and of adult sexual deficit does much to displace the traditional structures by which Marvell's sexuality has been understood. Indeed, I do not see how the attractions of liminality, or the prospects of pedophilia, can be escaped in reading Marvell's poetry. Still, I would part company with the assumptions that continue to underpin even such provocative work: that sexuality for Marvell, even if radically subaltern, was something fixed and complete; that the brilliance and beauty of his verse lies in how it both records a history of desire and simultaneously makes that history invisible; and that the difficulty of his poetry is therefore largely a matter of deception and disguise, the baffling transcript of an otherwise stable self. To the contrary, I argue that Marvell's poetics are a poetics of indeterminacy and in-betweenness, and that the poet's eros does not lie behind this poetic but is identical with it, such that the difficulty of his poetry actually signifies the form of his desire. The pleasure of the Marvellian text consists not in the...