Some Apocalyptic Strains in Marvell's Poetry

_------- 14 --------Some Apocalyptic Strains in Marvell's Poetry When I was working on Dreams of Love and Power at the Folger Library in the spring and summer of 1976, Kenneth Friedenreich appeared unexpectedly and asked me to contribute an essay to the anthology of tercentenary essays on Marvell which he was editing. I had once planned to do a book on Marvell, buthad ended up doingseveral disparate essays instead; Idecided it would be interesting (anda breakfrom Shakespeare) to try one more essay on a side ofMarvell Ihad hardly touched. We should beware of supposing that whenever in the study of Christian politics we meet with apocalyptic, eschatological and even millennial concepts, we are necessarily dealing with those chiliastic "religions of the oppressed" which are so much and so rightly studied. Concepts of this order formed a vital and powerful element in the vocabulary of Christian society, one just as likely to be employed by members of the established power structure as by rebels against it; they were used to explain events and justify claims too dramatic and unprecedented to be dealt with in any other way, and the powerful as well as the powerless might find themselves needing to do this. But the language of apocalyptic was thus widely employed because only a dramatised providence seemed capable of explaining secular and particular happenings when their particularity was so marked as to assume the character of sudden change. — J.G.A. Pocock, "Civic Humanism and its Role in Anglo-American Thought"1 Apocalyptic Strains in Marvell189 Some years ago Rosalie Colie remarked that "It is often difficult to remember that Andrew Marvell the poet was also a polemical Puritan and practical politician, so littledo his survivingpoems reflect his public activity," and she went on to note the relations between "Marvell's 'Bermudas' and the Puritan Paradise."2 Most of Marvell's poems are still usually read as ifthey were composed outside of time, lyrics of a poet with general sensitivity and a wonderful ear who was concerned with myth and pastoral and literary and religious traditions. I would not question that account of Marvell's gifts and concerns, but a number of the poems show also the poet's sensitive and particular responses to his own time and place, the importance of which it is easy to underestimate or to miss. Marvell's classicism is sometimes thought to indicate his deepest allegiances and to be largely responsible for his playful uses of multiple genres and stances. A wide acquaintance with classical history and texts, in addition to a knowledge of changes in expression, taste, and assumptions, might be expected to lead to a relatively static or cyclical view of history: the more it changes the more it is the same. If one knows what happened and what was said in the past, one must often experience the sense of déjà vu as one looks at the events and statements of the present. But such an expectation is likely to be perfectly fulfilled only in times of social and political stability. Augustine, after all, was a "classicist" convinced of literally earthshaking changes in human and divine history and life, and something of his attitude could appear in almost any later classicist. Before Augustine, of course, there were tragedies and epics and Virgil's "Messianic Eclogue" which focused precisely on moments of extraordinary change, events which made the future seem forever different from the past: the Trojan War, the founding of Rome, the curse on the house of Cadmus or Atreus. For many Christians in the Middle Ages, the world might, in comparison with such classical perspectives, have seemed relatively static: the most important transforming event had occurred once for all time, and the fluctuations of events while Nature gradually decayed (or even gradually improved) in expectation of the final Judgment could seem relatively unimportant, particularly if the divine revelation was thought to be complete, and no further enlightenment concerning ethics, society, or history to be expected. After the Reformation, that position became increasingly difficult to maintain, I believe, particularly for Protestants. However strongly the Reformers clung to the notion that they were only attempting to 190Apocalyptic Strains in Marvell restore...