Andrew Marvell: Pastoral and Lyric Poems 1681 (review)

264 Reviews Ormerod, David and Christopher Wortham, eds., Andrew Marvell: Pastoral and Lyric Poems 1681, Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 2000; paper; pp. 1, 337; R R P AUS$38.45; ISBN 187626814X. This new edition of a number of Marvell's poems is both outstanding and disappointing. Outstanding is the scholarship displayed in the areas of commentary and annotation. The general introduction is excellent, as are the briefer prefaces to the groups of poems ('The Dialogues', 'The Amorous Poems', etc.) which the editors have chosen to present. There is an extraordinarily detailed bibliography which wil prove helpful to numerous scholars and advanced students (undergraduates will probably find the entries too long). The editors - whose earlier edition of Doctor Faustus (1985)rightlyattracted great praise - are truly fine scholars, and their knowledge of Marvell's poetry and matters related to i t is massive. Other readers will be enormously grateful for the erudition and insight here brought to bear on explanation of the text, especially in the long, detailed notes which accompany each poem. Sometimes one might wish for notes a bit shorter and perhaps more directly to the point; there is a tendency to move rather too readily into consideration of what used to be called 'background' knowledge. For example, the phrase 'sea-monsters' in 'Bermudas' seems primarily an allusion to whales, and only secondarily to 'the Biblical Leviathan' with which the editors immediately start their comment. Even so, this book provides an important contribution to the knowledge and understanding ofMarvell's poetry, and to much of the mental world which that poetry expresses. I a m a little unhappy with the title used. Pastoral and Lyric Poems 1681 may well suggest to prospective buyers that there is a volume with this title, but there is not. Nor is the edition confined to pastoral and lyric poems from the 1681 Miscellaneous Poems, even though they are in the majority. It includes, for example, the 'Horatian Ode' (as part of a section called 'Elegy and Panegyric'). So, of course, should any sensible edition of Marvell's poetry, but the poem is neither pastoral nor lyrical, and the editors should have chosen a title like Selected Poems, especially as many more poems might have been presented. However, it is probably fair to say that this edition does offer us most of Marvell'sfinestpoetic work. It comes as a disappointment, then, tofindthe text much less satisfactory, and that fact would make it impossible for m e to set this volume as a student text. Indeed, I could not in all conscience recommend it for attention to anyone Reviews 265 except fellow scholars w h o are prepared to do comparative work by consulting the work of other editors, and of course the 1681 Miscellaneous Poems on which the text is based. Other readers would be best advised to use, as a modernised text, the Penguin Complete Poems edited by Elizabeth Story Donno (1972; henceforth 'D'), or, if they wish to consult an 'old-spelling' edition, that of H. M. Margoliouth's Poems and Letters (Oxford University Press, 1971, 3rd ed., rev. Pierre Legouis). The editors repunctuate the 1681 text 'in order to obtain, in a nonEmpsonian sense [sic], one single unambiguous literal meaning' (p. v). I a m all i n favour of clear, m o d e m punctuation, such as presumably the author would approve of if alive today. But what do w e get? The end of 'The Garden' is presented like this: H o w could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers. Here we have, I am convinced, a punctuation mark Marvell would not approve of, and I have difficulty understanding h o w anyone could. Undoubtedly, this sentence is a question. Often this fact has been expressed by - acceptably enough - an exclamation mark at the end (a tradition followed by D), but a question mark, as in The Norton Anthology ofEnglish Literature, Vol. 1 (6th ed., 1993), i s obviously better. A full stop is either incomprehensible, or suggests a kind of ambiguity we can well do without. This instance is not unique. A similar unwise f u l l stop...