Type, icon and number in Marvell's Bermudas

Type, icon and number in Marvell's Bermudas Marvell's short lyric Bermudas is allotted major status within the small canon of the poet's work, but it has attracted relatively few attempts at a holistic interpretation, although several scholars have provided illuminating explications of individual aspects of the poem. In this essay I shall attempt to demonstrate that it possesses the formal complexity and completeness of 77*6- Garden or To His Coy Mistress, in that it draws together and epitomizes numerous medieval and Renaissance typologies of the Promised Land.1 1 There has been considerable critical concern as to whether the poem's subject is the literal typography of Bermuda, as understood by an armchair voyager, or whether it represents a treatment of the Earthly Paradise motif, a locus amoenus transported overseas, and most readers seem to be stranded within 'the problem of choosing between a historical or an allegorical reading'. This antithesis is probably false, and to accept it is to find oneself caught between 'dichotomous views oftime',where no amount of N e w Critical ingenuity will bring these 'sets of dualities into fusion'.2 A more fruitful response would be that of the reader w h o remarks that 'in Bermudas . . . the relationship of the figurative to the literal is ... complex because the historical event is part of a larger story, itself conceptual' .3 The poem, which is exactly forty tines in length, opens with an exordium in the form of a quatrain (i.e. thefirsttwo couplets) which presents a visual vignette—a secret, distant little island, and, beside it, the approaching skiff. The poem proper starts at line 5, and consists of a hymn of praise sung by the boat's rowers in time to their oars.4 In their song, they praise G o d for their miraculous deliverance, indicate very briefly the cause of their perilous journey, describe the rigours of the pilgrimage, and extol the beauty of their island destination in contrasttothat other island, the point of their departure. The hymn ends at line 1 Quotations from these and others of Marvell's poems are taken from The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and E.E. Duncan-Jones, Oxford, 2 vols., 1971: Bermudas appears in 1, pp. 17-18. In their notes to the poem, pp. 245-46, the editors provide a brief account of Marvell's stay at the house of John Oxenbridge, and gloss the provenance and literal meaning of some of the lines, citing Edmund Waller and John Smith. 2 Joan Hartwig, 'Double Time in Marvell's Bermudas', Renaissance Papers (Duke University), Durham, NC, 1974, pp. 51, 52, and 54. 3 Anne E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: a Study of Marvell's Major Poems, Princeton, 1970, pp. 52-53. 4 For some patrological speculations on the function of music in the poem, see C.B. Hardman, 'Marvell's Rowers', Essays in Criticism 27 (1977), 93-99. 92 D. Ormerod 36, and the poem then terminates with a second quatrain (i.e. the last two couplets) which, along with the initial quatrain, constitutes a frame for the hymn, and establishes a polarity in which the departure and destination points of the poem's structure are paralleled. The inception of the rowers' journey, Britain, and their goal, Bermuda, m a y be seen as an island diptych with figurative undertones—a journey from one version of the Fortunate Isles to another.^ The literal journey which the travellers are undertaking is a flight, an exodus of a sort, from the allegedly Laudian persecution (historically-minded readers differ on this point) of a contemporary seventeenth-century England, towards the foundation of a new form of worship in the Caribbean and the Americas. This identification of the journey and the destination with Exodus and Genesis is often noticed. Patrick Cullen, for instance, remarks that 'the Exodus and Edenic analogues define and amplify the literal experience, on the one hand reflecting back on the lost Eden, on the other anticipating the exodus to the new Eden. Their exodus and then earthly Eden are thus an integrated pattern within, not an escape from, history and time'.6...