Authors, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Marvell, Andrew, 1621-1678
"Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines,
Curb me about, ye gadding vines,
And oh, so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place!
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through.
...
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There, like a bird, it sits and sings."
No poet is happier than Marvell in creating the impression that he made
his verses out of doors.
"He saw the partridge drum in the woods;
He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrush's broods,
And the shy hawk did wait for him.
What others did at distance hear
And guessed within the thicket's gloom
Was shown to this philosopher,
And at his bidding seemed to come."
(From Emerson's _Wood Notes_.)
Marvell's immediate fame as a true poet was, I dare say, obscured for a
good while both by its original note (for originality is always
forbidding at first sight) and by its author's fame as a satirist, and
his reputation as a lover of "liberty's glorious feast." It was as one
of the poets encountered in the _Poems on Affairs of State_ (fifth
edition, 1703) that Marvell was best known during the greater part of
the eighteenth century. As Milton's friend Marvell had, as it were, a
side-chapel in the great Miltonic temple. The patriotic member of
Parliament, who refused in his poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby's
proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite
quality of his garden-poetry was recognised. There was a cult for
Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell's name was
on the list of its professors. Wordsworth's sonnet has preserved this
tradition for us.
"Great men have been among us; hands that penn'd
And tongues that utter'd wisdom, better none:
The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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