Andrew Marvell

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Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell
31 March 1621
Born
Winestead, England
16 August 1678 (aged 57)
Died
London, England
Occupation Poet
Notable "To His Coy Mistress", "The Garden",
work(s) "An Horatian Ode"

Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical
poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman (also named
Andrew Marvell). As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and
George Herbert. He was a colleague and friend of John Milton.

Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire, near the city
of Kingston upon Hull. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed
Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar
School. A secondary school in the city is now named after him.

His most famous poems include To His Coy Mistress, The Garden, An Horatian Ode
upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, and the country house poem Upon Appleton
House.

Contents
[hide]
 • 1 Early life
• 2 First poems and Marvell's time at Nun Appleton
• 3 Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin secretary
• 4 After the Restoration
• 5 Views
• 6 Marvell's poetic style
• 7 Footnotes
• 8 Further reading

• 9 External links

[edit] Early life

At the age of twelve, Marvell attended Trinity College, Cambridge and eventually
received his BA degree.[1] Afterwards, from the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell
probably travelled in continental Europe. He may well have served as a tutor for an
aristocrat on the Grand Tour; but the facts are not clear on this point. While England
was embroiled in the civil war, Marvell seems to have remained on the continent until
1647. It is not known exactly where his travels took him, except that he was in Rome
in 1645 and Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages, including
French, Italian and Spanish.[2]

[edit] First poems and Marvell's time at Nun

Appleton
Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he
was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of
a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He only belatedly became
sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I's
execution, which took place 30 January 1649. His Horatian Ode, a political poem
dated to early 1650, responds with sorrow to the regicide even as it praises Oliver
Cromwell's return from Ireland.[3][4][5]

Circa 1650-52, Marvell served as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas
Fairfax, who had recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary army to
Cromwell. He lived during that time at Nun Appleton House, near York, where he
continued to write poetry. One poem, Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax,
uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax's and Marvell's own
situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known poem he
wrote at this time was To His Coy Mistress.

[edit] Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin

secretary
During the period of increasing tensions leading up to the First Anglo-Dutch War of
1653, Marvell wrote the satirical "Character of Holland," repeating the then current
stereotype of the Dutch as "drunken and profane": "This indigested vomit of the Sea,/
Fell to the Dutch by Just Propriety".

He became a tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, in 1653, and moved to live
with his pupil at the house of John Oxenbridge in Eton. Oxenbridge had made two
trips to Bermuda, and it is thought that this inspired Marvell to write his poem
Bermudas. He also wrote several poems in praise of Cromwell, who was by this time
Lord Protector of England. In 1656 Marvell and Dutton travelled to France, to visit
the Protestant Academy of Saumur.[6][7]

In 1657, Marvell joined Milton, who by that time had lost his sight, in service as Latin
secretary to Cromwell's Council of State at a salary of £200 a year, which represented
financial security at that time. In 1659 he was elected to Parliament from his
birthplace of Hull in Yorkshire, and was paid a rate of 6 shillings, 8 pence per day
during sittings of parliament, a financial support derived from the contributions of his
constituency [8]. This was a post Marvell soon lost in the changes that occurred to
parliament in 1659, only to regain it in 1660, whereafter he held it until his death.

[edit] After the Restoration

A statue of Andrew Marvell, located in Trinity Square, Kingston upon Hull, UK

Oliver Cromwell died in 1658. He was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son
Richard, but in 1660 the monarchy was restored to Charles II. Marvell eventually
came to write several long and bitterly satirical verses against the corruption of the
court. Although they circulated in manuscript form, and some found anonymous
publication in print, they were too politically sensitive and thus dangerous to be
published under his name until well after his death. He avoided punishment for his
own cooperation with republicanism, while he helped convince the government of
Charles II not to execute John Milton for his antimonarchical writings and
revolutionary activities. The closeness of the relationship between the two former
office mates is indicated by the fact that Marvell contributed an eloquent prefatory
poem to the second edition of Milton's famous epic Paradise Lost. According to a
biographer:

Skilled in the arts of self-preservation, he was not a toady.[9]

“ ”
Marvell took up opposition to the 'court party', and satirised them anonymously. In his
longest verse satire, Last Instructions to a Painter, written in 1667, Marvell responded
to the political corruption that had contributed to English failures during the Second
Anglo-Dutch War. The poem did not find print publication until after the Revolution
of 1688-9. The poem instructs an imaginary painter how to picture the state without a
proper navy to defend them, led by men without intelligence or courage, a corrupt and
dissolute court, and dishonest officials. Of another such satire, Samuel Pepys, himself
a government official, commented in his diary, "Here I met with a fourth Advice to a
Painter upon the coming in of the Dutch and the End of the War, that made my heart
ake to read, it being too sharp and so true."

From 1659 until his death in 1678, Marvell was a conscientious member of
Parliament, steadily reporting on parliamentary and national business to his
constituency and serving as London agent for the Hull Trinity House, a shipmasters'
guild. He went on two missions to the continent, one to Holland and the other
encompassing Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. He also wrote anonymous prose satires
criticizing the monarchy and Catholicism, defending Puritan dissenters, and
denouncing censorship.

Marvell's pamphlet An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government

in England, published in late 1677, claimed that:

There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the
“ Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert
”
the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery...[10]

John Kenyon described it as "one of the most influential pamphlets of the decade"[11]
and G. M. Trevelyan called it: "A fine pamphlet, which throws light on causes
provocative of the formation of the Whig party".[12]

[edit] Views
Although Marvell became a Parliamentarian, he was not a Puritan. He had flirted
briefly with Catholicism as a youth[13], and was described in his thirties (on the
Saumur visit) as "a notable English Italo-Machiavellian".[14][15] During his lifetime, his
prose satires were much better known than his verse[citation needed].
Andrew Marvell

A recent study by Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker of Washington University in St.
Louis, has speculated that Marvell's lifelong struggle for individual rights may have
been a result of his own inner struggle with homosexuality.[16] Vincent Palmieri noted
that Marvell is sometimes known as the "British Aristides" for his incorruptible
integrity in life and poverty at death. Many of his poems were not published until
1681, two years after his death, from a collection owned by Mary Palmer, his
housekeeper. After Marvell's death she lay dubious claim to having been his wife,
from the time of a secret marriage in 1667.[17]

[edit] Marvell's poetic style

Marvell’s poetry is often witty and full of elaborate conceits in the elegant style of the
metaphysical poets. Many poems were inspired by events of the time, public or
personal. The Picture of Little TC in a Prospect of Flowers was written about the
daughter of one of Marvell's friends, Theophila Cornwell, who was named after an
elder sister who had died as a baby. Marvell uses the picture of her surrounded by
flowers in a garden to convey the transience of spring and the fragility of childhood.

Others were written in the pastoral style of the classical Roman authors. Even here,
Marvell tends to place a particular picture before us. In The Nymph Complaining for
the Death of her Fawn, the nymph weeps for the little animal as it dies, and tells us
how it consoled her for her betrayal in love.

Marvell had keen eye for perspective[citation needed], and explored the options that genre
presented him with. His pastoral poems, including Upon Appleton House achieve
originality and a unique tone through his reworking and subversion of the genre