Top 6 - Andrew Marvell

Marvell was the subject of my third-year undergraduate dissertation and I haven't been back to him often in the last thirty years. He cropped up in Hull, of course, when I was really there for Larkin and I did go to St. Giles in the Fields in the summer but I haven't probably given him enough time and attention over the years.

If poets from bygone centuries had known how reluctant we generally are now to engage with long poems they might not have bothered but it has to be said that looking back through the Complete, one isn't tempted into anything over three pages long so, with apologies..

Marvell's poems, much likes Donne's are performances. You don't really believe in his cardboard characters or set piece scenarios. He was working at the dead end of a long tradition and remaking verse from cliches and hollow, familiar themes. To His Coy Mistress is knowingly and absurdly over exaggerated, and once we know that we can enjoy the ironic playfulness at work in the rest of the lyrics. Always in opposition but always in Parliament, Marvell seems like one of those clever survivors who knows a lot but doesn't hold deep convictions of his own. Or at least that's what he looks like. He apparently never uses the same poetic form twice. Always playing, experimenting, performing.

The Gallery is a nice conceit; The Garden a traditional symbol for paradise with its famous 'green thought in a green shade'; The Nymph Complaining on the Death of Her Fawn is a heartbreaking performance and The Coronet, to which my tutor John Mowat directed me to begin the thesis, is a humble hymn of unworthiness. The Unfortunate Lover is another typically 'metaphysical' study of love in which you just wonder if you notice the possibly ungenerous spirit of Marvell in sympathy with 'the malignant stars'. But somehow you still can't help admiring the lad.