World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray Read Free Book Online Page A

the mowers at work, images of war infiltrate, as well as religious images of redemption – the path of a mower through the grass is compared to the parting of the Red Sea for the Israelites. The recent conflict cannot be put out of mind even in what is ostensibly a gentle landscape portrait. There seem pointers, reminders, here – to Fairfax or the prematurely retired twenty-nine-year-old poet – of the world they have retreated from. Like the birds who nest in the meadow, hoping to shield themselves from sight, they are vulnerable to the mower’s scythe. Modest retirement may be no more than an evasion: ‘Unhappy Birds! what does it boot/To build below the Grasses Root;/When Lowness is unsafe as Hight’. Even a detail such as the release of the ‘Cataracts’ at Denton thirty miles up the River Wharfe – sluices opened to clear ponds, resulting in flooding of the meadows at Nun Appleton 6 – carries an ambiguous charge, as if it is obscurely reminding Fairfax of his abandonment of Denton and, by implication, of wider responsibilities. It also gives Marvell the opportunity for some wonderful conceits (‘And Fishes do the Stables scale’), playing with the inversions of the flood. After this, Marvell’s retreat into the wood contains more closely observed images of nature which Victorian taste was to light gratefully on:
    Then as I carless on the bed
    Of gelid Straw-berryes do tread,
    And through the Hazles thick espy
    The hatching Thrastles shining Eye
    The Heron from the Ashes top,
    The eldest of its young lets drop,
    As if it Stork-like did pretend
    That Tribute to its Lord to send.
    Sharp and vivid as the poet’s natural observations are, the political allusions never quite disappear. The ‘hewel’ or woodpecker is seen as slowly undermining the solid oak tree, which has been fatally weakened by a ‘Traitor-worm’ just as the state may have been weakened by the betrayals of the Royalists. ‘Who could have thought the tallest Oak /Should fall by such a feeble Strok’!’ After the Civil War the most solid institutions, including kingship, must be considered now impermanent.
    Marvell’s reference to himself as an ‘easie Philosopher’ of the wood sets up an echo with his poem ‘The Garden’ where Neoplatonist thoughts are triggered by nature. Marvell is almost Wordsworthian in his reading of a lesson from the vernal wood: ‘Thrice happy he who, not mistook,/Hath read in Nature’s mystick Book. ’ The poet who would, before the decade’s end, be immured in lodgings off the Strand and moving in the crowded world of Restoration politics, was plainly – however much he mediated it through sophisticated and allusive imagery – a lover of the natural world. Yet he could not leave that sophistication alone, and his choice of image to convey his languid passage through the leaf-canopied wood was one that expressed a Puritan twinge of guilt at over-indulged ease or forgetfulness of decent plainness: ‘Under this antick Cope I move/Like some great Prelate of the Grove. ’ Even his sensual pleasure in this bucolic recreation must be rendered with a dash of self-lacerating ardour:
    Bind me ye Woodbines in your ’twines,
    Curle 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.
    The poem ends with the arrival of ‘young Maria’, who ‘like a sprig of Misleto, /On the Fairfacian Oak does grow’. She is the only child of the Fairfaxes and Marvell refers to their hopes in her. Disappointed at the absence of a male heir they have made ‘their Destiny their Choice ’ and placed all their hopes for the future in Mary Fairfax. She would die, childless, as the Duchess of Buckingham in 1704, but