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

for now she is seen as the centre of an imagined, prelapsarian world of beauty and innocence: ‘Heaven’s Center, Nature’s Lap/And Paradice’s only Map.’ The sky is now growing dark and they must move in. In a final extravagant image – for which Marvell’s knuckles were rapped by T.S. Eliot, but which is one of the most delightful and witty in the poem – the darkening sky is compared to the dark leather coracle that the salmon-fishers hoist: ‘And, like Antipodes in Shoes,/Have shod their Heads in their Canoos ’.
    Marvell’s other topographical poem to Fairfax, ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow’, concerns another house owned by Fairfax at Bilborough, a few miles from Nun Appleton. The hill referred to is, in that flat country, a rather risible eminence of 145 feet which Marvell claims in the poem can be used by seamen on the Humber as a landmark. It is ‘a perfect Hemisphere’ with ‘a soft access and wide’ which may be why, as a local farmer told the present author in 1997: ‘Folk ski off it in winter.’ Again, Marvell alludes to the military past of Fairfax:
    Much other Groves, say they, then these
    And other Hills him once did please.
    Through Groves of Pikes he thunder’d then,
    And Mountains rais’d of dying Men.
    The poem concludes that Fairfax does not want those hills without the corresponding groves: ‘Nor Height but with Retirement loves’. The suggestion seems to be that he needs both the active and the contemplative life and Marvell, in his poems to his patron, seems to be holding him to that balance, reminding him of the world left behind and his duty to it, as well as praising the pleasures of retirement.
    â€˜The Garden’ grants more allowance to the need for withdrawal. ‘How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the Oke, or Bayes’, it begins, continuing in a mode of profound contemplation that does not seek to counterbalance every description of natural beauty with some allusion to politics or society or a call to the active life. It is thus different in temper from the Fairfax poems and may belong to a later date, when the need for calm reflection and quiet may have been more pressing. As a busy politician, Marvell often seemed in his correspondence to be rushed and harried. His letters of that period sometimes contain expressions of determination to go into the country to find the space to think and write. Although living in central London, during his years as an MP he spent some time in a cottage at Highgate, demolished in 1869 and now part of Waterlow Park. A memorial tablet in the wall of Lauderdale House, halfway up Highgate Hill, marks the putative spot of ‘Andrew Marvell’s Cottage’ today. Only one letter is actually dated from Highgate (24 June 1673), but there are several other references to going there in his correspondence. On 24 July 1675, for example, he wrote to his favourite nephew, William Popple, about being ‘resolved now to sequester my self one whole Day at Highgate ’ 7 and in another letter he apologised for a late reply to a letter, saying, ‘I am much out of Towne’ 8 – probably a reference to a further spell in Highgate. His reputation for secrecy may have had as much to do with this need to find time to read and to compose as with darker intrigues.
    The exclamation in ‘The Garden’ – ‘Fair quiet, have I found thee here,/And Innocence thy Sister dear!/Mistaken long, I sought you then/In busie Companies of Men’ – differs from the playful mock-languor of the Fairfax poems. There is an unqualified relish for seclusion – ‘Society is all but rude,/To this delicious Solitude’ – and a frank sensual enjoyment of the fruits of the garden – ‘The Luscious Clusters of the Vine/Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine’. The governing antithesis of this poem, however, is not the