by T. S. Eliot
might have trusted the King.”12 Marvell, therefore, more a man of the cen-
tury than a Puritan, speaks more clearly and unequivocally with the voice
of his literary age than does Milton.
This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in the “Coy Mistress.” The
theme is one of the great traditional commonplaces of European literature.
It is the theme of “O mistress mine,” of “Gather ye rosebuds,” of “Go,
lovely rose”;13 it is in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense levity
of Catullus.14 Where the wit of Marvell renews the theme is in the variety
and order of the images. In the first of the three paragraphs Marvell plays
with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to astonishment.
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
. . . I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
a n d r e w m a r v e l l
1 4 9
Till the conversion of the Jews;
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow. . . .
We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each
magnifying the original fancy. When this process has been carried to the
end and summed up, the poem turns suddenly with that surprise which
has been one of the most important means of poetic e¤ect since Homer:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.15
A whole civilization resides in these lines:
Pallida Mors aequa pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
Regumque turris. . . .
Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume,
Labuntur anni. . . .
Post equitem sedet atra Cura.16
And not only Horace, but Catullus himself:
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.17
The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus’s Latin;
but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive and penetrates
greater depths than any of those quoted from Horace.
A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have
closed on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of Marvell’s poem
have something like a syllogistic relation to each other. After a close ap-
proach to the mood of Donne,
then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity . . .
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace,
the conclusion,
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit; but it may not be evi-
dent that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of great
imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the
imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the successive images
(“my vegetable love,” “till the conversion of the Jews”), but this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cowley or Cleveland, for its own sake.18 It
is structural decoration of a serious idea. In this it is superior to the fancy
of “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” or the lighter and less successful poems of
Keats.19 In fact, this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the serious-
ness is intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to
identify. It is found in
Le squelette était invisible
Au temps heureux de l’art païen!20
of Gautier, and in the dandyisme of Baudelaire and Laforgue. It is in the
poem of Catullus which has been quoted, and in the variation by Ben
Jonson:
Cannot we deceive the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
’Tis no sin love’s fruits to steal,
But that sweet sin to reveal,
To be taken, to be seen,
These have sins accounted been.21
It is in Propertius and Ovid.22 It is a quality of a sophisticated literature;
a quality which expands in English literature just at the moment before
the English mind altered; it is not a quality which we should expect Puritan-
ism to encourage. When we come to Gray and Collins, the sophistication
remains only in the language, and has disappeared from the feeling.23
Gray and Collins were masters, but they had lost that hold on human val-
ues, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achieve-
ment of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This wisdom, cynical perhaps
a n d r e w m a r v e l l
1 5 1
but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying clairvoyance), leads toward, and
is only completed by, the religious comprehension; it leads to the point
of the Ainsi tout leur a craqué dans la main of Bouvard and Pécuchet.24
The di¤erence between imagination and fancy, in view of this poetry
of wit, is a very narrow one.25 Obviously, an image which is immediately
and unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy. In the poem “Upon Apple-
ton House,” Marvell falls in with one of these undesirable images, describ-
ing the attitude of the house toward its master:
Yet thus the laden house does sweat,
And scarce endures the master great;
But, where he comes, the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical;
which, whatever its intention, is more absurd than it was intended to be.
Marvell also falls into the even commoner error of images which are over-
developed or distracting; which support nothing but their own misshapen
bodies:
And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.26
Of this sort of image a choice collection may be found in Johnson’s “Life
of Cowley.”27 But the images in the “Coy Mistress” are not only witty, but
satisfy the elucidation of Imagination given by Coleridge:
This power . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of
opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with di¤erence;
of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the
individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and
freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state
of emotion with more than usual order; judgement ever awake
and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling pro-
found or vehement . . .28
Coleridge’s statement applies also to the following verses, which are selected
because of their similarity, and because they illustrate the marked caesura
which Marvell often introduces in a short line:
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
The tawny mowers enter next,
Who seem like Israelites to be
Walking on foot through a green sea.
And now the meadows fresher dyed,
Whose grass, with moister colour dashed,
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.30
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.31
Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.32
The whole poem, from which the last of these quotations is drawn (“The
Nymph and the Fawn”), is built upon a very slight foundation, and we can
imagine what some of our modern practitioners of slight themes would
have made of it. But we need not descend to an invidious contemporaneity
to point the di¤erence. Here are six lines from “The Nymph and the Fawn”:
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness;
And all the spring-time of the year
It only lovèd to be there.33
And here are five lines from “The Nymph’s Song to Hylas” in the Life and
Death of Jason, by William Morris:
I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.34
So far the resemblance is more striking than the di¤erence, although we
might just notice the vagueness of allusion in the last line to some indefinite
a n d r e w m a r v e l l
1 5 3
person, form, or phantom, compared with the more explicit reference of
emotion to object which we should expect from Marvell. But in the latter
part of the poem Morris divaricates widely:
Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place;
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea.35
Here the resemblance, if there is any, is to the latter part of “The Coy
Mistress.” As for the di¤erence, it could not be more pronounced. The
e¤ect of Morris’s charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the feel-
ing and the vagueness of its object; the e¤ect of Marvell’s upon its bright,
hard precision. And this precision is not due to the fact that Marvell is
concerned with cruder or simpler or more carnal emotions. The emotion
of Morris is not more refined or more spiritual; it is merely more vague;
if anyone doubts whether the more refined or spiritual emotion can be
precise, he should study the treatment of the varieties of discarnate emo-
tion in the Paradiso. A curious result of the comparison of Morris’s poem
with Marvell’s is that the former, though it appears to be more serious, is
found to be the slighter; and Marvell’s “Nymph and Fawn,” appearing
more slight, is the more serious.
So weeps the wounded balsam; so
The holy frankincense doth flow;
The brotherless Heliades
Melt in such amber tears as these.36
These verses have the suggestiveness of true poetry; and the verses of
Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest
nothing; and we are inclined to infer that the suggestiveness is the aura
around a bright clear centre, that you cannot have the aura alone. The day-
dreamy feeling of Morris is essentially a slight thing; Marvell takes a slight
a¤air, the feeling of a girl for her pet, and gives it a connexion with that
inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which surrounds all our exact
and practical passions and mingles with them. Again, Marvel does this
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
in a poem which, because of its formal pastoral machinery, may appear a
trifling object:
c l o r i n d a : Near this, a fountain’s liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.
d a m o n : Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
Or slake its drought?37
where we find that a metaphor has suddenly rapt us to the image of spiri-
tual purgation. There is here the element of surprise, as when Villon says: Necessité faict gens mesprendre
Et faim sailler le loup des boys,38
the surprise which Poe considered of the highest importance, and also
the restraint and quietness of tone which make the surprise possible.39
And in the verses of Marvell which have been quoted there is the making
the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge attributed
to good poetry.
The e¤ort to construct a dream-world, which alters English poetry so
greatly in the nineteenth century, a dream-world utterly di¤erent from
the visionary realities of the Vita Nuova or of the poetry of Dante’s contemporaries, is a problem of which various explanations may no doubt be
found; in any case, the result makes a poet of the nineteenth century, of
the same size as Marvell, a more trivial and less serious figure. Marvell is
no greater personality than William Morris, but he had something much
more solid behind him: he had the vast and penetrating influence of Ben
Jonson. Jonson never wrote anything so pure as Marvell’s “Horation Ode”;
but this ode has that same quality of wit which was di¤used over the whole
Elizabethan product and concentrated in the work of Jonson. And, as was
said before, this wit which pervades the poetry of Marvell is more Latin,
more refined, than anything that succeeded it. The great danger, as well
as the great interest and excitement, of English prose and verse, compared
with French, is that it permits and justifies an exaggeration of particular
qualities to the exclusion of others. Dryden was great in wit, as Milton in
magniloquence; but the former, by isolating this quality and making it by
itself into great poetry, and the latter, by coming to dispense with it alto-
gether, may perhaps have injured the language. In Dryden wit becomes
a n d r e w m a r v e l l
1 5 5
almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality; becomes pure
fun, which French wit almost never is.
The midwife placed her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing: Be thou dull.
A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed,
Of the true old enthusiastic breed.40
This is audacious and splendid; it belongs to satire, besides which Marvell’s
“Satires” are random babbling; but it is perhaps as exaggerated as:
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.41
How oddly the sharp Dantesque phrase “whence Gaza mourns” springs
out from the brilliant but ridiculous contortions of Milton’s sentence!
Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reservèd and austere,
(As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot)
Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of Time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mold;
The Pict
no shelter now shall find
Within his parti-coloured mind,
But, from this valour sad,
Shrink underneath the plaid.42
There is here an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones, which, while
it cannot raise Marvell to the level of Dryden or Milton, extorts an approval
which these poets do not receive from us, and bestows a pleasure at least
di¤erent in kind from any they can often give. It is what makes Marvell,
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
in the best sense, a classic: classic in a sense in which Gray and Collins
are not; for the latter, with all their accredited purity, are comparatively
poor in shades of feeling to contrast and unite.
We are baºed in the attempt to translate the quality indicated by the
dim and antiquated term wit into the equally unsatisfactory nomenclature
of our own time. Even Cowley is only able to define it by negatives:
Comely in thousand shapes appears;
Yonder we saw it plain; and here ’tis now,
Like spirits in a place, we know not how.43
It has passed out of our critical coinage altogether, and no new term has
been struck to replace it; the quality seldom exists, and is never recognized.
In a true piece of Wit all things must be
Yet all things there agree;
As in the Ark, join’d without force or strife,
All creatures dwelt, all creatures that had life.
Or as the primitive forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which, without discord or confusion, lie
In that strange mirror of the Deity.44
So far Cowley has spoken well. But if we are to attempt even no more than
Cowley, we, placed in a retrospective attitude, must risk much more anx-
ious generalizations. With our eye still on Marvell, we can say that wit is
not erudition; it is sometimes stifled by erudition, as in much of Milton.
It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be con-
fused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition
because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience;
and it is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection
and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit
in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which
are possible, which we find as clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvell.
Such a general statement may seem to take us a long way from “The