all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good
(XII.470 – 1).
The poem concludes with the postlapsarian couple confident in their own strength as they leave Paradise, aware that though the world they are entering will be harsher than the endlessly bountiful Eden, by looking beyond their immediate physical setting they can find new significances and value in it. Adam and Eve are not constrained by their fate: they possess the power to free themselves from the cruel reality of their environment, in a sense to overcome fate. Their freedom to do so, although God-given, is a condition of the liberty they have awarded themselves through the Fall. Unlike Satan, who claims that ‘the mind is its own place’ but who also recognises that ‘which way I turn am Hell / Myself am Hell’, the postlapsarian Adam and Eve do have the means to exist at one highly internalised level independent of all outward forces.
The notion that though the world is often a harsh, illogical and unforgiving place, in some places human beings possess a freedom to exist outside it is found throughout Marvell’s poetry. An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland demonstrates the possibility of men assuming authority that raises them to the status of gods. Cromwell, more potent than the lovers of ‘The Definition’, proves that fate’s ‘decrees of steel’ are in fact susceptible to humanity’s strongest exponents:
Though justice against fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain:
But those do hold or break
As men are strong or weak.
(37 – 40)
The world of the Horatian Ode is one where any redemptive or consolatory force in religion appears conspicuously absent. The extent of Cromwell’s achievements and the fundamental changes to society which have taken place since his assumption of power have called into question the most elemental tenets of human organisation; man has taken his fate into his own ‘bloody hands’ (56). The last part of the poem, with its emphasis on future triumphs based on Cromwell’s apparent successes in Ireland, underlines this sense of uncertainty. Even Charles, ‘the royal actor born’, did not call ‘the gods’ to ‘vindicate his helpless right’ (61 – 2), that last word carrying an implicit sense of its own just authority: it was right because it happened. The poem shows the conclusion of man being master of his own fate, yet unlike the contended reassurance found for the two lovers in ‘The Definition’, who by a complex astronomical and intellectual leap find that their separation is an aspect of the perfection of their love, here the human assumption of quasi-divine authority is more unsettling. Moral judgement is worthless against Cromwell, who in his virtual omnipotence makes this redundant:
‘Tis madness to resist or blame
The force of angry heaven’s flame
(25 – 6)
Throughout, Marvell famously refuses to praise Cromwell unequivocally, or to castigate the dead king, instead presenting an ambivalent response to the final events of the Civil War. Although it is a poem with a clear focus on the leaders and events which were forming England, it is much more personal than, for example, ‘The First Anniversary’, which has a clear sense of its position as ‘public’ literature. Given this, it might perhaps seem strange that the Horatian Ode presents a world where retreating into the self appears virtually impossible. Nature, the supreme goddess in the final fragmentary cantos of the Faerie Queene and a frequent force of authority in much Renaissance literature, has lost her power and been brutally disrupted by Cromwell’s arrival
like the three-forked lightning, first
Breaking the clouds where it was nursed,
(13 – 4).
In the unstable world of the Ode, palaces and temples are burnt and an individual’s industrious valour can ‘ruin the great work of time’ (34). The poem ends on a note of uncertainty, the speaker retreating from his recognition of Cromwell’s achievements to stress that these must be sustained if the Republic is to survive. Although man has now managed to defeat fate and thereby exhibit the freedom he possesses to change his situation, this does not bring the contented reassurance that might be hoped for.
‘To His Coy Mistress’ similarly presents man’s ability to take his fate into his own hands, though here the impetus is a carpe diem theme where the speaker stresses to his beloved the unstoppable march of time and the consequent loss of beauty that results from it. The freedom to defeat time, exhibited with shows of brutality and violence in the Horatian Ode, is here exhibited in terms of love. Just as Cromwell marked his public appearance with impressive displays of destructive flurry, here the speaker exhorts his lover to
tear our pleasures with rought strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
(43 – 4)
The lovers find a defence against the ravages of time: they can assert their own freedom over what seems invincible. Seeing time in this way is a consequence of the Fall, since it is only after disobeying God that time, in the sense of mortality, develops this significance. Tasting the fruit in Paradise Lost causes Adam and Eve to see time in terms of past, present and future, breaking the fluid continuity of Eden. That they spend their final moments ‘ling’ring’ in Paradise (XII.638) demonstrates their new awareness of time: the Fall has brought previously unexperiences emotions of regret and anxiety. The final triumphant message of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is that even though men cannot stop time, by living according to time’s rules they can develop new significances for time that will allow them to cherish each physical moment of themselves more than they otherwise would. Only Cromwell, in ‘A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector’ is compared with Gibeon, who was given the power to ‘make the sun / Stand still’. Milton equally wrote Paradise Lost with an understanding of the irreversibility of the events he described: Adam and Eve were always destined to fall, at least in the scheme of the epic. They are therefore intrinsically constrained by time, but it is a result of their capacity to see the benefits of their fallenness that their postlapsarian state is one that looks forward to the future, both to the immediate life that awaits them outside Paradise and the image of the Son’s final triumphing over Satan. They use their new understanding of time, one engendered by the Fall, to comprehend better a scheme of linear continuity, something that Raphael had hinted might be possible in Book VIII but which they had not been in the garden long enough to see realised.
The experience of the Fall, rather than tasting the apple itself, connotes an enhancement of Adam and Eve’s knowledge. Eating the fruit has the immediate effect of turning them to lust and awakening them to a new form of sexuality, and it causes them suddenly to feel shame as parts of their body become embarrassing. But it is really only the intervention of Michael and the lessons he gives Adam from the top of the highest hill in Eden that bring about an enrichment of knowledge. The loss of ‘that happy seat’ is then an educating experience. The notion that the loss of certain things of great importance can prove to be amongst the most significant human experiences is found equally in Marvell. ‘The Garden’ can be read as a call for a retreat to a passive innocence and a subjection to the motions of an animated botanic life:
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarene, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach
(35 – 38).
There is a kind of delighted lethargy as the speaker immerses himself in an abundant, Edenic profusion of food, apparently retreating so far into a prelapsarian state that he loses control, ‘stumbling on melons’. Yet even here knowledge is derived from an experience of loss. Ridding himself of ‘busy companies of men’, he loses his social lifestyle and learns instead the value of ‘delicious solitude’. Intellectually, he discovers the destructive powers of the mind:
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
(47 – 8)
Jonathan Crewe argued that ‘in the wake of political monarchy the only masculine absolutism may well be the displaced, solitary absolutism of the imaginary garden state’ (57). This theory does not take into account the extent to which a return to Eden constitutes a further subjection of one’s own power from that experienced on earth; it equally ignores the loss of knowledge that such a return necessarily requires. Postlapsarian Adam and Eve have a new freedom to experience life for themselves, to conduct themselves with far greater liberty than that afforded them in Paradise. Although of course life will not be without its rules of worship and behaviour, Providence is now their guide rather than their master.
Bibliography
‘The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure’, Jonathan Crewe, 1994
‘The Poet’s Time’, Warren L. Chernaik, 1983
‘Marvell’s Horatian Ode and the Politics of Genre’, David Norbrook, 1990
‘Paradise Lost and the Multiplicity of Time’, Amy Boesky, 2001