Garden Party

Garden Party: Finding Self in Marvell’s Garden

Marvell is known for being notoriously opaque and loath to take obvious sides in his writing. As an author in a time of enormous political and social upheaval in England, “Marvell chose to keep his cards close to his chest in the ideologically volatile atmosphere of the civil war and Restoration” (1654). But beyond this presumed opacity, in “The Garden,” Marvell takes at least one definite stance: the positive valuation of the individual self and its capacity to identify and articulate truth—even if that articulation veers past language and into raw epicurean experience.

“The Garden” itself fits into a tradition of pastoral poetry with allusions to Eden and the biblical fall as well as to the historical context of many political actors of the period to retreat to country estates. Marvell’s poem serves as an argument for retreating into nature during the restoration, many former members of the republic found themselves, like their royalist counter parts before them, retreating from public life and withdrawing into the solitude of removed pastoral spaces. Marvell instrumentalizes these traditions and creates an argument for independence and withdrawal into the self as a means of attaining linguistic and conceptual truth. To understand how or why Marvell is making this argument hinges on an understanding of the historical context, one in which the nature of language and truth had been severely upended due to the political strife and upheaval of the period. The struggle over public authority that defined the revolution was not only recorded in words—the sheer volume and variety of which stunned the nation—but was also conceptualized as a struggle about words, a struggle over the conditions and contexts of their production as well as over the libelous, blasphemous, or fantastical ‘opinions’ expressed by them.  

In “The Garden,” Marvell portrays his retreat into nature as a reaction to the bastardization of language and ideas that he saw occurring in public discourse.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here

And Innocence, thy sister dear!

Mistaken long, I sought you then

In busy companies of men;

Your sacred plants will grow.

Society is all but rude,

To this delicious solitude.

                                              (9-16.1663)

For Marvell, the Garden offers repose from the contested and warped interpretations of the public. Solitude offers an opportunity to create speech that has value independent of societal recognition or confirmation. The experience of nature in solitude yields an experience that is pure and individual. As Barnaby notes, “‘The Garden’ records one speaker’s attempt to escape from a society made ‘rude’ by its inhabitants’ ceaseless competition for preeminence” (Barnaby 339). Turning inward for Marvell’s speaker not only allows him access to a sacred or untouched space of expression, but creates a space in which “innocence” has been regained, suggesting the moral depravity of the “busy companies of men.” Rather in the silence of nature, no innocence can be breached, in complete solitude there are no temptations and no obfuscations of truth. In his state of isolation Marvell’s speaker can finally identify the “sacred plants” that he had sought but mistaken in the moral and rhetorical chaos of the “busy companies of men.” Liberated from the influence of others, without the potential influence of dialogue or public discourse to sway his perceptions of the world and shade his own experience, Marvell's speaker finds himself not only innocent, but insulated from sin. In his garden the fall is but a light trip into the grass.

What wondrous life in this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine, and curious peach,

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

     (33-40.1664)

“Insnared with flowers” the speaker is not tempted by the snake or caught up in rhetorical machinations and malignant dialogues, instead he’s merely caught up in flowers. In this stanza nature yields itself to our speaker, granting him unadulterated and sensual experiences of taste and touch. The fruits of the garden want to yield themselves, they want to reveal their taste and feeling, and share with our speaker their knowledge as they into his “hands themselves do reach.” The fruits, space, and the solitude of the garden allow our speaker to reach within himself and act to help define construct a pure version of the self, undisturbed by cultural discourse or base desire. In the absence of the other, where man “there walked without a mate,” knowledge is no longer sinful, but offers itself up freely, embodying the speaker in sensuous experience.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness:

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas,

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

                                        (41-8.1664)

While the garden provides sensual pleasure for our speaker it also offers the mind an opportunity to reflect and reach for its creative potential. Here, Marvell’s speak seems to be withdrawing into the self, acknowledging the artificiality of linguistic representation and retreating completely into a transcendent sense of self hood in which all artifice is “annihilated” and the mind is free to create its own transcendent world. Barnaby argues that this moment marks a rejection of “neoclassical discourse” and rhetoric.

Beyond all contact with what is outside itself, the speaker’s purified mind reclaims something like a prelapsarian condition, defined here as freedom from the contaminating demands of public life. And in the very image of his speaker’s antisocial cognitive privacy – privacy in which, as for the unfallen Adam, thoughts have some mystical-ontological relation to the realities they represent – Marvell thus appears at once to rewrite the neoclassical figure of the garden as the site of a merely associational, inferential cognitive experience and to reject the mid-century’s championing of such experience as the enabling condition of a new mode of cultural authority.  (Barnaby 346)

As Barnaby points out, Marvell’s rejection of the neoclassical paradigm is especially apparent if we compared him to someone like John Donne, who’s poem focus on a transcendent platonic love that culminates ultimately in a celebration of comingling, for Marvell, ecstasy is found in the inward turn, in “separating himself from any shared cognitive or communicative space” (346). With the garden, Marvell is refocusing on the self and the construction of the self as a transcendent individual, or as C.B. Macpherson would call, a possessive individual. “Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them… The human essence is freedom from the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession” (Hayles; Macpherson 3). Self, as it emerges in Marvell’s garden, results form a recalculation of platonic assumptions about discourse, rhetoric, and the “nature” itself. Moving away from an early modern understanding of the self and towards a more Cartesian notion of the division between body and soul, and an understanding of the individual body and an object of the soul. 

Works Cited

Barnaby, Andrew. "The Politics of Garden Spaces: Andrew Marvell and the Anxieties of Public Speech." 97.3 (2000): 331-61. Web. 26 May 2017.

Baswell, Christopher, David Damrosch, Kevin J. H. Dettmar, and Anne Howland Schotter. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. New York, NY: Longman, 2010. Print.

Hayles, Nancy Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2010. Print.

Macpherson, Crawford Brough. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism Hobbes to Locke. Don Mills (Ont.): Oxford UP, 2011. Print.