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'Disorderly Order' In The Garden Literature Of Browne, Marvell, And Milton

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'Disorderly Order' In The Garden Literature Of Browne, Marvell, And Milton

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Content This dluartatlon has b tm mlcrofUmad wearily aa racairad 6 8 -1 0 ,2 2 6 DEMARAY, Hannah D isin g er, 1935- "DISORDERLY ORDER” IN THE GARDEN LITERATURE OF BROWNE, MARVELL, AND MILTON. U n iversity o f Southern C aliforn ia, Fh.Da , 1968 Language and L iteratu re, m odern U niversity M icrofilms, Inc., Ann A rbor, M ichigan C opyright (c) by HANNAH DISINGER DEMARAY 1968 "DISORDERLY ORDER" IN THE GARDEN LITERATURE OP BROWNE, MARVELL, AND MILTON by Hannah Disinger Demaray A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) January 1968 UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH ERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK L 0 8 ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by _______ Haxmah..D.ifiAng.e.r..I?.eina.r.ay............. under the direction of hfix....Dissertation Com m ittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R OF P H IL O S O P H Y <3. Dean Date... J.an uar.y.,.. .1 .9 .6 .8 . DISSERTATION COMMITTEE . Chairman TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ............................................ 1 Chapter I. CONTRASTS IN THE OLD ORDER: THE GARDENS OF THOMAS BROWNE AND ANDREW MARVELL ............... 12 II. MARVELL'S DISORDERED GARDEN OF THE MIND .... 28 III. "DISORDERLY ORDER" IN JOHN MILTON'S EDEN .... 79 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................ 132 INTRODUCTION "There is no excellent beauty," wrote Francis Bacon, « ■ i "that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."1 With extraordinary variety the works of English poets of the j ! i seventeenth century give evidence of the perceptiveness of j i ^' ' Bacon's aesthetic principle. From the "sweet disorder in j ithe dress"3 of Robert Herrick's wildly civil lady, to the j I ^ "Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular"-3 movement of the , {crystalline spheres circling the earth in John Milton's ! ! ' I {Paradise Lost, poets of the period delighted in the mild i jirregularities of flowers, gardens, dew drops, and other ob- jects of nature and art, all analogously giving insight into Ithe spiritual proportions of the human soul. The mild dis- j I j orders provided charming pleasures within an orderly uni- | verse ordained by God. And whether that universe was poeti-j cally depicted as a hierarchical Chain of Being created and ! sustained by the Deity, or as a circular movement of life ! \ : l"Of Beauty," The Essays (New York, 1942), p. 138. 2ppetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. F. W. Moorman (Oxford^ 1915), p. 28. 3John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), p. 317, Bk. V, 1. 623. and matter about the Creator, one finds in many poetic works! j | hints or open suggestions of irregularity. | According to Francis Bacon, a rigid adherence to rules or laws governing art and the universe, an excessively logi-j cal or "geometrical" habit of mind, can never adequately i reflect the subtle variety thought to prevail in God's crea-j i J tion. In discussing two portrait painters, Bacon writes, the one, would make a personage by geometrical propor- i tions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers | faces, to make one excellent. Such personages, I think, 1 would please nobody, but the painter that made them. Not j j but I think a painter may make a better face than ever i was? but he must doe it by a kind of felicity (as a musi cian that maketh an excellent air in music), and not by a rule.4 ! ! ! The "strangeness in the proportion" of created beings makes | I i the true artist, in the practice of his discipline, felici- ! i tous and free of the doctrinaire. j In comparing Bacon's aesthetic views to those of recent! I I ■critics of seventeenth-century literature and culture, one | I 1 i becomes aware of the contemporary tendency to regard much i ! seventeenth-century poetry as a reflection of a relatively j rigid and geometrical hierarchical order. "Coming to the ! world picture itself," writes E. M. W. Tillyard of concep- i tions of the universe held in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, "one can say dogmatically that it was still solidly theocentric, and that it was a simplified version of a much 4"0f Beauty," p. 139. more complicated medieval picture."5 Tillyard suggests thatj there was posited "an ordered universe arranged in a fixed : j system of hierarchies but modified by man's sin and the hope! I I of his redemption" (pp. 5-6). "One is tempted to call the t i medieval habit of life mathematical," he continues, "or to I {compare it with a gigantic game where everything is included! and every act is conducted under the most complicated of rules" (pp. 6-7). He adds that "Protestantism was largely a| {selection and a simplification of what was there all the j j jtime" (p. 7) . I I In The Great Chain of Being, Arthur O. Lovejoy argues j j . i that the hierarchical view of the universe was based upon ! "the principle of unilinear gradation" which medieval com- j mentators believed was formulated in the works of Plato and j I Aristotle. Lovejoy then defines this J conception of the plan and structure of the world which, j | through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth | century . . . most educated men, were to accept without | ; question— the conception of the universe as a "Great Chainj ; of Being," composed of an immense, or— by the strict but j seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of con- tinuity--of an infinite, number of links ranging in hier- ; archical order from the meagerest kind of existence, which barely escape non-existence, through "every possible" grade up to the ens perfectissimum— or, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of crea ture, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite— every one of them differing from that immediately above and immediately below it by the "least possible" degree of difference.® 5The Elizabethan World Picture (New York, 1951), p. 4. 6The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York, I960), p. 59. : Man was a microcosm, a little world, composed of four humours corresponding to the four elements of the larger i i macrocosm, the universe. A unique creature located midway ! on the Chain of Being between the spiritual and material, and reflecting both in his make-up, man participated to a degree in the essence of those beings below and above him onj ! I the chain: of material elements, plants and flowers, ani- | i | mals, and even angels. By playing upon the correspondences i between man and other beings, the poets of the seventeenth icentury, as has been suggested in many contemporary studies,; 1 i could deftly focus their attention upon man. But in dis- I i . j !cussing the principle of order in unilinear gradation and i i j {correspondence, commentators have tended to minimize and j {sometimes have ignored the considerable degree of disorder 1 I {within the system. [ j I i This insensitivity to subtle variation possibly is the i j I result of the twentieth-century habit of viewing the seven-{ teenth century as a period of conflict between two "world j pictures": that of a universe of hierarchy and correspond-' ence postulated upon traditional theology and philosophy; and that of a radically disordered universe lacking in cor respondence and existing in vast and perhaps infinite spaced a universe modeled in accord with certain precepts of the "new" scientific philosophies of Copernicus, Galileo, Kep ler, and others. The old world picture, with its emphasis iupon order, is elaborated in the first chapters of Marjorie! Hope Nicolson's. The Breaking1 of the Circle (Evanston, 111., ;1950), Theodore Spencer's Shakespeare and the Nature of Man j (New York, 1942), and E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's His-! ! ! I tory Plays (London, 1950). Further commentary on the tradi-| tional view is to be found in Tillyard's The Elizabethan j World Picture (New York, 1951) and J. B. Bamborough's The | I ' . : Little World of Man (Oxford, 1952). The conflict in the iseventeenth century between the old philosophy and the new j jis examined in Richard Foster Jones' Ancients and Moderns | | (St. Louis, 1936), R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1949), Charles Coffin's John Donne and the New PhiH i 1 losophy (New York, 1937), and Douglas Bush's Science and j English Poetry (Oxford, 1967). Ernest Lee Tuveson has i I j traced early seventeenth-century theories on the possible evolution of man and the universe in Millenium and Utopia i i i (Berkeley, 1949). The need to define the differences be- j tween the old philosophy and the new, however, has hardened ! the lines of contrast to the point where these commentators j tend to emphasize the rigidity of the hierarchical system iri opposition to the radical qualities of change and disorder found in the "new" scientific theories. "A world of time and change— " writes Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being "— this, at least, our history has shown— is a world which can neither be deduced from nor reconciled with the ipostulate that existence is the expression and consequence |of a system of 'eternal' and 'necessary' truths inherent in jthe very logic of being" (p. 329). In translating the conflict of philosophies into aes- thetic terms, Marjorie Hope Nicolson has proposed that two I : Opposing aesthetic views dominated the seventeenth century: ! Jan aesthetics of regularity and order; and an aesthetics of i ! ' : the limitless universe of the new philosophers— an aesthet ics of the infinite. As philosophers were evolving a metaphysics of space, ! poets were building another aesthetics and an ethics to i take the place of that symbolized by the closed circle. j The new philosophy that had called all in doubt now gave back to man what should be his by nature— what had been | Thomas Traherne's even in infancy. It released him from ! | the limits of a finite world and universe, gave mind and ! j spirit space to expand, afforded room to those thoughts | that wander through eternity. Pondering upon vastness, J | the soul of man became vast. Its essence was Capacitie. j Man was discovering a new aesthetics— the "Aesthetics of , | the I n f i n i t e . ! | I This present study is an attempt to concentrate atten tion upon an aesthetics based neither upon complete order | i nor upon infinite expansiveness. This "Aesthetics of Dis- i jarray," as I shall call it, can be defined as the introduc- J Ition of varying degrees of irregularity into certain liter- j i ary works, but always within the orderly framework of the all-encompassing Chain of Being discussed by Arthur 0. Love-r joy. While this "Aesthetics of Disarray," like the Aesthet ics of Order and Infinity, could be examined with reference j to a massive body of theological, philosophical, and scien tific literature concerned with "nature" and its laws, I 7The Breaking of the Circle, p. 178. have centered attention, in the limited space available, i : i upon aesthetic attitudes revealed in the poetic works them- j selves. Readers should be aware, however, that varying | views of nature developed, not only from the discoveries of ithe new philosophy, but from Christian conceptions of naturej I | las a dependent and abundant creation, and from pagan Stoicalj 1 | conceptions of nature as self-sufficient and temperate, one j of the most important moral norms for man.& j While certain writers such as Thomas Browne do disclos^ ! ! in their writings a proclivity for mathematical hierarchy ! , land order, any general review of seventeenth-century literaJ ture as a whole should convince readers of the unique and i I individualized ways in which writers of the period use dis- j I order within a hierarchical frame. In the poetry of, among j i others, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Richard j i Lovelace, the pervasiveness of a highly stylized "Aesthetics; I i lof Disarray" became so apparent that it was necessary care- j |fully to restrict the discussion. This study, then, begins | I I at the Beginning with an examination of the movement from almost complete order toward increasing disorder, within a hierarchical system, in the Edens or gardens of Thomas Browne, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. The examination reveals little of the black-and-white opposition between j 8See Edward Tayler, "Classical Backgrounds," Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York and London^ 1964) , I " |pp. 48 ff. rigid geometrical order and wild disorder posited by Arthur O. Lovejoy: s The God of the seventeenth century, like its gardeners, j always geometrized; the God of Romanticism was one in j whose universe things grew wild without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes. The preference for irregularity, the yearning for echappees I into misty distances— these, which were eventually to in vade the intellectual life of Europe at all points, made their first modern appearance on a grand scale early in | the eighteenth century in the form of the new fashions in the pleasure gardens. . . .® [Lovejoy's strong assertions mirror the characteristic divi- ! - i [ I |sion of gardens, like poetry, into classifications sugges- i I ! itive of Miss Nicolson's opposed Aesthetics of Order and the i i | Infinite. With the possible exception of the garden of j Thomas Browne, however, and that only to a degree, the j j igardens in the literature of the seventeenth century cannot be understood in such categorical terms of strict order. Marvell and Milton are too centrally concerned with mild and often unpredictable disarray within a formal pattern. As | artists they have that felicity so desired by Francis Bacon.j j The strange proportions discovered in garden literature^ of the seventeenth century are individual to each work. Their delineations are subtle, but with care they can be noted and enjoyed, but they cannot with exactness be ideo logically defined, divided into "parts," or classified with-i out doing violence to their very uniqueness. This study thus proceeds from Bacon's astute, though somewhat mysteri- j 9The Great Chain of Being, p. 16. jous and admittedly ill-defined, observation that superior ; j art is not subject to mental partitioning. In the following study no ideological world pictures will be proposed, no | i hierarchical theories advanced. It should be obvious that jail of the garden writings examined are generally patterned land ordered by the authors' acceptance of assumptions, jreflected in the works, concerning a Chain of Being. But it ! Will be my aim to counteract the tendency toward over- j systematization and simply to reveal in each literary garden those irregular proportions within an orderly pattern that j i I tend to make each garden unique. | i This study begins with a cursory analysis of general j I orderliness in the literary gardens of Thomas Browne, that most mathematical and patterned of prominent, seventeenth- Icentury garden writers. A close analysis reveals irregular- I jities in the poetic gardens of Andrew Marvell, and a some what disturbing disorder is revealed in "On a Drop of Dew," ! ' . j a poem often cited by certain commentators as showing or- j iderly perfection. j In the following section the study broadens to include insights into correspondences, found in the poetry of Andrew Marvell, between the disordered gardens of the exterior ! world and the disordered mind of man's interior world. With increasing subtlety within the poetry Marvell suggests man'si ! ! possible alienation from nature and gardens. In an attempt ; | i to reveal at least some of the poetic complexities, a number i 1 of Renaissance garden books from the Huntington Library col-| lection are used for the first time to elaborate a new and ; extended reading of "The Garden." 1 Finally, a disorderly Garden of Eden in John Milton's i Paradise Lost is directly encountered and critically exam- i ined. Though literary works cited as "sources" for or i ; 1 Influences upon Milton's garden have been studied exhaus tively, this study takes a novel approach by relating the j sensuous disorder in Milton's Eden to visual parallels in | j Italian paintings the poet could have been expected to have j seen in Italy, and particularly while staying with the poet j Manso in Naples. These comments should also provide some I awareness of the considerable visual imagination of Milton, ithe power that T. S. Eliot claimed was lacking in the jpoet.10 In the concluding section disorders in Milton's ! Eden are carefully examined in the light of the "Aesthetics I j ' I of Disarray." j Speaking of the English Renaissance, Arthur O. Lovejoy ! : i writes, "Landscape-gardening, . . . seems a topic fairly ! remote from philosophy, yet at one point, at least, the his-) tory of landscape gardening becomes a part of a truly philo-j I sophical history of modern thought" (Chain, p. 15). So too garden literature remains a revealing index to the sensibil-j ity and thought of the seventeenth century. But on one ] ' i i i i l°Milton (London, 1947), p. 11. j r in ! ■ I point many poets of the period certainly would have disa- jgreed with Lovejoy. The God of the seventeenth century in the manner of some gardeners did not "always" geometrize. | In fact, the usual statements about the predominant geomet- I rical quality of seventeenth-century gardens and garden poetry are simply false. Irregular designs were coming intd ' I i ascendancy in the seventeenth century; and these designs | ' j anticipated the taste for the irregular and the picturesque ! |in the eighteenth century. Like Bacon's true artist, the ] Supreme Creator as depicted in the works studied here ap pears to have introduced into His orderly creation that j strangeness of proportion perhaps suggestive of an Infinite | jFelicity. CHAPTER I CONTRASTS IN THE OLD ORDER: THE GARDENS OF THOMAS BROWNE AND ANDREW MARVELL One of the most erudite as well as stylistically mas terful works on the ordered garden is Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus.^ The seventeenth-century physician reflects the analogical thinking that was characteristic of the Renaissance in his tendency to find analogies between the geometrical designs in nature and an abstract, divine | order. However, Browne's interests are at once both so {particular and so abstract that his work is outside the jstream of most seventeenth-century garden literature; that is, he does not give specific, practical plans for the idesign and execution of a garden, though it seems likely that he would favor a most elaborately formal plan. Browne's immersion in his studies has produced a compendium of esoterica on garden lore which, combined with his obser vation of the design apparent in the creation of plants and animals, leads Browne to conclude that "nature Geometrizeth J - The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, edited by G. L. Keynes, 6 vol. (London, 1928-31). All quotations are from this edition. 12 I I and observeth order in all things" (p. 222) . Though Pytha goras, whose mystical ways Browne admired, and other think- j ers have theorized upon the numerical significance of nature; ; ‘ i ; t jas the "Divine Hierpglyph,"2 it is with unusual intensity that Browne emblematically-* reads into nature a curious, omnipresent, mathematical order. In a study of the seven- jteenth-century writers' use of disorder and disarray, it is j jrevealing as a means of contrast and as a matter of perspec-i i i jtive to analyse briefly Browne's treatise on order as he I I presents it in the framework of a garden. j j Browne's is one of the final assertions of the formal j ! i lorder of the macrocosm: "Studious Observators may discover | more analogies in the orderly book of nature, and cannot ! i escape the Elegancy of her hand in other correspondencies" (p. 226). Although the tone is lofty, Browne's perspective as he surveys human knowledge is that of a calm, judicious | j physician. All things began in order so shall they end, and so shall : they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of H e a v e n .4 (p. 252) 2Cf. M. C. Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1940), p. 54. 3For a definition of the emblem and its use in seven teenth-century literature, see Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (New York, 1966). 4Marjorie Hope Nicolson in The Breaking of the Circle j(Evanston, 1950), pp. 93-94, sees Browne as vascillatrng be-r tween a delight in order and a despair that "it is too late j |to be ambitious.” His despair seems to underly his pleasure 'in the order of nature to a greater extent than noted by j Nicolson. j | Browne/ quite unlike Marvell and others, is not averse to applying art to nature, but for him the result should be a reinforcing of basic geometrized patterns. Speaking of jgardens generally, he writes, i ' | And if delight or ornamentall view invite a comely dis- posure by circular amputations, as it is elegantly per formed in Hawthorns; then will they answer the figures made by the conversion of a Rhombus, which maketh two con-! | centruicall Circles; . . . (p. 238) l Indeed, Browne may well be the first theorist of "cubism" since he goes far beyond the more ordinary designs for the jformal Renaissance garden, in his geometrical metaphysics of nature. I j Though he describes the virtues of various forms— hex- i j tagonals, cylinders, lozenges and, of course, circles— his j I favorite geometrical figures are "quincuncial forms and i i ordinations" (p. 220). The quincunx affords Browne the j greatest pleasure because "therin doth rest the setled rule j of nature" (p. 245). He also praises its symmetry and its | I relation to the mystic number five which was worshipped throughout antiquity (p. 246). And, "Lastly, it is no wonder that this Quincunciall order was first and is still affected as gratefull unto the eye: For all things are seen Quincuncially" (p. 247). To most moderns it would seem that Browne forces his view of order to mathematical absurdity; today few find it possible to read nature as a mathematical !emblem. And only artists have attempted to interpret nature in terms of geometrical forms, but in their aesthetiq usage there is little attempt at a metaphysical rendering ofi i divine truths in nature. | i Browne is too observant to overlook disorder and irreg-j ularity completely. He admits that there are "few General- j i | ities and U Finitas . . . in Nature" (p. 188), but his ini- | tial attempt to deal with any irregularity in orderly nature! is to dismiss such occurrences as "Exceptions" to be ex pected; he like such great students of universals as Aris- i | jtotle and Theophrastus discovered irregularities and re garded them as unimportant (p. 188). Another method Browne j uses for dealing with the less orderly aspects of nature is ! simply, "To omit the ruder Figures of the ostracion, the i ; i triangular or cunny-fish, or the pricks of the Sea Porcu- j i ! pine" (p. 223). Thus, he withholds "discourse on that which! i t is not agreeable unto our order" (p. 225). j I i | At times Browne seems to find it necessary to prove a i prevalent regularity even in such irregularities as the internodial parts of Vegetables [which unlike the "motive parts of animals"], are contrived with more uncer-j tainty; though the joints themselves, in many plants main tain a regular number . . . there may be observed some shadow of Harmony." (p. 227) Occasionally he is fascinated by the assymetrical and the irregular— "why oftimes one side of the leaf is uneguall unto the other," and why there should be such disproportions both in plants and animals. He cautiously concludes "that i i such matters deserve another enquiry" (p. 237). Browne's most extreme means of accounting for the [ " ~ " ' ' 16 iirregularities observed in nature is to impugn the observer j himself. He suggests the possibility of aberrations in the perceiving and thinking powers of such persons, and their "misconceptions" may be the result of intellectual and phantastical lines not rightly disposed but magnified, distorted and ill placed in the Mathemat- icks of some brains, whereby they have irregular apprehen-! sions of things .... (p. 243) jPerhaps Browne does offer a sound medical opinion useful for! the analysis of a disturbed mind, but he does not refute thej evidence for the presence of objectively verifiable irregu- j larity and disorder in nature. ; i Surprisingly little scholarly or critical attention has! been given to Browne, and especially to this rather anti- i : jquarian book, The Garden of Cyrus, which is usually dis- | : missed as an example of an extraordinary prose style expended upon an unfortunately quaint and dated subject.5 jHowever, many of Browne's preoccupations in The Garden of Cyrus, which today seem extraordinary, were as common in his^ day as were the more familiar commonplaces he elaborated in Religio Medici. His microscopic concentration on the mi- nutae of nature and the mathematical absurdities of his i cabalistic interpretations often prevent modern commentators from associating many of his emblematic uses of the circle, ^Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seven teenth Century (Oxford, 1945), pT 337. [ ------------------------ ■ .■ - 17 ! • the quincunx, and the Greek ° with the “metaphysical" images more imaginatively extended by such poets as Marvell, Donne, Vaughan, and Herbert. Perhaps none of these poets shares an awareness of the j emblematic significance of nature with Browne more fully than does Andrew Marvell. Most especially in his mystical i use of the circle in "On a Drop of Dew," Marvell elaborates ; i Plato's figure for "the motion of the indivisible soul ■ i 7 ! . . .."' And Browne's analysis of the soul as having an as-j ; i pect "circular and reciprocal, whereby it beholdeth it self,"8 is nowhere more exquisitely demonstrated than in karvell's poem. Here, Marvell's desire for the ordered neatness and emblematic clarity of Browne's microcosm, with ! I its implied correspondences to the macrocosm seems apparent.! i Yet in his treatment of order in such poems as "On a Drop of j j Dew" and "Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow," Marvell Surpasses in ambiguity and complexity Sir Thomas Browne's jPythagorean "simplicity." Some scholars, particularly Mar- i I jorie Hope Nicolson9 and H. M. Margoliouth,^-0 have used ^Nicolson does note briefly Browne's use of the Greek and the circle. See The Breaking of the Circle, p. 35. ^Browne, The Garden of Cyrus, p. 244. 8The Garden of Cyrus, p. 244. 9The Breaking of the Circle, pp. 68, 69, 77. Mountain; Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca, 1958), pp. 57-60. 10Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, edited by H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford, 1952), p. 219. All quotations are from; jthis edition. » ' """" 18 • i these poems to support the view that Marvell was obsessed by a need for aesthetic and ethical regularity and restraint which found expression in his assertions about circles and other images of order. Such simple interpretations often are appealing and seem workable in dealing with poets like Marvell or William Blake. Both Marvell and Blake take for I their province certain themes which are deceptively simple: innocence, humility, vision, and responsibility. In addi tion, both poets often draw their images from the most j ingenuous sources— gardens, flowers, trees, meadows, a drop | : i of dew, or a grain of sand. However, the fact that each j i employs a semi-private vocabulary and set of symbols has | inspired a host of rather contentious critics to qualify the! | i tendency of other commentators to give simplistic Interpretations. H ! | | Of course, on one level it is possible to see in Mar vell's poetry, as Nicolson does, a happy adherence to the Renaissance taste for order that is expressed most vividly in the image of a circle.I2 In "Upon the Hill and Grove at ; Bill-barow," Marvell writes, Hcf. for critical readings of Marvell's work, Milton Klonsky, "A Guide through the 'Garden,"' Sewanee Review, 58 I (1950), 16-35; Harold Toliver, Maryell's Ironic Vision (New Haven, 1965); and Joseph Summers, "Marvell's 'Nature'," Eng lish Literary History, 20 (1953), 121-135. For Blake, 6TT~ j Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947)? and M. O.j iPercival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny (New York, 1938). i 12jhe Breaking of the Circle, pp. 57-60? Mountain Gloom and Mountain GlorvI p p . 6 8 . 69. and 77. -.. --.1 See how the arched Earth does here Rise in a perfect Hemisphere 1 The stiffest compass could not strike A Line more circular and like; Nor softest pencil draw a Brow So equal as this Hill does bow. It seems as for a Model laid, And that the World by it was made. 1 (Stanza 1). And in commenting on the traditional distaste for irregular ity, Nicolson, on the most obvious level of meaning, is cor rect in perceiving Marvell's dislike for whatever distorts the "circle of perfection," whether in the elongation of a ! dew drop or in . . . Mountains more unjust. Which to abrupter greatness thrust, That do with your hook-shoulder'd height The Earth deform and Heaven fright, For whose excrescence ill design'd, “ Nature must a new Center find, ("Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow," Stanza 2). Nicolson's point is that Marvell praises the humility and restraint of his patron, Lord Fairfax, by suggesting a cor- ; responding virtue in the classical proportions and order to be found in nature (pp. 57-60). She believes the poet's favorite image for such a correspondence is the circle. But J. B. Leishman casts some doubt on such a theory in his sug gestion that this poem and "Upon Appleton House" are "hyper bolic compliments to his friend and patron."13 Aside from the fact that Marvell does use a poetic exaggeration in the images of roundness, order, and humility that might have l^The Art of Marvell's Poetry (London, 1966), p. 246. been regarded as a private joke by Fairfax, further confir mation that the poet's concept of order and disorder is less than traditional becomes apparent on closer reading of such poems as "On a Drop of Dew," "Upon Appleton House," and "The Garden." In order to understand Marvell's complexity in dealing with order and disorder in the longer poems, it is helpful to trace his treatment of certain themes in "Upon a Drop of Dew," a poem not often considered by the critics to be sig nificant beyond its beautiful compression and tour de force development of the analogy between a drop of dew and a human soul.14 Yet many of the themes Marvell elaborates in his "major" poems— withdrawal and emergence, activity and pas sivity, disorder and order, tension and harmony— are epitom ized in the unease of a material drop of dew on earth long- 15 ing for expiration in the abstract Platonic light. The poet's delight in the small and charming details of nature is apparent in this distillation of Platonic mysti cism into a drop of "Orient Dew" (1. 1). As for all good Platonists and Neo-Platonists, perfect form for all things, from an insignificant dew drop to the soul of man, 14 Cf. M. C. Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 66, 67; and Leishman, pp. 196-203. 15 For a fuller treatment of Marvell's Platonism, though not in relation to this poem, see Klonsky, Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), 16-35; and Toliver, pp. 13-41. For his use of Neo-Platonism, see Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth- Century Poetic (Madison, 1950). is realized only in the rarified atmosphere of pure light and motionless transcendence best suggested by the sun, the traditional mystical image for absolute calm and brightness. Marvell's spirit of contemptus mundi scorns even the "blow- ! ing Roses" (1. 3) and the "purple flowers" (1. 9) of earth as impure and contaminating. The drop of dew, apart from its origins in heaven, is distorted from perfect roundness 1 c ! into the pendant shape of a tear, ° and it trembles with an ; excess of motion in the earth flower But gazing back upon the Skies, Shines with a mournful Light; Like its own Tear, Because so long divided from the Sphere Restless it roules and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure: Till the warm Sun pitty it's Pain, And to the Skies exhale it back again. (11. | 11-18) | The fragility of this equipoise between emergence and with- | | ; drawal, alienation and harmony, reveals Marvell's sense of the precarious state of spiritual purity in a physical world. But even more profoundly restless is the soul im prisoned in the flesh.17 As M. C. Bradbook and Lloyd Thomas i^That Marvell associates tears with a loss of the per fect state suggested by a sphere is clear in his poem "Eyes and Tears," "And all the Jewels which we prize, / Melt in these Pendants of the Eyes." (Stanza 4) 17J. B. Leishman, pp. 196 ff. does note Marvell's use of what Leishman describes as a "conventional Platonism" in "On a Drop of Dew." Since his chief concern is with a de tailed comparison of parallel passages in Marvell's poem with Henry Vaughan's "The Waterfall," this scholar does not | 22; I write, "man is the unhappiest part of creation since he ! alone is at once an animal and divine."I® Marvell himself i states this view more gracefully: So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray j Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day, Could it within the humane flow'r be seen. Remembering still its former height, Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own Light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in an Heaven less. (11. 19-26) The poet's vision of this tension between the material and immaterial extends to the world itself, which is "Dark be- i neath, but bright above" (1. 31), yet "all about does up- j I ! wards bend" (1. 36) . j Few poets have given so delicate a treatment to the jmystical dictum, "as above, so below." Such a cabalistic reading of the universe, even to its smallest manifesta tions, is not unexpected in Marvell's poetry. What does distinguish "On a Drop of Dew," beyond the grace of its i jexpression and its compactness, is the fact that the poet is ; t disturbed by the most appealing and seemingly innocent of j natural, physical objects— flowers, leaves, Manna from i I Heaven, and "blossoms green"-(l. 23). For example, however j i divine the origins of Manna may have been, Marvell describes! it as "Congeal'd" and chilled into materiality on earth, andj distinguish Marvell's uniqueness in adapting Plato and Plo- j itinus nor the continuity of this Platonism in other poems. 18Andrew Marvell, p. 69. only in "dissolving" may it return to the perfection of "the | ■ I Glories of th'Almighty Sun" (1. 40). j j i That the poet discovers a drop of dew in a flower is : i appropriate, but that he draws the analogy of the soul en closed "within the humane flow'r" and held in "sweat leaves land blossoms green" is somewhat less expected. The point is [that it is not obvious physical grossness which disturbs ! Marvell's orderly spiritual world. The sensitivity and i balance of the spirit are more easily and subtly threatened jthan has been noted by such commentators as Harold Toliver, ! !J. B. Leishman, and Edward Tayler.19 Marvell has an ambigu- ! pus attitude toward nature which adds a note of wistfulness [and regret to his descriptions of seemingly innocuous | | if lowers and leaves. ! [ One of Marvell's most important unifying poetic pat- i terns is his unique use of an impinging and imprisoning I i {vegetable world as one of the causes of man's spiritual dis- t harmony. This pattern, though much more elaborately treated :in the Mower poems and "The Garden," is apparent in "On a | ■ I Drop of Dew." So also is his recurrent theme of the over- j ' • i cultivation of nature by "Luxurious Man." In "The Mower against Gardens" Marvell deplores man's "Vice" in having "dealt between the Bark and Tree, / Forbidden mixtures there! to see" (11. 1, 21, 22). The grafted trees and artificially! l^Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York, 1964), Chapter 6. ! I " 24 created "Pink" and "stripped Tulip" of the confined garden i ' i : are the products of man's "double Mind” (11. 8, 9, and 10). j jThe strangely perfumed roses (1. 11) may symbolize a corrup- I j jtion similar to that of the "purple flow'r" in "On a Drop of ‘ Dew." The over-cultivation of this second flower implies a double impurity because it is not only of the earth but a j iproduct of false art.20 Of course, there are strangely per-! I | fumed flowers in nature, and purple ones as well, but in i I I |this poem Marvell seems to regard the flower as suspect. ! I Thus, man violates and is violated by nature. Yet how-j |ever much man blights nature and however much nature thwarts jman's spiritual release, Marvell perceives a precarious beauty in the disordered world. Unlike Herbert and Donne, who overcome the tension and dissociation they feel between sensuous appeal and spiritual longing by the use of "meta physical" images, Marvell fixes upon the tension itself as a thing of beauty. This half-painful, half-pleasant awareness I of unresolvable dissociation is transformed by the poet into ;a delicately beautiful poetic experience. Marvell sustains I such a painful-pleasant state through images of endless emergence. Neither the drop of dew, the soul, nor even the ! reader are allowed to relax in any of the various phases of ; i 20Cf Tayler, pp. 159-161. Tayler traces the long his- j itory of the conflict between art and nature and concludes | his study with a close analysis of Marvell's poetry in terms; of the poet's repudiation of art, particularly those "arts" of grafting and simpling that to Marvell's mind violate jnature. movement toward spiritual ecstacy. The poet repeatedly uses this pattern in other poems, especially in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden," where again no state of body, mind,j or spirit is final. Such restlessness is, of course, in the; best classical and Augustinian tradition of the ceaseless movement of all materiality, a condition which can only be ended in union with the Unmoved Mover. What distinguishes j Marvell's appropriation of the commonplace from Herbert's2- * - | i i Usage in "The Pulley" is Marvell's unique ability to sustain; {the circularity of the whole pattern of emergence without having it end in final rest. Herbert assures the reader jthat at last the "repining restlessness" (1. 17) will end ini i God. And Donne, too, finally ceases to demand the assaults ! j |of God to break down his resistance (Sonnet 14, The Holy j Sonnets).22 Both these poets make clear that such restless ness and anguish are only incidental to the ultimate goal of: irest in God. But to Marvell, as to Keats, the state of be- i coming has a fascination and beauty that is an end in it self. The movement is never ended in "On a Drop of Dew"; the Manna will distill into abstraction, release, and har mony at the conclusion of the poem; but the reader is left feeling that the motion back to materiality will be 21Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 194TT- --------- ; ; 22The Poems of John Donne, edited by H. J. C. Grierson | (Oxford, 1912). “ 26 repeated. In this same manner Marvell's more complex poems,j "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden," end where they be gan. Of course, in all these poems the poet draws moral implications from his experience of emergence, especially asi it leads to meditation and a semi-mystical ecstacy. While 1 it is always clear enough that Marvell intellectually ac cedes to the doctrine of final rest as the highest goal of a| Platonic-Christian Idealist23 his emotional, even psycholog-i I | ical, state remains fixed on the exquisite pleasure-pain of i subtle patterns of emergence as the most beautiful matter I i for poetic expression. It is the very disorder of the phys-i | j ical world that makes possible the impermanence necessary ifor such a taste. j i ■ | Thus, Marvell is not quite so simple as Nicolson has j | found him to be in his attitude toward order and disorder, iyet neither is he complex in quite the way certain critics isuch as Bradbrook and Tayler have found him to be. In a study of the role of disorder and controlled irregularity asi an aesthetic principle, it would be convenient and perhaps revealing if Marvell's work did offer an unassailable exam- ; i ; 23In his poem "A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure," Marvell puns on rest in a manner sim ilar to Herbert in "The Pulley," where God is the final quiet for the soul. Marvell writes in the last stanza Triumph, triumph, victorious Soul; The World has not one Pleasure more: The rest does lie beyond the Pole, And is thine everlasting Store. pie of a seventeenth-century poet's taste for classical regularity. And with selectivity it is possible to find in his poetry a sense of order more beautiful than Sir Thomas Browne's. However, Marvell's concept of both Platonic and Christian order has undergone a modification which is not so! much a result of the seventeenth-century "new science" as it is the product of a private and almost "psychological" medi-i tative pattern which leads to an aesthetic pleasure in the I ; I disorder and impermanence of all temporal states. ! CHAPTER II MARVELL'S DISORDERED GARDEN OF THE MIND In "Upon Appleton House"^ Marvell departs from the com pactness of the single image he employs in "On a Drop of ] ■ ! Dew" and develops his more complex "reading" of nature through the looser imagery suggested by the sprawling house j and grounds of his patron and friend, Lord Fairfax. In this poem Marvell reveals his sense of the disorder underlying the outward restraint and harmony of nature. In the first I few stanzas the poet seems to present a conventional state ment of order: ! i i ; I But all things are composed here j Like Nature, orderly and near: In which we the Dimensions find Of that more sober Age and Mind.2 (Stanza 4) 1J. B. Leishman, p. 197, places the date of composition of "Upon Appleton House" at the time of Marvell's residence as tutor to Mary Fairfax, daughter of Lord Fairfax, between the years 1651 and 1653. 2That a vaster perspective may reveal nature's more rampant and irregular aspects may be implied as early as this stanza. Marvell seems to state a rather Stoic concept here with the implications of restraint and temperance; elsewhere his concept of nature seems quite clearly to allow1 for a qualified exuberance that falls only a little short of being "romantic." 28 And in Stanza six Marvell writes, Humility alone designs Those snort but admirable Lines, By which, ungirt and unconstrain'd Things greater are in less contain'd. In a way it is true as Nicolson says in Breaking of the Circle (p. 58), that Marvell is praising classical order and| i restraint in nature and the corresponding virtue of humility in man, especially in the particular man, Lord Fairfax. Such an ethical and aesthetic intent seems clear. So Honour better Lowness bears, Than That unwonted Greatness wears. Height with a certain Grace does bend, But low Things clownishly ascend. And yet what needs there here Excuse, Where ev'ry Thing does answer Use? | Where neatness nothing can condemn, Nor Pride invent what to contemn? j i (Stanza 8) iHowever, these statements lose some of their effect as guar antees of Marvell's attitude toward order when seen, as ■ | J. B. Leishman suggests,3 as hyperbolic compliments from Marvell to Lord Fairfax. It is quite possible to imagine j that Fairfax was amused at his house-guest's paradox, an exaggerated and vaunting praise of humility. Perhaps Fair fax did not take too seriously the poet's assertions of order in nature. In a passage not quoted by Nicolson, it is clear that the actual setting of house and grounds was not quite of the composed orderliness suggested in Stanza four. 3The Art of Marvell's Poetry, p. 246. But Nature here hath been so free As if she said leave this to me Art would more neatly have defac'd What she had laid so sweetly wast; In fragrant Gardens, shaddy Woods, Deep Meadows, and transparent Floods. (Stanza 10) Thus, in all that the eye can survey there seems to be a casualness and variety in the plan of gardens, wood, mead ows, and water. Nor does the poet seem upset at this super ficial lack of formal order. i While with slow Eye we these survey, And on each pleasant footstep stay, We opportunly may relate The Progress of this Houses Fate. (Stanza 11) jit is not artless irregularity in nature which holds Mar vell's attention. It is almost always the more grievous and| j I subtle disorder in man which in turn disorders and compli cates nature. After his hyperbolic jokes on order and re- ( j straint, Marvell cleverly proceeds to use the actual scene :of the house and grounds at Appleton to initiate his more serious statements on the disordered "garden of the mind."^ Following an account of the house's history as a Nun nery, Marvell describes the only really formal garden on the property. It is a garden in the pattern of a fort designed by a military ancestor of the Fairfax family. Who, when retired here to Peace, His warlike Studies could not cease; ^.The phrase is Edward Tayler's, p. 142. But laid these Gardens out in sport In the just Figure of a Fort; And with five Bastions it did fence, As aiming one for ev'ry Sense. (Stanza 36) Marvell often displays an ambivalence toward formal gardens, j <an attitude which becomes even more apparent in the Mower i ; poems and in "The Garden." They are suspect because they are created by "Luxurious man," but they can also be mean ingful symbols in certain circumstances; for example, in "Upon Appleton House" the poet reads the military history of ; i England up to its current civil war in the little world of the garden laid out "In the just figure of a Fort." Oh Thou, that dear and happy Isle The Garden of the World ere while, j Thou Paradise of four Seas, What luckless Apple did we tast, To make us Mortal, and the Wast? I Unhappy !shall we never more That sweet Militia restore. When Gardens onlyhad their Towrs And all the Garrisons were Flowrs, When Roses only Arms might bear, And Men did rosie Garlands wear? Tulips, in several Colours barr'd, Were then the Switzers of our Guard. The Gardiner had the Souldiers place, And his more Gentle Forts did trace, The Nursery of all things green Was then the only Magazeen. But War all this doth overgrow: We Ord'nance Plant and Powder sow. (Stanzas 41, 42, 43) 32 This fort, garden simultaneously and paradoxically suggests the militant world in its fort-like outlines, the ideal pas toral Garden of Eden in its freshness, and finally, England itself in its evocation of a blighted garden island. In a curious and ambiguous blend of violent flowers, innocent weapons, and an Edenic garden laid out like a fort, Marvell makes his statement on the disorder man has made of nature and of polity. The ultimate sign of this disorder and failure is war. The hope of a return to order is made pos sible, the poet says, through Fairfax, who . . . did with his utmost Skill, Ambition weed,but Conscience till Conscience, that Heaven-nursed Plant, Which most our Earthly Gardens want. (Stanza 45) However, Marvell never develops in the poem the success of Fairfax in creating order and peace in the world beyond Appleton House. As in "On a Drop of Dew," the poet is more interested in the experience of emergence, both physical and spiritual, than in dwelling long on the prospects of ideal peace or rest. Aside from Leishman, who seems to over-emphasize the role of "conscience," reason, and intellect in this and other poems by Marvell, the tendency of most explica- 6For a brief treatment of Marvell's use of paradox, see Rosalie Colie's Paradoxica Epidemica (Princeton, 1966). 7P. 309. | .. ' ' " " ' ” 33 j j jtors® is to disregard the poet's initial experience of the formal garden and to dwell upon the more familiar mower sec tion. Harold Toliver dismisses the fort garden as a simple ; image revealing the harmony between politics and pastoral ; ■ j life.9 To see such a positive implication in this very sug- gestive image is to overlook an early statement by Marvell 6n the complex and disordered relationship of man and na- jture, and to miss the progression in the poet's attitude jtoward this disorder as it evolves in his movement from the i fort garden, to the meadow, and to the forest. I ; A more general critical problem for explicators has ! ' I been whether or not "Upon Appleton House" is an unsuccess- i i n i iful, discursive exercise in politxcal verse, w or a par- j ' 1 Itially successful, discursive exercise in pastoral poetry, i or finally, a successful, only apparently discursive blend of both political and pastoral modes.The length of the | poem creates some of these critical difficulties; so do Mar-| veil's shifts in tone and mood. Toliver, though overlooking! ' _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ j ®For example, Bradbrook and Thomas, Andrew Marvell; Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, 1950); and Edward Tayler. ^Marvell's Ironic Vision, pp. 116, 117. 10Lawrence Hyman, "Politics and Poetry in Andrew Mar vell," Publications of the Modern Language Association, 73 (1958), 475-479. 11Muriel C. Bradbrook, "Marvell and the Poetry of Rural! Solitude," Review of English Studies, 17 (1941), 37-46. j j I ■^Toliver, p. 114. r ............................ ...' ■“ 3 4 ! i i i i the more sinister aspects of the fort garden, does argue Well for the recurring though subordinate motif of the rec onciliation of history and pastoral. However, an additional! unity emerges by tracing the predominant theme of disorder in nature and m a n . 13 Marvell develops this theme in the movement, literal ! and imagistic, from the Edenic garden, which is also formal, to the less ordered meadow of "unfathomable Grass" (1. 370),: I ; ^here both innocence and guilt are heightened in an atmos- jphere of untrammeled pastoral beauty. The meadows are more ; |intensely provocative to the poet's sensibility than was the! formal garden. Without the "form" of a recognizable design,! |the meadows are at once more innocent and more "unfathom- lable" than a garden created by "art." They are also more i i ! isubject to violation by man. From the nation, guilty of ; ] ; icivil war, the poet turns to the individual blood-guilt of j i : !the Mower. As in the Mower poems, Marvell seems to identify 13Another unifying motif, not noted by the critics, is ! Marvell's use of the Biblical pastoral tradition. Scrip tural references develop his increasing awareness of the disturbance in man's relationship to nature and its effect |on his tranquility of mind. From the innocence of Eden and the ensuing loss of Paradise, the poet proceeds to images related to the Red Sea (Stanzas 49-55), followed by refer ences to the Flood and the Ark (Stanzas 59-61). New Testa ment allusions occur in Marvell's covert references to jChrist (Stanzas 77-79) and to Mary (Stanzas 82-94). The fact that Nuns formerly occupied Appleton House jmay have suggested the Biblical motif; it is more likely, jhowever, that this association only reinforced the poet's lhabit of mind which repeatedly identified gardens and pastoH iral settings with Scriptural parallels (Cf. "Eyes and [Tears," "Bermudas," and "The Coronet.") \ with, the mower and also with the grass. This simultaneous identification heightens the discomfiture first hinted at in! i his reaction to the formal garden. It is in the enigmatic figure of the mower, who has been the delight of critics and scholars alike, that Marvell explores man's uneasy relation to the informal and spontaneous nature suggested by the fields. The Mower is vulnerable to the Reaper Death, for, as Isaiah says, "All flesh is grass" (Isaiah 40:6); yet the Mower is also destructive, and in his personal violence to the grass and to the Rail, the Mower may read his own fate. With whistling Sithe, and Elbow strong, These Massacre the Grass along: While one, unknowing, carves the Rail, Whose yet unfeather'd Quils her fail. The Edge all bloody from its Breast ! He draws, and does his stroke detest; Fearing the Flesh untimely mow'd | To him a Fate as black forebode. j (Stanza 50) j I In this section of "Upon Appleton House" and in the Mower poems, Harold Toliver notes that for Marvell nature "stimulates ambiguously the impulse to maim, and the impulse! to be absorbed, and to absorb it in return" (p. 93). In the : i alienation that man suffers, it is impossible for him to act With unmixed motives toward nature or to enjoy it with un mixed pleasure. Man is cursed to do violence to nature because of his need for food, because of his use of false "arts," and sometimes because of an unkind, capricious Fate. iNature, in turn, threatens man with the distraction of sensuousness. Strangely, Marvell seldom concerns himself with the problems of man in conflict with nature in its more; pvertly destructive forms of storms or other cataclysms. j The poet remains preoccupied with the more elusive aspects of the inter-relationship of man, nature, art, and history. After the Mower and his companions complete the reap ing, Marvell resumes his images of battle. The rigid out- lines of the fort garden had suggested the regimentation and! jorder of planned warfare; now the open field resembles "A Camp of Battail newly fought" (1. 420). One of the Mowers "now commands the field" (1. 418), but his victory is as bloody as pitched warfare in Marvell's setting, and more I i i ambiguous. j ! ' j | ...the Plain Lies quilted ore with Bodies slain: The Women that with forks it fling j Do represent the Pillaging. j (Stanza 53) Marvell is ironic in the next stanza as he describes the Mowers' relaxation after doing battle with Nature. ' And now the careless Victors play, Dancing the Triumphs of the Hay; Where every Mowers wholesome Heat Smells like an Alexanders sweat. Their Females fragrant as the Mead Which they in Fairy Circles tread: When at their Dances End they kiss, Their new-made Hay not sweeter is. (Stanza 54) iWhatever momentary remorse the Mower felt at killing the Rail is quite forgotten as the slayer becomes the "careless ; Victor" in his "Triumph of the Hay." The mystery of man's jfate to kill and to be killed is grotesquely apparent in the; suspicion that it is really a dance macabre that the reapers! Celebrate. The "wholesome Heat" of the "Victor" is tainted be cause, like "Alexanders sweaty" it comes from the heat of battle as well as from honorable labor. And the kiss, sweet] t i as the "new-made Hay" loses its innocence because Marvell i i has described that same hay as "Bodies Slain" in the pre- ] ; I I . ; seeding stanza. 1 ; j From the meadows and the mowers the "Scene again with- j i | idrawing brings / A new and empty Face of things" (1. 441) . i i Thus, without drawing an obvious moral lesson from the com- j | pound of ironies he has perceived in the Mower's relation- i ship to nature, Marvell turns to the "Levell'd space" j | (1. 443). As with the fort garden and the meadow before, 'the plain seems at first to be an ideal landscape. The World when first created sure Was such a Table rase and pure. I (Stanza 59) But a sense of foreboding is implied when the poet adds a qualification. Or rather such is the Toril Ere the Bulls enter at Madril (Stanza 59) ( I i , |And soon the plains are flooded, upsetting the order of all ] r -------- ----------- ■ -------------- 38] I i natural things as did the original Flood. ! Let others tell the Paradox, I How Eels now bellow in the Ox; How Boats can over Bridges sail; And Fishes do the Stables scale. How Salmons trespassing are found; And Pikes are taken in the Pound. < (Stanza 60) fro escape the flooded meadows and the chaos and disorder [they suggest, the poet withdraws again, this time to a wood. i jln continuing the analogy of escape from the original Flood,j Marvell treats the wood as an Ark (Stanza 61) where he can j ! . i Imagine a state of harmony for man and nature. To make thxsj i ! imaginative Ark it is not necessary to violate nature by i butting the trees, for they remain "Yet green, yet growing."' L * jFor the first time in the poem, man seems to escape the j Necessity of killing in order to create a Sanctuary. j ! However, the poet's thoughts soon return to the actual j j ■ wood, With the realization that some of the trees have ^Several ingenious readings of the political and his- ! torical implications of this section have been suggested; cf. Toliver, pp. 122 ff.; Hyman, "Politics and Poetry in jAndrew Marvell," PMLA, 25 (1958), 13-22; Don C. Allen, Images and Meaning; Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 93-153. Edward Tayler's sug- ; gestion that these views are persuasive but somewhat limited! j(p. 152), is well taken. . It is not possible to pursue most i jof the political allusions beyond a superficial level. For example, if "Leveller" represents the Puritans, is the Mower; then Cromwell or even Fairfax, and does the "Rail" become Charles? If so, Tayler asks, how does one deal with allu sions to "Roman Camps," "Memphis," "Pyramids,." and "Israel ites" a few stanzas later? I L_________ -..... . . ...J ! ". — 39 almost certainly been cut and used in war (1. 453). Thus, the trees can no longer form a retreat for the poet. In gazing at the birds in the wood, Marvell perceives that not ; ! ' ' Only has man violated the trees but some of nature's own creatures share in the general destructiveness. The trees are not safe from the Hewel or woodpecker, who "with his Beak, examines well / Which fit to stand and which to fell" i (11. 543, 544). Marvell seems to imply that the bird I j i exploits the tree. The good he numbers up, and hacks; As if he mark'd them with the Ax. But where he, tinkling with his Beak, Does find the hollow Oak to speak, That for his building he designs, 1 And through the tainted Side he mines. I Who could have thought the tallest Oak ! Should fall by such a feeble Strok' I j ' ' ! Nor would it, had the Tree not fed j ! A Traitor-worm, within it bred. | (As first our Flesh corrupt within I Tempts impotent and bashful Sin. (Stanzas 69, 70) Yet the Hewel is not consciously vicious but simply acts with a remorseless natural instinct that is almost Darwin ian. Marvell seems to say that the necessary but regretable| cruelty of nature's creatures is parallel to man's ambiguous relationship to nature. He suggests also that men and trees^ fall in "one common Ruin"15 because both are corrupted by the "Traitor worm within." 15"The Mower's Song," 1. 22. Marvell, the "eas ie Philosopher1 1 (1. 561), does not spell out all his cryptic meanings in these scenes of gardenj and meadows. Out of these scatter'd Sibyls Leaves Strange Prophecies my Phancy weaves: And in one History consumes, Like Mexique Paintings, all the Plumes. What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said I in this light Mosaick read. Thrice happy he who, not mistook, Hath read in Natures mystick Book. (Stanza 73) And having over-taxed his reader and perhaps himself with the "strange Prophecies" his "Phancy weaves," the poet again; withdraws, now to recline "On Pallets swoln of Velvet Moss" ! (1. 594). At last nature seems to co-operate with the i ! ipoet's desire for retreat and harmony, "the Wind, cooling j jthrough the Boughs, / Flatters with Air my panting Brows" j (11. 595, 596). Part of the harmony nature brings is the S winnowing of "Thoughts" like Chaff from the poet's head (p. 600). Only when he submits to nature, can Marvell be i truly released from the entangling thoughts which have dis- | turbed his tranquility in the formal garden and the meadows.; As the poet abdicates his role as victor over nature and ceases all outward aggression against nature, he can ex claim, "How safe, methinks, and strong, behind / These Trees have I incamp'd my Mind;" (11. 601, 602). Previously, in the wood the poet had experienced the loss of the security of his "green, yet growing Ark." So he now seeks to assure his stay in this new retreat by being bound. His passivity is also a recompense for man's long history of aggression against nature. 1 Bind me ye Woodbines in your 'twines Curie 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, 0 Brambles, chain me too, And courteous briars nail me through. (Stanza 72) ; i i | It is, of course, obvious why Harold Toliver (p. 123) and other commentators see this rather masochistic desire j for binding to be similar to Christ's sufferings. However, j | • i Marvell never directly mentions Christ, and it would appear j J ! that the poet's last withdrawal has not put a stop to his | 'tendency to create elusive images from "Natures mystick \ i iBook." Nevertheless, aside from evidence of the images of sacrifice and crucifixion, there is the Biblical context in which these references appear. Yet almost all explicators of this passage fail to relate this particular reference to the earlier sections on Eden, the Red Sea, the Flood, and the Ark; they also overlook the succeeding allusions to Mary in relation to Christ. Yet cryptic as he is, Marvell seems to suggest that he might be happily offered as a martyr to obtain a new hope for harmony between man and nature. But unlike Christ, the poet need not die, and to eliminate this violence between man and nature is the great reconciliation! hitherto impossible to achieve in all the preceding scenes. "Crucified," as it were, on the bank of the river, Marvell may at last relax having achieved a more permanent peace than was possible in the imaginative retreats of the Eden- j like fort garden or the growing Ark of trees. The Christ analogy is maintained as the "serpent" is banished from the ' scene by the poet's presence. Indeed, all nature seems ; i refreshed by his submission. For now the Waves are fal'n and dry'd, And now the Meadows fresher dy'd; Whose Grass, with moister colour dasht, Seems as green Silks but newly washt, No Serpent new nor Crocodile j Remains behind our little Nile; I (Stanza 79) j j |Without over-stressing Marvell's use of Biblical allusions, | it seems reasonable to interpret certain references in the | i light of his allusions that regularly appear in this poem. J For example, he mentions his "Temples" as being hedged with | "heavy sedge" (11. 641, 642), and the pleasure he experi- : ' ] ences in "Abandoning my lazy Side" ( 11. 643). Instead of I i suffering the actual wounds inflicted on Christ by the crown of thorns and the spear, Marvell seems to be soothed by his - own bloodless sacrifice to a gentle nature. Finally, the "Fishes" that "twang" (1. 648) on his "Line" may represent the fishing for "disciples" to maintain the newly estab lished harmony. Such a suggestion seems less fanciful when | in stanza 82 the poet turns from his "Hooks" and "Quills" td "The young Maria," who, because she "already is the law / Of! all her Sex, her Ages Aw" (11. 655, 666) , will be the endur-i |ing "formal" force in maintaining the new harmony between man and nature. ; \ In this shift of focus to Maria, Marvell abandons all reference to as if the problem of his own consciousness in relation to nature were solved. Maria is, of course, on 1 pne level of significance to be understood as Marvell's Ipupil Mary Fairfax. One commentator, Maren-Sofie Rjrfstvig, i suggests that Mary Fairfax is the vital element in the j structure of the poem, "The garden at Nun Appleton derives j ' : |its ordered beauty from her; she is the only image of Para- I dise, while the outside world is 'but a rude heap together j hurl'd; / All negligently overthrown.'"16 Though Mary Fair-! fax may inform a level of significance, it is surprising ! that Rjzfstvig, Toliver, Leishman, Bradbrook, Wallerstein, and! I the other critics and scholars familiar with Donne's multi- j level intention in his use of Elizabeth Drury in The Anni versary poems should overlook Marvell's somewhat similar intention in "Upon Appleton House." As Donne had the advan tage of a pun on the name of Elizabeth, so also does Marvell in the name of his young pupil. That Marvell intends more ithan a reference to Mary Fairfax seems apparent. Maria such, and so doth hush ! The World, and through the Ev'ning rush. 16The Happy Man (Oslo, 1954)., p. 255. No new-born Comet such a Train Draws through the Skie, nor Star new-slain. For streight those giddy Rockets fail, Which from the putrid Earth exhale, But by her Flames, in Heaven try'd Nature is wholly vitrifi'd. (Stanza 86) To regard Maria as only Mary Fairfax is to disregard the Biblical motif Marvell has maintained throughout the poem. After Christ, or in this case, the poet, has been bound and has made the sacrifice of himself as a step toward i i i ■ a new harmony controlling the disorder of the Eden-like fort j ' j garden the meadows, the fields, and the forest it is left to Mary to maintain this harmony. She gives further order to ■ 1 nature. j ' i ! See how loose Nature, in respect i To her, it self doth recollect; i And every thing so whist and fine, j Starts forth with to its Bonne Mine. ! (Stanza 87) I ; As Elizabeth Drury in her capacity as shee^ gave form and i : beauty to the world, so it is Mary ... that to these Gardens gave that wondrous Beauty which they have; She streightness on the Woods bestows; To Her the Meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the River be So Chirystal-pure, Sweet, Streight, and Fair, Then Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers are. (Stanza 87) 17cf. Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle, p. 65 ff., and Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954), p. 221 ff. ; Although Marvell is writing several years after his I ' : brief Catholic phase,it is not distasteful to him to play! ! | upon the name of his pupil in a high compliment that relates! i * t her to the Biblical Mary. As the spirit of the first Mary gives cohesion to faith, so does the spirit of Mary Fairfax i act as the presiding genius of the gardens. In a rather playful way Marvell may also be thinking that, as he instructs his pupil, she in turn gives form to the grounds, j I But this small world that Mary Fairfax orders is not the j vaster world. | j Alienation and disorder impinge upon both the harmony j i | of the grounds at Appleton House and upon the vaster realms | of nature they suggest. Marvell concludes that the harmony ! vouchsafed by religion, and on another level by the poet and Mary Fairfax, is limited. 19 • 'Tis not what it once was, the World; l^Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Sev- : j enteenth Century, 1600-1660 (New York, 1945), p. 159. From ! Bush's account, Marvell must have been a Catholic for about j ione year, probably in 1641 or 1642. 19In a note (p. 129), Toliver interprets this stanza tcj mean "that the world is now changed for the better (no long-* er being 'but* a rude heap) through incorporation into jMary's world, ..." Such an interpretation ignores the meaning suggested by Margoliouth's punctuation (p. 82). And leven critics and scholars such as Rpfstvig, Allen, Leishman, | and Nicolson, who offer very different readings of the poem I concur in reading this stanza as a statement on the change jwrought to the world either after the Fall or after the jFlood. These commentators, however, fail to relate these ! Biblical cataclysms in Stanza 96 to the earlier Biblical j ; references. Yet to establish this connection, as this chap-* jter has attempted to do, is to offer further internal E But a rude heap together hurl'd; All negligently overthrown, Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone. (Stanza 96) And however lovely and ordered the grounds of Appleton House; may be, Marvell sees the irregularities of the larger i : "World" reflected in his patron's "lesser World" (1. 765). ] • : The only difference is that in the microcosm of the Fairfax ; grounds a "more decent Order Tame" prevails. In this self- | ! i ! contained arena of nature and man, the imaginative mind can i i | |analyse man's history and his complex fate. The grounds thus serve the instructive purpose which Marvell has implied! | 'throughout the poem in his use of Biblical images. This j i"lesser World" is \ i | ! . . . Heaven's Center; Nature's Lap. j j And Paradice's only Map. j j | i (Stanza 96) ! i I While offering his patron the highest of compliments, j I I IMarvell manages to maintain his equivocal attitude toward J i nature. Indeed, it seems ironic that these grounds, with their flower forts suggesting war, and meadows filled with embattled mowers, offer "Paradice's only Map." Perhaps as a retreat from the active world of war and history, business, and society some beauty and harmony can emerge from the meditation which leads to a symbolic submission of the evidence that Marvell consistently uses such allusions to create poetic and thematic unity. 47 poet's and man's aggressive instincts against nature. Thus, however disordered these gardens and meadows may be, they do present a "more decent Order tame" that is preferable to that physically and spiritually disordered vaster "World," which is but a rude and incomprehensible "heap together hurl'd; ..." In the last stanza of "Upon Appleton House," the poet emerges from his state of self-abandonment and meditation while "staked" on the river bank. Darkness ends the lessons to be learned from "Natures mystic Book." Most explicators choose to ignore this last stanza, perhaps because there is a disturbing note of foreboding in the approaching night which seems difficult to reconcile with the apparent peace of the preceding stanza. Also, the significance of the "Salmon-Fishers" or "rational Amphibii" is elusive. Toliver, one of the few critics to attempt an interpreta tion, is only partly successful in his explanation: if the poet . . . has a patron like Thomas Fairfax— the "dark Hemisphere" is not threatening. It becomes com- fortably like salmon fishermen . . . or like turtles carrying their means of withdrawal and emergence, their own Appleton Houses, with them. (p. 129) Such a reading denies the distinct element of uneasiness in this passage. However, this stanza becomes comprehensible if these "Salmon-Fishers" are seen to be a part of the larger, disordered world which is not a part of the more orderly Fairfax estate. Unlike the poet on the bank (Stanza 81) who only dabbles with the fish, they are fishermen who ! " 48 j ! I I resemble the Mower in their ambiguous relationship to na- | ; jture. They serve to remind the poet of mysteries yet un solved by his "easie Philosophy.” Even their odd resem blance to animals is disturbing— the world indeed is not ; \ "what once it was," when men now have “shod their Heads in ! their Canoos" (1. 772). Equally disturbing and incompre- ! 1 hensible is the "dark Hemisphere" which "Does now like one of them appear" (11. 775, 776). From the final sense of ! j |disorder in vaster nature, the poet retreats. He perceives j S |that whatever order can be embraced exists only in the microcosm of what "things are composed here, . . . orderly j I ! and near." To escape the confusions of the "dark Hemis- S ! Sphere," which is an extension of that "rude heap" the I j"World," the poet suggests, "Let's in." And so the poet !returns to the company of men within the more familiar j "sober Frame" of the house. After contemplation of man's j most cruel violations of nature and other men in war, and i i ; |after a retreat into abstract contemplation the poet may j return to the activities of his world. j Nicolson suggests that to Marvell i beauty was, as Aristotle and the Fathers had taught, a I | mean between extremes, appealing to Reason that recognized proportion, limitation, and restraint as qualities imposed, by God, when he brought order out of chaos.20 To suggest such a classical commitment to an aesthetic of i 1 iorder is to disregard Marvell's awareness of disorder in j ! — — i 2 0 I Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, p. 69. nature and the more serious need for harmony in a world which is no longer ordered and comprehensible in the way i Aristotle and the Fathers found it to be. Perfection in nature does not exist for Marvell, nor is nature quite the emblem of "Divine Geometry" teaching "lessons of modera tion"21 that Nicolson believes it to be. The garden, the earth, and man are disordered, but not j intolerably; and with the perspective gained in meditation jit is possible for Marvell to perceive that the equivocal j ! j relation of man to nature can offer a precarious harmony and; beauty to the contemplative man. In "The Garden" Marvell achieves his most concentrated I poetic statement on the themes of disorder, harmony, beauty,| ; i land contemplation. He also introduces the problem of art I ■versus nature reflected in "The Mower against Gardens."22 ! ' i ! j He continues to doubt the role of sex in the contemplative life, as he did in "The Mower's Song." Perhaps because of j i the number of preoccupations which the poet revealed in "Thej Garden," many varied, ingenious, and sometimes excellent analyses of the work have been offered in recent years— so many, in fact, that the poem would seem to prove the crit ical axiom that a work of art is inexhaustable. Much of the major historical scholarship has been done 1 21Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, p. 68. 22Cf. Edward Tayler, p. 142 ff. ! " 50 ! | ^y such writers as Milton Klonsky, who traces Marvell's use j ! . . . . of the philosophy of Plotinus and his use of Plotinian j p.mages.23 Ruth Wallerstein also reads "The Garden" in terms; jof Plotinus, but she relates the poem as well to the works j of Hugo of St. Victor and Bonaventura.24 Lawrence Hyman analyzes Marvell's use of the androgynous Adam.25 And another work of scholarship and analysis is offered by M. C. Bradbrook and Lloyd Thomas, who believe that in "The Garden"; | ! "Metamorphosis is the poetical answer to the decay of | I | beauty and the triumph of time is behind the exultation of i _ > transformation.^® Recently, J. B. Leishmaxi, in the post- ; j i ; humously published The Art of Marvell's Poetry, presents a j i i source study of "the argument in images" (p. 292), which j Leishman says Marvell drew from the same tradition of para- j dox and debate used by John Donne (p. 292). i I Among the legion of critics perhaps the most famous, asl ! well as one of the earliest, is William Empson who in his i * book Some Versions of Pastoral isolates the unique "orien talism" he finds in Marvell's attempt to "control and recon-| cile conscious and unconscious states, intuitive and intellectual modes of apprehension." Empson adds that such j 23Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), 16-35. 24Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, 1950). 25"Marvell's 'Garden,'" English Literary History, 25 (1958) , 13-22. j [ 26Andrew Marvell, p. 61. ] | ndistinctions are never made, perhaps could not have been knade . . . ."27 In discussing "The Garden" Harold Toliver ^continues his analysis of Marvell's ironic intention in the I 2 f t Vise of pastoral and history. Edward Tayler explicates the poem as Marvell's most successful statement on the conflict pf art and nature.28 And Frank Kermode, in an essay called "The Argument in Marvell's 'Garden'" asserts that this is a poem of the anti-genre category. Toliver might agree with iKermode's statement that "it is poetry written in the lan guage of, or using 'the norms' of, a genre in a formal refutation of the genre. However, to present a complete account of all the jscholarly and critical works dealing with "The Garden" is not essential to an understanding of Marvell's concept of disorder. Henry Hawkin's quaint stricture in 1633 still affords a delightful check to the temptation to dwell over- I long on the involvements of modern expositors. I I will not take upon me to tel al; for so of a Garden of flowers, should I make a Labyrinth of discourse, and should never be able to get forth.31 And, after all, since it is a garden, one might well trace the gardening traditions which were available to 27(London, 1935), p. 119. 28Marvell's Ironic Vision, pp. 139-151. 29p. k >6 ff. 88Essays in Criticism (July, 1952), pp. 225, 241. 3-^Partheneia Sacra (London, 1633) , p. 63. ! '.. " ' ‘ 52 Marvell and which are manifest in the poem. Yet surprising-' ly little has been done in this direction. Even Frank Ker- j mode, always quick to disparage the limitations of histor- j ’ : leal scholarship, suggests that there may be some poetic significance in the tradition of the symbolic gardens of thej 1 ' i Middle Ages, the garden of meditation for the Platonists, i and the garden retreats of Montaigne and Cowley.32 But morej ! i in keeping with his critical approach, Kermode quickly adds | ithat he "thinks it is misleading to dwell on the history of ; : ' i the idea."33 However, new insight into Marvell's artistic achievement can be gained by dwelling on the seventeenth- | ! century gardening traditions as they are used by Marvell in j "The Garden." Kermode is not alone in hastening over the garden lore which informs much of the poem's imagery. Ex- j j cept for a paragraph by Bradbrook and Thomas who mention the! formal gardens of the seventeenth century,34 scholars as j well as critics have virtually ignored the century's garden : traditions when analyzing the poem. Yet much of the poem's "tightness" results from the sustained motif of a literal garden as the framework for the abstract themes of Marvell's "garden of the mind." Even commentators who suggest that Marvell is discursive in other poems35 acknowledge the unity of "The Garden" while overlooking the importance of the 32"The Argument in Marvell's 'Garden'," p. 230. ' * | 55P. 230. ^^P. 63. 5"*Leishman, p. 298. garden imagery in creating this unity. From his reading i * Marvell had available to him the long tradition of the gar den of meditation from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, b'rom his personal experience he had doubtless enjoyed the gardens of his friends as well as the numerous public gar- i ; dens in London and at Cambridge. He may also have acquired a more sophisticated knowledge of exotic forms of vegetation; and of gardening from John Oxenbridge, the horticulturist, i ! jwith whom Marvell lived in 1652-53 and whom he may have Renown for several years.36 It is, of course, appropriate that a poem dealing with themes of meditation should be set in a garden. And the ifact that Marvell's garden of meditation bears some resem- 1 ’ ! J i blance to a pre-lapsarian Eden is not surprising; the sym- | bolic relationship was a seventeenth-century commonplace. i As Sir William Temple wrote, echoing Bacon, "God almighty ' I i esteemed the life of a man in a garden the happiest He could [give him or else He would not have placed Adam in that of ' i Eden . . .."37 While Leishman may be correct in stating that Marvell's is the "first poem distinguishably and mem orably celebrating . . . the Philosopher's Garden . . . ,"38 Prose writers of garden texts had long assumed the associ- 36Bradbrook and Thomas, p. 5. I 370f the Gardens of Epicurus (London, 1685). 38P. 294. ation of gardens with meditation and spiritual refreshment. < John Gerard, in The Herball, does distinguishably, if not jnaemorably, celebrate in prose the garden of meditation. j i ' : What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants as with a robe of imbroidered worke! set with orient pearles and garnished with great diversi- ; tie of rare and costly jewels? . . . But these delights j are in the outward senses— the principal delight is in the| minde singularly enriched with the knowledge of these vis-! ible things, setting forth to us the invisible wisdome and; admirable workmanship of almightie God.39 And John Austen, in A Treatise of Fruit-Trees, concurs but even more prosaically and morally. i How fitly does the Garden of Fruit-trees offer unto us that most profitable and, fruitful Meditation of our first i fall, and original sin, whereof we were all guilty in suchj a place; I . . in which Meditation our affections should work to lay ourselves low in our own eyes, to abhor our selves, and to exalt G o d .40 j I i To the confusion or the delight of the critics, Marvell! draws his lessons from the emblem of nature with a bit more j i ' l subtlety than his more pedestrian contemporaries; but he 'does draw a moral, and he does share their conviction that : ■ i the garden is an apt place for meditation. The difference I ; is one of imagination and poetic sensibility; for example, Ralph Austen's statement on the benefits of a garden might almost serve as a gloss for the first stanza of Marvell's poem. This course of life about Orchards and Gardens is full of sweet rest, honest businesse, and modest pleasures . . . 39(London, 1597), p. 54. 40(Londonf 1653), p. 205. H ....... “ " .."""". 55 j here a man enjoys pleasant quietnesse and tranquillity of mind which is seldome attained by those that follow State Imployment . . .. 1 j | Marvell introduces the garden motif at once in the i first line reference to the maze. How vainly men themselve amaze To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes; l Amaze, a maze, and maze were very nearly synonymous in sev- ienteenth-century usage, according to the Oxford English Pic- | l j tionary. The OED quotes "I was in amaze, and knew not what to do,"42 written in 1616, as conveying the idea of bewil derment and mental confusion. A similar understanding of a j maze seems apparent in this earlier usage: "To gape and i 1 loke as it were in a mase."^ And more than one of the def-j initions of the structure, the maze, associates thoughts and! labyrinths in a manner similar to Marvell's image. For jexample, "Some maze their Thoughts in Labyrinths, and thus ! jInvoke no Reader, but an Oedipus."44 The entanglements of the speaker in the distractions of i ' : society and later in the garden are established in this image of the maze. In other poems, "Upon Appleton House," 4^A Treatise of Fruit-Trees, pp. 70, 71. 42(oxford, 1933), Vol. VI, 265. Quoted from Walter Traver's English Pilgrimage, I, 351. i 43qed, p. 265; quoted from John Lydgate's Chronicle of j Troy, I (1430). Though of earlier date, this meaning seems ito have been retained into the seventeenth century. 44qed, p. 265; quoted from Richard Whitlock's Zootomia I (1654), p. 4. | "A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleas ure," and the Mower poems, Marvell is both fascinated and jdisturbed by man's similar entanglements; but only in "The garden" does he choose to use the maze to symbolize the com-j plexities of society, and later in the poem, the entangle ments of nature. The "maze" implied in the pun of Stanza ione suggests the artificially contrived devices of "bad" art! ! i which Marvell frequently deplores as doing violence to i I ! nature. Men display false, corrupt values in creating the ;artifice of a maze. In his delightful Dictionary of Hus bandry, Gardening, Trade, Commerce, John Worlidge notes thisj artificiality of the maze,45 and makes clear that its designj ! ! is ! j | to cause an intricate and difficut labour to find out the j j center; And the aim in making them is to make them so ; intricate that a person may lose himself in it and meet | I with as great a number of Stops and Disappointments as j possible. (p. 71) In "The Garden" Marvell is aware of the deliberateness with which man "loses himself" and bewilders those faculties! ; I which are most necessary to the discovery of "repose" (1. 8), "Fair quiet" (1. 9), "And Innocence" (1. 10). However, since he is a Platonic and Christian mystic it cannot be the losing of oneself that Marvell disparages. It is the blind, paradoxically elaborate manner in which men confound them- selves and expend their energies in "uncessant Labours" 45(London, 1667), p. 70. i [ ' ’ “ ““ 57 1 j (1. 3) for the vain and meager rewards of "some single Herb ! or Tree (1. 4). Marvell may also be denouncing the vanity I * r i j Of the poet's art in referring to the "Oke and Bayes"— poet-! I I ry may be a part of the "uncessant Labours," or, since ! i poetry is a created pleasure it may be suspect. i In contrast to the puritanical prudence of society in the rewards it offers, the rich multiplicity of nature, | ! expressed in "Plow'rs and Trees," (1. 7) creates or "weaves" jthe "Garlands of repose" (1. 8). Such a created pleasure Jescapes the poet's criticism and is sanctioned because it isi ingenuous, spontaneous, and innocent. Marvell seems next toj i ‘ I pun on "close," implying the security of the enclosed garden; of meditation in a monastery or about a cathedral.46 It is j not that Marvell is critical of all art and created forms, j jas Edward Tayler implies (p. 145), because the "Garlands" ! ! • 1 jand the "close" are "made," but they are designed with a i i nobler purpose than the mazes of over-busy men. The "close"; ! I or the garden to which the speaker retires is more clearly related to the actual gardens of the seventeenth century in ' purpose than has been noted by commentators who, while offering illuminating accounts of Marvell's mysticism, his classical debts, or his use of French sources, neglect the garden lore which the poet had available to him in his I 46L. Hyman, in his essay "Marvell's 'Garden'," (p. 16), jreads "close" to mean an escape into the embrace of the vegetable world, free from all sexual connotations. I . - - - ...... i ! personal experience and from written sources. j | In his turning from society to nature for mystical repose, Marvell again encounters, as he did in "Upon Apple- j i ton House" and the Mower poems, the materiality that can j ; I I ! delight the sensuous man but disturb the mystic. So many i ' | authors of garden books delineate such a similar sequence of j . withdrawal, contemplation, and renewal that one might be lieve a distinct formula for garden meditation had evolved. I i ! But on a closer study of Marvell's poem, it is clear that hej i | most ingeniously examines and parodies these commonplace j i notions of what serves for meditative tranquility. Marvell agrees that a garden is indeed conducive to meditation. The I | sacred plants of "Fair quiet" (1. 9) and "Innocence" (1. 10), if to be found at all on earth will be in a garden (11. jl3, 14).47 He £s aware also that in such a setting the | I ■ | senses will be the first faculty to be stimulated. But j Marvell as a serious mystic and as a "witty" poet sees the j absurdity of seeking a mystical state by following the medi-; i itative "formula" set forth by Worlidge and John Austen. These writers seem to suggest that the intense concentration Of sense pleasures can be a direct source of meditative refreshment. Worlidge enumerates the benefits of gardening. . . . the imperfect Pen can never sufficiently convince the reader of those transcendent pleasures, that the Owneri of a Garden every day enjoys: Nor how all his Senses are j 47For a discussion of the significance of innocent jplants in a pre-lapsarian Garden, see L. Hyman, p. 17. satiated with the great variety of Objects it yields to every of them: Nor what an influence they have upon the passions of the mind, reducing a discomposed fancy to a more sedate temper by contemplating on these miracles of Nature's Gardens . . .*8 j Austen offers a lengthy account of the particular pleasure afforded to each of the senses. His "catalggue of delights" is not at all unusual in seventeenth-century garden books. It is a pleasure to the Eare to heare the sweet notes and i tunes of singing Birds .... And besides, something morej this sense may receive from an Orchard by hearing the slow motion of Boughs and Leaves. Secondly, the sense of Touch may have more Pleasure in an Orchard from the cool fruits, and leaves of Trees, smoothing and brushing the face therewith, .... But this sense receives Pleasure chiefly by the shade of Trees in Sommer time. Thirdly, the sense of sight, partakes of Pleasure in anj Orchard, in beholding the exact Order in Planting of the | ' Trees, their decent formes, the well compos'd Allies, Walks, Seats, and Arbours therin; for order and curious j forms of things much delight the sight. Fourthly, the sense of smell, may likewise have its | share of pleasure .... Sweet perfumes work immediately upon the spirits for their refreshing. ! Fifthly, the Sense of Taste has its pleasure in an Orchard .... This sense hath pleasure from all sorts of ripe, and raw fruits, besides meats and drinks and many | dainties made of them .... (pp. 186-190) It is not that Marvell does not enjoy the senses for i their own sake. His acuteness to sensation, apparent in all| his "pastoral" poetry, suggests an experienced refinement ofj the senses. In "The Garden" he also has obvious pleasure in| a curious synesthesia of sexual and sensuous images in whicll "Solitude" is "delicious" (1. 6), "green" is "amorous" (1. 18), and "Passions heat" ends in a tree (1. 28). 48 Systema Horti-culturae (London, 1677), p. 76, r " ' " " " " ............. ....................' " 60 Unlike Austien who promises a soothing effect to the jspirit and mind in the pleasures of the garden, Marvell becomes increasingly agitated by the stimulation of his isenses. What is simple country delight for Austen, becomes I I a snare to the poet. Marvell offers what amounts to a i parody of the sense delights of the garden. The same trees, i leaves, blossoms, fruits, and dainties that please Austen, are caricatured by Marvell. In "Upon Appleton House" Mar- veil had described the formal garden as armed with flowers, : i ' 1 i i "As aiming one for ev'ry Sense" (1. 287), as if the plants ; ! ' i iwere ready to do battle with the beholder, not soothe him. i I He maintains this rather defensive attitude toward nature inj ; i j"The Garden." ! As the intensity and urgency of physical sensation I { ' ! |increases from stanza to stanza so also does the accelera- j tion and violence of the activity. Although the play j : between emergence and withdrawal; passivity and action has been noted so often by commentators, none has noted Mar- : I veil's extraordinary use of this increasingly frenzied pace j to reinforce the bombardment of the senses. Stanza one ends t on a promise of repose and escape from hurry and the "uncesJ sant Labours" of "vain men." And the beginning of Stanza two seems to bode well for that repose if one overlooks the unwritten, weary sigh that seems to precede the exclamation,! i ■ "Fair quiet, have I found thee here . . . I" But the still-f ness has the quiessence of relief, not peace. And although; jthe only "action" is the growth of plants and the only ! sensuousness that obtrudes is the savoring of "this deli- i I cious Solitude," it is an uneasy garden, which is far less j . i perfect than most explicators have perceived.49 There is the hint of past failures— "Mistaken long, I sought you i 1 then / In busie Companies of Men" (11. 10, 11). Even the jword "Solitude" seems to initiate a contemplation of its i opposite, for in Stanza three, Marvell begins with a refer- j ! ' S jence, negative to be sure, to the feminine. No white or red was ever seen So am'rous as this lovely green. . | From the innocence and quiet of the preceding stanza, 49Most critics and scholars agree that from Stanza two j I through Stanza eight, Marvell creates an Eden-like paradise, j ! which, while peculiarly Marvellian, is nevertheless a pre- lapsarian Eden. They point out the innocent solitude of Adam before Eve or any other society intruded (Cf. Hyman, "Marvell's 'Garden'," pp. 13-22; Bradbrook and Thomas, pp. |65, 66; and Tayler, pp. 166, 167). Harold Toliver (p. 145) |notes the poet's delight in the senses with his only misad- | venture being a tumble in the grass in Stanza five. But this garden, to paraphrase Eve in Paradise Lost, "is not as jwe are told." Marvell implies as early as Stanza two that | it is not quite the Eden of Genesis; it is clearly a garden! retreat, set apart from the busy world but still in the con-r text of a post-lapsarian universe. The speaker betrays his! awareness of past failures and painful weariness. Eden should be no place for such disturbances. Stanley Stewart in The Enclosed Garden (Madison, 1966) interprets "The Gar- den" as an allegory based on the Christian traditions of Christ and his bride, the Church. Such a tradition is pre figured by the lovers and the enclosed garden of Solomon's i Song of Songs (pp. 133-137). Ruth Wallerstein's caution iagainst reading into Marvell's poetry any Biblical signifi cances not clearly stated by the poet (p. 117) is well itaken. In addition, the indulgence of the senses which is j |implied in Stewart's interpretation is not supported by a close analysis' of "The Garden" or Marvell's other poetry. the poet has already moved to the thought of "Lovers cruel" (1. 19) , who "Cut in these Trees their Mistress name" (1. 24). And now the sigh is real: "Alas," grieves the poet at the disharmony between man and nature and the inherent cruelty in passion. But it will take more than his vow not to wound the trees with "No Name but [their] own" (1. 24), to create a paradise of this garden. In the course of one stanza, sex and cruelty have appeared to disorder the garden. In Stanza four the poet is presumably to find surcease from "Passions heat" (1. 25) by reducing passion's feminine objects to vegetable forms— all done in the best classical jtr adit ion. When we have run our Passions heat. Love hither makes his best retreat, j The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase, | Still in a Tree did end their race. Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that She might Laurel grow. And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed. However, the desperation of such a solution reveals the power of the threat. In this stanza Marvell uses words like "heat," "chase," "race," "hunted," and "speed." Even the word "retreat" is not used in the context of a garden of meditation. Bradbrook and Thomas read this section as another instance of metamorphosis, "in this case illustrat- i ling that lasting satisfaction for the instincts is in an activity which does not employ the [instincts] for their original purpose" (p. 61). To these scholars, then, the i transformation to a vegetable state is an advance in Mar vell' s progress to a higher form. In discussing this same j : stanza Toliver suggests that for once Marvell "makes explic-; I it the relationship between innocence and sensuality." Toliver believes that Marvell means "After we have run our Passions heat," then "may we discover that all violence ends in simple repose" (p. 144). On one level, these commenta- tors who assume a predominately positive interpretation of i ' ' j : the abrupt movement from passion to a state of vegetable ! i arrest, offer persuasive explications. However, Bradbrook land Thomas as well as Toliver fail to recall that Marvell as| i i ja Platonist associates such "vegetable love" (see "To His I ! ' | Coy Mistress"), however pleasant, with the lower passions, j i ' 1 Ficino, whose work Marvell may have known,writes, I i j | for the soul lives the life of a plant when it serves the | body . . . the life of an animal when it flatters the senses; the life of a man. when it deliberates through reason on human affairs. The final trap of the gods who pursue sexual love is to be cursed, not blessed, with the absurdity and frustration of loving a plant. Love may make its "best retreat" into the garden and into the plants, but it is, at best, an ambiguous! repose which is achieved by the sublimation of physical i 50Toliver, p. 149. i 1 51 ‘ Theologia Platonica, XII, 3, Josephine L. Burrough's translation, Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 237. passion from its. usual object to a vegetable. Art may be the result of such sublimation, as Bradbrook and Thomas pro-; pose, but it is not usual in Marvell's poetry for him to desire such an end to passion; the object of his chase in "To His Coy Mistress" was the seduction of the lady, not repose in the love of a tree. The gods are trapped by their passions, and the poet is left to contemplate the half- cursed, half-blessed fate of loving a plant. It is not sur-: | ; prising that Marvell should exclaim in the next stanza, |"What wond'rous Life in this I lead 1" The passive vege tables of Stanza four become an aggressive force in this stanza. The parody of the senses accelerates. Ralph Austen i ! jwould recognize Marvell's list of fruits and commend their | powers to refresh, but Marvell perceives instead a confusing: jblur of lush vegetation which forces itself upon the poet j i : with such quickness and urgency that he is overwhelmed. Ripe Apples drop about my head; The Luscious Clusters of the Vine Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine; The Nectaren, and curious Peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on Melons, as I pass, Insnar'd with Flow'rs, I fall on Grass. This scene captures the surprise and half-pleasure of an I assault. The poet has unwittingly invited the attack and he I i may be more amazed than displeased. The action is precipi tate as the fruits "drop," "crush," "reach," and "ensnare" i i iin rapid succession. Indeed, the plants are more intense and hurried than were the gods who chased the nymphs. The ! - * roles are reversed, and now the man is pursued by plants. The first fruits to drop are "Ripe apples," and the i reader is prepared at once for a trap and for a fall. But | I unlike Adam, the poet need not reach for the fruit; it drops iabout his head. The pace increases and a heightened sense jof urgency results from the telescoping of the ripening i i process; all the fruits are simultaneously ripe, and even jthe fermentation of the grapes is unnecessary, for they j 1 1 crush their Wine" upon the poet's mouth. The demand placed! i 1 i upon the poet by these offerings of forced pleasure exceeds ] | ' : his ability to react, ingest, and savor. He stumbles, is t jensnared, and falls. ! | The particular fruits offered are unique in another respect; all except the "Ripe Apples" are the result of man's intrusion into nature; the nectarine and curious peach iare the products of experimentation and grafting. Melons jwere exotic imports in the seventeenth century. Marvell repeatedly condemns such violations of nature by "Luxurious man." And the many critics and scholars who have seen this section as Marvell's paradise, that garden of the golden age in which man finds his best environment, overlook the poet's deliberate use of the over-sensuous to construct the poem's !second labyrinth. The flowers and trees of Stanza one no i |longer weave a "Garland of repose." The fruits of those j seemingly benign trees are in this section of the poem the products of man's over-curious art, and as such are not so innocent as they at first appear. They are a part of "all that's made" (1. 47) and make the sensuous and sensual snare! which fells the poet. But it is a felix culpa, and the paradox of the "fortunate fall" as treated by Marvell is more "witty" than is usual even in the seventeenth century. ! In the first place, Marvell has been "playing" with the image of a maze introduced in line one. In escaping from | the first maze, the poet (and the reader) move into the morel beguiling maze of nature. But it is no wonder that most i | commentators fail to perceive the outlines of this second | maze. The poet has so subtly constructed the labyrinth of sensuous and sensual images that the reader, as well as the j Ispeaker, is "Insnar'd with flow'rs." It is almost as if the plants, which have been "made" by "Luxurious man," do in j I their turn make a snare or labyrinth to trap man. ; ! Along with the garden convention of the maze, Marvell i icontinues to parody the traditional view that the satiating i i of the senses, which is possible in a garden, could ever be j the specific cause of a mystical experience. In "A Dialogue! between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure," Marvell is more clear in his rejection of the immediate power of "Natures banquet" (1. 14) to lead to spiritual growth. i ; pleasure invites the soul to j ! Welcome the Creations Guest, j Lord of Earth, and Heavens Heir. Lay aside that Warlike Crest, i ... ... ■ j And of Nature's banquet share: Where the Souls of fruits and flow'rs j Stand prepar'd to heighten yours. I : ' | But the Soul replys. I sup above, and cannot stay to bait so long upon the way. (11. 11-18) To Marvell, distraction not meditation is the result of the j I ultimate extension of the senses. The increasing excess of I 'motion in the material world has built up stanza by stanza i and comes to resemble the agitation of the drop of dew trem-j jbling on the "purple rose" in the poem "On a Drop of Dew." j I As the soul, symbolized by the dew, longs for release from | i i the material world, so also does the poet in "The Garden" I seek release from the over-lush world of sense pleasures. i What is fortunate in man's fall described in this stanza is that it precipitates the poet's escape from this i maze of sensuousness into a higher mystical state, and only in this respect do the senses lead to a spiritual plane. Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less, j Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does streight 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. At last, free of the snare of physical sensation, Marvell | I can find the "happiness" which is distinct from "pleas- | j u r e ."52 i I _ | j 1 | ^2Leishman, p. 312. j Most critics regard this stanza as the most difficult land the most crucial to understanding the poem. Part of thej difficulty lies in the ambiguity of the phrase, "from pleas-j i : ure less." Empson was probably the first to note the ambi- j i i guity.53 Leishman says it is "unintentional," an artistic I | mistake not uncommon in Marvell's work (p. 312). Leishman continues his analysis of this stanza by suggesting an Aris-; i totelian interpretation of the passage with happiness, the | I I highest goal of the poet, associated with reason, intellect,; land contemplation. But Leishman is forcing an Aristotelian ■ mode onto a Platonic-Christian mystic who, unlike most Aris- itotelians, is not content to stop with the happiness of j conscious intellect and reason implied by "mind." Such a J I j position is in keeping with Leishman's point that Marvell is "arguing in images" to create the debate-paradox motif that I Leishman believes to be central to "The Garden." j Actually, Marvell uses deliberate ambiguity; as under stood in context with the entire poem, he means in this ling both that the mind is made less by pleasure, which is a desirable state in the meditative process; and he means as well that the mind withdraws from pleasure into happiness. The key to such a paradox is an awareness of the traditional! Platonic distinction Marvell is observing between the lower : ! pleasure of the senses, the higher happiness of mind, and | i i i - I 1 JJSome Versions of Pastoral, pp. 127-131. the highest ecstasy of the soul.Thus, having withdrawn from the senses, the mind proceeds to the next phase of meditation in which the mind abstracts and creates from its i own perceptions, "Far other Worlds and Other Seas." And to ; make way for the activities of the soul, the mind must annihilate "all that's made / To a green Thought in a green Shade." In using the color green to symbolize this supra national state, Marvell has provided critics and scholars j iwith a particularly stimulating puzzle which has called ! forth amazing ingenuity. For example, Leishman concludes, j ; j after reference to several Latin sources, that Marvell meansj I I |that "his thought is as green and innocent as the thoughts j of Adam among the innocent, newly created greenery of the j i j jAge of Innocence" (pp. 313-315). And on one level of inter-j Ipretation such an explanation seems valid; however, what , Leishman, Tayler, Toliver, and even Empson— the latter of i whom offers a list of every instance of Marvell's use of green (pp. 127-131)— overlook is one very simple but rele vant meaning of "green." The humblest gardener was aware of the soothing effects of green upon the sight and mind. If a [man's] sight be obfuscated and dull, as it may easily be, with continually [studying] there is no better ; way to relieve it, than to view the pleasant greenesse of ; Herbes, which is the way that Painters use, when they have almost spent their sight by their most earnest contem- ! 54 Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York, 1937), p. 43. plation of brighter objects; neither doe they only feed the Eyes, but comfort the wearied Braine . . . 55 And Ralph Austen sees the practical value of green to be that it is the color "accounted most helpfull to the sight" i(p. 70). It seems that in addition to the primordial inno- 1 cence of green and its association with hope, suggested by its traditional usage, Marvell also has in mind the visual ! j and psychic effect of green which was as appreciated in the j I ; iseventeenth century as it is today. Thus, greenness becomes; for Marvell the quintessence of all that is soothing to the j i over-wrought senses and spirit of the speaker. This univer-; | sal greenness is the final simplicity to which the mind | r j annihilates "all that's made" — summing up in "made” the i industry of men on the material earth and all of man's over- curious and perverse artifice. The "green thought" and the !"green shade" exist simultaneously, thus reconciling into = ! } \ I the oneness of the color the abstractness of thought and the concreteness of the material world which is at last dis- j j solved into a shade. . i l Yet even such a state of transcendent oneness is not Marvell's final goal since it is an activity of the mind, not the soul. What the poet has achieved is the mystical penetration of the significance of both nature and mind— a necessary step toward the ultimate ecstasy of the soul. Ini j j !terms of a literal descent, Marvell conveys this newly | __ ^William coles, The Art of Simpling (London, 1656), P* 66. _ ...... j achieved rudimentary understanding of nature. Here at the Fountains sliding foot, Or at some Fruit-trees mossy root, (11. 49, 50) This descent to the fundamentals or "roots" of matter 'reveals the poet's triumph over nature's entangling munifi- cence in the earlier passages. To paraphrase the Biblical injunction, Marvell implies that the mystic must paradox ically gain the whole of sensuous nature and transcend it inj order to "lose" his soul in mystical ecstasy. From this physical abasement in which "the Bodies Vest" (1. 51) may 1 i now be cast aside, the poet's "Soul" is free to ascend into j the boughs (1. 52, 53). There transformed into a bird, the Plotinian symbol for the soul, according to Wallerstein (p. j 217, 218), the poet adorns himself for "longer flight" (1. | I I 1 I j56). Marvell's rather ill-defined mysticism may owe more toj j j jthe Oriental than to the Platonic or Neo-Platonic.56 It is j i • ; on this point of anticipation rather than realization that Marvell culminates the ecstasy of meditation. It is appro- j i ; priate that the last word of Stanza seven is "Light." The plumes of the Bird are deliberately preened and made silvery to reflect and refract the "various Light" so that the soul,‘ in the figure of the bird, begins to participate in the 56Cf.. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, pp. 119-127. : , 57 ' transcendent Light even before it takes flight. I i I At last the soul escapes the disorder of sensuousness j land artifice. It is the total experience— the escape from I i [society, the indulgence and transcendence of the body, the 'emergence of mind, and the ecstasy of the soul— that Marvell jsums up in the word "Such" at the beginning of Stanza eight. Most commentators regard the garden as a paradise throughout the poem. However, it is only when the particulars of the ; I j physical garden have led to a state of mystical ecstasy thatj jMarvell specifically refers to paradise in the most dis- j i I jtinctly Edenic terms of the poem. At one time paradise was i !a fait accompli; now it is an intermittent achievement made I possible only through deliberate meditation. | i The past tense, "Such was that happy Garden-state, j . . ." betrays the precariousness of such an experience. j The poet recalls that such a "Place so pure, and sweet" (1. j i 59) was also vulnerable. ' I : Such was that happy Garden-state, ' While Man there walk'd without a Mate: After a Place so pure, and sweet, | What other help could yet be meet! But 'twas beyond a Mortal's share To wander solitary there: Two Paradises 'twere in one To live in Paradise alone. Most recent explicators agree with Lawrence Hyman that Mar vell means that an androgynous Adam would have escaped the 57 . i Light here is understood to be the Light of the Ideal [described first by Plato in The Republic and later in a more elaborate and systematic manner by Plotinus in The Enneads. complexities, tensions, and snares of sex and the temptation: jof the apple offered by Eve.®® In addition, Marvell may jalso be suggesting that the essence of man's fall was his ! i departure from the consuming desire for union with God or j i Light. Such a state of mystical oneness would produce the | paradox of wandering "solitary there" (1. 62) and yet enjoy-H ling "Two Paradises." Thus, there is a spiritual oneness, unnoted by most commentators, as well as a sexual oneness in the solitude of the androgynous Adam. Two Paradises 1twere in one I To live in Paradise alone. | (1. 63, 64) : i With the reminder of the lost paradise, Marvell returns ! to an ambiguous "real" garden made symbolic and meaningful by the poet's experience of ecstasy and his renewed aware ness of the precariousness of all earthly states. How well the skilful Gardner drew Of flow'rs and herbes this Dial new; j | Where from above the milder Sun Does through a fragrant Zodiack run; And, as it works, th'industrious Bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholsome Hours Be reckon'd but with herbs and flow'rs! Again Marvell's use of seventeenth-century garden traditions is apparent in this concluding stanza. As "God almighty planted the first Garden," so now, as a "skilful i I ( !Gardner," He draws "Of flow'rs and herbes this Dial new." i 58"Marvell's 'Garden,'" pp. 13-22. -At last the poet may now exclaim, ''How well," , instead of j ; i "How vainly," labor may be expended. The rich image of the sundial made of flowers and Iherbes reconciles with great compactness the themes of the j entire poem. The fact that sundials, which were placed in the midst of a garden, bore mottoes, suits Marvell's final intention to affix a moral lesson to the emblem of nature. Of course, the moral to be read in this dial goes beyond the; ! I commonplaces usually inscribed on dials. Marvell's is a floral dial, divinely drawn and encompassing the entire garden. Surprisingly little scholarly and critical atten tion has been addressed to this final and important image. i ; ' l ! In his charming book Ye Sundial Booke, Geoffrey W. | Henslow deplores the "lugubrious" lack of variety in the mottoes, most of which remind the reader of the brevity of life and encourage the reader to seize the day.59 For exam ple, : i Amyddst ye fflowres I tell ye houres. Tyme wanes awaye As fflowres decaye. Beyond ye tombe Ffreshe fflowrets bloome. Soe man shall ryse Above ye skyes. 1665 And this inscription of a dialogue between the sundial and la passenger is on an ancient dial at Millrigg, Culgarth, j ! 59(London, 1914), p. 18. hear Penrith. i Dial Staie, Passenger Tell me thy name Thy nature. Pass. Thy name is die All. I am a mortall Creature. Dial Since my name And thy nature Soe agree Think on thy selfe When thou looks i Upon me. i 1615 | ; I This inscription is on a pedestal of a dial erected in the j ! gardens of Drummond Castle, near Crieff, and mentions the iZodiack. I | We are the hours on the pillare you see, I Marked by the shadows that ever flee. ! And move with the sun in its course on high, 1 j We who are dark and dusky in hue, Mark out the hours on the zodiac blue, . . . 1630 | i I |Yet it is just these seventeenth-century commonplaces which ; | Marvell turns to significant and subtle use. Even the over-' used pun on "die-all" becomes fresh in the context of the fall in Stanza eight. Man's fall causes change and death tp enter the world, yet even this drastic disorder to existence! ! imay take a new form if viewed from the vaster perspective imade possible by meditation. The resulting order is in the j form of the "Dial new," and the inevitable force of change bay be seen everywhere in nature; yet at the same time it is, i ; ] flowers and herbs that tell the hours of this change. In i spite of the disorder death and time impose upon the post- | : lapsarian garden, a new order and a new beauty are created I i from the very stuff of this garden— its flowers and herbs. To look on nature is to see time and death everywhere, but 'their terror is somewhat mitigated if one may also read in | I the flowers and herbs the promise of renewal, beauty, and j j i isweetness. ! I i Unlike the maze or the ensnaring tangle of vegetation, j ! | the dial reconciles art and nature because it is divinely drawn from the flowers and herbs of nature with the inten- ; i j ition to instruct, not to "amaze" or to ensnare man. Neither i !is it now the "Garland of repose" which is now needed to jsoothe the tired, world-weary poet. Instead it is a sundial |which suggests the need for a return to activity and mean- j : ingful labor in a world of time. With the perspective I ; |gained in meditation it will not be a return to the "unces- j sant Labours" of confused men. Man may learn from the j "industrious Bee" who telescopes in its briefer life span the limitation of man's life, and he may discover as well the honor of wise labor. Marvell seems to pun on sweet in the next line, implying that the honey produced by the bee | las it moves about the floral dial parallels the sweetness of I the "practical" labors of the poet's meditation in the gar- | i I i ! den and of his anticipated activity in the world. j In addition to recalling the realm of time, Marvell luses the floral dial to reassert the proper order and sig- i ! nificance of the vegetable world. The flowers and herbs which once ensnared the poet in over-sensuousness are now noj longer aggressive but, as part of the dial, are the charming! yet serious reminders of the lost, timeless garden. The iplants can now be enjoyed as a delight to the senses— fra- ; ! ! jgrant and sweet— but they are also a "wholesome" and essen- j jtial element in the emblem of nature created to instruct iman. The floral dial admonishes and reassures all who pass i I ! I ; jthrough the necessary meditative steps required to under- jstand its lesson. Here, as in "To His Coy Mistress," Mar- j veil has not "made the sun stand still"; and the sun is less! bright than the original Platonic-Christian Sun. Though paradise is lost and with it the possibility of unmixed t I pleasure in nature, the "milder Sun" is still luminous | i enough to cast a shadow on the floral dial and to draw forthj |a comforting fragrance. j Although Marvell treats nature, especially in "The Gar-1 den," as an emblem, God is not the Great Geometer that Sir Thomas Browne declared. To Marvell, nature is more ambigu ous and its lessons more subtle. God is a gracious time keeper who draws floral dials, not geometric figures, to |suggest the aspect of eternity behind all change. As in I i "Upon Appleton House," Marvell notes the lesser order now i j ! prevailing in the post-Edenic world; but with the perspec- tive gained in the intense experience of the senses, the mind, and the soul made possible through a garden medita tion , the poet arrives at a new peace with the activities of: a world of time and a new joy in the beauty of nature. CHAPTER III "DISORDERLY ORDER" IN JOHN MILTON'S EDEN John Milton reveals a sophisticated awareness of the aesthetic value of controlled disorder in his poetic de scriptions of the Garden in Paradise Lost. Although consid erable scholarly labor has been spent in tracing sources for Milton's Eden even in comparison to the formidable mass of research devoted to the poet's theology, science, and poli tics— the Garden, especially in its aesthetic, visual as pects, seems to suffer relative neglect. Of those scholars who examine Milton's sources for Eden, Sister Mary I. Cor coran, in her study Milton's Paradise with Reference to the Hexameral Background,^ seems most thoroughly to trace the Biblical and classical origins of the hexameral tradition appropriated by Milton. She believes that Peter Heylyn's Microcosmos (1657) and Samuel Purchas' His Pilgramage (1617) contain verbal parallels to Milton's descriptions of Eden "too close and too individual to be attributed merely to the use of common sources" (pp. 15, 19, and 20). The main source is, according to Corcoran, Genesis 1:27, 28; 2:7-15 ^Washington, D.C., 1945. 79 ' ' 80] ' i (p. 24); she lists other important sources in the following i j . . order: St. Augustine's City of God, XI, 21, 22; St. Thomas'] I Summa Theoloqica, IV, 319 ff.; and from the Protestant tra- ] dition she cites Calvin, Hall, and Weemes (p. 124). She | suggests that Milton's sources for the ornamentation of the j Garden are St. Basil, the Jewish writers, Purchas, Heylyn, Diodorus, Spenser, and the classics. Watson Kirkconnell in ] ! I The Celestial Cycle (Toronto, 1952) presents an illuminating! collection of analogues in an attempt to "make the most ] I significant parallels to Paradise Lost accessible, in whole j or in part, to all serious students of Milton" (Introduc- j ; l Ition, p. vii). Among the analogues included in whole or in ] i ! part are Caedominian Genesis; Du Bartas, La Sepmaine and La Seconde Semaine; Spenser, Hymne of Heavenly Love; Grotius, j Adamus Exul; Andreini, L ' Adamo ; Fletcher, Purple Island; j I Salandra, Adamo Caduto; and Vondel, Lucifer and Adam in ! I ' Ballingschap. More recently A. Bartlett Giamatti in The ) j i Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic analyzes the vari-f ous treatments of the garden paradise beginning with the Old i Testament, continuing through the Italian and English epic, I and—concluding with Milton's Garden in Paradise Lost, which ] Giamatti declares to be "the sum of all that came before it'i (p. 295).2 Of course, those commentators on Paradise Lost 2Merritt Y. Hughes, from whose edition John Milton, j Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York, 19t>7) all quota tions from Miltonls work will be taken, believes the poet's ] \"main debt was to Diodorus's description of the Nyseian ! who deal with matters theological, such as Maurice Kelly,^ and matters scientific, such as Kester Svendson,4 must al most inevitably touch upon the Garden. Milton's Eden is also important to those historians of taste, such as Beverly Sprague Allen^ and Jean Hagstrum,^ who in tracing I the fashions in cultural expression from period to period have come to consider the taste in garden paintings and the j t art of gardening itself to be an important index of the ' i sensibility of an age.^ Surprisingly little study has been j Isle.1 1 This description was later "embroidered in Purchas' I Pllgramage . . . and later in Heylyn's Cosmography" (p. 280, note 132). Cf. Mordecai Clark, "Miltons Abyssinian Para dise," University of Texas Studies in English, XXIX (1950), 1138-41; J. M. Evans, "Genesis B. and Its Background," Review |of English Studies (Fall, 1963), 1-16; S. N. Kramer, "Sume rian Paradise Myth," The American Journal of Archaeology (January, 1946), 176 ff.; Thomas Kranidas, "Adam and Eve in the Garden: A Study of Paradise Lost, Book V," English Lan- guage Notes, IV, 71-83; Thomas Pakenham, "On the Site of the Earthly Paradise," (London) Times Literary Supplement, Feb ruary 15, 1957, p. 104; and D. Starnes, "The Hesperean Gar- |den," University of Texas Studies in English, XXXI (1952), j |42—51. Giamatti's study includes an annotated bibliography ; at the conclusion of his chapter on Milton's Garden. ! ^This Great Argument: A Study of Milton's "De Doctrinal Christiana" as a Gloss Upon Paradise Lost (Princeton, 194l) . j 4Milton and Science (Cambridge, 1956). ^Tides in English Taste (Cambridge, 1937). 6The Sister Arts (Chicago, 1958). ^However definite Milton may have been in his own con- i ception of the prelapsarian Eden, his Paradise has proved to be many quite different things to different men in different ages. In fact, the various interpretations of Milton's Edeii jare some indication of varying aesthetic tastes from period to period. These interpretations are also a revelation of the prevailing habit of mind in regard to such subjects as j done on the physical aspects of Milton's Eden in relation to; I the seventeenth-century gardening and landscape traditions theology, psychology, and philosophy. For example, Joseph wartoh (Allen, p. 117) and Hugh Walpole (Allen, p. 117) in ithe eighteenth century regarded Milton's Garden as an antic-; jipation of the "natural" garden favored in their time. Not ; only do such commentators unquestioningly assume that Mil ton's Garden is undisputably "natural" but they attribute to: the poet an achievement in prophecy in the delineation of Eden which was probably not Milton's intention however much j he may have wished to be a prophet in the more serious, taatters of man's destiny (Bk. Ill, 33-36). The eighteenth- i century writers and landscape fanciers are not alone in | assuming that Milton's concept of Paradise is unique in its ! emphasis on the "natural" and the irregular. In the nine teenth century, the drawings for Paradise Lost by William Blake and John Martin, though very different in approach and! technique, have in common a rather "romantic" preoccupation | with the mystical, the dramatic, and the mysterious. I Blake's pervasive abhorrence of Reason and his strong reli- | ance on the mystical and instinctual would seem to leave him! ill-equipped to express Milton's vision. And although j Blake's engravings may emphasize the tension between Reason ! and spirituality in a manner not entirely Miltonic, Blake { does focus primarily on the figures human and divine rather j than on the landscape of Eden. In this respect, at least, | Blake's engravings more than Martin's seem to be more in j keeping with Milton's repeatedly stated purpose to "justify j the ways of God to man" (Bk. I, 26). Martin, in his plates j of 1827, reveals an exaggerated sense of the drama of land scape; the figures are greatly reduced and the human and j divine drama is subordinate to the dominating landscape. Unlike Blake, who seems to draw upon his own private vision | of Milton's Eden, Martin appears to derive his emphasis on ! landscape from the eighteenth-century taste for the pictur- | esque, "natural" garden. Only Martin's unique handling of I space, which results in a sense of the vast and the infinitei distinguishes his illustrations from the countless landscape! drawings of the earlier century. Nicolson suggests that this sense of the infinite had its beginnings in the seven- ; iteenth century and came to full realization with the Roman tic poets. Cf. her books The Breaking of the Circle, and Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory for a more elaborate account of the importance of this sense of the vast and the j resulting "Aesthetics of the Infinite" dominant in the romantic movement. ! i r ........ - ............................ — ■ 83 in England and on the Continent. Equally neglected is the relation of Milton's concept of Eden to the "ideal" gardens j and landscapes depicted in Italian, French, and English art,; particularly paintings. The tendency of most Miltonists and! {the chroniclers of taste has been to elaborate a possible ! background for understanding Milton's creation of Eden with out offering a sustained or persuasive close reading of the : ! various garden passages of Paradise Lost. Giamatti, in his | ! i jattempt to place Milton's Paradise in the perspective of the | ! garden in Renaissance epics does sustain an analysis of Mil-j i i {ton's treatment of Paradise in relation to Biblical and ! j j classical traditions. And it would seem at first glance ! ! ! that Giamatti has perceived Milton's poetic intention in the| i poet's employing controlled disorder through the use of ! certain ambiguous, classical allusions which occur in the Garden passages. As a source study and as a provocative i interpretive aid, Giamatti's work is of considerable value. i i {But, as this present study will later seek to reveal, jGiamatti's analysis does violence to certain of Milton's most seriously espoused views. And in spite of earlier O studies done in a similar vein by W. B. Hunter, Jr., M. W. ®"Eve's Demonic Dream," English Language History, XIII ; (1946), 255-265. Bundy,9 and Millicent Bell,1® a much fuller and more careful analysis of Milton's concept of mild disorder and controlled! i irregularity as an aesthetic principle operating throughout | the epic, but particularly in the Garden passages, remains |to be done. Such an analysis will be based, in part, on a new perspectus of the seventeenth-century tastes in gardens and landscapes and on the foundation of these tastes in Continental art. Without contradicting the valuable source I ! [ jstudies of Corcoran, Kirkconnell, or Giamatti, and without ; i f suggesting a specific new source for Milton's Eden, it is | both possible and necessary to re-examine Paradise Lost in ! ! f ! terms of the visual, physical aspects traditionally used by j j ! jartists and literary theorists to express the aesthetic and i i i moral perfection of the first Garden. It will become apparent that certain irregular features of Eden and its j ! ’ I inhabitants may have their origin in Milton's visual memory | of landscape scenes and paintings which he saw in his youth.! ' i Although Milton's treatment of disorder in the Garden j is of central interest to this study, the poet's sophisti- ' icated awareness of not only the aesthetic but the more far- reaching implications of "disorderly order" is apparent throughout Paradise Lost. Indeed, it might quite plausibly 9"Milton's Prelapsarian Adam," Research Studies of the! iUniversity of Washington, XII (1946), 163-184. ’ i 10Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXX (1955), 1192-1202. be argued tha;t the concept of a fellx culpa, often regarded by commentators such as Svendson (p. 79) and John Diek- |hoff,H as central to Milton's "great argument," is the ultimate moral and theological counterpart to a principle at! operation in the poet's thinking on matters of science, metaphysics, and ethics as well as aesthetics. That is to say, that for Milton not only grace is made possible by the I fall but perhaps a greater beauty and harmony is also pos sible as a result of, or in spite of, the marred perfection | in prelapsarian nature. ; i i As with Andrew Marvell's "The Garden," critical and i scholarly attention has so often centered on other matters— j politics, classical traditions, philosophy, and religion— ! |that the obvious fact that Milton's imaginatively created ! j |Garden is related to the gardening traditions and his pri- i jvate experiences and travel has been neglected. To emphasize the visual aspects of Milton's achievement! in this area is to depart from the critical commonplace that; he is perhaps the most audial of all poets to write in Eng- | lish. Of course, it is undeniable that, following the exam-; pie of his father,I2 Milton was delighted by music. Mil ton's early pleasure in music and sound continued and is ^ Milton's "Paradise Lost": A Commentary on the Argu ment (New York, 1$46). | 12Cf. Ernest Brennecke, Jr., John Milton the Elder and iHis Music (New York, .1938). I I apparent in nearly all his work. His blindness in later years may have increased slightly his intense awareness of jthe audial. But much of the force of T. S. Eliot's asser- j tion that Milton wrote as one of the two great blind poets of England, both of whom because of blindness were reduced !to audial imagery,^3 is mitigated by the fact that much of Milton's early poetry, such as "L'Allegro," " I I Penseroso," j "Lycidas," "Arcades," "At a Solemn Music," and Comus were jail written long before his blindness. They celebrate his i | I pleasure in music while demonstrating his knowledge as well.; He often expresses his desire for metaphysical harmony and j i - ) order through images drawn from music. j I ! : Such sweet compulsion doth in music ly, j To lull the daughters of Necessity, I And keep unsteddy Nature to her Law. ("Arcades," 68-70) I ] Yet however much Milton depended upon such images, it is j j i |difficult to conclude with Hagstrum that "one of the charac-i I i teristic motions of [Milton's] imagination is to approach | pictorialist conventions and then to withdraw into other i forms of expression" (The Sister Arts, p. 127). Those otheij forms of expression are, according to Hagstrum, usually audial; and the pattern of approach to the pictorialial and then the withdrawal to the audial is said to be repeated so! joften as to seem deliberate (p. 127). Hagstrum does admit J i I , ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ^^ Milton, pp. 11, 12. Cf. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Mil-j S tonic Setting (Cambridge, 1938). that the "pictorialist conventions" open for Milton, as they did for Dante, the "transcendent and invisible reality" (p. : 128). But more than Hagstrum's brief statement on the : I importance of pictorialist conventions to Milton's imagina- ! j 1 tion is necessary. I The poet's interest in the visual is apparent as early i as his writing of "L'Allegro." The sun rises "Rob'd in ; i jflames, and Amber light" (1. 61), revealing a scene peopled j | j with a Milkmaid (1. 65), a Plowman (1. 64), a Mower (1. 66),; i | and a Shepherd (1. 67). The poet next sees | . . . the Landscape [which] round [it measures, Russet Lawns and Fallows Gray, j Where the nibbling flocks do stray; Mountains on whose barren breast The laboring clouds do often rest; | Meadows trim with Daisies pied, j Towers and Battlements next [the j [poet's eye] sees i Bosom'd high in tufted Trees I s ! (11. 70-77) j : Milton here creates a scene in which the details of the sev-j | ;enteenth-century pastoral setting are as visual and as cal- ! culated in their effect of "natural" bucolic pleasure as those in an eighteenth-century "picturesque" landscape draw ing. While in "L'Allegro" the rustic setting is appropri ately treated in a low style, the same command of descrip tive powers which conveys a physical environment through ! i selecting detail remains with the blind poet as he describes; i I the ideal Garden in the high style of his epic poem. Since j Hagstrum is primarily interested in demonstrating the inter-j dependence of the arts, especially the visual and the liter-j ary, it would have been very much to his purpose to pursue j more fully the very real knowledge of painting, landscape ! art, and gardening that Milton reveals throughout Paradise Lost. I To Addison's remark that "Milton would never have been i able . . . to have laid out his Paradise, had he not seen j the gardens of Italy,"^^ one is inclined to add that the poet could not have created his Eden without seeing the paintings of Italy as well. Too often it is assumed, even j by historians of taste,that during the sixteenth and sev-j enteenth centuries the Italian sensibility in respect to I i nature was confined to a taste for the strictly formal gar- i ; den. In the course of discussing Milton's awareness of i j Italian landscapes and art, it will become apparent that i ' I nature in her more varied forms appealed to the Italian and the Continental eye. Unfortunately, Milton's tone in The Second Defense of the English People, in which he tells of his Italian jour ney, is colored by the need to defend himself against charges of youthful excesses. The events of the tour are somewhat glossed over by the writer's urgent need to convey -^The Spectator, no. 267 (Philadelphia, 1832), p. 248. ^Allen, H 6; Hagstrum, pp. 74-77. t i his unsullied devotion to the Protestant cause. Yet David I Masson, in his monumental biography of Milton, makes clear |that the young scholar would have seen the art of the ! ' | masters— Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto— as ' | | yell as that of the contemporary artists, such as Pietro da i Corona of the Florentine school, and Salvator Rosa of the Neapolitan; the latter was a young man in 1638 when Milton j ' ; began his tour of Italy. j ' ; j As a Protestant Milton was free from the necessity of a; I : ritual religious journey to the Roman Catholic holy places i ' , Of Italy, and he could pursue with zeal his private inter- 1 i 17 ' bsts. ' That his itinerary was full is clear from the re- I ; marks of his redoubtable guide, Manso, Marquis of Villa, who! i after diligently escorting his new acquaintance through Naples excuses himself to Milton for the few omissions of j the tour because, in Milton's words, "I would not be more ! I close in the matter of religion."-^8 Milton found Manso him-; i | Iself to be "truly most friendly to me, he himself leading me! | I round through the different parts of the city ..." (The ■ ! i Second Defense, p. 829). In his sojourn to Naples and other; j 16I (London, 1859), 713. H James H. Hanford, in A Milton Handbook (New York, 1926, 1954), notes the lack o£ satisfactory scholarship done jay either English-speaking or Italian scholars concerning Milton's activity during the Italian journey, p. 401. i ' ; | 18The Second Defense of the English People, edited by M. Y. Hughes, p. 829. 90 ■ I Italian cities, Milton surely would have visited the dis played art and antiquities, the churches, private salons, and gardens as he did in Rome (Second Defense, p. 829). It j may well be that he studied the antiquities of Rome and the ! i art works of Italy's other great cities with some of the enthusiasm for beauty he had expressed a year earlier in a letter to his friend Charles Diodati, "Ceres never sought ! her daughter Proserpina . . . with greater ardor than I do |this idea of Beauty."19 ; ! j That Milton was to remember the visual details of his | visit to certain attractions in Maples and Rome years later j during the composition of Paradise Lost has been argued by | I Marjorie Hope Nicolson20 and Rebecca W. Smith.21 Micolson : j demonstrates the importance of the landscape of Maples and | i the surrounding area, particularly the Phelagraean Fields, [ as a source for Hell in Book 1, 11. 228, 229; 670-74. The > i i i thesis of Smith is that Milton's description of Pandemonium , ; i at the end of Book I, 11. 757-798 is drawn from the poet's visual memory of St. Peter's in Rome. Her argument is basedj on a close reading of the text in the light of seventeenth- 19The Works of John Milton, XII (Mew York, 1931-42), 26. 2®"Milton's Hell and the Phelagraean Fields," The Uni- ; i versity of Toronto Quarterly, VII (1938), 500-513. i 1 21"The Source of Milton's Pandemonium," Modern Philol ogy, XXIX (1941), 187-198. i '..“ . “ ... . ............" 91 2 2 ' century pictures and plates of St. Peter's.. Militant Protestant though he was, Milton seems to havel taken an inspiration for Paradise as well as for Hell from I 03 his impressions of the landscape and art of Italy. J Some aspects of Milton's Garden are strikingly like certain Italian landscape and garden paintings and also strikingly j. . . , like the natural landscape of crags, hills, and wild vegeta-; jtion surrounding Naples.24 In the paintings of Salvator Rosa and others it is ; ‘ i |apparent that for them the ideal landscape was best repre- ! i ! ! I sented by use of these wilder features of nature. Rosa's | ! paintings are perhaps the most famous reminders that long i before the eighteenth century the Italians had found the ir regular, the deliberately disordered and the dramatically 22There are, of course, difficulties and dangers in- j volved for the critic who attempts the feat of relating the | visual arts to the literary. Perhaps the rather confused efforts of some critics to make the Baroque a meaningful concept in literary history and criticism should qualify anyj over-enthusiastic attempt to apply the principles of one art |form to another. One such effort is Wylie Sypher's Four j Stages of Renaissance Style (New York, 1955). Others in- | elude Lowery Nelson^s The baroque Lyric in Renaissance Po- j etry (New Haven, 1961), and Roy Danlell's Milton, Mannerism j and Baroque (Toronto, 1963). The direction of this present | study is not to propose new critical norms but, rather, simply to offer a new scope for assessing the range of Mil ton's memory and imagination. 23Milton spent about four months in Florence and Rome. Two months were spent in Naples and one month in Venice. The rest of his time in Italy was divided among the smaller j jtowns— Bologna, Pisa, Leghorn, and Genoa (The Second De- !fense, pp. 828, 829). I — ! | 24See Hagstrum, pp. 8-35. "natural" scene to be aesthetically pleasing. Although jRosa's paintings caught the imagination of certain eight- j eenth-century arbiters of taste who seem to have created thej impression that Rosa's landscapes were unique when, in fact,! | j his concept of the ideal landscape as wild and irregular had; | i long been sanctioned by generations of earlier artists, j . . . , including certain of the masters. It will become clear also; i ’ i jthat although the hills, crags, and grottos of the Neapoli- j jtan landscape were particularly inspiring for such treat- ! I I iment, painters throughout Renaissance Italy found such a j | I vision of landscape congenial for secular scenes and for | idealized religious scenes as well. In contrast to these landscape paintings, the actual j gardens in Italy at that time seem to have been "governed byj an architectural spirit" in which "the symmetry of the gar- j i den and its various divisions echoes the symmetry of the | house and indicates their compositional kinship" (Allen, Vol. I, 116). Drawings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen tury estate gardens generally confirm such a generalization. ! Again such a dichotomy illustrates the hazy distinction between the desire for mathematical regularity and the simultaneous desire for spontaneous irregularity. The paintings which are either exclusively landscape j ' ; i studies or which include an important landscape passage reveal a distinct taste for this spontaneous irregularity. I i |In gaining perspective on Milton's Eden, it is necessary toj remember the distinction between what was the ideal land- ! scape in a work of art and what was considered the ideal i landscape or garden in actual fact. Much of the confusion j I i iin the studies of Allen, Hagstrum, Giamatti, and others is ' j in part due to the failure to observe such a distinction or ; to perceive the disparity in what was the ideal in a paint- ; ing and what was the more common practice in actual garden plans. j I | | For his introduction to the varied landscape of Naples i i i : I and perhaps for an acquaintance with certain contemporary artists including Rosa, Milton was indebted to his aging and i ! O C | venerable host, Manso. In his Vita di Tasso, Manso dwells; on the particular "natural art" of the site of Naples (pp. 190-93). He praises the hills, the plains on the east, and the rich greenness of Posilipo on the west. Manso's de scription includes a catalogue of the historical and mythi- | cal associations of the area that would have appealed to the| i ardent classicist in Milton and perhaps have reinforced a | growing respect for the beauties of an untrammeled and ir- ; regular landscape. As Manso describes the scene from the | shore of the Bay of Naples, he sees on the right side The shores and rocks glorious by the sepulture of Virgil and Sannazaro by the grotto of Lucullus, the villa of Cicero, the still and the bubbling waters of Cumae, and the fires of Pozzuoli, all protected by the mountains of Baiae, the promontory of Miletus . . .." (pp. 790-93) ! ; ! ; ; | ^S^he edition of 1634, translated by Masson, p. 762. ' In addition to his knowledge of the great past of the krea# Manso is also aware of the "superabundance of all the ! I requisites of a pleasant life” which result from the fecun dity of nature in a southern climate. He delights in the • ' I wines# fruits# and flowers of his native city (Masson# p. ! 763). And# as Masson suggests# i With none the less pleasure would Milton behold all this, j because Tasso had beheld it before him# or because he had j read Manso's description of it . . .# or because the same Manso was with him to point out the separate beauties as he had pointed them out to Tasso fifty years before .... (p. 763) Even the situation of Manso*s villa "close by the hill of j Posilipo and the grotto of Pozzuoli"^® would serve to im- j j press Milton with the irregular and peculiar beauties of a ! I landscape very different from England. It is surprising j I that scholars have not before noted the striking appropri- j ateness of the landscape and the richness of the vegetation j i in the vicinity of Naples as a possible setting for Milton'^ Eden in Book IV, 11. 132-154, 171-177, and 208-268. The classical associations of the area, famous as the burial place of Virgil; the natural beauty of the spot# striking for its unfamiliarity to a northerner; and the almost perennial abundance of food must have impressed the "sensu- | ous Puritan" and remained# along with the Phelagarean Fields and St. Peter's# a part of those visual memories he carried: Masson determines the site of Manso's villa by docu mentary evidence from Appendix No. 5 to Walker's Historical Memoir of Italian Tragedy (1799), p. 763. back to England. ; Manso may also have been responsible for Milton's ac- l guaintance with some of Naples' artists and their work. As ! I > ; a young nobleman Manso had served with distinction as a sol-1 i | dier (Masson, 756), but the whole of his later life was j ! j taken up with art, philosophy, and the elegant amusements ofj a wealthy gentleman, including the writing of poetry, sev- j : I eral Dialogues, and his Life of Tasso (Masson, 756, 759). j By the time of Milton's arrival at Naples in 1638, Manso was the president and patron of two of Naples most famous insti tutions, the Oziosi and the Dei Nobili (Masson, p. 760). | l jBoth the Oziosi, an Academy much like the others currently | i I in vogue throughout Italy, and the Dei Nobili, an institute j for young Neopolitan nobles, were founded by Manso himself ! and encouraged intellectual and artistic culture. To Manso and his circle, the art theories of Giambattista Marino and Giorgio Vasari were undoubtedly a critical commonplace and jthe paintings of the masters and many of the more recent artists were already familiar. The well-read Milton, who | ! i had made a long study of how to fulfill his calling as a jpoet could hardly have been unaware of the artistic theories! of Vasari and Marino. Indeed, Marino had once been a guest | of Manso's, and Milton's Latin poem to Manso mentions the i "sweet-tongued Marini, who took pleasure in being called { I your foster child . . ." (Hughes' edition, p. 127). | i Of course, the critical principles of Marino and Vasarij Were known and influential in early seventeenth-century Eng-; land.2^ In theories of beauty in general and landscapes ! j specifically both "critics" were aware of the aesthetic value of the wild, the irregular, and the grotesque. lHagstrum observes that the value of antithetical contrast was recognized in ancient and Renaissance criticism, but not the' beauty of natural wildness and disorder. It was however, a practice of ; Renaissance painters, noticed and sanctioned by Vasari, to! use a background of crag and thicket, of rock and natural ; growth, to achieve the effect of startling natural contrast. (p. 76) i I ; I Hagstrum believes that this "practice passed to poetry, notably that of Ariosto.28 The Epistle to Spenser's Shep- heardes Calender reveals E. K.'s awareness of just how | ! | sophisticated the English had become as early as 1579 in j I * understanding and applying to writing a successful principle| of painting. In justifying Spenser's use of what might be j t ! i jtermed "rough and harsh termes" (The Epistle, p. 4), E. K. j icredits the poet with the self-conscious artistry of a j painter. : i But all as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze j and portraict not onely the daintie lineaments of beautye j but also rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts, that by the basenesse of such parts, more excellency may accrew to the principall; for oftimes we fynde ourselues, I know not how, singularly delighted with| ^Marino's theories of art were published in 1620 and | were available in England in 1623. His poem Adone was also j ; published in 1623. Vasari's Lives of Painters was known in i jseventeenth-century England (Hagstrum, pp. 104, 109). I 28Hagstrum, p. 76. Hagstrum refers to Orlando Furioso,! Ill, 34, 35, 37, 41, 52; VII, 11; and XII, 8-TffT ; j ! the shewe of such naturall rudenesse, and take great pleasure in that disorderly order.29 E. K. does not identify specific paintings or indicate if J the works he has in mind are Italian, French, or English. j What is important for understanding Milton's use of "dis orderly order" in creating Eden is to see the poet1s long conditioning for such an aesthetic principle before his ’ introduction to the actual landscape of Campania and art i 1 works of Italy. It is helpful at this point to qualify the tendency of I I modern scholars and critics, such as Nicolson (Mountain | Gloom and Mountain Glory, p. 267) and Allen (p. 121), to 'dismiss both the earlier Renaissance (especially Italian) concept of natural rudeness and Milton's later use of con trolled disorder as merely a simple device for creating a | contrast to an over-all perfection. The work of certain ! earlier Italian masters— "The Virgin of the Rocks" (Paris, j jLouvre) by da Vinci, "The Allegory of Justice and Mercy" i _ | I (Florence, Uffizi) by Bellini, and "The Esterhazy Madonna" j (Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts) by Raphael— can be made to ! fit such a critical commonplace. But these same artists who seemingly offer such clear-cut examples of the contrast of j an irregular landscape to a peaceful foreground demand more | i careful analysis. For example, da Vinci in his drawing [ ' ~ “ ...."............ ~ ' ' 98 ! I t "Landscape of 1473" (Florence, Uffizi), sketches rough hills, untrammeled trees, and gnarled vegetation without any! |apparent attempt to convey a sense of contrast to more or- I derly passages in the sketch. And in another work, a red 1 * i I j chalk drawing "Storm in the Alps" (Windsor, Windsor Castle),| he delights in nature's more violent aspects. In this work j ' i i ) lowering clouds dominate the scene of a storm breaking over ! rugged mountains. It is clear that da Vinci is interested jin the irregular qualities of nature in a manner far more jsophisticated than is suggested by the remarks of E. K. or | jlatter-day critics who see only an attempt at contrast in j I . . . | most Italian landscapes. One suspects that the character of| i : !"La Gioconda' 1 (Paris, Louvre) is akin to the elusive, irreg-j iular background and that the artist was attempting to offer a hint of ambiguity, remoteness, and unearthliness in both the woman and the landscape. Richard Turner, in his book | The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, j 1966), notes the deliberate irregularities and asymmetry used by da Vinci in delineating the shape of La Giaconda's face, her uneven smile, and her indirect gaze. The combina-j tion of foreground and background irregularity and ambiguity creates an effect of "restlessness and unresolved tensions" ; (pp. 28-30). In Giovanni Bellini's "St. Frances" (the Frick, New jYork) the artist achieves an "intimate connection between nature and human activity" (Turner, p. 62). The saint of ! " " “ ~ ~ ~ ' 99 ; j nature is surrounded by a morning landscape composed of sim-i | ' ; j?le, unadorned natural objects— flowers, herbs, animals, jtrees, and hills— but also apparent are signs of cultivation; land order in the plan of fields, buildings, and a lectern. I ' | Bellini carefully balances a sense of spontaneity and "naturalness" which is expressed in the irregular features Of the foreground dwelling of St. Frances and the rolling | i ' l orderliness of the cultivated countryside west of Venice j | |(Turner, p. 60). The equilibrium of order and irregularity j iis a great part of the harmony and beauty of this painting, i ! _ ! I The point is that, by the height of the Italian Renais-| jsance in the sixteenth century, several generations of i artists had been treating landscape as an important, even anj i integral, part of the total statement of a work of art. This deliberate co-ordination of meaning, feeling, and the ! landscape passages which is apparent in the early Renais- sance becomes even more significant in the middle 1500's in | jthe work of such masters as Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Bassano. Though handling such an approach in very dif- j ferent ways, these major painters often make use of the irregular features of landscape as an integral part of this statement in a manner that goes far beyond simple contrast or visual adornment. In Giorgione's mysterious painting "La Tempesta" the I foreground figures and the background landscape "fuse and from this union arises the dominant mood of the canvas" 100 (Turner, p. 88). With Giorgione comes the suggestive and evocative uses of nature's more aberrant moments and more ambiguous aspects (Turner, p. 90). While in Venice, Milton could easily have seen this painting or those of Giorgione's most famous pupil, Titian; but which painting Milton actually saw matters less than the fact that by the time of Milton's visit to salons and churches or private collec tions, the minor as well as the most influential artists for several decades had been elaborating with great sophistica tion the "psychological interrelationship of the narrative elements ^and the landscape passages" (Turner, p. 88). It is essential to note that very often one of the basic elements in this interrelationship is the irregular and varied land scape which serves to reinforce the narrative foreground. In those Italian paintings which deal with religious subjects, including Adam and Eve in Paradise, the use of this interrelationship and the manipulation of controlled irregularity is very similar to Milton's treatment of these elements in Paradise Lost and Eden in particular. In a manner much in keeping with the unity of vision apparent in these paintings, Milton expresses his similar vision of the harmony of the human, the divine, and the natural through his depiction of Eden. For the poet as for the painter . . . landscape is not seen for itself, but as a commen tary upon the human condition, as a speculation upon the tension between order and disorder in the world . . . the business of landscape painting was to evoke a moment of contemplation, wherein a man might discover his just ( 101' I I relationship to an often tumultuous world. (Turner, p. ! : 212) j An irregular and disordered landscape is often very | ; • i I | much in evidence in the works of those two extraordinarily ! j prolific artists, Titian and Tintoretto. To be aware of J many of their major works, Milton need only have visited the! jDoges Palace and the School of San Rocco while he was in jVenice during the spring of 1639. The most striking paral lels between the Renaissance artists' concept of Paradise i and Milton's written description of Eden becomes apparent i when the paintings are actually viewed in the context of the I igarden sections in Paradise Lost. For example, certain of |the lush details of Book IV, 11. 215-240 recall and almost serve as a verbal description of Tintoretto's representation of "Adam and Eve" (Venice, Accademia). ! In both the painting and the epic the landscape is of | | j jfar more importance than simple adornment, and both artist jand poet regard the irregular aspects of the landscape as i ( I ; appropriate for the ideal garden. Turner describes the 1 I Tintoretto woods as "moist and luxuriant" with a "lushness" j in the "leafy landscape" almost beyond equal in the century I (p. 124). Actually this painting is of special interest for another reason. It simultaneously depicts Adam before the fall in the foreground passage, and after the fall in the ;background passage. Tintoretto's lush foreground vegetation is untouched by what Milton was later to call "nice Art" ! t ! " ' ' ■ 102; (Bk. IV, 1. 241). The middle-ground scene has a stream which resembles the one in Book IV, 1. 234, and the back- j i | ground rocks and mountains all are very much in keeping withj {Milton's description of "umbrageous Grots and Caves" (Bk. j jlV, 1. 257). Milton, like Tintoretto, seems to be intrigued j with the possibility of representing a state of perfection, j i the potentials of temptation, and the consequences of the {fall with as much concentration as possible. Both Milton ; I {and Tintoretto approach their subject with the awareness J j that their audience consists of "the corrupt and intelli- { {gent."30 : | However, for a sense of intimacy Titian's "The Original^ Sin" (the Prado, Madrid) seems most to resemble Milton's Eden. The landscape is predominately stated in the fore ground with little hint of distance. The human drama is as immediate as the setting. Mature is fecund and specifically detailed as it is in Paradise Lost. In Titian's painting i there is no suggestion of a formal garden, but rather, the j bower is a setting for the relaxed enjoyment of the senses. { Milton's Eden abounds in animals (Bk. IV, 11. 340-345) , { i {and many of the paintings of the period, such as Jacopo {Bassano's "The Earthly Paradise" (Rome, Galleria Doria) {includes animals of a similar variety and in such a manner i !as to suggest a balance and harmony between the human ! i------------------------------------------------------------------ j 3®Prank Kermode, "Adam Unparadised" in The Living Mil-; |ton (New York, 1961), p. 90. j figures, animals, and all nature that Is suggestive of Mil- j ton's Garden. In the background a stream meanders, and i there is the suggestion of rugged hills.31 That there was no diminishing of the importance of the | rugged, irregular features in landscape painting at the time! iof Milton's visit to Italy is clear from the works of Salva-| tor Rosa and his contemporaries. Just how aware Milton was j of this aesthetic norm of controlled irregularity in an | ! I ideal landscape becomes clear on turning to the Garden j | sections of Paradise Lost. j i Milton judiciously employs the concept of "disorderly j order" so that the specific instances are a meaningful part j of his over-all poetic vision. In discussing his use of such a concept it is helpful, though of course somewhat j I arbitrary, to isolate the poet's particular uses of con- j i trolled irregularity and disorder. The artificiality of | 31Allen, who does not offer an interpretation of the Garden passages in Paradise Lost, does suggest in passing that Milton could easily have known "The Garden of Eden" (Maurithius, The Hague) in which the voluptuous figures are j Ipainted by Rubens and the lush vegetation and animal life iare detailed by Jan Brueghel (p. 120). Allen also believes j iMilton may have known Domenichino's "The Original Sin" !(Palazzo Barberini, Rome) (p. 120). Allen's "explanation" |for Milton's depicting Eden as a "natural" rather than a formal garden is perhaps a bit too simple; he says that ;Milton knew that a formal garden would be an anachronism I (p. 122). Yet one of the illustrations for Andreini's L'Adamo is of a formal Garden of Eden, and numerous medieval engravings clearly indicate that certain artists were not averse to depicting Eden as a rigidly patterned Garden. In; addition, Milton could on occasion make effective use of anachonisms, for example, in the description of the battle I against Satan (Bks. V and VI). 104 jsuch a convenience disappears upon the careful, specific i 1 analysis of these uses, an analysis which will reveal the | inevitable overlapping and interrelationship which occurs in iMilton's subtle command over the suggestive range of this I ! i I jmotif of "disorderly order." He uses controlled disorder inj at least four different ways in delineating the Garden and | I ' i its inhabitants: (1) the conventional use of dramatic dis- | | order as a means of contrast to the ordered or the ideal; | (2) the use of dishevelment and slight irregularity as an i ‘ jintegral part of beauty and perfection; (3) the use of cer- jtain "natural" and seemingly innocent irregularities as a jportent of the fall; and (4) the possible transformation of i i i the post-lapsarian blight upon all things into a state that can be beautiful though marred. Throughout Paradise Lost Milton successfully employs various contrasts. Usually he employs contrast to reveal j the drama and the irony of the disparity between good and | evil. Sometimes the poet will contrast two positive though jdifferent qualities for the obvious effect of heightening the reader's awareness of certain characteristics. Occa sionally he uses contrast for an effect of piquancy and charm. Milton begins in Book I with the dramatic contrast i ; between Hell and Heaven. Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd For those rebellious, here thir Prison ordained In utter darkness, and thir portion set | I ; " ' " ' t o 5 ] I As far remov'd, from God and light of Heav'n j j As from the Center thfice to th' utmost Pole. I O how unlike the place from whence they fell 1 j (11. 70-76) ! ! One of Satan's most persistent and bitter complaints is his ‘ painful awareness of just such a disparity between his j i 1 |former state and his present state. i ■ ] Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, i Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat j That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? I ! I | (Bk. I, 11. 242-245) i | i The Fallen Angels' expulsion from Heaven into Hell, and I |their physical alteration are abrupt and obvious. Satan is so radically changed from his former beauty that Beelzebub j scarcely recognizes him. If thou beest hee; But O how fall'n Ihow chang'd From him, who in this happy Realms of Light Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine Myriads though bright: i (Bk. I, 11. 84-87) ! i : The drama of contrast on earth cannot be so great as | that between Heaven and Hell because neither man nor his ! |environment is created with the divine dimension necessary 'for extreme contrast. In fact Eve's physical change after ] |the fall is at first hardly perceptible to Adam. It is only in "her cheek [that] distemper flushing glow'd" (Bk. IX, 1. .887). And only after Adam too has eaten the fruit does the ; i ; |full impact of the "fatal Trespass" (Bk. IX, 889) register i ! jas profound changes to man, to Nature, and to the Garden. I 106 Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan. Sky low'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some [sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original; . . . (Bk. IX, 11. 1000-1004) Nicolson's book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory has Iprepared the modern reader to regard mountains as a symbol i of terror and abhorrence for most seventeenth-century writers. And the Hill or mountain in Hell which Milton de- i scribes in Book I justifies such an interpretation. j There stood a Hill not far whose grisly top Belch'd fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire Shone with a glossy scurf, undoubted sign That in his womb was hid metallic Ore, The work of Sulphur . . ..32 I ! (11. 670-674) I But in her very helpful book, Nicolson tends to overlook the! fact that certain writers, including Milton, could quite j I happily on one occasion use mountains as symbols of evil ancj on another occasion use them as a picturesque contrast to an ideal setting. The belching mountain33 in Hell is undeni- j i ably evil, but the "Assyrian mount" (Bk. IV, 1. 126) stand- | ing just outside Eden34 as well as another mountain in the j 32cf. Bk. I, 1. 443. 33Milton tends to use mountain and hill synonymously (see B, IV, 11. 224-227) unless he specifically qualifies the noun by an adjective, for example, "slope hills" (Bk. IV, 1. 261) . 34Cf. Bk. IV, 1. 226. f 107 Garden are not sinister. That earth's mountains are not ! I ; i | evil is clear from Milton's suggestion that God arranged the! jmountain in Eden to aid in watering the Garden. Southward through Eden went a River large, ! Nor chang'd his course, but through the shaggy [hill j Pass'd underneath ingulft, for God had thrown i That Mountain as his Garden mould high rais'd Upon the rapid current, which through veins I Of porous Earth with kindly thirst up-drawn, Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill ! Water'd the Garden; . . . i I j (Bk. IV, 11. 223-230) Sin the Genesis 2 account of the Garden, there is no mention i of this mountain, so it would seem that Milton introduces these irregularities in the earth's surface deliberately. Certainly, the evil of Hell is dramatically contrasted to Eden's beauty in the comparison between these mountains. The mountain in Paradise is actually a necessary force in watering the Garden, and it also becomes a part of the ! visual pleasure experienced in imagining the varied terrain. i {Milton also seems intrigued with the possibility of the \ j prospect which mountains afford.35 j He may recall, for a source of inspiration in depicting! 35Cf. Bk. Ill .... As when a Scout Through dark and desert ways with peril gone All night; at last by break of cheerful dawn Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill, Which to his eye discovers unaware The goodly prospect of some foreign land (11. 543-548) 1 “ " ' 108! ! these mountains of Paradise, the numerous Italian paintings i in which mountains are a conspicuous part of the landscape of Eden. Before the fall a rural mound, a plateau or "cham paign head," a "steep wilderness," a sheltered bower, thick-! i ! ets, and river form the varied and beautiful landscape of Eden (Bk. IV, 134 ff.). With so much variety there is, of 1 'course, some drama in the contrasts that result. The effect is to affirm Milton's capacious acceptance of great variety.| At this point in the epic, all created things in their ! ' ! richest variety are good (Bk. IV, 1. 435). The contrast i between the lush bower and the "steep savage Hill" (Bk. IV, j I 1. 172)3® outside enhances the scene and creates an atmos- j i i Iphere of intimacy for the human activity. S But a much more important use of contrast has been | operating from the beginning with Satan's voyage to earth, j i | By means of subtle and sustained contrasts Milton has been i slowly "focusing in" on Eden. While it is a critical com monplace that the poet deliberately contrasts Satan and j Christ, reason and appetite, it has not been sufficiently noted that as early as Book II, 1. 95 ff. the visual effects of disorder, wildness, "Chaos and old Night" have been dex- trously controlled by Milton so that as the reader approach4 es Eden in Book IV he becomes aware that the degree of dis-! order diminishes until there is only the mild and acceptably ; j 36Cf. Hughes, p. 281. i i irregularities of shaggy hills, grots, and caves. ! Of course, theolpgians and philosophers had long believed Hell or the underworld to be in a state of constant! I . ! i , motion. In such a scheme, as one approached perfection and | i ' the outermost spheres, motion slowed and finally ceased un- ; j i |til there remained only God or the Unmoved Mover, to use t o * 7 | Aristotle's term. ' Following in this tradition Milton I jconstructs rich visual expression for this movement from Hell and Chaos to the Earthly Paradise and relative order. Hell itself is filled with noise and meaningless j ! ' ! jmotion; the Devils "Rend up both Rocks and Hills, and ride I ! |the Air / In whirlwind; Hell scarce holds the wild uproar" I (Bk. II, 11. 40, 41). But it is during the course of Satan's journey to Eden rather than in Hell itself that Mil ton's handling of degrees of disorder is most notable. From the horror of his first encounter which is with Sin and Death (Bk. II, 11. 649-870), Satan passes into j ! . . . a dark j Illimitable Ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, | [and highth, And time and place are lost; where eldest | [Night And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal Anarchy, amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand. (Bk. II, 11. 890-898) And next he moves | .--------- 37Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, pp. 26 ff. . . . Into this wild Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave . . . nigh founder'd on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying; behoves him now both Oar and Sail. As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness With winged course o'er Hill or moory Dale, O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, [dense, or rare, I . . . when straight behold the Throne j Of Chaos, . . . i ! i ! I | (Bk. II, 11. 940 ff.) ; jwith Chaos and "Sable-vested Night" dwells Humor, Chance, j Tumult, Confusion, and Discord (Bk. II, 11. 965-967) who j i direct Satan's course until he emerges into the first realm of light, and there is in this "dubious light" (1. 1043) a lessening of the "tumult" and the "hostile din" (1. 1040). In Book III the atmosphere changes even more percep- j | | jtibly as Satan approaches Earth in the "dun Air sublime" | 1 ; |(1. 72). He alights upon the "firm opacous Globe" (1. 418). i j i The images Milton uses at this point suggest that disorder, | but less severe than that just experienced, prevails on the i I outer reaches of the earth, far from Paradise. | ■ . . . a Globe far off It seem'd, now seems a boundless Continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless expos'd, and ever-threat'ning storms Of Chaos blust'ring round, inclement sky; t ! (11. 422-426) |However unsavoury this region may be, it is not so fearful ' ■ 111 I and disordered as was the realm of Chaos and Ancient Night, j At last Satan secures a view "Of all this World at once” j | i 1(1. 543) and perceives his course past the Archangel Uriel, i i Having left Uriel, Satan renews his avowal, "Evil be thou my! | ' 1 Good" (Bk. IV, 1. 11), and his subsequent further disfigure-* i j ment (1. 127) contrast effectively with Milton's ensuing jdescription of Eden. The wilderness and controlled disorderj surrounding Paradise emphasize the more serious and marring j disorder in Satan's character and appearance. The progres- ! sion from extreme disorder to controlled disorder is accom- | plished with Satan's attempt to enter Eden through the ! i itangle of ragged brush. ! j But further way found none, so thick entwin'd, j As one continued brake, the undergrowth Of shrubs and tangling bushes had perplext All path of Man or Beast that pass'd that way: (Bk. IV, 11. 175-179) ] As in the paintings of the Renaissance so in Milton's | j verbal picture, the rocks, caves, and wilderness add to the ! i ; variety and beauty of the scene, because these features are | i j not essentially foreboding, but afford a pleasant shading and contrast to the luminous foreground scene to be re vealed. It might be said that Satan's presence near Eden is; in itself the intrusion of disorder and chaos since he has "Hell within him" (Bk. IV, 1. 20). Milton is undoubtedly iaware that to present the first detailed description of Eden I ! land its inhabitants from Satan's viewpoint is to reinforce i ' the contrast between good and evil and also to suggest thatj r 112 i ■ i 1 i while Paradise is innocent, it is also vulnerable. The "order" in Milton's Earthly Paradise is not, of jcourse, the distinct and hierarchical order which is to be found only in his Heaven. This hierarchical order is most apparent in the speeches of God and the Son in Books III andj V. In a way the pre-fall Garden is a happy synthesis of the! divine heavenly order and the inchoate disorder from which I 1 the terrestial creation sprang. | . . . at his Word the formless Mass, j This world's material mould, came to a heap: | Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar j Stood rul'd, stood vast infinitude confin'd Till at his second bidding darkeness fled, j Light shone, and order from disorder sprung. | ; I (Bk. Ill, 709-713) i | When it is suggested that Milton's Paradise is a happy syn- j I |thesis the implication is not that evil is actually present | in the creation of the Garden; but rather that certain physical characteristics of the earth and its heavens, such I i 1 j jas rough mountains, eccentric and elliptical movements of i * i j | the spheres, which earlier theologians and philosophers re- j garded as incompatible with the rational and ordered world38 are not only theologically acceptable to Milton but assimi lable as a part of the beauty of creation. Thus, while the rough and irregular features of the iarea surrounding Eden act, in some measure, as a means of i icontrast they also add piquancy and interest to the entire 38Tillyard, pp. 26, 54, 55, and 90. t_______ ....... .... 'i scene. But Milton's use of "disorderly order" in the de- lineation of Eden is more subtle than for the purpose of j ; I contrast alone, though such a use is usually regarded by most commentators to be his chief i n t e n t i o n . 3 9 The poet is j I i I ; demonstrating in visual terms one of his basic affirmations j about the universe. It is summed up in Raphael's speech to Adam concerning the harmony of the heavens, the creation, | end all its creatures. I j That day, as other solemn days, they spent I In song and dance about the sacred Hill, j Mystical dance, which yonder starry Sphere i j Of Planets and of fixt^in all her Wheels j i Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular j Then most, when most irregular they seem; | And in thir motions harmony Divine So smooths her charming tones, that God's | I [own ear j | Listens delighted . . I (Bk. V, 11. 618-628) And again in Books V and VIII the images of the "maze" and I ' ; ithe "mystic Dance" are used (Bk. V, 1. 177; Bk. VIII, 1. | I : 126). These dances of praise to the Creator follow patterns; ! I jthat are irregular and "wand'ring . . . now high, now low, then hid, / Progressive, retrograde, or standing still" |(Bk. VIII, 11. 126, 127), and which for all their irregular ity are a part of an over-all pattern removed "from human sense" (Bk. VIII, 1. 119), but meaningful and beautiful. I i | 39jjicoisonr Mountain Gloom, p. 267; and Allen, p. 121. I ^®Cf. Sir John Davies, Orchestra: . . ., Stanza 36, j |11. 1-4, edited by E. M. W. Tillyard (London, 1947). [ . . "------------ ' 114 The essential point is that Milton and certain other writers, such as Sir John Davies to a limited extent and Sirj Francis Bacon to a greater extent, display a capacity for accepting variation and even exceptions as an integral part i i | of the pre-fall perfection of the universe. To Milton, these slight irregularities and mild disorders in the move- ! bent of the spheres were compatible with a higher perfec- | ! j tion. Davies is more committed to the older schemetized | ..system of order than either Milton or Bacon, but Davies does give one of the most famous metaphors for the regular and | ! slightly irregular movements of the spheres' poetic expres- J : i > t sion in his poem Orchestra: Or a Poeme of Dauncing (1596). | For Davies and for Milton, the dance epitomizes the essen tially orderly movement of the spheres, an order which can i include certain irregularities. What if to you these sparks disordered seeme As if by chaunce they had been scattered there? ! The Gods a solemne measure doe it deeme. And see a iust proportion euery where. Bacon too admits that harmony and design are behind the seemingly irregular aspects of nature, and he also agrees with what Milton later was to suggest, that man does not 4 3 w i l l i a m chamberlayne in Pharonnida (ed. George Saintsbury [Oxford, 1905]) uses the image of the masque dance to express the irregular as a part of an over-all reg-, ular pattern. A dance, where method in disorder lay, Where each seemed out, though all their rules obey, Was first in different measures trod; . . . (Bk. II, Canto I, 11. 133-135) perceive this ultimate harmony because of his own limita- j i tions. i If the great Workmaster had been of a human disposition, he would have cast the stars into some pleasant and beau tiful works and orders, like the frets in the roofs of | houses; whereas one can scarce find a posture in square, j or triangle or straight line amongst such an infinite j number; so differing an harmony there is between the j Spirit of Man and the spirit of Nature. (The Advancement of Learning, p. 119) In creating his Eden Milton's visual imagination seems to have been formed, in part at least, by his intellectual acceptance of certain controlled irregularities as a part of the scheme of created perfection. This abstract affirmation seems to have coalesced with the poet's memory of the pic- j torial representations of the ideal earthly realm as also | manifesting the slightly disordered and the irregular. The j i ! first detailed description of Eden is almost a verbal re- i i | Iflection of those Italian paintings of Paradise which Miltoni |saw in his youth. Milton's Garden reveals his acceptance ofj |a mild and abstract metaphysical disorder as it is manifest |in the physical world even before the fall. The Garden is d , "delicious Paradise" (Bk. IV, 1. 132) surrounded by a . . . steep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, . . . and over head up grew Insuperable highth of loftiest shade, | Cedar, and Pine, and Fir, and branching Palm, A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend j Shade above shade, a woody Theatre j Of stateliest view. Yet higher than thir tops ! The verdurous wall of P’ aradise up sprung: Which to our general Sire gave prospect large Into his nether Empire neighboring round. And higher than that Wall a cl rr.l i ng, row » Of goodliest Trees loaden with, fairest? Fruit*.__________I i .................................. 1161 j I Blossoms and Fruits at once of golden hue Appear'd with gay enamell'd colors mixt: On which the Sun more glad impress'd his beams | Them in fair Evening Cloud, or humid Bow, j | When God hath show'r'd the earth; so lovely seem'd That Lantskip: . . . (Bk. IV, 11. 132-153) | i Not only because of the contrast afforded by these wilder l : ! outlying areas of Paradise does this scene resemble certain i Italian paintings, but also because these elements function i I j as an essential part of the human drama to ensue. Thus, the "steep wilderness" overgrown with "thicket" (1. 135) is | not only picturesque, but in its sexual overtones, adds a jnew dimension to the nature of Satan's assault on Eden.42 I The growth is also described as "grotesque and wild" (1. i ' i 13.36) . . . "so thick entwin'd, / As one continued brake" : (11. 174-175). This rough terrain is foreboding to Satan, but clearly such vegetation and the effect of grotesqueness i ' i i j is not, for Milton, incompatible with the beauty of the ! i j j j scene. The trees create a dramatic umbrage of "loftiest ;shade" (1. 139), and when Milton calls the sight a "Silvan j Scene" (1. 140), it is as if he were titling a painting. Asj ' ! he describes the scene, he leads the reader's eye upward "Shade above shade" to the stateliest view. It could be thd ! description of a beautiful "natural" vista in the Italian i countryside or a detailed account of a painting of Eden. 42Cf. Arnold Stein's Answerable Style: Essays on adise Lost" (Minneapolis, Id*>3) , in which he interprets thi§ description in terms of Eden as the "womb of Nature" (p. 58) . . . . . . . ..................... ! The language Miltpn uses in this passage and other de- j i scriptive sections is often almost the technical language ofj landscaping or of landscape painting. The associations of a word like grotesque, which is the French form for the I tali-; ! ! Jan grotto, meaning cave,43 link the scene even more closely j i with the countryside and art works it resembles. Merritt i Hughes notes that in Milton's "time [grotesque] referred to j painting or sculpture in which foliage was prominent" (p. j 281). Milton seems to be exploiting his knowledge of the ! older Italian meaning as well as of the current connotation in England. In any case, the link between the verbal and i the visual is strengthened by the use of the word grotesque.j i \ In mentioning the "prospect large" (1. 144) afforded to Adam; jby the lofty site of Paradise, the poet implies an awareness! !of the value of a well-chosen prospect. The necessity of a I i suitable prospect, whether for a dwelling or for a painting,; jhad been recognized long before the eighteenth-century vogue jof picturesque tours in quest of a beautiful locale.44 iHenry Peacham in The Art of Drawing with the Pen and Limning* in Water Colours (London, 1606) instructs the would-be artist to exercise great care in his choice of a scene from which he may draw a landscape (p. 5). Milton's depiction of Eden resembles a painting again in the "Blossoms and Fruits at once of golden hue / [Which] 43Hughes, p. 281, note 136. 44Allaix*. Vol. II, 146. 118 Appear'd with gay enamell'd colors mixt . . (11. 148- 149). The terminology suggests that these flowers are painted or enamelled into the scene as a part of the over all pictorial representation. The sun intensifies the color of the flowers and the entire vista so that Milton declares it to be an uniquely "lovely" "Lantskip" (11. 153, 154). In his choice of this term, "Lantskip," he seems to label the entire description as a distinct form of pictorial represen tation. Almost every extended description of Eden recalls the landscape paintings of the Italian Renaissance which also depend upon the voluptuous and irregular features of nature to convey the sense of perfection. Milton's second, closer view of Eden has much the same mood of intimacy as Titian's "The Original Sin" or Ruben's and Brueghel's "The Garden of Eden." The details and color are vividly warm in both the artists' and the poet's works. Milton writes that "Thus was this place," A happy rural seat of various view: Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gums and Balm, Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden J*ind Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true, If true, here only, and of delicious taste: Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks Grazing the1 tender herb, were interpos'd. Or palmy hillock, or the flow'ry lap Of some irriguous Valley spread her store, Flow'rs of all hue, and without Thorn the R o s e : | Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves ! Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling Vine Lays forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps j Luxuriant; I : | (Bk. IV, 11. 247-260) I ; i jsince verbal analogues have seemingly been exhausted for I I ’ ! this and other passages relating to Eden, it is valuable to j suggest the visual analogues of Titian, Tintoretto, and Bassano. The attempt here is not to establish a particular ! artist or painting as a source for Milton's Eden, but to i offer the tradition and habit of mind suggested by the visual as well as the written accounts of Paradise. i | i The poetic uses for irregularity proposed at the begin-j jning of this chapter includes the irregular used as an inno-j Icent part of the pre-fall beauty of the Garden and also as an element foreboding the fall. In distinguishing between these usages, it will be necessary to qualify the claims of i certain commentators, particularly Bartlett Giamatti, Milli- cent Bell, M. W. Bundy, and W. B. Hunter, Jr., all of whom attempt, in varying waiys, to demonstrate that Eden and the first couple are "ideal" and sinless when Milton first pre- ; sents them. -Milton does, in spite of modern attempts to prove *^Hughes notes the tradition that Milton here is fol lowing , that Before man's fall the Rose was born, St Ambrose says, without the thorn. (Robert Herrick, "The Rose," p. 123). ' 120 otherwise, describe what he believes to be a perfect Earthly Paradise. The poet goes to some lengths to assert this perfection. As early as Book I, he refers to man's original state as that "blissful Seat" (1. 5), and in Book III Eden I |is the "happy Garden" where man may "reap immortal fruits of joy and love, / Uninterrupted joy, unrivall'd love / In blissful solitude; . . ." (11. 66-69). It is a place j "Chos'n by the sovran Planter, when he fram'd / All things to man's delightful use" (Bk. V, 11. 690-693). Milton com pares its perfection to that of Christian and classical j i myths only to find that Eden excels them all. j . . . Not that fair field of Enna, where Proserpin gath'ring flow'rs i Herself a fairer Flow'r by gloomy Pis I Was gather'd, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove Daphne by Orontes, and th' inspir'd Castalian Spring might with this Paradise Of Eden strive; . . . | (Bk. IV, 11. 268-281) An important statement on this perfection introduces one of the significant descriptions of the details of the | Garden. From his high vantage point atop the Tree of Life, Satan "Beneath him with new wonder now he views" To all delight of human sense expos'd In narrow room Nature's whole wealth, yea more, A Heaven on Earth: for blissful Paradise Of God the Garden was, by him in the East Of Eden planted; . . . (Bk. IV, 11. 205-210) Nor are the inhabitants less perfect than the Garden. "I 121 made him [Adam] just and right / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall" (Bk. Ill, 11. 98, 99), and "I form'd ! them free, and free they must remain, / Till they enthrall ' i themselves: . . ." (Bk. Ill, 11. 124-125). Most impor- jtantly, just before the fall in Book IX Milton declares that! Eve is "yet sinless" (1. 659). j i To establish that Milton clearly intends the reader to j accept Eden and the first couple as perfect is to undercut much of the force of the critical arguments to the contrary.j i The most recent and stimulating attempt to read into Mil- i ton's prelapsarian Paradise the "sinister potential" implic-j i ! |it in certain allusions and images of irregularity is the (study by Bartlett Giamatti in The Earthly Paradise and the l llenaissance Epic.4* * Giamatti's concentration on the physi cal aspects of the Garden, and Adam and Eve, distinguishes — i his work from that of earlier commentators who have limited | i : (their studies of Milton's use of disorder primarily to a 47 discussion of character development. M. W. Bundy, W. B. 4 8 49 Hunter, Jr., and Millicent Bell have all sought to account for the abruptness of the fall by noting weaknesses in the character of both Adam and Eve before the fatal scene 46 Princeton, 1966, p. 295. ^ "Milton's Prelapsarian Adam," pp. 163-184. 48nEve«s Demonic Dream," pp. 255-265. ^"The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost," pp. 863- 883. r~ ' ' " 122 i i in Book IX. Hughes attacks such analyses by observing that 1 i jit is tempting for these scholars "to read modern psychology! I j iinto Milton to try to evade the problem in 'the intractable j myth' by injecting a smooth development of character into jthe story ..." (p. 196). Such latter-day attempts to j I establish motivation is j i at the expense of losing Milton's tenacious faith, that although the fall was "fortunate," something in a supreme j way valuable was forever and needlessly lost through the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the power to know good without knowing evil. (p. 196) I i Giamatti's interpretation, which is more indebted to these earlier studies than he acknowledges, does provide a I i valuable awareness of the poet's self-conscious use of "ver-l bal ambiguity" (p. 299) through what Giamatti calls Milton'sj "Satanic style" (p. 299). However, certain qualifications and distinctions are necessary to check Giamatti's tendency either to over-look or to over-simplify what is Milton's jsubtle apprehension of the positive aesthetic value in con trolled disorder. Giamatti also fails to observe the degrees and quality of disorder before and after the fall. In addition, Giamatti errs in his implication that Milton's ; pre-fall Eden is very nearly as corrupt as Spenser's Bower of Bliss (p. 311). He asserts that "both Bowers are arti facts, . . . something has happened to the Bower in Eden. Some damage has been done" (p. 312). And finally, Giamatti does not take into account the fact that Milton need not have a sinister intention in his use of what Giamatti calls "ambiguous" details: the wandering movement of the river inj ! ’ ' . . . . j Paradise, the various images of gold, and the dishevelled i hair of Eve. ] Giamatti believes that Eden is a "radical amalgam" (p. j | ; 295) of the Christian and the classical. However, he tends I : i i ; to neglect the Biblical background in order to emphasize the classical tradition. Such an emphasis enhances his con-j i tention that Milton is continually and subtly interweaving ! old enchanted garden themes (p. 312). Giamatti asserts that the "enchanted gardens of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser" pre- sided over by Alcina, Armida, and Acrasia are created from jthe tradition established by Homer's Circe (p. 6). These i i gardens and their ladies are both "ultimately traps" (p. 6); j ' ; the more beautiful the garden and the lady, the more danger- ous they are. There lurks in the enchanted gardens of the I , * Renaissance epic, according to Giamatti, the "problem of the beautiful-appearing garden of love which may not be what it seems" (p. 66). But Giamatti does not observe that it is not merely a "garden of love" which Milton is describing, nor is the Garden presided over by Eve alone. Milton has made clear that it is "Heaven on Earth" (Bk. IV, 1. 208), and Eve is in subjection to Adam (Bk. IV, 1. 299 ff.); she 'does not rule as a sorceress. In emphasizing Milton's use of the classical, Giamatti sees only sinister implications in the poet's use of the irregular. Yet Milton repeatedly chooses the most nearly perfect examples of classical gardens, perhaps in part to j j express what Empson calls "his pagan feelings about para- jdise."50 Milton explores the entire range of images avail- j j ; able to him as a learned poet to convey the impression of jperfection; in doing so he has often been faulted for his 1 i intruding the pagan into the Christian. Giamatti's inter- I pretation of the Garden passages is, in the final analysis, i ; i another of those many criticisms based on the premise th^': i I ithere is something implicitly "wrong" with the pagan. To suggest, as Giamatti does, that Eden is a place j < i where the "mind is seduced by the landscape" (p. 272), is toj attribute to Milton's Paradise a sensuous richness often I ; I denied it by many critics who lament the poet's "sensuous | • poverty. Certainly Milton seems to intend sensuous and even sexual overtones in certain passages (Bk. IV, 11. 130- 150), but it is almost impossible to agree with Giamatti that the landscape actually conspires in seducing man's reason. Satan, while perceiving the need to use the partic ulars of the Garden, goes directly to the abstract and moral issues involved in the temptation (Bk. IV, 1. 515 ff.). Although it seems demonstrable that Milton does use certain images of irregularity and disorder to hint at the ^ Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 174. 51F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Garden City, 1954), p. 145. 1251 I 52 potential of change and evil, not all instances of this j controlled disorder are sinister. The weakness in Giamat- | i ti's study is essentially his failure to note that Milton j i deliberately uses irregularity as a part of the pre-fall j beauty of Eden. An awareness of the tradition of represent ing such irregularities in paintings would have prevented Giamatti from misreading certain allusions and images. I Giamatti is more illuminating in his suggestion that | i Milton employs "amaze," "maze," "wandering," and "wave" with i the deliberate intention of preparing the reader for the fall. In these instances Milton seems to be using what | j Giamatti calls a "vocabulary of temptation" (p. 335). Mil- I i J ton repeatedly plays upon the idea and the image of the maze! | i and labyrinth in connection with Satan's movements and appearance (Bk. IX, 1. 499) and also with the corresponding ■ "mazing" of Eve's reason (Bk. IX, 11. 552, 614) and Adam's |reason (Bk. IX, 1. 889). Giamatti correctly relates these Ilater, fatal mazes to the stream that runs with "mazy error" i(Bk. IV, 239) through Paradise. And perhaps Eve's hair, :"Dishevell'd, but in wanton ringlets wav'd / As the Vine curls her tendrils" (Bk. IV, 11. 306-307) does suggest entanglement and potential danger. But it is important to add that before the fall and until the moment of the fall, ! I Milton assures the reader that the Garden and all things ard 52Giamatti rightly says that the "Garden like Adam and i Eve must include potential for change, change for the better or change for the worse" (p. 299). j 126 created perfect with nothing "deficient" (Bk. IX, 1. 345). Eve's hair, although it is tossed and provocative, is not a I I isign of lust or wantonness before the fall. Milton de- ! I ’ 1 scribes her as being with "perfect beauty adorn'd" (Bk. IV, j i ' | 1. 635). Eve's dream may leave her more vulnerable to temp tation and her hair may be even more disarranged, but her reason, honor, beauty, and will are still intact; and that i i is enough for even Milton's high standards of virtue. j ; i In writing for a "knowing audience" Milton could weave i I into the description of Eden and the first couple certain | images of slight disorder which are compromising only to the imagination of one who knows the fall is imminent. To Adam and Eve the environment is pure and is no more marred than i they themselves are. Those few irregular aspects of the {Garden and of Eve's appearance are sinister only in retro spect; they are not intrinsically evil and are actually a i | part of the beauty of both. | By describing Eden as tainted and corrupt before the jfall, Giamatti undercuts the drama of what happens to the | Garden and its inhabitants after the fall. Milton makes j very clear that after Adam eats the fruit there was an immediate and damaging change to nature and to man (Bk. IX, | 1. 1000, ff.). ; w j In the long history of interpretations of Eden, Giamat-j i ti's is among the few asserting that Milton's Eden is an "artifact" (p. 312). Giamatti believes that Milton is ; ... . . . . . J [.. ' 127 i exploiting the darker side of the traditional art-nature I . . . . . . |theme to create an atmosphere of "seeming" in which illusion ! ' i jeventually prevails (p. 312) . But there is little "art" in I | j Eden in the sense of self-consciously applied skills for the| I purpose of creating a beautiful object. Only in performing the one task given to them by God— the grooming of the gar- j den (Bk. IV, 11. 436, 437)— do Adam and Eve approach being j i "artificers." Milton does not at any point before the fall ! indicate that such a task is anything but noble and digni- j fied (Bk. IV, 1. 612) . It is clear that Eden is a spontan- j ; eous growth of great variety. It is better left free of thej rigid designs of a formal garden. The flowers grow in a I i jmanner j i . . . which not nice Art In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon Pour'd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain. (Bk. IV, 11. 240-243) The Garden itself is A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here ; Wanton'd as in her prime, and play'd at will Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, Wild above Rule or Art, enormous bliss. (Bk. V, 11. 294-297) Eve too is untouched by art although her artlessness in the disarray of her hair may have much the same sensuality as that of Herrick's lady ("Delight in Disorder") or Lovelace's Amarantha ("To Amarantha, That she would dishevell her J 128 53 haire" ). But when compared to the Amarantha of Richard 54 — Lovelace, Eve alone embodies pristine innocence. The harmony in the life that Adam shares with Eve in the "happy Garden spot" is the final subject of his story to Raphael in Book VIII. "Let it suffice thee that thou know'st / Us happy . . ." (Bk. VIII, 11. 620-621). This delight in the Garden and with Eve is forever lost in the next Book (IX). By the juxtaposition of this connubial hap piness and pleasure in nature against the slowly emerging despair and loss after the fall, Milton creates a moving contrast. The extent of loss in terms of the universe and physical nature is one of the subjects dealt with at length in Svendson's Milton and Science. Svendson perceives that after the fall there begins to be in the world a "dialectic of disorder" (p. 293), in which disease, the extremes of climate, and the radical variations in the movement of the spheres all correspond to man's inner corruption.^ This 53The Poems of Richard Lovelace, edited by C. H. Wilk inson (Oxford, 1925), Vol. 2, 18. 54Hughes notes that Milton "remembered Virgil's Venus appearing in sudden glory to Aeneas with dishevell'd hair, Which flowing from her shoulders reach'd the ground, And widely spread ambrosial scents around." (The Aeneid I, 11. 403-404. Dryden's translation.) 55"The dialectic of disease and remedy so frequently met in Milton's prose issues from such postulates as the cosmic correspondence of man with the great world and the inescapable equation of disease with disorder, health with harmony and unity, and remedy with curative measures in church and state. Order is not only heaven's first law, but man's." (Svendson, p. 193) 129 inner corruption is, according to Svendson, reflected in Milton's "imagery of internal disorder" (p. 195). Milton declares that Death "snuff'd the smell / Of mortal change on Earth ..." (Bk. X, 1. 272). And he regards the "stars themselves as blasted by Sin and Death" (Hughes, p. 416). Some say he bid his Angels turn askance The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more From the Sun's Axle; they with labor push'd Oblique the Centric Globe: Some say the Sun Was bid turn Reins from th' Equinoctial Road . . . to bring in change Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flow'rs, . . . Thus began Outrage from lifeless things .... (Bk. X, 11. 668-707) The scene of change and disorder is not the small world of the Garden, but rather the whole of the universe, and the question of what can possibly emerge as beautiful from such desolation is answered only indirectly. Because "Conscience" now represents "All things with double terror" (Bk. X, 1. 850) the extremes of animal viol ence, of weather, of darkness, and light— all create gro tesque contrasts like those in a Gothic sketch. Beast now with Beast gan war, and Fowl with Fowl, And Fish with Fish; to graze the Herb all leaving, Devour'd each other; nor stood much in awe Of Man, but fled him, or with count'nance grim Glar'd on him passing: these were from without The growing miseries, which Adam saw Already in part, though hid in gloomiest shade. (Bk. X, 11. 710-716) 130 Despair now detracts from what was once the innocent allure of Eve's dishevelled hair. She falls at Adam's feet "with jTears that ceas'd not flowing, / And tresses all disorder'd j > . . (Bk. X, 1. 911). Eden itself is to be destroyed; "To teach thee that Godj attributes to place / No sanctity, if none be thither j : i jbrought / By Men who there frequent, or therein dwell" (Bk. i i ; XII, 11. 836-839). | ; j Only after Adam is comforted by Michael's visit and | the vision of redemption through the Son, does Adam experi- i I ! ience hope. | | O goodness infinite, goodness immense1 That all this good of evil shall produce. And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness 1 full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By mee done and occasion'd, or rejoice Much more, that much more good therof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to Men From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. (Bk. XII, 11. 469-488) And in leaving the Earthly Paradise, the first couple are promised, "A paradise within thee, happier far" (Bk. XII, 1. 587). With such comfort Adam and Eve are left in a world of time and change where the gentle irregularities of their familiar Garden are replaced by the extremes of disease, climate, and darkness. But as greater grace and happiness may be possible through the paradox of the felix culpa so also may there be greater beauty and harmony possible | through the paradox of the transformation of the marred and i disordered features of the natural world into something resembling the beautiful. B I B L I O G R A P H Y 132 BIBLIOGRAPHY Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. 2 vols. Philadelphia, | 1832. Allen, Beverly Sprague. Tides in English Taste. 2 vols. I Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937. ! I ' I Allen, Don Cameron. Images and Meaning; Metaphoric Tradi- [ I tions in Renaissance Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hop-| kins University Press, 196d. Andreini, Giambattista. L*Adamo. Milan, 1613. Austen, John. A Treatise of Fruit-Trees. London, 1653. j i Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning? Philosophical J Works. Edited by J. M. Robertson. London, 1905. j ________ . The Essays. New York: Walter Black Press, 1942.j Bamborough, J. B. The Little World of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Bell, Millicent. "The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost," Publications of the Modern Language Associa- ! tion, LXVIII, 863-883. The Bible. London, 1616. Bradbrook, M. C., and Thomas, Lloyd. Andrew Marvell. Cam- | bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1940. : Brehier, Emile. The Philosophy of Plotinus. Translated by Joseph Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Brennecke, Ernest. John Milton the Elder and His Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936. Browne, Sir Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Edited by Geoffrey L. Kaynes. 6 vols. London: Faber, 1928. 133 " .....................................................134] i | Bundy, M. W. “Milton's Prelapsarian Adam," Research Studies j of the University of Washington, XII (1946), 163-84. i Bush, Douglas. English Literature in the Earlier Seven- teenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, I 1945. Science and English Poetry. ~versity Press, 1967. Oxford: Oxford Uni-j Chamberlayne, William. Pharonnida. Edited by George Saintsbury. Oxford, 1905. Clark, Mordecai. "Milton's Abyssinian Paradise," University of Texas Studies in English, XXIX (1950), 138-41. i i Coffin, Charles. John Donne and the New Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Coles, William. The Art of Simpling. London, 1656. j Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica, the Renaissance Tradi tion of Paradox. Princeton: Princeton University | Press, 1966. I i Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: The Oxford- University Press, 1949. ! Corcoran, Sister Mary. Milton's Paradise with Reference to the Hexameral Background. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, Inc., 1945. Daniells, Roy. Milton, Mannerism and Baroque. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963. Davies, Sir John. Orchestra. Edited by E. M. W. Tillyard. London: Chatto and Windus, 1947. Diekhoff, John. Milton's "Paradise Lost": A Commentary on the Argument. New York: Humanities Press, 1946. | Donne, John. The Poems of John Donne. Edited by H. J. C. Grierson. Oxford: The Oxford University Press, • 1912. Eliot, T. S. Milton. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1947. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chat to and Windus, 1935. i Evans, J. M. "Genesis B. and Its Background," Review of 1351 I j English Studies/ Fall, 1963, pp. 1-16. Ficino. Theologia Platonica, XII.3. Translated by Jose- j phme Burrough. Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 j V (1944), 236-38. i [Freeman, Rosemary. English Emblem Books. New York: Octa gon Books, 1966. jFrye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. i Gerard, John. The Herball. London, 1597. Giamatti, A. Bartlett. The Earthly Paradise and the Renais- sance Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 15657 Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956. Hanford, James Holly. A Milton Handbook. New York: Apple ton, Century, Crofts, Inc. , 192"6, 1954. Hawkins, Henry. Partheneia Sacra. London, 1633. [Henslow, Geoffrey W. Ye Sundial Booke. London: Privately ; Published, 1917T! Herbert, George. The Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1941. i ! Herrick, Robert. Poetical Works of R. H. Edited by F. W. Moorman. Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1915. [Hunter, W. B. "Eve's Demonic Dream," English Language His tory, XIII (1946), 255-65. Hyman, Lawrence. "Marvell's 'Garden,'" English Literary History, XXV (1958), 13-22. "Politics and Poetry in Andrew Marvell," Publica tions of the Modern Language Association, LXXIII (19 58 ), 475-479.----- -------------------------- ! Jones, Richard Foster. Ancients and Moderns. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1936. jKelly, Maurice. This Great Argument: A Study of Milton's "De Doctrina Christiana" as a Gloss upon "Paradise 136 Lost." Princeton: Princeton University Press T9TT. Kermode# Frank. "The Arguments in Marvell's 'Garden# 1,1 Essays in Criticism# July# 1952# pp. 225-241. Kirkconnell# Watson. The Celestial Cycle. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press# 1952. Klonsky# Milton. "A Guide through the Garden#" Sewanee Review of English Studies# LVIII (1950) # 1( 3-35. Kramer# S. tf. "The Sumerian Paradise Myth#" The American Journal of Archaeology# January, 1946, p. 176ff. Kranidas# Thomas. "Adam and Eve in the Garden: A Study of Paradise Lost# Book V," English Language Notes# IV# 71-83. Leavis# F. R. The Great Tradition. Garden City: Double day# 19S4. ' Leishman# J. B. The Art of Marvell's Poetry. London: Hutchinson# 1966. Lovejoy# Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an idea. Cambridge# Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1936. 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"On the Site of the Earthly Paradise," (London) Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 1957, p. 108. Peacham, Henry. The Art of Drawing with the Pen and Limning in Water Colours. London, 1606. Percival, M. O. William Blake's Circle of Destiny. New York: Columbia University Press, 19 38. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: The Tudor Publishing Co., 1937. Platt, Sir Hugh. Floraes Paradise. London, 1608. Plotinus. Plotinus; The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Faber and Faber, 1917-1930. Rjrfstvig, Maren-Sofie. The Happy Man. Oslo: Akademisk For- lay, 1954. Saintsbury, George, ed. and introduction. Minor Poets of the Caroline Period. 3 vols. Oxford: The Claren- don Press, 1905. Smith, Rebecca W. "The Source of Milton's Pandemonium," Modern Philology, XXIX (1941), 187-98. Spencer, Theodore. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1942. Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Poetical Works. Boston: Houghton Cambridge ed., 1908. Starnes, D. 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Creator Demaray, Hannah Disinger (author)

Core Title 'Disorderly Order' In The Garden Literature Of Browne, Marvell, And Milton

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

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Advisor Arnold, Aerol (committee chair), Robb, J. Wesley (committee member), Tufte, Virginia James (committee member)

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