Andrew Marvell, the author of our Poem of the Week, was a consummate artist, even though he did not consider poetry to be his prime trade. His main work was as a statesman, which I won’t get into here, except to note that we might not have a completed Paradise Lost, had not Marvell intervened on behalf of John Milton. You see, Marvell, who had worked closely at times with Oliver Cromwell during the Puritan interregnum, had friends and allies in the royal court, too, so that when the young Charles II was restored to the throne of England in 1660, a couple of years after Cromwell died, he could plead for Milton’s life. That took some doing, I imagine, because Milton had written, for Cromwell, apologias to the crowned heads of Europe and to the people of England, justifying the execution of Charles I, the new king’s father. Milton was blind by then, but by no means apologetic about what he had done. After all, it’s Satan who desired, as Milton wrote, “to set himself in glory above his peers.” Milton was emphatically not an egalitarian, but he was deeply suspicious of kings and potentates, and we’d do well in the United States to try to understand the minds of our founders through the glass of a Miltonic republicanism.
Anyway, our Word of the Week is soul, and it’s the subtle interconnections between the body and the soul that inspire Marvell with the idea behind this Dialogue. It wasn’t the first such dialogue. It was, in fact, a common school exercise to have the students write essays or poems taking each side of a controversy in turn: so the young Milton himself wrote the pair of poems L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso (the names are Italian; Milton was fluent in a good many languages), the first one in praise of cheerfulness, the second in praise of sobriety and melancholy. So the question for Marvell’s poem is, which has the worse trouble, the Soul on account of the Body, or the Body on account of the Soul? As you might expect, Marvell appears to lean in the direction of the speaker who speaks last, and — it’s the Body. More than just speaking last, the Body gets an extra four lines, the climactic lines in the poem. That is, the Soul speaks for ten lines, then the Body replies with ten, then the Soul gets another ten, but the Body answers with ten plus four. And naturally, we lean against the first person in a controversy who begins the complaining, and that would be the Soul.
But really, if you had to choose one or the other, wouldn’t you prefer to suffer in the body but remain strong and hale in the soul, rather than being fully healthy in your body but sick and pining away in the soul? Or, to take it from the point of an observer, if you’ve read Dostoyevsky’s novel, think of the characters of Father Zossima and the young hare-brained soldier with violent love and violent hate, Dmitri Karamazov. Father Zossima is near to dying, but he brings wisdom and peace to all in his presence, while Dmitri is torn up with hatred for his father, a strong sense of honor, passionate love but perhaps for the wrong woman, a desperate need for money — all of which will lead him to being the likely suspect for a murder he did not commit. The body afflicts the soul, but, it seems that Marvell is suggesting to us, those afflictions are small by comparison with what the soul does to the body and to itself.
In the final couplet, we have what looks like an odd turn in direction, but it is really a quiet and sad commentary on the works of the soul as against what grows naturally. Green trees grow in the forest, but architects cut them down and hew them into planks. The body grows naturally, but the soul forces it into shapes that do not fit. Consider it just a touch of what will become, more than a hundred years later, the Romantic sense that all of our worst ills are artificial — what we bring on ourselves by our own creations. Take it for what it is worth. Sin is worse than disease, and joy and innocence are better than a sound digestive system.
SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslaved so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fettered stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; Tortured, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart. BODY O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretched upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go; And warms and moves this needless frame, (A fever could but do the same) And, wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die. A body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possessed. SOUL What magic could me thus confine Within another’s grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain; And all my care itself employs That to preserve which me destroys; Constrained not only to endure Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure; And ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwrecked into health again. BODY But physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat; Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex, Or sorrow’s other madness vex; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego. What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew.
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