For several years when I was a boy, one of the local radio stations played tapes of the old radio shows that my father remembered listening to when he was a kid. Some of them were “superhero” shows, like The Green Hornet and Superman. Others were police shows or mysteries, like The Shadow: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,” says the narrator, with a subtle laugh. The Shadow, in ordinary life one Lamont Cranston, was on the side of the angels. Then there were wonderful comedies, like The Jack Benny Show. You shouldn’t think of these as television shows without the video. As in all the arts, the true masters use the constraints of the art to their immense advantage: do we think that Michelangelo was limited by the marble he had to carve? Or that Bach was frustrated by the twelve-tone scale? These were shows specifically for radio, and their wide variety suggests a medium of art that was vibrant and alive.
“What does all this have to do with your Word of the Week, garden?” you may ask. Well, let me tease it out a little. When poetry was a vibrant part of life, from folk songs and church hymns, familiar by the hundreds to ordinary people, who sang them or played them, or listened in person while other people did so — for how else would they have experienced music? — it wasn’t just the quality of the work that strikes me, but the sheer variety.
Our Poem of the Week, “The Mower’s Song,” is like one of those shows in the heyday of radio, in that I can’t imagine anybody writing anything like it now, and I’m talking about the kind of thing it is, and not about its excellence. For we’ve got a song sung by a mower who’s in love with a girl named Juliana, and it’s both merry and sad at once. That is, she doesn’t love him in return, or who knows what she does that drives him mad, so he sings a song about how miserable he is, and yet — the air of the song and its tempo are cheerful and light-footed. We judge the poem’s character not alone by what it says, but by the breeziness, the playful repetition of the last two lines, and the mower’s never really specifying what it is that Juliana does to him that’s like what he does to the grass. The poem — the song — is fun!
The second thing has to do with a long-running debate, extending at least from Shakespeare’s time to Marvell’s, almost a hundred years later, on what the garden had to do with the relation of art to nature. Everyone acknowledged that man should somehow combine his efforts, his talents, and his vision with the powers of nature. That’s what Milton’s Adam and Eve do in Paradise Lost, while they are yet innocent. They are the governors of all the world, and the gardeners too, but you can over-garden and make things look merely artificial — think here of French gardens or topiary gardens, where plants are laid out or lopped “in beds and curious knots.” Milton wasn’t fond of those, or of art that was too precious, or too severely distinct from nature. But just where does art end and artificiality begin? What kind of art enhances nature, or works with it in harmony to produce what is sweet, good, inspiring, even magnificent? You’d think that Baroque artists, composers, and poets, of all people, wouldn’t care about that, but they most certainly did. At their best, what we get from them is art wound up to its highest pitch, yet art in homage to nature, whether it’s human nature or that of the whole created world. And here’s where our poet today, Andrew Marvell, comes in for special honor.
Marvell’s language is clear, direct, precise — but also, in its mood, in the feelings he stirs in us, broadly suggestive, only opening itself up, like flowers, to the power of imagination. Don’t suppose by what I’ve said here that he was a delicate and effeminate fellow. Far from that! He was a prime actor in the tumultuous politics of his time, turning to poetry as his avocation. Marvell gets some credit for saving Milton’s life, when Charles Stuart, to be King Charles II, came back from France to assume the crown of England after the long protectorate under the Cromwells. Milton had been Oliver Cromwell’s Latin secretary, charged with writing official letters of state to the other heads of government in Europe, and he had been a sharp critic of the Anglican Church establishment, so his enemies had him in their sights when Charles returned. The young Marvell too had worked for Cromwell, under Milton’s authority. A trustworthy and able political player, Marvell had allies on both sides, so he intervened to get his old friend Milton released from prison and pardoned for what the enemies wanted to punish even by death. That did not mean he was a toady for the royalists. He was a force for broad tolerance in religion, and in that way he was in harmony with Charles’s sensibilities, and he was far from the puritan in Cromwell, but he wrote also, with sharp wit, against the riotous and luxurious and often flagrantly immoral life of the Caroline court. He was a sober and honest man, whose poetry, like his politics, resists easy categorization.
So with Marvell, we don’t ask so much, “What does this line mean?” but “What is Marvell leading us to think or to feel here in this line?” Is he nudging us, feinting with the right hand then hitting with the left, putting on a guise, smiling — what? Is it merry, or sad, or both? It ends with the Mower saying that the flowers he cuts are going to deck his tomb. Really? Can he mean it so fully, with that rollicking refrain? Just with what movement of the heart do we understand him? What do you say, dear Readers?
My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay, And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hope as in a glass; When Juliana came, and she, What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But these, while I with sorrow pine, Grew more luxuriant still and fine, That not one blade of grass you spied, But had a flower on either side; When Juliana came, and she, What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. Unthankful meadows, could you so A fellowship so true forgo, And in your gaudy May-games meet, While I lay trodden under feet? When Juliana came, and she, What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. But what you in compassion ought, Shall now by my revenge be wrought; And flowers, and grass, and I, and all Will in one common ruin fall; For Juliana comes, and she, What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me. And thus, ye meadows, which have been Companions of my thoughts more green, Shall now the heraldry become With which I shall adorn my tomb; For Juliana comes, and she, What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
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