"The Coronet" by Andrew Marvell

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Romanticism, Modernism, and The Lyric

-Defining ourselves against the vices of our age

-Historical problems with Lyric

-Modernism as pharmakon

-T.S. Eliot's essay, Andrew Marvell

-T.S. Eliot's essay, The Metaphysical Poets

-Marvell's Horatian Ode

-Marvell's Country House poem, Upon Appleton House

-Marvell's "Collige, Virgo, Rosas" or "Carpe Diem" poem, To His Coy Mistress

-Paradise Lost 

-An anatomy of Marvell's style

-La Corona by John Donne (my episode on Donne here)

-A Wreath by George Herbert (my episode on Herbert here)

-Stichic vs. Strophic

-On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost by Marvell

-The selfish heart of the artist

-The Faerie Queene 

-Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

-The terrifying prodigality of God

Transcript

Versecraft 5-5: “The Coronet” by Andrew Marvell

         Hey everyone, I hope you’re all having a lovely week, and welcome to your weekly slice of juicy poetry analysis. Since Versecraft’s inception, my intention has been to focus not only on lyric poetry composed in accentual-syllabic meter, rhyme, and traditional forms, but to specifically concentrate on lyric poetry of this description written in the 20th and 21st centuries. My ostensible reason for this is to demonstrate that meter and rhyme are and can continue to be vital forces in modern and contemporary poetry. There is another more controversial reason though, which I’ve been aware of for some time but as yet haven’t fully reckoned with, which is that I think that the best of modern lyric poetry tends to be, on the whole, more interesting and insightful than lyric poetry from earlier centuries. Please note that I am specifically talking about lyric here— so far, there is no dramatic or epic poetry of modern times that can even hold a candle to the great dramas and epics of the Renaissance and Classical worlds. 

But lyric is different. As much as I disdain so many Romantic and Modernist impulses, and as much as I admire the logical structure of English Renaissance lyric, I cannot deny that Romanticism and Modernism have, in the long run, added a depth of psychological nuance and breadth of subject matter to the lyric genre which have made it richer than it was before. I believe, as Yvor Winters did, that the ethos of realism and descriptive precision espoused by the Imagists and the conceptually complex methods introduced by the Symbolists allow, when properly synthesized and situated within a framework of Classical reason, for the production of the greatest lyric poetry yet written, an apex combination which Winters and Bowers found best exemplified in Paul Valery’s “Sketch of A Serpent” and “The Graveyard By The Sea,” and which I myself find in the best work of Bowers, Wilbur, and Robinson, and in many of the poems I’ve featured on this show. One thing that Winters was never able to fully admit however was how much this ideal method owed to the innovations of Romanticism and Modernism more generally. The ambivalent complexity of our post-Enlightenment inheritance is something I would love to devote more time to in a future episode. 

As many of you know, I believe that Romantic, Modernist, and Postmodernist approaches to art are fraught with morbidities and toxicities, and much of my critical efforts are spent attempting to point out the ways in which these flaws continue to plague contemporary thought and craft. When I do this, though, I must always bear two things in mind: firstly, that much undeniably great art of the 19th and 20th centuries was produced not only despite of but because of those aforementioned movements, and that it is therefore necessary to discover how and why this is so. Secondly, that there are also other, contrary ways in which art and culture can go astray. The primary reason I focus on the ills of Romanticism and Modernism is that these are the ideological frameworks which require the most resistance in our own time. By contrast, had I lived in the late 18th century, it would have been necessary for me, like the Romantics themselves, to protest against the outrageous dogmatism, toadyism, derivativeness, soullessness, superficiality, and effete sentimentality enforced by the prevailing mode of neoclassicism. No recent century is so conspicuously barren of good lyric as the 18th, and whatever else Romanticism did, it revived this genre for future generations. 

If 19th century lyric was marred by a sloppy, immature Romanticism, and 18th century lyric was marred by a decadent, constrictive, senile neoclassicism, looking back further, I find that even in the 16th and 17th centuries, usually considered the golden age of Western art, a nexus of mannerist clichés proved largely deadly to lyric writing. The amount of poetic talent wasted in these years writing extravagant, superficial, insincere love poetry on the questionable model of Petrarch, pallid pseudo-imitations of classical works, and uncritical, existentially naïve religious poetry is tragic to contemplate. Even Shakespeare, the strongest of us all, was a victim of his time’s conventions, and was only able to channel a small fraction of his talent into his sonnets—compared with Hamlet or Macbeth, his greatest lyrics are like puny candle-flames swallowed by the brilliance of the sun. We find a similar situation in the case of Dante a couple hundred years before, where the quality of the epic writing outshines the quality of the lyric writing to an almost preposterous extent. Even if we go back to the original spring of Greek poetry, we see the qualitative chasm between Homer and the tragedians on one hand and Pindar, Sappho, and company on the other. 

         Heretical as it may be to say, I think that lyric writing has been the least developed poetic genre in Western art, and I think that at least in English, it probably reached its historic high point in the mid-20th century. There is a tragic irony in this, because this is the exact same time that the very foundations of traditional lyric were being savagely undermined by the Beats and their ilk. In this case, Modernism was a pharmakon, producing both the cure and the poison. 

         Good examples of art transcend the silly vogues which prevail in their times and places. Great examples of art tend to not only transcend these vogues but exploit them for their own advantage. Racine utilized neoclassical restrictions to create gem-like dramas of unparalleled concentration and intensity. Dante utilized the medieval taste for overt religiosity, episodic romance, and the grotesque to create an epic of unparalleled theological scope and imagination. Due to the former dominance of epic and drama, transcendent genius of this kind was rarely applied consistently to lyric poetry in past centuries, but we do find it here and there in fits and bursts. We find it in the classical purity and poignant honesty of some of Ben Jonson’s poems; in the spiritual ferocity and mental rigor of some of Fulke Greville’s poems; in the visionary consciousness and astounding language of some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. When I look to the poetry of the distant past for inspiration or enrichment, I am nearly always looking at drama or epic rather than lyric, so when a lyric stands out to me as exemplary from the Renaissance, Enlightenment, or 19th century, I am keen to give it extra attention. 

         And so we come to today’s poem, by the fascinating Interregnum and Restoration poet Andrew Marvell, a man notable not only for the vivid, strange, and witty qualities of his poetry—astutely discussed by T.S. Eliot in his essay on the poet— but for formulating and evolving a poetic practice which straddled the ornate metaphysical style of the early 17th century, exemplified by John Donne, and the smooth, clear, satirical neoclassicism of the late 17th century, exemplified by John Dryden. If the so-called modern world begins with the Enlightenment, and if this pivot point is the most significant shift in Western thought since the introduction of Christianity, which I believe it is, then Marvell stands smack in the middle of this most important transition, and the quality of his mind reflects the passage from an age of religious humanism and unified sensibility to an age of secular humanism and dissociated sensibility, a catastrophic mental break which Eliot articulated in his famous essay, “The Metaphysical Poets.”  

         As always, before we properly begin, let me remind you that if you enjoy this episode, please consider donating to the show or purchasing a Versecraft t-shirt, which you can do at my link in the show notes. You can also help out by sharing this episode with your friends, or rating the show on Apple or Spotify. I’d like to give a special shout-out to Barbara Goldin for her generous contribution to the show this past week. Thank you so much Barbara, you’re an example to us all. 

         Andrew Marvell, who lived from 1621 to 1678, was born in Yorkshire and educated at Cambridge, where he mastered Greek and Latin. He spent much of his twenties traveling around continental Europe, likely as a tutor, where he conveniently missed out on the English Civil War, and took it upon himself to pick up French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch as well. Upon returning to Cromwell’s England, he ambivalently aligned himself to the new regime with his first major poem, “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland,” which, due to its powerful rhetoric and complexity of tone has now come to be seen as the greatest political ode in the English language. This would not be the only time he wrote the definitive poem in a microgenre. At this time, he also became a tutor to Civil War leader Thomas Fairfax’s daughter, and enjoyed the privilege of living at the general’s estate at Nun Appleton Hall, where he wrote “Upon Appleton House” in his patron’s honor, one of the most well-known Country House poems, as well as “To His Coy Mistress,” his most famous poem, and considered the supreme and definitive example of the Collige, Virgo, Rosas or seductive Carpe Diem poem, a poem addressed to a lover in which the shortness of life and youth is argued as a reason for the beloved to yield herself to the speaker. 

         After another stint of tutoring for Oliver Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, Marvell was offered a salaried position as a Latin secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State, where he became coworkers with his long-time friend, John Milton. A couple years later, he was elected MP for Kingston Upon Hull, and in his later years would attain wide renown as a just politician. In 1660, when the Commonwealth collapsed and Charles II gained power, Marvell was able to use his connections and diplomatic savoir faire to save the irascibly anti-Royalist Milton from execution. We therefore have Marvell partially to thank for the existence of Paradise Lost. 

         During the Restoration, Marvell made his name as a statesman and a satirist against corruption and became known by some as the “British Aristides” for his righteous integrity and selflessness. Despite appearances of cheerfulness and heartiness, he died suddenly at a town hall meeting in Hull at the age of 57. 

He is now considered one of the three greatest metaphysical poets, along with John Donne and George Herbert, whom I have covered elsewhere. I confess that while I think Donne is more ingenious and Herbert the better craftsman, Marvell is my favorite of the three. He has more of what Eliot called a “tough reasonableness.” He is wryer and more deliciously cruel, less hysterical than the other two. A touch of Spenser’s lush pastoral imagery, a touch of Jonson’s rakish but gentlemanly lucidity, a touch of Dryden’s witty contempt, and a touch of Crashaw’s psychedelic wackiness, and you have Marvell. It is a compelling combination. 

While I have limited patience for elaborate metaphysical conceits, I think I am drawn to the Metaphysicals because they were never content to be conventional or dogmatic in their thinking, but were always seeking out nuanced and insightful approaches to romantic and religious feeling, and in doing so produced quite a bit more original and imaginative thought than their lyrical peers and predecessors. I am particularly interested in poems of independent but disciplined spiritual meditation, and few pre-modern poets in English fit this bill better than the metaphysical poets. 

         Of the major metaphysicals, Marvell was by far the least religious, at least in his work. He was content to serve both Puritans and Royalists, and in his personal life was said to be a mild-mannered Anglican. Of his poems, there is only one that I would go so far as to call devotional, and it is the one I have chosen for today, “The Coronet.” “Coronet” means crown, and in using a coronation conceit Marvell is following in the footsteps of works like Donne’s “La Corona,” and Herbert’s “A Wreath,” although the poem itself is quite different from either. I find this poem intriguing not only because it is unique in Marvell’s oeuvre, but because I think it gets directly to the heart of the spiritual dilemma of being a poet in a way I have not seen elsewhere. The poem goes like this:

The Coronet

When for the thorns with which I long, too long,

With many a piercing wound,

My Saviour’s head have crowned,

I seek with garlands to redress that wrong:

Through every garden, every mead,

I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers),

Dismantling all the fragrant towers

That once adorned my shepherdess’s head.

And now when I have summed up all my store,

Thinking (so I myself deceive)

So rich a chaplet thence to weave

As never yet the King of Glory wore:

Alas, I find the serpent old

That, twining in his speckled breast,

About the flowers disguised does fold,

With wreaths of fame and interest.

Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,

And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem!

But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame,

Either his slippery knots at once untie;

And disentangle all his winding snare;

Or shatter too with him my curious frame,

And let these wither, so that he may die,

Though set with skill and chosen out with care:

That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,

May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.

         You will notice that I have read the word “woond” as “wownd” and the word “meed” as “med” in order to preserve the rhyme sounds of the original 17th century English. Med of course is short for “meadow,” a word we still use which preserves the original pronunciation. If we glance at this poem, we see that it is one long column of language. Unlike most lyric poems, it is stichic rather than strophic—that is, it is lineated language organized into a paragraph, not into discrete stanzas. However, this is really no more than a typographical illusion—the sound of the poem gives us very discrete stanzas indeed. Were we to break up the poem according to the rhyme scheme, we would end up with three enclosed rhyme quatrains, one alternate rhyme quatrain, a heroic couplet, a sestet, and a concluding heroic couplet. This organization gives us echoes of sonnet structure, like a scrambled up curtal double sonnet, and indeed at line 19 we get something like a volta with the words “But thou.” 

         Another thing to notice is the presence of mixed meter, which was very much in vogue at the time Marvell was writing. We begin with pentameter enclosing trimeter; then tetrameter alternating with pentameter; then tetrameter enclosing pentameter; then a quatrain of tetrameter, and then, interestingly, the remainder of the poem is in pentameter. Pentameter has a gravitas which the shorter meters do not, and when pentameter takes over we know we have entered the more somber part of the poem. Indeed, it takes over when Marvell scolds himself: “Oh foolish man!” and then continues through the rest of the poem which turns on a devotional address to God. 

         Aside from a couple standard issue first foot trochaic substitutions, this poem is as metrically immaculate as you would expect from a work of this period. I will note however that this perfectly iambic reading is only possible if we remember to elide. For example, in line six, we have: “I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers).” If we were to scan this the way most of us would read it, we would end up with a second foot amphibrachic or a third foot anapestic substitution and a feminine ending. For Marvell however, “flowers” is pronounced as one syllable, and this preserves the meter. 

Let’s now go back and read the first twelve lines again:

When for the thorns with which I long, too long,

With many a piercing wound,

My Saviour’s head have crowned,

I seek with garlands to redress that wrong:

Through every garden, every mead,

I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers),

Dismantling all the fragrant towers

That once adorned my shepherdess’s head.

And now when I have summed up all my store,

Thinking (so I myself deceive)

So rich a chaplet thence to weave

As never yet the King of Glory wore:

Until recently, I found the beginning of this poem disorienting, because I read “with which I long, too long” to refer to the speaker’s longing, rather than something the speaker has done for a long time. Even though the second meaning is the only one that makes sense, I have no doubt that Marvell phrased his sentence this way in order to suggest the spiritual longing which lies beneath his words. He is saying that for too long he has crowned Christ’s head with thorns—that is, he has sinned, causing Christ pain on his behalf. We also have a pun here on the word “wound,” which refers both to the wounding of Christ and the winding of the thorns around his head. In order to “redress this wrong,” Marvell offers to replace the thorns with flowers. 

With these words, Marvell expects us to understand a couple of things which might not be obvious to a modern reader: Firstly, that he is, as Metaphysicals are wont to do, taking an image of romantic devotion and transfiguring it into one of religious devotion. We of course still give flowers to our loved ones, but Marvell is specifically referring to the flower crown that a shepherd might make for his maiden in a typical pastoral love poem. Indeed, the bucolic imagery of this poem is entirely in the pastoral tradition, and evinces Marvell’s debt to Edmund Spenser, who popularized this mode in English. Lush gardens and meadows are Marvell’s signature settings, and his love for the darkly mystical rustic idyll is one of the enchanting features that most distinguishes him from other Metaphysical poets. 

We are also meant to immediately understand that when he says “flowers,” what he really means are poems. The metaphorical pairing of flowers and poems is a traditional one—the word “anthology” comes from the Greek anthos, meaning flower, and logia, meaning collection. An anthology is a collection of flowers, a bouquet of words, or, in Marvell’s case, a crown for his savior. 

In the second quatrain, when he playfully laments that his “fruits are only flowers,” he is therefore humbly saying that the fruits of his labor, his poems, do not actually have any nutriment to them, but are, like flowers, merely decorative. To make the crown for his savior, he dismantles “all the fragrant towers that once adorned my shepherdesses’ head.” Here, Marvell makes explicit his conversion from romantic to divine love. We should also note that the word “towers” is less fanciful than it might appear— in Marvell’s’ time, it was not uncommon to refer to an elaborate female headdress as a tower.

In the third quatrain, any trace of humility has gone— once the poet has gathered all his romantic material, which he intends to transform into devotional material, he is quite confident that he will weave from it a chaplet, a set of prayer beads, “as never yet the King of Glory wore.” It would be tempting to read this last line as a sly dig by Marvell at his pal Milton, who in Paradise Lost claimed that he would sing of “things un-attempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Unfortunately, this is impossible, as Marvell’s poem was written quite a few years before. For Marvell’s shocked but impressed reaction to his friend’s bold and brash masterpiece, see his poem “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost.”

The poet knows however that he has deceived himself, and in the next lines, the plot thickens: 

Alas, I find the serpent old

That, twining in his speckled breast,

About the flowers disguised does fold,

With wreaths of fame and interest.

Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,

And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem!

But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame,

Either his slippery knots at once untie;

And disentangle all his winding snare;

Or shatter too with him my curious frame,

And let these wither, so that he may die,

Though set with skill and chosen out with care:

That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,

May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.

Upon going to crown Christ with his wreath of flowers, the poet notices that his offering hides another, unexpected wreath: a snake has hidden and wound itself among his flowers. This old serpent is of course Satan, and here he embodies the sins of pride and greed, the secret motivations which the poet has hidden from himself or attempted to disguise as he makes a show of becoming a poet of God. 

This psychological analysis and moral condemnation of the poet rings deeply true to me. It is very tempting as artists to try to convince ourselves and others that we devote our lives to art instead of something practical because it is a selfless act—that we create our work solely for the common good, to support a cause, to inspire others, or to offer anonymous praise to creation, and that the goodness of the work is all we care about. This is hogwash, but it is the kind of hogwash which is devilishly tempting and convincing precisely because it is not entirely untrue. Most artists do actually believe that their art can make a positive difference in the lives of others, and that it can beautify reality, and artists do sometimes make art simply for the joy of making it. However, these are far from the only reasons that someone devotes themselves to being an artist. I would wager that most artists are just as if not equally motivated by two other things: A. The desire for contemporary recognition and flattery, and B. the megalomaniacal desire for their names to live on forever. A businessman simply wants to be rich—a poet may not care about being rich, but only because they think adulation and immortality are worthier prizes. I do believe that there are artists, probably mostly religious artists, who are entirely selfless, but that is not most of us, and it is not Marvell. 

We should note that the detail that the snake has a “speckled breast” is not merely a suggestion of impurity, but is another tribute to Spenser, who in Book I of his Faerie Queene describes the dragon as “forelifting up aloft his speckled breast.” It was perhaps partly in order to repudiate such associations of speckledness with sin that Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote his famous ode to dappled things, “Pied Beauty.” 

Upon reckoning with the presence of the snake, his own self-interest, Marvell is sheepish and distraught— how foolish to attempt to create a tribute to God that is so infested by thoughts of fame and glory! He wishes to be a righteous and devout person, but he cannot bear the idea of giving up his art. In desperation, he knows that the only thing he can do is appeal to God’s grace. The rest of the poem takes the form of a prayer: Please God, disentangle my art-making from sinful thoughts of pride and glory; or, if that is not possible, destroy my art and my artistic impulse so that Satan has nothing left to feed on. When Marvell offers for God to “shatter his curious frame,” he is speaking primarily about the coronet of flowers/poems he has woven, but we of course may also read this as a plea for God to destroy Marvell’s own body, and thereby his very life. He also very movingly retains a small modicum of pride even in the throes of his desperate prayer—though he is begging God to destroy his art, he cannot help but remark that his flowers were “set with skill and chosen out with care.” If God is a paternal figure, Marvell is suggesting that if he is not allowed to take pride in himself, then he at least hopes that God be proud of his son. 

Marvell concludes the poem ingeniously by saying that if his crown of poems is unworthy of God’s head, God should trample them along with the snake, and that they will then at least be worthy of adorning God’s feet. This is a witty image, but what are the conceptual implications? Obviously, it brings glory to God to destroy evil, but does it also bring glory to God to destroy beautiful art, however suspiciously intentioned? If Marvell smacks of Puritanism anywhere, it is in this last couplet. We do sense however a certain haunting truth in this uncomfortable claim—if God is a source of infinite beauty and infinite generation, then there is nothing so beautiful or precious that it cannot be destroyed for God’s sake. God is prodigal—God creates beautiful life forms only to kill them, sometimes after only a few moments of life. Billions of civilizations and galaxies may rise and fall at His whim. God can afford to do such things. 

From a God’s eye perspective, we go beyond the binary of valuable and valueless. Within God’s divine presence and His infinite capacity for care, all things are valuable— yet at the same time there is nothing that God actually needs. When God casually destroys that which seems valuable to us, it is a flex of His omnipotence, and brings Him glory. At the end of this poem, Marvell does not only offer a witty comeback to his own self-loathing, but hints at God’s alien ferocity and sublimity in a way which haunts us long after we leave the poem on the page. 

         With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

The Coronet

When for the thorns with which I long, too long,

With many a piercing wound,

My Saviour’s head have crowned,

I seek with garlands to redress that wrong:

Through every garden, every mead,

I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers),

Dismantling all the fragrant towers

That once adorned my shepherdess’s head.

And now when I have summed up all my store,

Thinking (so I myself deceive)

So rich a chaplet thence to weave

As never yet the King of Glory wore:

Alas, I find the serpent old

That, twining in his speckled breast,

About the flowers disguised does fold,

With wreaths of fame and interest.

Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,

And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem!

But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame,

Either his slippery knots at once untie;

And disentangle all his winding snare;

Or shatter too with him my curious frame,

And let these wither, so that he may die,

Though set with skill and chosen out with care:

That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,

May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.