1How vainly men themselves amaze
2To win the palm, the oak, or bays;
3And their uncessant labours see
4Crowned from some single herb or tree,
5Whose short and narrow verged shade
6Does prudently their toils upbraid;
7While all flowers and all trees do close
8To weave the garlands of repose.
9Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
10And Innocence, thy sister dear!
11Mistaken long, I sought you then
12In busy companies of men;
13Your sacred plants, if here below,
14Only among the plants will grow.
15Society is all but rude,
16To this delicious solitude.
17No white nor red was ever seen
18So amorous as this lovely green.
19Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
20Cut in these trees their mistress' name;
21Little, alas, they know or heed
22How far these beauties hers exceed!
23Fair trees! wheresoe'er your barks I wound,
24No name shall but your own be found.
25When we have run our passion's heat,
26Love hither makes his best retreat.
27The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
28Still in a tree did end their race.
29Apollo hunted Daphne so,
30Only that she might laurel grow,
31And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
32Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
33What wondrous life in this I lead!
34Ripe apples drop about my head;
35The luscious clusters of the vine
36Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
37The nectarine and curious peach
38Into my hands themselves do reach;
39Stumbling on melons as I pass,
40Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
41Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
42Withdraws into its happiness:
43The mind, that ocean where each kind
44Does straight its own resemblance find;
45Yet it creates, transcending these,
46Far other worlds, and other seas;
47Annihilating all that's made
48To a green thought in a green shade.
49Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
50Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
51Casting the body's vest aside,
52My soul into the boughs does glide:
53There like a bird it sits and sings,
54Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
55And, till prepared for longer flight,
56Waves in its plumes the various light.
57Such was that happy garden-state,
58While man there walked without a mate:
59After a place so pure and sweet,
60What other help could yet be meet!
61But 'twas beyond a mortal's share
62To wander solitary there:
63Two paradises 'twere in one
64To live in paradise alone.
65How well the skillful gard'ner drew
66Of flowers and herbs this dial new;
67Where from above the milder sun
68Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
69And as it works, th' industrious bee
70Computes its time as well as we.
71How could such sweet and wholesome hours
72Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!
In Andrew Marvell's "The Garden," a curmudgeonly but lyrical speaker rejects all of human civilization in favor of the solitary pleasures of a green garden. Alone in a garden, the speaker says, a person can enjoy what's truly best in life: an unhurried, untroubled, sensuous creativity that mirrors the garden's own. How silly, then, that people spend their lives scurrying around pursuing fame and love when they might be immersing themselves in a "green shade." Though Marvell probably wrote "The Garden" in the early 1650s, it was first published after his death in the 1681 collection Miscellaneous Poems.
How pointless it is when people strive to win military, political, or artistic glory—to earn a symbolic crown of leaves from one lone tree, whose insufficient little bit of shade warns them against their folly. It's silly to seek one tree when every flower and tree can come together to offer you perfect peace.
Oh, lovely Quiet, I've found you here in this garden—and your dear sister Innocence! Once, I mistakenly looked for you among bustling crowds of people. But you, oh holy flowers, only grow among other plants. Civilization and company feel crude and rough compared to my lovely solitude here.
No one ever saw pale skin or a red lip as gorgeous as the green of this garden. Foolish lovers, harsh as the flame of the love that burns them, cut their beloveds' names in the bark of the trees. Alas, they can't see that the trees are far lovelier than their ladies are. Beautiful trees! If I carve any names into your bark, they'll only be your own.
Once people wear themselves out with passion, it's best to come to a garden to recover. That's just what the Greek gods did, finishing their quests for love by ending up with plants. Apollo ran after the nymph Daphne only so that she'd turn into a laurel tree, and Pan pursued the nymph Syrinx not because he wanted her, but because he wanted the reed she'd turn into.
What a glorious life I live in this garden! Ripe apples fall all around me. Juicy bunches of grapes press themselves into wine against my lips. The nectarine and peach push themselves into my hands. As I walk along, I stumble over melons and get tangled up in flowers, but I only fall down on soft grass.
In the midst of all these pleasures, the busy mind shrinks down and gets quiet. The mind—a place that mirrors and contains the whole world—can also create new things, moving beyond reality to build other worlds and other oceans. At last, everything in the world can become nothing but one thought, as green as the shade I lie in.
Here, resting beside a running fountain or sitting on the mossy roots of a fruit tree, my soul can throw off my body like an old jacket and soar into the branches. There, it sits and sings like a bird, then grooms its silvery wings. While it waits to be ready for a longer journey, it plays with the shifting beams of light in its feathers.
This is how the Garden of Eden once was, after God created Adam but before he created Eve. After experiencing a place so innocent and delightful, what company could Adam have needed? Alas, such a great pleasure as solitude in Eden is beyond the reach of any mortal: it would be like two paradises at once to live in paradise all alone.
A clever gardener made this excellent, sweet-smelling clock out of herbs and flowers that open to mark the movements of the gentle sun. As this clock marks the hours, the hardworking bee measures its time just as well as a person does. How could you mark times this healthy and delightful except with a clock made of herbs and flowers?
The speaker of “The Garden” finds that his deepest moments of delight and understanding come when he withdraws from the bustle of civilization to lie in the grass of a lovely garden. The natural world, in this poem, offers the end-all and be-all of earthly pleasures, providing everything a person could possibly need—and in a perfectly wholesome and innocent form, unlike the often corrupt or dangerous wider world. Sitting alone in a garden is as close to heaven as this speaker can imagine getting on earth.
The pleasure a person can find in nature, the speaker says, is the highest there is. His garden’s “lovely green” is more “amorous” (more attractive, loving, and lovable) than the prettiest lady: nature offers an overwhelming aesthetic satisfaction that outclasses all human beauty. Nature also offers an innocent, simple response to the complex and sometimes dangerous pleasures of love. In this garden, the speaker can enjoy the sensuality of sweet, abundant fruits and cool shade without worrying about sex, sin, and heartache. Pleasure, in the garden, comes without pain.
Alongside that physical delight, the garden is the perfect environment for imagination, insight, and spiritual wisdom. As he sits dreaming under a tree, the speaker’s mind becomes as calmly present as the tree is, until he thinks nothing but “a green thought in a green shade”—a thought in perfect harmony with the world around him. Such thoughts are as fertile as the garden itself. In his “happy garden-state,” the speaker is able to “transcend[]” the everyday world and dream up “far other worlds and other seas”; his soul can even take flight from his body like a bird, in a preview of his “longer journey” to heaven.
What’s more, the physical, mental, and spiritual pleasures the garden offers are all innocent and enduring, as human civilization rarely is. The speaker rejects both romantic love and the pursuit of “the palm, the oak, or bays” (the leafy crowns that traditionally symbolize military, civic, and poetic triumph, respectively). Scrambling after these kinds of success, he feels, means giving up on nature’s “Innocence” and “Quiet” in favor of victories that can only ever be “short and narrow.” The garden, on the other hand, offers lasting pleasure and wisdom uncompromised by “toils” and striving. The speaker’s retreat to the garden is thus rather like a return to the Garden of Eden itself, a place where all delight is innocent.
Resting in the garden, then, is the speaker’s idea of an utterly fulfilling life. A thoughtful and happy person doesn’t need to achieve big worldly success, this poem suggests, and perhaps should even avoid trying: they only need to take part in nature’s innocent pleasure and wisdom.
In “The Garden,” a speaker’s delight in a lovely garden is only intensified by the thought that no one else is there with him. Ideally, he’d like to live that way forever, withdrawing from all the world’s foolish bustle and enjoying perfect privacy among the trees. Other people, this poem rather misanthropically suggests, only get in the way of the pleasures of solitude, and too much company corrupts.
Out among “busy companies of men,” the speaker says, one can never enjoy the pleasant company of “Quiet” and “Innocence.” Civilization, he feels, is full of meaningless noise and bustle: people rush around trying to win the “palm, the oak, or bays” (leaves that symbolize military, civic, and poetic triumph, respectively) or to quench their “passion’s heat” by romancing a beloved. In the speaker’s eyes, this is a whole lot of fuss for no good reason.
Real happiness, the speaker feels, can only be found in solitary contemplation. Out among the trees, all by himself, a guy can calm down and hear himself think. Eventually, he might even find a peace so perfect that he becomes one with the garden he’s alone in, thinking only “a green thought in a green shade,” as a tree might. In such a state, his soul is as close to its eventual “longer flight” to heaven as it can get on earth.
This placid, thoughtful existence, of course, is only possible if there’s no one else around to muck it up with their noise, ambition, and temptations. The speaker reflects that the only guy who got to fully enjoy the bliss of solitude was Adam before Eve was created: “Two paradises ‘twere in one / To live in paradise alone,” he says wistfully. If one is altogether alone in a garden, there’s no danger of, say, being talked into eating a forbidden fruit by your lady friend. Alone in his garden, if the speaker “falls” (an allusion to the story of the Fall of Man itself), he’ll only “fall on grass,” not into sin.
The speaker thus suggests that public life—whether in war, politics, art, or love—is a corrupt, corrupting, and foolish endeavor, one that has nothing on the kind of spiritual refreshment you can only find alone. The desire for achievement and relationships is just a distraction from what’s truly best in life: private meditation in a green shade.
One of the many reasons this poem’s speaker chooses to reject the world and withdraw to a beautiful garden is because, in his eyes, the pleasure you can get from nature is much safer and more wholesome than the pleasure you can get from love. By persistently choosing plants over women, the speaker suggests that sexuality is a disappointment at best and a dangerous trap at worst.
Settling down into his garden, the speaker observes that “no red nor white was ever seen / So amorous as this lovely green.” In other words, the colors of a pretty lady’s complexion aren’t nearly so attractive as the leafy beauty around him. In fact, he’s happy to tell the trees that—unlike the thoughtless lovers who carve their beloved’s names into tree trunks—he’d only ever adoringly carve the trees’ own names into their bark.
Even the Greek gods agreed with his preference for a tree over a lady, the speaker continues. Alluding to myths in which beautiful nymphs transformed into plants to evade amorous gods, the poem’s speaker claims that Apollo and Pan chased after Daphne and Syrinx, not because they wanted to have sex with them, but because they longed for the laurel trees and reeds the women would turn into.
This pointed preference for nature over women comes from a general sense of disillusionment and exhaustion around sexuality (as well as from some general misogyny, by today's standards). Passion, to this speaker, is a burning “flame,” an uncomfortable “heat” that leads nowhere good. This, he feels, has always been the way. The first man, Adam, enjoyed “two paradises” in one when he “live[d] in Paradise alone,” the speaker says: everything was going great before Eve came along and complicated things. The implication here is that Eve’s arrival led to the Fall of Man itself, the descent from paradise into sin.
Though the speaker withdraws to his garden to escape all the mess, discomfort, and corruption of sex, even here he can’t totally get away. When all the fruits of his garden come to life and sexily press themselves against him, readers get the sense that passion follows him wherever he goes. His great hope is to enjoy an innocently fruity sensuality, not a perilous fleshy one.
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays;
And their uncessant labours see
Crowned from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow verged shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all flowers and all trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.
As “The Garden” begins, the poem’s speaker sits back to cast a cynical, amused eye on the folly of humankind, as if he were watching a crowd from afar.
How silly it is, he reflects, that people run around trying to “win the palm, the oak, or bays”—that is, to earn the leafy crowns that symbolize military, civic, and poetic triumph, respectively. Such victories, in his view, can only satisfy for so long.
He makes that point through a surprising, witty leap from symbolic palms, oaks, and bays to literal ones. A quest for the glory of “the palm, the oak, or bays,” he says, means committing yourself to “some single herb or tree”: that is, to one little plant, whose “short and narrow verged shade” can offer only the most limited shelter. Public triumph, in other words, can't offer lasting satisfaction. Soon enough, people’s victories fade away, and they have to scurry after yet another triumph to keep themselves going.
The trees that provide crowns of leaves, the speaker goes on, are wiser by far than the people who pursue those crowns. Punnily, even as a crown of palm, oak, or bay leaves braids around a victor’s temples, the tree’s inadequate shade upbraids (or rebukes) the person who pursues it.
The speaker has his own strong sense of what’s worth pursuing, and it isn’t any one symbolic shrub. Rather, it’s the metaphorical “garlands of repose,” wreaths that one can only weave from “all flowers and all trees.” In other words, it’s the rest and calm one finds in a garden. Only the real, live natural world offers the great and lasting reward of peace.
In this poem, the speaker will turn his back on all the sweating and striving that makes civilization look so petty and tiresome to him, retreating into an ideal garden in quest for those “garlands of repose.” But this isn’t a simple poem about the glory of nature, though that’s part of it. Rather, this artful speaker will weave literal and metaphorical ideas about gardens together. His ideal garden, readers will discover, is at once a real place and a rich conceit, an extended metaphor for his dream of a perfect inner life.
Fittingly enough, Andrew Marvell here uses a form that feels manicured as a flowerbed:
Taken all together, this neat shape evokes a kind of deep, calm order—a sense that, in the speaker’s garden, all is perfectly in balance.
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
Unlock all 322 words of this analysis of Lines 9-16 of “The Garden,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+No white nor red was ever seen
So amorous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress' name;
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheresoe'er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
When we have run our passion's heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
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.
What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked 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.
How well the skillful gard'ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new;
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th' industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!
The pleasure this poem’s speaker’s takes in his garden isn’t the same as a Romantic poet’s pleasure in the rhythms of real-life nature. For this isn’t a wilderness, or even the open countryside, but a garden, a cultivated collaboration between nature and humanity. For that matter, it’s a supernatural garden, eternally green and fertile; its fruits even throw themselves at the speaker, begging him to eat them. For that reason, readers have also interpreted this poem, not just as a meditation on nature’s delights, but as a symbolic depiction of an poet’s inner life: a solitary, rich, imaginative, and fertile place where raw natural materials can be shaped into art.
The garden's greenness draws on traditional symbolism that connects the color to fertility and creativity. Since leafy, grassy green is the color of the natural world in summer—and the color of evergreens, trees that live all through the winter—the color has always been associated with life, growth, and even immortality. The speaker certainly uses that idea here: his garden seems perpetually green, unlike the fast-fading leaf crowns that foolish people pursue. What's more, this greenery feels not just refreshing and enlivening, but outright erotic. To this speaker, green is "amorous" and seductive. All that greenery reflects the idea that the garden is a vibrant, lively, inspiring place; a place that refreshes and rejuvenates the speaker.
The poem’s metaphors transform the speaker’s philosophies into concrete, surprising, and even funny images.
In the second stanza, the speaker personifies the qualities that make his garden perfect, presenting “Quiet” and “Innocence” as a pair of lovely sisters. There’s something ironic about this moment: the only reason Quiet and Innocence live in the garden is because there’s nobody there! The only company the speaker needs, the personification suggests, is the absence of company.
Company, after all, only leads to struggles and troubles. The speaker is particularly happy to leave behind the exhausting pursuit of romance. Lovers, he observes, become “cruel as their flame”—that is, cruel as the metaphorical flame of passion that burns within them. Such flames drive them to do silly things like carve their beloveds’ names on the bark of innocent trees, behavior the speaker rolls his eyes over.
He's far happier spending his time in:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
This metaphor draws on the old belief that the ocean contains an analogue of every land animal: if there are rabbits on land, for instance, there must be sea-rabbits to match them. If the mind is an ocean, it’s not only vast and deep but also a mirror of the whole world, inhabited by a mind-copy of everything it observes around it.
Navigating this inner ocean, the speaker can get so absorbed in his imagination that he feels as if he’s tossed “the body’s vest aside”—that is, as if he’s shrugged off his body like an old jacket. His soul, in a simile, is then “like a bird,” unbound from earthly limitations and free to fly among the green branches above him.
Above and around all these metaphors, some might read the speaker’s dazzlingly green garden as itself a conceit, an extended metaphor for the poet’s own mind. This solitary place, after all, is endlessly lush, sensuous, and creatively fertile, just like the generative imagination the speaker describes in the sixth stanza.
Unlock all 422 words of this analysis of Imagery in “The Garden,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
Pointlessly and foolishly.
"The Garden" uses an elegant, measured form of Marvell's own invention: nine octets (or eight-line stanzas) built from four pairs of rhymed couplets apiece. This solid shape feels not unlike a well-maintained garden itself. Within these orderly stanzas, the speaker cultivates all kinds of "green thought[s]," from reflections on the mind's imaginative power to sensuous fantasies of seductive fruit. to wry rejections of human folly.
Notice, though, that there might be a tiny hint of transgression in the poem's neat shape. If Marvell had used eight stanzas of eight lines apiece, "The Garden" would be perfectly square, as geometrically neat as a knot garden. Instead, he uses nine stanzas—a subtle overreach that introduces the merest hint of wildness to his green paradise.
“The Garden” is written in iambic tetrameter, a rhythm as steady and leisurely as the speaker’s “happy garden-state” itself. In iambic tetrameter, each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here’s how that sounds in the poem's first lines:
How vain- | ly men | themselves | amaze
To win | the palm, | the oak, | or bays;
Those four pulsing beats keep the poem ticking along like a heart, evoking the speaker's calm pleasure as he rests in the garden.
However, the meter isn't perfectly regular throughout. Like a lot of poems written in iambic meters, "The Garden" plays with its rhythms from time to time; in moments of strong feeling, the speaker's meter changes to match his mood.
For instance, listen to the music of these famous lines:
Anni- | hila- | ting all | that's made
To a | green thought | in a | green shade.
The first line here is straight-ahead iambic tetrameter. The second still has four beats, but moves those beats around, so that the two strong spondees (feet with a DUM-DUM rhythm) of "green thought" and "green shade" carry all the weight of the line. The speaker's green thought is thus aligned with the green shade, not just because they share a color, but because they share a rhythm. It's as if the speaker has almost merged with the world around him.
The rhymes in “The Garden” are planted as neatly as rows of tulips. Each stanza uses a sequence of four rhymed couplets, like this:
AABBCCDD
These tidy rhymes line right up with many of the speaker’s feelings. The mind, the speaker reflects, is itself a reflector: sitting in his garden, he becomes aware that his mind contains a little version of everything in the world, putting him in tune with what’s around him. Just as, within the mind, everything finds “its own resemblance,” the rhymes swiftly find a resemblance to each other, making the poem’s lines a picture of the relationship between speaker and garden.
The speaker even drives the point home by threading internal rhymes through his description of finding likenesses between the inner and outer world:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
The poem’s speaker is a complex and contradictory fellow:
In one thing, however, he’s singleminded. His greatest pleasure comes from immersing himself in his private garden-world until he can barely distinguish his “green thought” from the “green shade” around him. Being in the garden, to him, eventually turns into being the garden: his happiest state is one in which imaginative visions come as easily to him as leaves to a tree.
This shifty poetic figure might even be read as a voice for Marvell himself. Though it’s not altogether clear when Marvell wrote this poem, there’s evidence to suggest that he composed it in the 1650s, when he was employed as tutor to a nobleman's daughter at a lovely country house called Nunappleton. The speaker's withdrawal into a peaceful garden world could mirror Marvell's own retreat from public life.
The poem's lush garden is a place both tangible and otherworldly.
The garden's “green shade” will feel real and familiar to anyone who’s ever sat under a summer tree, and its "mossy root[s]" and "sliding fountain[s]" could come straight out of a stately old English country garden. But active, seductive fruits and hints of eternity—it never seems to be autumn or winter here, only the height of green summer—suggest that this isn’t any ordinary backyard. Readers might take this poem's landscape as an image of the private paradise that is the speaker's mind, or as a vision of Eden itself (before Eve came along and things got complicated, that is).
In either of its guises, real or imaginary, this garden is the speaker's ideal place, containing within its green and pleasant boundaries all possible delights for the body, the mind, and the soul.
Readers might observe, too, that this garden combines the pleasures of nature and art. This isn't a wild Romantic landscape, but a cultivated place where humanity and nature work and grow together.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was a famously elusive writer. In his political commitments and his poetry alike, he never stuck to one tradition or another: he's not quite a Cavalier poet and not quite a Metaphysical poet, though his work shows the marks and influences of both of those traditions.
For instance, Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is one of the greatest examples of a carpe diem poem (that is, a poem in which a speaker tries to convince a lady to sleep with him)—a theme for which the Cavalier poets were famous. But Marvell was quick to turn his back on the Cavalier cause when the Puritanical government of Oliver Cromwell rose to power—and then to cheerfully become a monarchist again when King Charles II returned from exile and resumed his throne.
"The Garden," of course, expresses a general dissatisfaction with the grubby world of politics—and with people, full stop. In its picture of an Eden made even lovelier by total solitude, "The Garden" might respond not just to a depressing political climate, but to the work of Marvell's friend John Milton, whose epic Paradise Lost tells the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of humanity. The poem's visions of the mind itself—one can even read the garden as a conceit for the poetic imagination—also links Marvell to the scintillating philosophizing of Metaphysical poets like John Donne and George Herbert.
Like many of Marvell's poems, "The Garden" appeared posthumously in 1681, when a woman who claimed to be Marvell's wife (but was probably actually his hard-up housekeeper) published an assortment of his manuscripts in the hopes of collecting some royalties. Though this publication history makes the poem's origins a bit mysterious, many critics suspect that Marvell wrote "The Garden" while working as a tutor in the lovely country house called Nunappleton—his own retreat from the sorrows of a war-torn world.
Andrew Marvell lived through one of the most dramatic episodes in English history: the English Civil War. In this earthshaking conflict, the Roundheads, led by Oliver Cromwell, rose up against the Cavaliers, forces loyal to King Charles I and to the monarchy in general. Cromwell's Roundheads argued for increased Parliamentary power as a curb on kingly tyranny.
This clash came to a dramatic climax in 1649 when Cromwell's forces tried, convicted, and beheaded Charles I for treason. This execution was a huge shock to a country whose recent monarchs had proclaimed the "divine right of kings," the idea that kings and queens were appointed by God.
Cromwell's stand against such ideas would start to look ironic when he began to exercise dictatorial control in his role as "Lord Protector." His power and popularity soon waned, and England invited Charles I's exiled son Charles II back to the throne, ushering in an era of luxury, elegance, and wit.
Marvell navigated these dangerous years by swearing his allegiance to whichever side happened to be dominant at the moment—a tricky strategy that he pulled off through brilliance, usefulness, and fast talking. If he held deeper political convictions than his actions suggest, they're hard to trace in his poetry. Though the tone and subject matter of his work make him sound a lot like a Cavalier poet, he also wrote poems in praise of Cromwell and was close friends with the anti-monarchical John Milton, whom he rescued from prison after Charles II resumed the throne.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Marvell's life and times in this short biography from the Poetry Foundation.
Marvell's Legacy — Learn more about Marvell's mysterious, shifty life (and afterlife) in this review of Nigel Smith's biography of the poet.
Portraits of Marvell — See some images of Marvell himself (looking rather rakish and piratical) via London's National Portrait Gallery.
Marvell's Manuscripts — Study images of Marvell's manuscripts and books at the British Library's website.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.