mentioned Mistress Anne Bradstreet, a colonist whose poems were published in
London without her knowledge in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in
America.
From this date the educated wrote less about heaven.Anne Finch, Countess of
Winchilsea (1661–1720), wrote that the soul ‘Joys in the inferior world’ of natural
scenes. In the light of sense and reason, vision glimmered and decayed.
Cavalier poets
A quietist reaction to religious and political revolution had begun in the 1640s. With
the Civil War, high Anglican devotion became private. The gallant secular verse of
‘Cavalier poets’ such as Sir John Suckling (1609–1642) and Sir Richard Lovelace
(1618–1658) came to an end or rusticated itself, as in Lovelace’s ‘The Grasshopper’,
a delightful poem of friendship written to Charles Cotton. Abraham Cowley also
wrote a ‘Grasshopper’; Izaak Walton’s Angler is an Anglican version of the retiring
Roman poet Horace. Most cavaliers did not join Charles II in France but joined the
clergy in the country, sending (like grasshoppers) chirpy signals to their short-lived
fellows. The Civil War overwhelmed some good writers. Court and Church had been
patrons of fine literature before the War; the alliance survived, but sacred and
profane verse diverged.
The most astonishing poems from the country were by Andrew Marvell
(1621–1678), written 1650–1 but published only scribally and printed posthu-
mously. Opposing the execution of the king, Sir Thomas Fairfax, Lord General of the
Parliamentary forces, had retired to his Yorkshire estate. Marvell tutored his daugh-
ter there, then taught at Eton. A moderate parliamentarian, he was later a Member
of Parliament and a diplomat. Marvell’s poems have Donne’s wit and Jonson’s neat-
ness,with a lighter touch and a social, detached tone. ‘Society is all but rude / To
this delicious solitude,’ he wrote in ‘The Garden’, not claiming a philosopher’s digni-
fied calm but a poet’s pleasure in ‘the garlands of repose’: ‘Annihilating all that’s
made / To a green thought in a green shade.’ Contemplation, scorned by Milton in
1644 as ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue’, is defended at length in ‘Upon Appleton
House’.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
These lines from ‘To his Coy Mistress’ condense the Renaissance apprehension of
time to a metaphysical conception of eternity as infinite empty space. Like Herrick
in ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’, Marvell makes mortality an argument for
sexual love: ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none I think do there
embra ce.’ In this casual epigram, ‘fine’ and ‘private’ keep their Latin senses, ‘narrow’
and ‘deprived’. His poems play discreetly on words, a finesse boldly used in his
‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, a remarkable analysis of the
co ntemporary crisis. It praises Cromwell’s strength, then his art – suggesting that he
let the king escape so that he should be recaptured and tried:
That thence the royal actor borne,
The tragic scaffold might adorn;
While round the arméd bands
Did clap their bloody hands.THE STUART CENTURY 153