THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

awarded to saints, soldiers, athletes, and poets; they contain the originals of traditional metaphors for, and expressions
of, physical love; and they suggest that all passion ends in vegetable life (Apollo only chased Daphne, and Pan Syrinx,
knowing that they would conveniently turn into plants). When the narratorial ‘I’ enters the poem in the fifth stanza,
we are presented with an alternative vision, that of a fertile paradise where fruits offer themselves to be touched and
tasted and where, as yet, the only fall results from the amorous outreaching of melon tendrils and the embraces of
flowers. This, however, is neither Goblin Market nor the
[p. 238]
loquacious garden of Alice in Wonderland. The poem represents an attempt to recapture innocence through
meditation and solitude. The creative mind finds the strength to ‘annihilate’ all existing creation into the freshness of
‘a green Thought in a green shade’ and the imagined world is seen as an exclusive paradise possessed by a solitary
Adam. Only the references to time in the final stanza subtly suggest that seasonless Eden is separated from a
corrupted and transient world by the consequences of a historic Fall.
Marvell’s lyric poems are haunted by time and a tantalizing and sometimes disorienting sense of human failure.
Like explicatory poems from an emblem book, ‘On a Drop of Dew’ and ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’
contrast pictures of the ‘restless’ and ‘unsecure’ soul, longing for heaven, with those of the enclosing and complaining
prison of the body. ‘The Definition of Love’ plays, in the manner of Donne, with paradoxes and images of frustration
in dealing with a love ‘begotten by despair | Upon Impossibility’. ‘Young Love’ and ‘The Picture of little T.C. in a
Prospect of Flowers’ express a delight in the beauty of young girls, girls courted by an older poet or, in the case of
‘little T.C.’, wooed by Nature, but preserved from any consummation of love by the fact of their youth. Marvell’s
famous address ‘To his Coy Mistress’ is perhaps the finest of the many variations on the theme of carpe diem
developed in English Renaissance poetry. It has a witty urgency which is both fantastic and millenarian:
Had we but World enough and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
. . . . . . . . .
I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
The inclination of the Lady’s heart may well be revealed by ‘the last Age’, but the narrator presses her to yield before
the extinction of passion on the Day of Judgement. Time does not redeem, it destroys; its ‘winged Charriot’ rushes the
lovers towards the prospect of ‘Deserts of vast Eternity’ and to a grave where the poet’s song echoes in the vacancy.
The last section attempts to counter these negatives with a reassertion of life and pleasure. Only here does the narrator
insist that the lovers’ energy can try to outpace or stop Time; by rolling their strength into a ball they can ‘tear’, like
cannon-shot, through ‘the Iron gates of Life’, though what kind of serenity they will achieve once through these
barriers remains indeterminate. ‘To his Coy Mistress’ both argues against and assaults resistance. It sees an
unconsummated relationship standing frailly against a background of mortality, war, and the end of all things; it
briefly, even desperately, holds out the possibility of a physical triumph against the all too evident encroachments of
change and decay.
[p. 239]
Pepys, Evelyn, and Seventeenth-Century Autobiographical Writing
As a I5-year-old schoolboy Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) had witnessed the execution of King Charles I at Whitehall. In
an entry in his diary for 30 January 1663 he notes the official commemoration of the event in Restoration London
with wry solemnity; the Fast for the King’s murther was one which his household was forced to keep ‘more than we
would have done, having forgot to take any victuals into the house’. Pepys expressed his loyalty to the restored Crown
by going to his parish church for the newly decreed service marking ‘the Day of the Martyrdom of the Blessed King’
and by hearing a sermon ‘upon David’s heart smiting him for cutting off the garment of Saule’. Pepys had begun his
diary in January 1660 well aware of the rapid and momentous changes taking place in British politics; in May of that
year he accompanied his patron, Lord Sandwich, on the voyage to bring over Charles II from the Netherlands, and in
October he saw the ‘first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the king’ when the regicide Thomas Harrison was