Every lover of books also loves those lines. In Areopagitica Milton also writes about temptation and the need to face it, to overcome it frankly and fearlessly, and not to shrink away:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
It was a hard man who wrote that, who had lived a hard life.
ANDREW MARVELL
1621–1678
Poems
Andrew Marvell was born in Hull, Yorkshire, in 1621 and enjoyed an exceptionally fortunate life throughout his fifty-seven years; all his clouds had silver linings.
He attended Cambridge but had to leave without a degree when his father died; however, to gain his living, he then traveled on the Continent as a tutor and thus missed the civil war. He was at first opposed to Cromwell’s government, but the character of Cromwell won him over and he became Latin Secretary (succeeding Milton). This might have caused him grave difficulties, but he was elected a Member of Parliament from his native city in 1659. When Charles II was restored, in 1660, it was thought prudent to allow MPs to continue in office (else there might have been another civil war), so Marvell weathered the transition. He served in the Commons as the Member for Hull for the rest of his life.
During the 1660s and 1670s he wrote a number of engaging political satires, in verse and prose, and was a well-known man in London and throughout the realm. He did not publish any of his serious poems, but they were published after his death by a woman claiming to be his wife, although they had probably never been married. Thus the few superb poems of Marvell survived. They are very few; perhaps only three short poems belong in the great canon of English literature.
“An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” written in 1650, shows Marvell’s growing admiration for Cromwell but it is most famous for its lines describing the death upon the scaffold of King Charles I.
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene …
But laid his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
The poem expresses the way many Englishmen must have felt about “that memorable scene,” when the king stood upon the scaffold erected at Whitehall on Tuesday, January 30, 1649. That is, they approved of the act in principle but deeply regretted the death of this man whose last moments were the best of his life.
“To His Coy Mistress” is an example—perhaps the best example in literature—of the so-called carpe diem poem. “Carpe diem” means, in the Latin of the poet Horace, “seize the day”—that is, take advantage of the present moment, for it will pass and with it youth and beauty. Carpe diem poems were written by the cartload by young men desiring to seduce young women, who are—or were in those days—deeply affected by the idea that once their beauty has passed no one will want them. Often enough, the young beauty was compared to a flower, usually a rose, which would soon wither and die. The girl was supposed to take that fact to heart and act accordingly, but when the poems were really good they rose above the occasion.
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is almost unique in being at once a serious carpe diem poem and at the same time a kind of parody of such verses.
Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews.
“For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate,” the poet says. However, he adds:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
That is of course the carpe diem reminder. Yet here it is advanced to a level seldom if ever seen before. Not only is this woman whom Marvell is addressing not just some young thing with a rising bosom but instead a lady of deep and wide intelligence; in addition, the carpe diem warning is extended to the entire race. Marvell not only deepens the relations between the sexes but also uses the ancient traditional form to say something profound about human life in general. Altogether a remarkable poem, in which you will certainly find much more than I have suggested.
“The Garden” is probably the most admired of Marvell’s poems. Written in the same rapid octosyllabic couplets as “To His Coy Mistress”—couplets of which Marvell is the acknowledged master in English—it is a good deal more mysterious than its surface suggests. In fact, what the poem is finally saying about the conflict between society and solitude, between busyness and quietude, between the great world and the proscribed one of the secluded garden, is not, at first sight, entirely clear. The poem contains symbols, as well, that are difficult to interpret. But it weaves an incomparable spelclass="underline"
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.
T.S. Eliot admired those lines, and spoke of Marvell’s unique ability to turn thoughts into concrete things, and things into thoughts. Perhaps that is what Marvell was doing. At any rate, it was quite wonderful.
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA
1632–1677
The Ethics
In his story “The Spinoza of Market Street,” I.B. Singer tells of an old Jew who, after a lifetime of scholarly devotion to the philosophy of Spinoza, falls in love with a crude young woman and marries her, to the amused scorn of his friends. It is not long, of course, before he begins to contemplate the quiet peacefulness of his past life as compared to the turmoil of his present and, doubtless, his future. He goes to the window to gaze up at the cold, circling stars. “Forgive me, great Spinoza,” he whispers. “I have become a fool.”
Reading Spinoza’s Ethics is no guarantee against folly—there is none such—but if any book will help, this one will. It is about the passions, or emotions as we not too accurately call them now, and how to deal with them. The reason why “passions” is a better word than “emotions” for anger, envy, scorn, fear, and so forth is that it declares its derivation from a Latin word that also gives us “passive,” and it is precisely because our passions act upon us and we are passive with regard to them that they make us unhappy. Spinoza’s advice to us in his Ethics is to learn to be active toward our passions; in other words, to control them and not allow them to control us. It is good advice, although not exactly new.
Benedict de Spinoza (his Hebrew name was Baruch) was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the son of Jewish parents who provided him with a good education in traditional religious subjects. He studied philosophy, modern languages, and physics and mathematics on his own, and from the time that he discovered Descartes, in the 1650s, he was a rebel against almost all intellectual tradition. A queer, inward-turning man, he gave up his inheritance and became a grinder and polisher of lenses for microscopes and telescopes. He died at forty-five from consumption brought on by the inhalation of glass dust in his shop.