The Amphibious Poet

A good place to start thinking about Andrew Marvell – a poet renowned for the depth and subtlety of his imagery – is with one of his own images. At the end of ‘Upon Appleton House’ (st. 97) the poetspeaker notes with wonder and satisfaction the emergence of salmon-fishers from the river as night draws on. They place their leathern boats on their heads as if they were a kind of inverted footwear (‘Antipodes in shoes’) and advance from the water like speedy tortoises. But they remain landsmen whose professional element is water (‘rational amphibii’). The most recent biography of Marvell by Nigel Smith claims Marvell as a chameleon, a shape-shifter. The ‘rational amphibian’ – an image of charm, unexpectedness with a touch of surrealism (‘a faint nonsense air’ writes Alvarez) – hints at many of Marvell’s characteristics as a poet: distinctive in voice, elusive in purpose, and able, apparently to exist in a number of settings, personal and political, at once. Even the spelling of his name fluctuates – Marvell, Marvel, Mervaille, Merville – from document to document. As spy he seems to have used the alias ‘Mr George’. His art is thus simultaneously at home in more than one context: on water and land (like his great religious poem, ‘The Bermudas’); in great houses but also their gardens; responding to cultivation and wildness; negotiating the critical relationship between nature and artifice; between past and present; present and future; war and peace; private and public; activity and retirement. The ‘rational amphibian’ is also the political Marvell, living through Civil War, Commonwealth, Protectorate and Restoration; absent from England for most of the Civil War yet closely involved with two of the most significant men of the period (Fairfax and Cromwell); friend to Royalists and Republicans; a politician and accomplished diplomat who seems to have dabbled in espionage but one whose exact political ideology and practice are often veiled. Andrew Marvell Complete Poems As he writes in his 1669 satire, ‘The Loyal Scot’, boundaries are the result of usage or need, and so flowing, not fixed. The boundary between Scotland and England, for instance, is endlessly debateable, as are so many human frontiers: Prick down the point (whoever has the art) Where Nature Scotland does from England part. Anatomists may sooner fix the cells Where life resides, or understanding dwells . . . What ethic river is this wondrous Tweed, Whose one bank virtue, other vice does breed (ll. 73-76; 85-86)? Marvell’s sensitivity to the openness of questions ensures he always reminds his readers to be aware of shifting perspectives. The poet-speaker at the close of ‘Upon Appleton House’ stands on a rise of ground that gives him a full perspective of the ‘landskip’ in front of him and yet which appears to elevate him above the humdrum activities of both fishermen and mowers. In all his riddling lyrics and balanced political satires Marvell always climbs to, and claims, the high ground of vision and reason, and reposes there, camouflaged, a ‘rational amphibian’ sunning himself.