MARVELLING AT MARVELL

‘Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak’ :

We have already marvelled at Shakespeare's anticipation some two hundred years earlier of Coleridge's definition of the imagination's role in the creative process.

We might also marvel that with all the creative fecundity of the intervening years there should have be no other precedents to Coleridge's insights. However, our re-examination of Marvell's ‘The Garden’ last week suggests that there has, in fact, been just such a link.

It is to be found in the climactic sixth verse of the poem which we analysed in terms of the poem's context, namely the influence of nature.

We noted that Marvell had anticipated Wordsworth's discovery a century later of nature's revelatory role, as described in ‘Tintern Abbey'. What we had not realised is that Marvell also seems to have anticipated the discovery of Wordsworth's contemporary, Coleridge, regarding the modus operandi of the imagination.

Robert Frost

Of course, there is no specific reference to the imagination, as in the case of Shakespeare's earlier preview, which is why the significance of the verse may not have been obvious.

Like Shakespeare, however, it effectively describes the role of the imagination in poetic terms; and like Coleridge it is quite explicit as to the manner of the imagination's functioning. Nor is it a mere bridging of the gap that this verse provides. It actually enhances our understanding of the subject.

For, where Shakespeare describes the results of the imagination at work, ie. things unseen getting a local habitation and name; and Coleridge explains what he calls the esemplastic or all-encompassing and unifying role the imagination plays; what Marvell does - once we acknowledge this aspect of the significance of the verse - is to show how the imagination gets the mind of the poet to work on the recreation of experience.

As such Marvell's is probably the most practical of the three definitions. But let us look afresh at the verse:

“Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does streight 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.”

The point to be made is that in this verse Marvell is not only revealing how the contemplation of Nature leads to an otherwise unobtainable level of enlightenment, as does Wordsworth.

He is at the same time, perhaps unwittingly, revealing the imaginative process whereby the poet is able to achieve such enlightenment. In other words, Marvell is revealing the creative imagination at work as no other poet has done.

In the first couplet we see what follows the sensory experience where, in the imaginatively exquisite description of the previous verse, nature seems to overpower the poet so that ‘insnar'd by Flowers, he falls on grass.” At this climactic point the mind begins to retreat from the external world of the senses into an interior world of its own making.

Here the mind finds a different kind of joy. It has to do with the mind forming its own its impressions of the external realities to which it has been exposed. The next couplet, comparing the mind to an ocean, reflects the prevalent belief that all land species have their counterparts in the sea. But it is also a virtual figurative version of the dictionary definition of imagination as “a mental faculty forming images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.”

But of course the creative imagination goes far beyond the mere dictionary definition of its role. And this is what the next couplet brings out as the transcending of these images and the creation of further worlds or realms of thought.

And this is precisely the transformational role of the imagination that Coleridge would go on to explain. As the mind goes on pondering its experience of reality the imagination so transforms the original impressions as to facilitate the perception of realities hitherto unconsidered.

At this point we are at the stage that Keats describes as ‘magic casements being charmed to open on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.’ Could Keats have had Marvell's ‘far other Seas’ in mind when he wrote that line?

Finally this recreation of experience results in a fresh insight into life in which everything seems to fall into place. It is the sort of epiphanous experience we have come to expect from great literature. The ultimate meaning of life is simplified into a single thought, a simple insight. Yet – and herein lies the greatness of a Marvell's wit whereby seriousness is intensified by levity – that green thought could not have come without the green shade.

Nor could the green shade of the creative process have come about without the greenery of the garden, the sensory impressions that gave rise to the imaginative process in the first instance.

Thus, to quote Eliot this time, it is ‘a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.’ Yes, the imagination has brought the totality of the poet's experience and the totality of his being into activity to arrive at this sublime clarity of perception.

And so, some seventy five years after Shakespeare and some hundred and twenty five years before Coleridge, we have this wonderful revelation from Marvell. Without using the word at all, he reveals how the imagination works to recreate experience and present it as something rich and strange to the poet and to the reader alike.

He also, in that last line, makes the point that the imagination is firmly grounded in reality, rather than taking off on ethereal flights of fancy as Keats’ line might suggest.

And this reminds us of what Wallace Stevens once said: “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.” One of the finest examples of this truth is Robert Frost's poem, ‘Mowing':

“There was never a sound in the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound – And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.”

In this poem there are no images. It disabuses us of the idea that could have arisen from the previous three examples that the imagination must have figurative richness of language, a profusion of metaphors and similes, to perform its transformational role. Frost simply describes himself at work in a field of grass with his scythe.

He does not compare the activity with anything else. He avoids any make-believe about it.

And then comes the great truth or insight from the imaginative grasp of reality. Anything more than the truth, the actuality of the experience, would be uncalled-for. The earnest love of labour performed in close contact with the earth needs no sentimentalising or glorifying. The fact of such labour provides its own sweet dream.

The imagination, working on the poet after the experience of his labour, brings him a fresh insight about the significance of work: in the words of Yeats, that “labour is blossoming and dancing”.

Labour is its own reward when undertaken in the right spirit with an understanding of its intrinsic dignity. It provides a joy that down-time can never provide, a sense of fulfilment and peace that comes from the bodily exertion in connection with the earth that man was made for. That is Frost's green thought in his green shade.