The Garden by Andrew Marvell

First published: 1681, in Miscellaneous Poems

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Garden,” which comprises nine eight-line stanzas, opens with the assertion that people ordinarily confuse themselves (“amaze,” with a possible pun on the “maze,” a common feature of seventeenth century formal gardens) by pursuing recognition in only one field, as represented by wreaths associated with military (palm), civic (oak), and poetic (bay) achievements. Against those conventional modes of activity, the speaker, who enters the poem as “I” in the next stanza, argues for the ease and retirement embodied in the combined vegetation of the garden. Its plants, he offers, will provide the quiet and innocence he has mistakenly sought in the busy world, for such conditions result not from “society,” but from “solitude.”

In the third and fourth stanzas, the speaker reflects on the destructiveness of lovers, who record their passions by carving their initials on trees. The white and red (pallor and blushing) of the lovers’ complexions are not actually as worthy of admiration as is the green of the restful garden. Against the intense pursuits recounted in classical mythology, specifically in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.), the speaker (now using the first-person plural, “we”) proposes love’s retreat to the security of the garden.

With the fifth stanza, the speaker exalts in his own sensuous indulgence in the rich fruits of the garden. In an environment without passionate distractions, desire is transferred to the other senses, notably to taste and touch. The next stanza, however, suggests a transition from physical to mental or intellectual fulfillment, as the mind withdraws from lesser pleasures (“from pleasure less”) to those of what might be called the creative imagination. The divisiveness of worldly pursuits, whether of ambition or love, resolves to the unity implied by the annihilation of “all that’s made/ To a green thought in a green shade.”

The seventh stanza opens to a spiritual transcendence, as the speaker, at the slippery (“sliding”) foot of a fountain or at the roots of a fruit tree (that is, at the point of origin), discards his physical being. His soul soars upwards and sings in preparation for a “longer flight” (presumably, its eventual glorification).

At this point, however, the speaker steps back from his prophetic speculation and drops into the past tense: Before the coming of Eve, man (Adam) experienced bliss, but it was not his destiny as a mortal to live alone. When he comments, “Two Paradises ‘twere in one/ To live in Paradise alone,” the speaker may be reasserting his view that this garden must be without the tensions of passion, or he may be restating his preference for total solitude.

The concluding stanza introduces a “skilful Gardener” who creates a sundial of flowers and herbs, thus reestablishing the world of time against the implied claims of eternity and the Edenic past of the previous two stanzas. The only industry in this garden of meditation and reflection, however, is that of the bee, which, unlike the busy humans of the opening sections, moves with the rhythms of nature.

Forms and Devices

Andrew Marvell employs iambic tetrameter in this poem, generally in the form of closed couplets. For a meditative poem, one might expect the lengthier and more formal pentameter (ten-syllable) couplet, but Marvell insists on the lighter and more lyrical line. This is not to imply that the poem is superficial in any way, but it is a reminder that the tone of the poem remains witty and even somewhat playful throughout.

Joseph Summers, in The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (1970), argues that Marvell pushes the claims for the superiority of retirement “to their ultimately absurd limits” in this poem. The speaker teases the “fond” (foolish) lovers in the third stanza, and when he stumbles on melons, becomes ensnared in flowers, and falls on the grass in the fifth stanza, one is not reminded so much of the Fall of Adam and Eve as of the antics of a man who has gorged himself and is left staggering drunkenly. This is not to undercut the striking imagery of that passage, with such rich assonance as “luscious clusters” of grapes which “crush” their wine on the speaker’s mouth. The consonance that links the m and n sounds of “Stumbling on melons” assures him a soft fall.

In the metaphors of the sixth stanza, the mind becomes an ocean, and the created world finds complete unity as “a green thought in a green shade.” The “green thought” is, presumably, life-giving and “innocent” as opposed to the destructive passions embodied in the colors red and white. Marvell’s most elaborate metaphor occurs in the next stanza, where the body is regarded as clothing (a vest) to be cast aside and the soul becomes a bird with silver wings. Both metaphors are conventional enough; their impact comes from the context and from the language that Marvell uses to give them life. (Consider, for example, the verbs associated with the bird/soul: sits, sings, whets, combs, waves.)

The language of “The Garden” is conceptually charged or “loaded.” The title itself suggests both a secular garden and the Garden of Eden, and Marvell fully exploits both significations. The “skilful Gardener” of the last stanza may be an ordinary horticulturalist or God Himself, and Marvell, like other poets of his age, delights in the sort of wordplay that would allow the reader to think of the “milder sun” as something other than the star around which the earth rotates. Even “time,” by this stage of the poem, may refer as readily to the herb as to the hour.