A Marvellous garden

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head ;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine ;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach ;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

The Garden, written in the seventeenth century by Andrew Marvell is one of my favourite poems. I’m sure you can see why this verse sprang to mind when I opened the door to the bedroom terrace where the vines have overreached themselves…

Until I came to Provence, I thought Marvell’s overblown opulence here (“Stumbling on melons”, for goodness’ sake!) was pure amusement with a touch of bathos, as indeed it was probably intended. But now I’m not sure sure he didn’t have somewhere just like our garden in mind, where the excess does feel slightly mad, lightly crazy.

Like the old poet, I too love to sit in a green shade and think and simply be, comforted by the knowledge I have no pressing engagements or people to see. While I was at university, while I still hardly knew my own character – the real one, as opposed to the extravert carapace I’d spent years building as protective cover – I wrote a dissertation on Marvell and the conflict between private and public life.

Such is the power of poetry: it connects with the emotions rather than everyday logic. I must have felt this strongly myself, though it had yet to filter up through my subconscious. Though, obviously, my life was nothing like his public life as a politician, administrator, philosopher balanced with a private life of poetry, unpublished during his lifetime: it was more a recognition of his admission that the introvert can go out and achieve as much as the extravert but then needs time alone to settle the nerves and re-arm inner resources.

Marvell’s The Garden opens with some wonderful and intricate punning that cleverly captures the kind of frenetic activities that lead to the desire for seclusion:

 How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays ;
And their uncessant labours see
Crowned from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow-vergèd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid ;
While all the flowers and trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

I love the way “vainly” means both “in vain” and “with vanity”; “amaze” has all the force of “amazement” but with a strong sense of being stunned, hit with force, and also of confusion: “a-mazed”, perhaps, trapped in a maze with no way out. The great honours are symbolised by trees, such as the bay (or laurel), but he would rather have the tree itself.

In the garden, the calmed mind finds its own happiness: Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. 

You can read the whole poem by clicking here. And if you’re curious about Andrew Marvell now, there’s plenty more information about him on the same Luminarium site.