THE MOWER AGAINST GARDENSANDREW MARVELLL.O: To analyse the content and content of the poem.

To use appropriate terminology to write about the poem.

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THE MOWER AGAINST GARDENSAndrew Marvell (1621-1678)Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,Did after him the world seduce;And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,Where Nature was most plain and pure.He first enclosed within the garden’s squareA dead and standing pool of air,And a more luscious earth for them did knead,Which stupefied them while it fed.The pink grew then as double as his mind;The nutriment did change the kind.With strange perfumes he did the roses taint;And flow’rs themselves were taught to paint.The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,And learned to interline its cheek;Its onion root they then so high did hold,That one was for a meadow sold:Another world was searched, through oceans new,To find the Marvel of Peru;And yet these rarities might be allowedTo man, that sovereign thing and proud,

Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,Forbidden mixtures there to see.No plant now knew the stock from which it came;He grafts upon the wild the tame:That the uncertain and adulterate fruitMight put the palate in dispute.His green Seraglio has its eunuchs too,Lest any tyrant him outdo;And in the cherry he does Nature vex,To procreate without a sex.'Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,While the sweet fields do lie forgot,Where willing Nature does to all dispenseA wild and fragrant innocence;And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,More by their presence than their skill.Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,May to adorn the gardens stand,But, howsoe'er the figures do excel,The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Investigating The Mower against Gardens

On first reading of The Mower against Gardens Can you identify any modern ecological concerns that

the Mower is voicing?

How important are gardens?

What makes them important?

Pick out words and phrases in The Mower against Gardens which suggest the Mower's strong displeasure.

What has modern society lost, in the Mower's view?

CONTEXT

Most political and cultural activity was centred on the court of Queen Elizabeth. Parliament existed but only met when the sovereign decided, for as long as she wished. MPs were unpaid. Either they covered their own expenses, or had a patron whose money they took and whose bidding they did. The patrons would typically be aristocrats, who would frequent the court.

The courtly idealCareer-minded young men, therefore, tried to become part of the court. But there was a courtly ideal, to which they needed to conform. This went back to the Renaissance ideal of the courtier, someone who was: educated, but kept his learning hidden; a soldier; a poet; a ladies’ man, graceful and witty.The Elizabethans frequently held up one man as their ideal, Sir Philip Sidney, a talented poet. Sadly, he died as a soldier, fighting a war in Holland.

EducationMany of these young men had been educated at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, or at one of the Inns of Court in London. These Inns, like Lincoln's Inn, were training grounds for lawyers, and knowledge of the law was seen as a good entry point into politics, as it still is today. The young men of the Inns were within reach of all the cultural life of London, and, by all accounts, availed themselves of it.

METAPHYSICAL POETS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aythWSgjDRk

‘Metaphysical’ is a strange name. Literally, it means:

a certain branch of philosophy, to do with concepts like ‘Being’ and ‘Knowing’

It addresses key questions such as What does it mean to exist? How do we know? How can we be sure we know? What can we know?

The Metaphysical poets never used this term of themselves. It was their successors, who did not much care for their poetry, who gave them and their poetry the name:

Poetic philosophy

Metaphysical poetry is not afraid of ideas and concepts. These may be philosophical, but they may also be to do with religion, or science, or politics, or mathematics. Metaphysical poetry sometimes uses these ideas as the main part of the argument of the poem; but they are also used as a source of imagery, to illustrate a point.Intellect and feeling

In much Metaphysical poetry there is a debate going on, as in a law-court, in which a case is being made for or against somebody or something. The poems can have a considerable intellectual content but this does not mean that they are academic, boring, or without feeling. Most of the Metaphysical poets were also very passionate and very engaged emotionally but they managed to combine intellect and emotion, as good lawyers do in court.

ANDREW MARVELL

Andrew Marvell an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman (also named Andrew Marvell). As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert. He was a colleague and friend of John Milton.

Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire, near the city of Kingston upon Hull. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. A secondary school in the city is now named after him.

His most famous poems include To His Coy Mistress, The Garden, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, The Mower's Song and the country house poem Upon Appleton House.

Early LifeAt the age of twelve, Marvell attended Trinity

College, Cambridge and eventually received his BA degree. Afterwards, from the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell probably travelled in continental Europe. He may well have served as a tutor for an aristocrat on the Grand Tour; but the facts are not clear on this point. While England was embroiled in the civil war, Marvell seems to have remained on the continent until 1647. It is not known exactly where his travels took him, except that he was in Rome in 1645 and Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages, including French, Italian and Spanish.

First poems and Marvell's time at Nun Appleton

Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He only belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I's execution, which took place 30 January 1649. His Horatian Ode, a political poem dated to early 1650, responds with sorrow to the regicide even as it praises Oliver Cromwell's return from Ireland.

Circa 1650-52, Marvell served as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who had recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary army to Cromwell. He lived during that time at Nun Appleton House, near York, where he continued to write poetry. One poem, Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax, uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax's and Marvell's own situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known poem he wrote at this time was To His Coy Mistress.

CONTENT

"The Mower Against Gardens" is the first of the "Mower" sequence, an attack on the sophistications of human invention and a praise of Nature. The poem's disgust with the freaks produced by science is balanced with the praise of Nature's "wild and fragrant innocence". A supporter of Cromwell. "The Mower Against Gardens" is one of several poems that Marvell wrote using the persona of Damon the Mower, a rural type even more rustic than the conventional shepherds of the pastoral mode. The mower is one with nature; he doesn't use fertilizers or plows, he doesn't graft plants to make hybrids, he doesn't use the arts of horticulture or agricultural husbandry. Instead, he's like the gatherer half of a hunter/gatherer tribe: he mows, with his scythe, the green grasses which nature provides; he makes his living taking what Nature in its pure form has to offer. Here, he describes other ways of life in very disapproving terms.

THE MOWER

In the Miscellaneous Poems of Marvell, published posthumously, this poem stands first in a set of four pastoral poems around the figure of the mower. The others are: Damon the Mower; The Mower to the Glo-Worms; and The Mower's Song. Mowers also occur in Upon Appleton House. Mowers were, of course, quite common in agricultural scenes in the seventeenth century, especially in hay-making. But a mower can stand for Time, with his scythe cutting down all life.

Pastoral A significant proportion of Marvell's poetry is pastoral; but, as

here, Marvell uses the pastoral convention in a most original way to ask fundamental questions about the Fall of Humankind, human passions, and the possibility of (re)gaining lost innocence within Nature. One of pastoralism's big themes is the destructiveness and artificiality of modern urban life as against traditional natural life. Today, we may ask the same questions in different terms, but they are just as urgent. The mower's complaint is both theological and ecological. Marvell turns out to be a very ‘green’ poet.

FORM

Statement Evidence Analysis

Structure - The poem is written in rhyming couplets where the first line sets up a statement and the second undercuts or extends the thought. Uses discourse markers [and yet, that, but]

Hidden stanzas

Although this looks like a non-stanzaic poem, it really does have hidden stanzas, and a clearly defined structure. The poem falls into two sections, ll.1-18 and ll.19-36, with a 4-line conclusion. Each section consists of four quatrains and a couplet. Each quatrain is a full sentence, and divides neatly into two rhyming couplets. Each couplet consists of an iambic pentameter and an iambic tetrameter – an interesting metre. The precise structure makes for a controlled argument, rather than a mere invective without shape or direction.

Tampering with nature The first half of the poem covers evidence of

consumerism and human misapplication of the simplicities of Nature: the doubling of flowers; new scents; new species. This, by itself, the Mower would be willing to forgive (‘these Rarities might be allow'd’). What makes the display insupportable is the cross-breeding, grafting one kind on another, which he sees as ‘Forbidden mixtures’, a sort of incest. Identity, kind and species become confused. We can think of modern agricultural experiments, and the suspicion many of them arouse, in genetic engineering.

All this interest in the artificial means that ‘the sweet Fields do lie forgot’. Man is cut off from Nature by all this, and the spiritual force of Nature, represented mythologically by the ‘Fauns and Faryes’, have become lost to mere ornaments, statuettes in the gardens, which are lifeless.

SYNTAX

Statement Evidence Analysis

Complex declaratives.

Syntax ‘Man the sovereign thing and proud’

for emphasis and rhyme.

Elision ‘tis for rhythm and naturalness

LEXIS

Statement Evidence Analysis

Lexis of nature/plants

Pre-modifiers

Technical horticultural lexis

Personification of Nature.

The language is fairly technical, in that the Mower is describing new horticultural techniques. We need to know what ‘Pinks’, the ‘Marvel of Peru’, or ‘the Stock’ are, for example. There is also the technical language of the pastoral genre itself: ‘the Grot’, which means ‘grotto’ or a cave. The reference is to the artificial landscape then in vogue, the creation of fountains and caves for the sake of ornament only. ‘'Tis all enforced’ (l.31) he says, again using language which has sexual undertones. ‘Fauns and Fayres’ are again a pastoral convention, symbolising the spiritual forces in Nature.A complaint

The voice is of complaint against ‘luxurious Man’. It is a cumulative list of grievances, going from bad to worse, using stronger and stronger language. Only at the end can the Mower find anything positive to say:‘The Gods themselves with us do dwell.’

IMAGERY

Statement Evidence Analysis

Classical and exotic imagery.

Sexual imagery

conceits

The imagery is strong, conveying the Mower's indignation in his complaint.

Much of it is sexual: ‘to procreate without a sex’ (l.30), perhaps because the new cherry is stoneless. In seventeenth century slang, stones meant ‘testicles’.

‘Seduce’ (l.2) suggests that the vice mentioned in the first line is like sexual appetite. As Satan ‘seduced’ Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:1-7), so now man seduces Nature.

Incest is suggested by ‘forbidden mixtures’ (l.22); sexual immorality in ‘adult'rate’ (l.25); sexual luxury in ‘paint ... complexion’ (11.12-13) and ‘Seraglio’ (or harem); and sexual unnaturalness in ‘Eunuchs’ (l.27), echoing the sexless cherry.

Lack of life There are other striking conceits. The enclosed garden is ‘A dead and standing pool of Air’

(l.6), a forceful natural image suggesting lack of life and therefore of movement. Enclosure brings not only restraint, loss of freedom; the plants become ‘stupifi'd’ and double-minded (l.9). Humans have become tyrants (l.28). Their idols are signified by the new ‘Statues’ (l.37).

PHONOLOGY AND ORTHOGRAPHY

Statement Evidence Analysis

fricatives

S.E.A PARAGRAPHS

Choose one of the points from the table to write at least one statement, evidence, analysis paragraph.

HOMEWORK

Find at least one prose or non-fiction piece that could be linked to this poem.

Think about the main themes and ideas discussed in the poem.