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Katie Kadue on Andrew Marvell ("The Garden")
2.3k Plays2 years ago
What a delight it was to talk to the brilliant Katie Kadue about Andrew Marvell's beautiful and perverse poem "The Garden."
Katie is the author of Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (Chicago, 2021). She is currently a Fellow at the International Network for Comparative Humanities at Notre Dame and Princeton. She has published academic essays on Andrew Marvell, Michel de Montaigne, and misogyny and cliché in Renaissance lyric poetry, and her writing has also appeared in venues such as n+1, Gawker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Her piece on Marvell for the University of Chicago Press blog provides an excellent brief introduction to the poet we discuss in this episode—you can find it here. Finally, make sure to follow Katie on Twitter.
Please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear—and subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.
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Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I am your host, Kameran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure today to have Katie Cadou on the podcast.
00:00:12
Speaker
Katie has chosen a poem that I've long been fascinated by and curious about and confused by in many ways, but its beauty is obvious to me, has always been obvious to me, so I'm very excited. I was very excited when she made this choice. The poem that Katie wants to talk about today is The Garden by the poet Andrew Marvell.
00:00:41
Speaker
And we'll talk more about who Marvell was and where this poem sort of fits into literary and poetic history maybe once we get started. But first, let me tell you a little bit about Katie. She is the author of a book called Domestic Georgic, Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton, which came out from the University of Chicago Press in 2021. And Katie Caddoo is currently a fellow
00:01:10
Speaker
at the International Network for Comparative Humanities at Notre Dame and Princeton. She has written academic essays on the poet that we're talking about today, Andrew Marvell, also Michel de Montaigne, and the topics of misogyny and cliche in Renaissance lyric poetry.
00:01:33
Speaker
And her writing has also appeared in venues like N Plus One and Gawker and the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Cadou's Work and Analysis in Academia
00:01:44
Speaker
In fact, I just read and admired and was both
00:01:51
Speaker
entertained and dismayed by Kitty's recent piece in the Chronicle where she visited the English Institute, which is a kind of venerable annual gathering of literary scholars. Kitty wrote about what has happened to the idea of academic stars in the present and what that has to do with the hollowing out of academic
00:02:20
Speaker
institutions in particular in literary studies, the hollowing out of tenure lines and so forth, and the scourge of precarity.
00:02:35
Speaker
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, I remember admiring as, I think, Katie and I are both hailed from Los Angeles. And I remember admiring her essay on the death of Yves Babbitts, or an essay occasioned by that event.
00:02:55
Speaker
And I also want to recommend, and I'll put links to all of the stuff in the episode notes and the newsletter that goes out with the episode. Katie wrote a terrific piece in N plus 1 on Milton and Twitter, the hell site, as people call it, and Milton's idea of hell.
00:03:18
Speaker
And I just have to say, Katie makes Twitter a not hellish place to be for me. Still, she's one of the most delightful, erudite, but also just extremely witty and funny. She makes me laugh on a kind of daily basis with her tweets. I cannot match them at all. I'm a Twitter addict myself, but hopelessly earnest compared to
00:03:45
Speaker
and Katie's disarming wit and intelligence in that space. She's really mastered that form. I encourage you to follow Katie if you haven't done so already, and I'll put a link to her Twitter profile in the episode notes too. So I'm very excited to have Katie Caddoo on the podcast.
Introduction to 'The Garden' by Andrew Marvell
00:04:05
Speaker
Marvell and the Garden is just the kind of poem that I hope
00:04:10
Speaker
we would be featuring when I started this crazy enterprise, and I'm very glad to see it coming to fruition, which is maybe a bad pun today. And well, with that, I just want to say welcome, Katie, and how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
00:04:29
Speaker
Oh, it's really my pleasure. It genuinely is. So, Katie, I thought that the first thing we could do is to hear you read the poem out loud.
00:04:42
Speaker
Um, and, um, you know, again, I would say to our listeners, if, um, if you're interested and maybe in particular, if this isn't a poem you've read before, I might recommend that you, uh, take a look at the episode notes and click on the link that I've provided there so that you can be looking at a text as Katie reads. Um, but, uh, yeah, Katie, why don't you, why don't you share the poem with us? Okay.
00:05:12
Speaker
How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or baze, And their incessant labors see, Crowned from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow verdured shade Does prudently their toils upbraid, While all flowers and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. Fair quiet have I found thee here, And innocence thy sister dear,
00:05:39
Speaker
Mistaken long, I sought you then in busy companies of men. Your sacred plants, if here below, only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude to this delicious solitude. No white nor red was ever seen so amorous as this lovely green. Fawn's lovers cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress name. Little alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed.
00:06:09
Speaker
Fair trees, where sere your barks I wound, No name shall but your own be found. When we have run our passions heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race. Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow, And panned it after searing speed, Not as a nymph, but for a reed. What wondrous life is this I lead?
00:06:39
Speaker
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 ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Meanwhile, the mind from pleasures less withdraws into its happiness. The mind that ocean where each kind does straight its own resemblance find.
00:07:09
Speaker
Yet it creates, transcending these, far other worlds and other seas, annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade. Here at the fountain, sliding foot, or at some fruit tree's mossy root, casting the body's vest aside, my soul into the boughs does glide. There like a bird, it sits and sings, then wets and combs its silver wings. And till prepared for longer flight,
00:07:39
Speaker
waves in its plumes the various light. Such was that happy garden state, while man there walked without a mate. After a place so pure and sweet, what other help could yet be meet? But was beyond a mortal share to wander solitary there. Two paradises tore in one to live in paradise alone.
00:08:02
Speaker
how well the skillful gardener drew of flowers and herbs this dial knew, where from above the milder sun does through a fake fragrant zodiac run, and as it works, the industrious bee computes its time as well as we. How could set sweet and wholesome hours be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?
00:08:23
Speaker
Thank you so much, Katie. So this poem is maybe a slightly longer poem than we tend to feature here on the podcast.
00:08:39
Speaker
I guess it might be useful to hear, you know, having listened to you read the poem, it might be useful to hear just a word or two from you about how we should think of the poem sort of standing back from it. So what would you say to describe the kind of poem this is? And maybe thinking of people who aren't, who've never studied Marvell in school or don't remember or know much about him.
00:09:12
Speaker
What sorts of contexts could you provide, Katie, to begin? Well, this will sound a bit obvious, I guess, but it's really in the category of garden poems, I would say, poems about guys, usually guys who want to get away from it all, all the hustle and bustle of the world and retreat to a space preserved from commerce and from
00:09:35
Speaker
busyness, the busy companies of men, as Marbell says. And so it's related to the genre of pastoral, this praise of idleness hanging out in the meadows rather than doing business in the city. And to philosophical traditions like stoicism and epicureanism or the garden was this place where philosophical contemplation could happen.
Themes of Isolation and Art in 'The Garden'
00:09:58
Speaker
So there are a lot of other poems by Marvell that are also set in nature that involve a lot of work. Like he has a whole series of poems featuring a mower who's working really hard out in the fields. He's not just relaxing. But this is a poem about someone who, it appears, is just hanging out and not doing anything at all.
00:10:21
Speaker
I guess the idea of poems that are set in nature or poems that are about nature or about a kind of love of nature or desire to
00:10:32
Speaker
to be in the natural world are things that people will typically associate with poetry. I don't know. Fair assumption to make, I guess. It's one of poetry's great subjects. But I guess it occurs to me that a garden is not quite nature, right? Or it's a kind of cultivated nature and I assume
00:10:59
Speaker
that the garden poem as you describe it as a kind of sub-genre or something of poetry must be particularly interested in that or would tend to be sort of interested in that interplay between letting nature go a kind of non-human world and human intervention in a natural world. Is that a fair description?
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in a way, the garden is a kind of metaphor for nature poetry itself, the coming together of art and nature in one site. And what's funny about this poem is that Marvell admits, or his speaker, admits of no actual human labor. It's almost like the plants, if anyone's working, it seems it would be the plants who are abrading and weaving
00:11:53
Speaker
and the fruits that are coming right out his mouth. There's no indication other than carving the names of the trees and the trees themselves that humans are really impacting this environment.
00:12:06
Speaker
Right. But I don't want to pass over something you said almost as a throwaway at the beginning of that comment, which is such a brilliant thought that the garden as a metaphor for the nature of poems. So I just want to make sure I have that, well, first of all, that I've quoted you right. But also that I understand the idea, right, that the idea is that a garden is a kind of
00:12:32
Speaker
human intervention in a world that's non-human and it's a way to sort of give it form, tidy it up, presumably so that other humans can enjoy it, look at it,
00:12:47
Speaker
recreate in it, rest in it, whatever, but feel at home in it. And so the idea would be what? That nature poetry does this all the time, whether it's about gardens or forests or mountains or the sea, for that matter. Because in other words, there you have a poet sort of cultivating a non-human world, but in literary terms. Is that the idea?
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think what's, what's funny about, about this garden poem is that as you were saying, nature poetry is about weaving art and nature together for other people, for other people's enjoyment. But part of the shtick of this speaker is that there's no one else there. So in a way it's, it is both a perfect garden poem in some ways, but also an anti
00:13:40
Speaker
poem, poem more generally because it's really not for anyone or so it claims.
00:13:48
Speaker
It's a garden, but not a garden party, right? Garden party of one. Right, that's right. Okay, that's lovely. Okay, so that's useful in thinking about the kind of genre of the form, but again, obviously, I've suggested that people take a look at it, but I understand that people are driving. If you're driving, don't look at it.
00:14:13
Speaker
So for people who don't have a visual in front of them, is it useful, Katie, to think about the way the poem is organized? I mean, some of it, obviously, I think we could probably hear in your reading. So for one thing, just to get a further obvious point out of the way, it's a poem that rhymes.
00:14:31
Speaker
It's a poem that's in, what, iambic tetrameter? Have I got that right? And little I know of Marvell, that's like one of his favored meters, right? A kind of a natural one for him. So for people who are novice to this kind of thing, tetrameter just means four beats in a line rather than perhaps the more well-known pentameter, which is five beats in a line.
00:14:57
Speaker
And I don't know that this is just the thing I have thought or was taught at some point that tetrameter can tend to sound more conversational than pentameter, though maybe rhyming couplets isn't quite. So what else can we say about the way the poem is organized on the page formally? What seems interesting to you about that, if anything? How does that fit into the poetic context in which Marvell was writing?
00:15:28
Speaker
So it's nine stanzas, right? And it is in the satraminer couplets and all the stanzas are eight lines. So there's a kind of like little squares, which adds to the sense of a human order being imposed on nature, these little eight by eight grids that we see on the page.
00:15:47
Speaker
And the couplets, I think, make the poem and the distributor make the poem feel really easy. There's something like you're really slipping into a different shade of consciousness when you're reading this poem that with the poet, you're annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade. I think that's a deceptive ease. But I think that is always my first impression when I read it when I haven't read it for a while. I think it's many people's first impression that you're being
00:16:16
Speaker
lulled into this really chill, carefree spa day out in the garden by yourself, not a care in the world. Right. So there's nothing at least, and I want to come back to the, you're calling it deceptive, which, you know, pricks my antenna up a bit, like one, one, oh, deceptive how, but right when, if, if you're reading this poem, you don't,
00:16:44
Speaker
And yes, it's a poem about the natural world, but it's not a poem in which you think some predator lurks just out of sight or the weather is going to be inhospitable. It feels like a world that you can sink into and float away in. Spa day sounds right to me. So what's deceptive about its ease or is that getting ahead of ourselves?
00:17:09
Speaker
I think for one thing, there is a lot of work going on. As I mentioned, the plants themselves seem to be working in the first stanza. Do you want to remind us of those lines? Sure. We'll just read the whole first stanza again. Sure. Yeah. How vainly men themselves amaze to win the palm, the oak or bays, and their incessant labors see, crowned from some single herb or tree, whose short and narrow vergid shade does prudently their toils abrade.
00:17:39
Speaker
while all flowers and all trees do clothes to weave the garlands of repose." So he's rebuking people who are seeking military, civic, and poetic honors, going back to the idea of this being a kind of anti-poetic poem in a way. So the military, civic, and poetic would be the palm, the oak, or bays, yeah? Exactly. Got it. And saying instead of, or
00:18:02
Speaker
you're out there striving for these honors, which are symbolized by these botanical crowns. Meanwhile, look at these trees, the actual palm tree, oak tree, and bay tree. They're outstripping you in honor just by sitting there. But if you look at the lines, right, to say that these trees abrade the toils of men
00:18:27
Speaker
You're also given an image of trees actually braiding themselves or vines or branches braiding and weaving the garlands of repose. That's kind of a metaphor, but you also get this image of plants doing the almost the poetic work of weaving a text together.
00:18:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's lovely. And so I think we'll have more to say about the work that Rhyme is doing in the poem as we go along. And there are some moments of Rhyme that really I'm curious about here. But I guess fair to say that Rhyme is its own kind of
00:19:13
Speaker
weaving together or that maybe once you start doing it, it feels natural and effortless. But of course, it's not, right? It's profoundly unnatural, right? Right. And I think that the weaving work of Rhyme is related to the work that these puns are doing, a braid
00:19:34
Speaker
weave, amaze. Can you, sorry, upgrade might be just unfamiliar enough a word for people to, for it to be useful for you to clarify what you mean by calling it a pun. Can you spell that out? Yeah, so it means to chastise, to reprove, these plants are kind of shaking their fingers at these men for being so silly as to seek laurel crowns instead of laurel trees. But it also just means to weave into a wreath.
00:20:04
Speaker
Right, right, right. Okay, perfect. And then moving into the second stanza, it occurs to me, I think there we really do get this, like what I have written in the margin of the version of this poem I printed out so that I could have it handy for this conversation is like,
00:20:25
Speaker
God, this is profoundly antisocial.
Color Symbolism and Gender Politics in the Poem
00:20:29
Speaker
I don't know if maybe this poem feels more resonant in a time of social distancing and sort of pandemic living or whatever, but yeah, is that, I don't know, what do you make of this initial kind of, so I'm thinking of lines like,
00:20:58
Speaker
Mistaken long, I sought you then in busy companies of men. Your sacred plants of here below, only among the plants will grow. Society is all but rude to this delicious solitude. This sounds like a person who doesn't want to go out, you know?
00:21:14
Speaker
who won't answer his friends' phone calls and texts, right? Can you contextualize or say something more about what is going on for you in the kind of antisocial tendencies that begin to emerge there in the Second Stanza? Yeah, I think the poem as a whole is deeply antisocial in ways that are somewhat sympathetic. I mean, he
00:21:41
Speaker
is worn out by the daily grind of having to work out in the world. I mean, who doesn't? Who doesn't feel that way? Who wouldn't rather just at least have some time to relax and retreat? Well, I really love my colleagues and my students, so I don't know what you're talking about. No, no, no, you get it. Right. Yes, it's nice to retreat. Exactly. Okay.
00:22:05
Speaker
And Marbell himself was a very public figure. He worked as a Latin secretary under Cromwell. He was a member of parliament. He had a very active public life. So this doesn't really describe his his lifestyle as the kind of poet who was just a hermit always by himself. So I think I think the poem really is a joke on some level.
00:22:30
Speaker
and that the antisociality is meant to sound extreme and absurd, even as it's also appealing in part. A joke because he would trust his readers, you know, to know that he was
00:22:50
Speaker
articulating a position here that was not the way he lived or in that sense, right, that he's sort of making a sort of exaggerating, a kind of hyperbolic version of a wish that anybody might feel. Right. And I think that this is not a, this wouldn't be a value that people had to want to leave the world completely and quite
00:23:20
Speaker
in such an extravagant way. Yeah, I mean, I guess as it goes on, the wish for solitude feels more and more extreme and sort of perverse and maybe less. Maybe we can talk about some of the ways in which it feels
00:23:38
Speaker
It's anti-sociality feels not charming but offensive or worrisome. But it also occurs to me, Katie, that we've
00:23:51
Speaker
moved right into the poem without saying much of anything at all about Marvell and where he fits into history or dates or anything like that. So sort of relative to big major figures, not that Marvell isn't himself, but like where does he fit in to literary history or to English history?
00:24:17
Speaker
Could you give us just a quick thumbnail sketch of dates and that sort of thing? Yeah, so he was a contemporary of John Milton and they were friends. Milton got him a job and then he saved Milton's life and made Paradise Lost possible after the restoration. So he was writing during a very living and working as a public figure during a really tumultuous time in English history, during the English Civil War, and the execution of Charles I.
00:24:47
Speaker
and then the interregnum and then the restoration. So he... How did he save Milton's life? Milton was imprisoned for his support of the regicide. He wrote many tracts defending the English people for executing their king and Marbell pulled some strings and got him out of prison. So like a profoundly well-connected man, yeah.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, he was really good at molding himself to the political climate. So he was initially a royalist in the, I don't know when, the early 1640s, and then he switched sides to be a parliamentarian on the other side of the Civil War, and then conveniently switched back with the restoration of the monarchy to be
00:25:35
Speaker
on the royalist side again. So not burdened by firm ideological commitments. You could say that. Okay, right. We know the type, I guess. I don't want to reduce him to a type. Okay, so that's useful. So contemporary of Milton's, we were talking just before we started recording that
00:25:58
Speaker
I was looking again today at Milton's great epic poem Paradise Lost, which maybe we come back to towards the end of this episode.
00:26:07
Speaker
noticing or sort of reminding myself again that before that poem begins, in my edition, there's a kind of prefatory poem by Marvell. So these are two figures who are quite closely related, not just in friendship or life, but also in literary history. Yeah. OK, cool. So that context might help us understand some of the ways in which the poem
00:26:35
Speaker
is a surprising kind of text for this poet to have written. And maybe one other thing I can say is that or ask you about, you know, I think that probably the poem by Marvell that most people would know if they know one poem of his at all
00:27:01
Speaker
is the poem to his koi mistress which actually came up in the episode that we just had with Lindsay Turner on the shampoo where we talked about the idea of a carpe diem poem and that feels like one of the classics in that genre so it just struck me in rereading the garden sort of preparing for this poem that's kind of pining for solitude
00:27:22
Speaker
seems so antithetical to the kind of attitude of the poem of seduction, right? So is that also a kind of, I mean, I know a moment ago you were talking about the kind of political contradictory tendencies in Marvell's history, but does this point to another kind of contradictory set of impulses?
00:27:49
Speaker
seduction on the one hand, a desire for solitude on the other.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah, this is an anti-carpetium poem in a different way than The Shampoo by Bishop Fizz in the sense that in Tuis Coy Mistress, the problem is that there's not world enough or time as the first line goes. And in the garden, there's all the world and time that you could possibly want. And there's also no women, which is the whole point of a carpetium poem is that you have the woman who's right there in front of you and you're trying to seduce her before she gets old, which will be any minute now.
00:28:24
Speaker
So without that threat of the woman's sexual viability disappearing, there's no time pressure. Part of what makes this poem feel expansive and relaxed is that there are no women who are making sexual or other demands on the male speaker.
00:28:44
Speaker
Right. So does that also, because that's so interesting that you put it that way because the next, I mean, obviously I want to come back to the topic because I know it's one that you're very interested in and that is clearly at issue here in the poem and that we need to say something about that, namely the topic of misogyny or the sort of poem's attitude towards women.
00:29:08
Speaker
But what I was going to ask you about in a way sort of leading up to that was, this is the opening couplet of the third stanza of the poem, no white nor red was ever seen so amorous as this lovely green. If you had asked me a month ago or whatever before you and I ever planned this episode and before I had started kind of here and there rereading this poem in preparation for this event,
00:29:36
Speaker
Like, oh, Qamran, The Garden by Marvell, what do you remember about that poem?
00:29:42
Speaker
and put it in a word, the word would have been green. It's a poem that you close your eyes and you, or if you are me, you close your eyes and you see green. So I find in general the business of like, oh, well, color X symbolizes this abstract idea always and forever in poems and color wide, this other one.
00:30:12
Speaker
But here it does seem like green must have some sort of set of associated meanings with them. And my launching into this question was prompted by your description of the anti-carpadium poem as one in, you know, like in the Carpe Diem poem, the woman is about to get old. She's like ever on the precipice of that. Whereas this seems to be a poem in which things are green
00:30:40
Speaker
which might mean young and will be evergreen. There's no danger of autumn coming here, it seems. But I don't normally think of green as an amorous color. So that seems like a kind of a perversity of the poem. So yeah, I don't know, Katie, what do you make of the function of the color green in this poem?
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned evergreen because we just talked about the Apollo Daphne coupling, but Daphne turns into a laurel, which is evergreen, and she becomes a symbol in Petrarch's poetic sequence of his everlasting love for Laura, Laura, Laurel, but also for the immortality of his poetry. But green, as you're saying, is not a particularly erotic color. And in fact, in the Renaissance,
00:31:39
Speaker
If you thought about green and erotics, you'd probably think about green sickness, which is the disease that virgins had. So the cure for a green sick girl was to have sex because there was something about her greenness that suggested a repressed sexuality, something wrong with her sexuality. So it's not in the same,
00:32:08
Speaker
register as white or red, which would be the lilies that a woman's hands are compared to, or the red that her, the roses that her cheeks are compared to. It's in a different, different palette than that altogether. Yeah, I mean, it sounds, I confess I had never heard of the green sickness before. So it sounds like a well in God, like an
00:32:37
Speaker
an awfully convenient diagnosis for men to provide, but also a weird kind of mixing of a pathological kind of reading with, I don't know, the
00:33:01
Speaker
the implication of a kind of readiness or ripeness or sexual arousal or something like that. It's a perverse, I keep using that word with the spoon, but there's something really odd about bringing those two things together. I mean,
00:33:18
Speaker
I guess for us, if you say someone's turning green, it brings up ideas of nausea and illness that feel profoundly unsexy. But there's something else, there's a different kind of historical context here is what I'm hearing from you. Yeah, it's basically like a more colorful version of hysteria.
00:33:40
Speaker
Right. Okay. Well, say more about that. What do you mean? More colorful version of hysteria? Like the Freudian sense that the hysteric is expressing these symptoms because of some kind of sexual repression.
00:34:03
Speaker
Right, right, right. I don't know if the audio just got picked up over here. But I think when I started asking questions about signs and symptoms, the voice assistant on my phone turned on and started to offer helpful diagnostic tips. And I don't know what it said. But well, anyway, if you heard that, dear listeners, that's what that was.
00:34:32
Speaker
Okay, so towards the middle of the poem we get this catalog of mythological figures that you alluded to a moment ago, Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx.
Mythical References and Gender Analysis
00:34:50
Speaker
I suppose this might lead us into a discussion of some of the gendered politics in this poem.
00:34:56
Speaker
Katie, what strikes you about those moments in the poem or what can we learn from knowing a little bit more about the mythological allusions in that stanza? I think that these couplets are the most perverse, to use your word, part of the poem. Maybe I'll just read them aloud. Apollo hunted Daphne so only that she might laurel grow and panned it after searing speed, not as a nymph, but for a reed.
00:35:26
Speaker
So the most canonical version of the stories of Daphne and Syrinx are in Ovid's Metamorphoses. And basically the story of Apollo and Daphne is that Apollo, the god, falls in love with this nymph Daphne. She wants nothing to do with him. He pursues her. She runs away. He keeps pursuing her.
00:35:48
Speaker
She calls out begging her father, who's a river god, to kill her or do something because she would rather die than sleep with this guy. And her father decides to turn her into a laurel tree. And Apollo catches up with her right as she's metamorphosing into a laurel tree. And he's not immediately turned off, actually. He keeps trying to embrace her as she turns into a tree, but eventually gives up.
00:36:19
Speaker
and decides that since he can't have Daphne sexually, he will have the laurel as a symbol of his poetic prowess. So he takes some leaves off of the laurel tree and he laureates, he crowns himself as the first poet laureate. And this is a kind of foundational myth for lyric poetry.
00:36:40
Speaker
that because we can't always have what we want, we can't have the true object of our desire, lyric is a consolation for that loss.
00:36:51
Speaker
If you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. Exactly. So lyric is like a sublimated version of erotic desire that's unconsummated. And among the consequences of that is the objectification, I mean, in a literal sense, of the desired after woman who goes from being a live woman into a thing. Yeah, OK.
00:37:21
Speaker
So say more, yeah, please. And the syrinx myth is much shorter and off it, but similar situation with Pan and God Pan and other nymph syrinx. He chases her into a lake and she turns into a reed and he hears the wind blowing through the reeds and things. Aha, what a great pipe this would be. And he invents a musical instrument. So again, it's a consolation for loss that gives birth to a form of art
00:37:51
Speaker
Okay, yeah. So what is knowing or sort of keeping those mythologies in mind? What sort of use, if that's even the right way to describe it, is Marvell putting them to here? Well, part of what's interesting, especially in the Daphne couplet is this is like 100 lines in Ovid. It's a pretty long and involved story. And Marvell really radically compresses it into this little couplet. And it also compresses
00:38:20
Speaker
temporality in a way. So what he's saying is that Apollo didn't seek Daphne and as a consolation for his inability to rape her, for his loss of Daphne, he gets to have the laurel and he gets to have poetry. He's saying that he hunted Daphne so that she would turn into a laurel tree. That's what he wanted all along. That wasn't a consolation.
00:38:43
Speaker
that was the goal in the first place, which is just literally femicidal, right? Instead of just, there are plenty of plants around. There are lots of plants that he could use to make a little crown out of her himself if he wants, but he wants to kill her. He wants her to no longer have her mortal form and to instead be a tree. So it's a kind of,
00:39:07
Speaker
a really hyper efficient composting system in a way, right? Wanting to take this woman and turn her into, back into the materials of nature. It's a kind of, you know, green economy. That's also right. That aside.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I was going to say, so like, whereas an Ovid, like the Laurel is a kind of making do with the failure of the attempt in Marvell's account of things. It's like that was the point all along for that transformation to happen.
00:39:48
Speaker
The desire for sex was merely kind of instrumental as a way to kind of get to the final thing, which is the scene in which the woman's not there at all, but instead it's the man with his bit of green sort of trophy or something. Yeah, I think part of what happened to this compression is that it's not clear sex was even involved as a pretext in Robert's version. It just seems like he saw a nymph and thought,
00:40:14
Speaker
Oh, she looks like she's laurel material. If I chase her, maybe she'll turn into a laurel and I can get my crown. Right. And I and it's worth, you know, because I like I had circled the word that because it seemed to be doing so much work as I reread the poem today. Apollo hunted Daphne so only that she might laurel grow. I suppose there are different ways that you could one could potentially take that that right. Like Apollo hunted her
00:40:43
Speaker
And it turned out only that she grew, only that she, you know, she grew into Laurel or so that, right? In order that, and I take it that you are persuaded that that second meaning that I just referred to is really operative here, whether or not the others are as well. Yeah, it's funny that you say that that is doing a lot of work. Things, one of these cases where
00:41:13
Speaker
a spare use of words, a low output of words on the poet's part is also a kind of hard work. I think one of the tensions throughout this poem is, is the poet or is the speaker or is any figure in this poem working hard or hardly working? What exactly is the labor situation in this garden? Because stuff is happening.
00:41:42
Speaker
Apollo could just be walking around the garden and picking leaves from random plants, but instead he's chasing, he's hunting, and Pan is speeding. They're exerting themselves.
00:41:55
Speaker
when they should just be relaxing, it seems. And that would also be a little bit less violent. I don't know. Oh, yeah, right. So what's the violence for? It might be a good question to ask. It occurs to me then that we move, there's a kind of jarring transition from that stanza with all of that perversity in it to this
00:42:17
Speaker
The next stanza begins, what wondrous life is the side lead. Ripe apples drop about my head. And it's this cartoonish version of Eden on steroids or something, where the fruit is just so bountiful. It's totally this luxuriate atmosphere.
00:42:41
Speaker
Yeah, so how do you understand the move from that stanza that we were just discussing to this one that feels like, I don't know, you know that song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, where the waterfalls are made of whiskey and everything is there for the having, like some kind of fantasy land. How do we get from one to the other, Kitty?
00:43:07
Speaker
I think it's by killing women, honestly. So in the Apollo, Daphne, Pan, Cyrena, you have this surgical elimination of women, which allows for this sensual pleasure, the luscious clusters of the vine crushing their wine on his mouth and the curious peach reaching itself into his hands. It's really sensual and juicy.
00:43:34
Speaker
But it's safe because it's completely separate and sanitized from any actual women or any actual people being involved in this sexy encounter with fruit.
00:43:50
Speaker
Can I ask, I mean, given the very provocative and persuasive way that you just phrased how we get to the kind of Edenic scene here by killing women, you've chosen this poem for us to read and pay attention to. I think it's obvious to me that you're being
00:44:16
Speaker
quite sincere and forthright in your reading of it. But I also take it that you find pleasure in reading the poem, that you love it in one way or another. Now love can be a complicated feeling, right? But can you say, I mean, is this a moment where maybe you can reflect a little bit on how both things can be true for you?
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really troubling in the Apollo Daphne story itself, in Ovid, how what's basically a story of attempted rape has become the foundation of a lot of Western culture really, and Western lyric in particular.
00:45:00
Speaker
And so many of the love poems that I love from the early modern period and beyond are a little rapey. There's something really hard to disambiguate between a violent, misogynist attitude toward women and a romantic attitude toward women that you see in a Carpe Diem poem, especially. A Carpe Diem poem is often a threat that the woman give it up or else.
00:45:26
Speaker
And I think it's just that women play a role in Western poetry that is both literal and figurative. There are many poems that are about women, really about romantic love, but women are also metaphors for metaphor itself, in a way.
00:45:51
Speaker
I think that, I don't think this poem is a misogynist poem. I don't think that Marvell is a misogynist, but I think that he's really pushing us to see how much misogyny is at the core of the tradition that he's working in. And also how much the idea of separation from women or even the annihilation to use Marvell's different context of women is necessary for culture and for contemplation.
00:46:21
Speaker
So, I mean, I think I just, yeah, I don't, there's something I'm really working through. Right. Yeah. Well, and I'm sorry if I apologize if I put you on the spot with that question, but it just struck me that it was, you know, I could, you know, I hear your reading of the poem and it feels utterly persuasive to me. And I also detect your, you know, enthusiasm for the poem coming through at the same time. And,
00:46:50
Speaker
I was sure that you'd have an interesting account of those two things, and I was right, so I'm glad I asked, and I'm interested in your answer. But it's also why I think the poem is a joke. I think that he's showing how the implications, the premises of this antisocial stance that the speaker has are
00:47:13
Speaker
ridiculously misogynist, not that misogyny wasn't common and accepted at the time and today, but it's really farcical the extent that he goes with it, I think. Yeah, and maybe we can talk about the, I've lost count of them, let's see, one, two, three,
00:47:34
Speaker
four, five, so the sixth and seventh stanzas, the one that begins, meanwhile, the mind from pleasure less withdraws into its happiness, the mind that ocean where each kind does straight its own resemblance find. And that was a place where like the rhyme just seems so insistent to me. And it also seems like the lines are maybe describing rhyme, even as they're enacting it. And this gets us to,
00:48:00
Speaker
I don't know. I think they're maybe the most famous lines in the poem, but maybe I'm wrong about that. Yet it creates transcending these far other worlds and other seas, annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade. You've said a couple of times now that the poem is a kind of a joke. Do those lines feel jokey to you, or is there a kind of earnest
00:48:28
Speaker
desire for annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade. We ought to talk about those lines in one way or another. So you lead us, Katie. What should we notice about them? Hey, I think there is sincerity behind any joke. And I do think that there is a real pleasure that the mind and that the speaker and that Marbellle takes in this
00:48:57
Speaker
in this kind of retreat. And I think also that that word annihilating, which I don't really know exactly what to do with it because I think that it's both a really extreme word about apocalypse, total annihilation of everything that exists, but it's also
00:49:24
Speaker
It's just like, it could just be describing tuning everything out. Just flipping a switch, turning down the volume. Zoning out.
00:49:34
Speaker
zoning out, exactly. Yeah. So annihilating, I mean, it's obvious as soon as you look it up or think about it for a moment, if you know, I don't know, sorry, obvious if you like, I studied Latin once upon a time, but the etymology of that word, you know, it's like turning to nothing, literally, right? Nihel, nothing. So annihilating is like making things into nothing. And
00:50:00
Speaker
Well, I guess it's true. We all have moods and they're not necessarily even unhappy ones. Sometimes they can be quite pleasurable ones where we want the experience of obliteration or of just zoning out and gliding off into some state of non-existence. To a green thought in a green shade
00:50:30
Speaker
I don't know, it's such a beautiful line, that doubling of the green in that line, that sort of insistence on things coming sort of coalescing down to a point. Were you going to say something else about that line today? Yeah, I mean, just going back to what you were saying about crime more generally in the poem and about the mind being an ocean,
00:50:56
Speaker
So that those lines, the mind, that ocean, where each kind is straight, its own resemblance find is a reference to a theory whereby everything that's every land creature has its little twin analog in the ocean. And so the mind is kind of like the ocean and that it can create or everything from the world can find a version of itself within the mind. So the mind is a kind of double of the world.
00:51:26
Speaker
I suppose if you felt that way, you might be more content to like shut out the world because you have your own little world in, you know, a kind of simulation of the world ready to go in your mind. And you can also create more, it turns out. Right, right, right. That doubling of green and green is so interesting because so much of the
00:51:50
Speaker
of the poem seems to be about resemblance. And rhyme isn't exactly the same. A pun has two meanings that are different, even though they're contained in one word. But that doubling of green, green is greed. It is insisting on identity more than resemblance, total identity, which seems to be in some ways the goal of this poem, to cut out
00:52:12
Speaker
mediation, the mediation of metaphor, the mediation of women, the mediation of business, commerce, negotium, and just get to things being what they are without anything else in position.
Metaphorical Significance and Rhyming Structure
00:52:26
Speaker
Right. So rhyme is a little bit like metaphor simile in that it sort of takes two terms and sort of asks you to notice their resemblance to each other. And in case of rhyme, it's not a semantic resemblance so much as it is an oral one or something, right?
00:52:41
Speaker
But there's this kind of indulgence in rhyme that the ultimate expression of which might not be resemblance at all, but instead identity, as you put it, sort of two things not being like each other, but being the same thing, being one thing.
00:53:00
Speaker
And I'm so struck in that, I mean, in the stanza that follows that green thought in a green shade stanza, there's this idea of like the, here at the fountain sliding foot or at some fruit trees mossy root, casting the body's vest aside my soul into the boughs, does glide this like,
00:53:19
Speaker
Am I reading that right? It's like the poet is kind of slipping out of his body and now the trees and the green and so forth are his body instead or something? Yeah, and it's weird that simile emerges here, that the soul is like a bird when it seems like so much of the poem is about annihilating simile and metaphor and having things
00:53:44
Speaker
be what they are in a straightforward sense, and suddenly we get the soul not being a soul, but like a bird. Yeah, yeah. What do you make of that? Yeah, why similarly here? Is it because once the body's relinquished, mission accomplished, and now the ordinary stuff of poetic figuration can start happening again?
00:54:11
Speaker
Maybe. I hadn't thought about it before, so. Yeah, yeah. Right, good. Yeah, that's fair enough. There, like a bird, it sits and sings, then wets and combs its silver wings, until prepared for longer flight, waves in its plumes the various light. And that it is all a referent back to my soul, yeah?
00:54:40
Speaker
Yeah, but I guess what's interesting about the simile is that he's not really going elsewhere. He's not leaving the world of the garden to make the simile. He's sitting at maybe the foot of this tree and maybe looking up and seeing a bird and being like, oh, my soul. He's not really. He's not exactly bridging different worlds. He's just using what's in front of him in a way that is more consistent with even the poem's anti poetic moments.
00:55:06
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. Well, this brings us very near the end of the poem and probably near the end of our conversation. It seems so obvious to me that in the final two stanzas of the poem, the garden, well, whatever like ordinary garden the poem began in, if it did, if it was an ordinary garden at all, is now like
00:55:29
Speaker
asking us to recall a very particular garden. The first one, Eden, namely, such was that happy garden state, while man there walked without a mate. After a place so pure and sweet, what other help could yet be meet?
00:55:45
Speaker
But twice beyond a mortal share at a wonder solitary, there are two paradises tore in one to live in paradise alone. So we talked at the beginning of the podcast about the friendship between Marvell and John Milton. We mentioned Paradise Lost earlier in this conversation as well. You and I were discussing briefly before we started recording today
00:56:15
Speaker
There's some contention, I guess, among Marvell scholars or has been historically about the dating of this poem, but seems to me like this is a poem that's written in the wake of Paradise Lost or sort of in with Paradise Lost on the mind. So
00:56:32
Speaker
First of all, does that seem right to you, Katie? And if so, what kind of relation or response are you reading here to the, well, I guess to Paradise Lost in particular, or to the story that Paradise Lost tells, which is a familiar one even before Milton wrote it, the story of
00:56:56
Speaker
Adam and Eve and the expulsion from that garden. How is Marvell responding to that kind of mythological backdrop? Well, in some ways, Marvell's Eden is very different from Milton's because in Milton's Eden, Adam and Eve work really hard. And that's a really important part of their innocent existence, that they keep up the garden. Going back to what we're talking about at the beginning, that their garden is one that is upheld by human labor in a really insistent sense for Milton.
00:57:27
Speaker
There's also another reference a little bit earlier to Eden in stanza five.
00:57:32
Speaker
the wondrous life when he says, stumbling on melons as I pass ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. So falling in a garden usually is going to make people think of the garden of Eden and the fall of man. But here there are no consequences to the fall. The next stanza begins, meanwhile, the mind from Pleasers Less, so that the fall had no impact. It was a completely innocent fall, you might say.
00:58:00
Speaker
But it seems like in that penultimate stance that there's a kind of nostalgia for Adam's time in the garden before Eve. Is that right? Yeah. Say more about that. Yeah. And there's some interesting math here when he says,
00:58:13
Speaker
Twas beyond a mortal share to wander solitary there. Two paradises tour in one to live in paradise alone. So being single, bachelorhood in paradise is double the fun of married life. And here he just sounds like a sitcom dad or something. He's like, ugh, I really wish I could have some peace and quiet to watch the game instead of just really nagging me.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, Andrew Marvell and his man cave, right. Okay, right. Okay, right. Two paradises to earn one to live in paradise alone. And I'm hearing somewhere in those lines, the wandering solitary there,
00:58:52
Speaker
a kind of verbal echoing of the very final and just like incredibly beautifully rendered final lines of Paradise Lost.
Comparison with Milton's 'Paradise Lost'
00:59:02
Speaker
We shouldn't assume, Katie, that everybody has read Paradise Lost, but I guess very briefly, right, it tells the story of the fall of man and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and does so at great length. It's an epic poem, but at the very end of the poem, Adam and Eve
00:59:21
Speaker
are hand in hand with wandering steps and slow leaving Eden. Do you have those lines handy or memorized or something? Would you read those last lines of Paradise Lost for Us? Sure. The world was all before them. Where to choose their place of rest and providence their guide. They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow through Eden took their solitary way.
00:59:50
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, I guess I'm hearing like the wandering, the two and one kind of doubling, right? But everything sort of differently configured here somehow. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a lovely and interesting connection because Milton is playing with singleness and doubleness between Adam and Eve as well, because they're hand in hand, but they're also solitary. Right. And here there's two paradises when someone is
01:00:19
Speaker
solitary. So it's really, it's almost the opposite, right? That for, yeah, I'm getting a little bit dizzy trying to think about how these different configurations work, but... Well, and it also occurs to me that, you know, so Milton's Adam and Eve are hand in hand, but of course, famously, Milton's poem doesn't rhyme.
01:00:44
Speaker
And Marvell doesn't want anyone to hold his hand, right? Because he's holding his own or something. The poem rhymes and it's doing its own kind of companionate thing in that sense. Yeah, that's really funny you mentioned that because Marvell's preparatory poem to Milton's Paradise Lost does rhyme, and he praises Milton's lack of rhyme in rhyme. Right. So it's a little bit...
01:01:10
Speaker
is like a sub-tweet or something, I don't know. Yeah, that's very funny. And so maybe just as a final question, because we're totally out of time here, a final question I could ask you is about the way time is working at the end of this poem.
01:01:29
Speaker
And maybe relative to the way that it, I don't know if this feels illuminating for you, run with it, but if not, just please talk to us about what's happening with time at the end of this poem. But what I was going to say is it always struck me that at the end of Paradise Lost, that line that you read, the world was all before them, I mean suggests first of all a kind of
01:01:50
Speaker
spatial description. So Adam and Eve are leaving Eden, this sort of contained space, and now they have the whole world before them, like in front of them, before in that sense. But I think, and I'm not a Miltonist so I don't know if this is like a reasonable reading or one that everybody says or if it's I'm just misreading badly somehow, that I always hear in that some echo of like the world was all before them in the sense of temporal before, like
01:02:18
Speaker
the world has already happened in some sense. The drama has already happened and their fate has been sealed, either because of what Satan did or what they did in the garden or whatever. Yeah, they've got to go live their lives, but now they're going to die, whereas they weren't going to before that somehow they've come too late. So what's happening with time at the end of Marvell's version of the garden poem? And does it have anything to do with Paradise Lost or whatever?
01:02:48
Speaker
That's interesting reading because in Paradise Lost, Adam has just had a crash course on biblical history and all human history up to the apocalypse from an angel who's come down and told him what's going to happen. So in a way, you're right, everything has already happened in the text poem. But yeah, I think in Mar-Vell, something very different is going on with time. There's this image of a sundial that's made of flowers in the final stanza.
01:03:16
Speaker
how well the skillful gardener, guru of flowers and herbs, this dial new. Just really a cute idea, just having a little sundial made of flowers. And it also, because it spatializes time in a way that, again, going back to two is coin mistress. It almost seems like a joke about having world enough in time because it's right here. We have a world made of time. It's a floral sundial right here in front of us in the garden.
01:03:44
Speaker
And the industrious bee computes his time as well as we. Yeah. What does that mean? Yeah, I wonder if there's a...
01:03:54
Speaker
a pun on time that it's like T-H-Y-M-E, that it's pollinating time flowers. And that's just as good as us with our clock time. But yeah, even having an industrious bee in there is funny. It's like, well, I thought that this was a place we all got away from labor. Why at the very end of this poem do we have a little worker bee? And what does it mean that it computes its time as well?
01:04:22
Speaker
as we, is it, you think it might be better, but it's just the same? Yeah, or just as well or something, right? Yeah, it seems related to what you were saying about resemblance, that wanting to find an analog in the B, that the soul, instead of just being content with itself, it does find itself always having to make comparisons and find resemblance, instead of being content in the green thought and green shade.
01:04:49
Speaker
I guess worth saying that the final rhyme in the poem is between the words hours and flowers, right? So that time is measured in this kind of, I don't know, natural or spatial floration or something. How could such sweet and wholesome hours be reckoned but with herbs and flowers? Yeah, that's lovely how flowers reckons hours by rhyming with it.
01:05:16
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's so fun. I love it. Well, that's a beautiful, beautiful final observation. Great place, I think, for us to end. So Katie Kudu, I just want to really thank you for this hour of conversation, hour plus, I guess. I owe you a flower, I think. And I want to thank everybody for listening to the podcast. And I hope you will.
01:05:43
Speaker
Stay tuned for more episodes. We have some exciting ones coming up in the future. But be well, everyone, and thank you so much. Thanks, Katie. Thank you.