You know who Andrew Marvell was — one of the major Metaphysical poets of 17th century England, he’s best known for his poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘Had we but world enough, and time…’

As well as this memento mori, he also wrote a series of four poems narrated by a mysterious figure called the Mower. They are: The Mower’s Song, The Mower Against Gardens, Damon the Mower, and The Mower to the Glowworms.

I want to consider the poem, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’. The three other Mower poems are concerned with the narrator’s — the Mower’s — unrequited passion for a woman called Juliana. This is the only one in which she isn’t mentioned. There’s been a lot written in Marvell circles about the four poems as a unit, and there’s a lot of serious scholarship out there about how they fit into Marvell’s work as a whole. But however it fits into the sequence, this poem takes on an interesting cast when considered as a separate unit right now, in 2021. And although I like context, my business — as a writer, reader and teacher of poems — is less in the scholarship than in how we encounter a poem. This poem casts an interesting light on how we view the past. It illuminates our culture’s current preoccupations in some new ways, and I’m interested in its register and tone.

The Mower Against Gardens

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 gardens square
A dead and standing pool of air,
And a more luscious earth for them did knead,
Which stupified 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 flowers 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 allowed
To 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 th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit
Might 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 dispense
A 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.

Marvell wasn’t known as a poet in his lifetime; he was a prose writer and a government official (in fact, a protegé of John Milton) during the rule of Oliver Cromwell, and he was able to keep his position in the new government after the Restoration. When Milton was arrested in the autumn of 1660, his books burned and banned, Marvell intervened to get him released from the Tower of London.

From its first word, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’, is wholly constructed within the puritan frame of reference that formed 17th century English civil discourse. ‘Luxurious’ in this context implies a sort of selfish carnality that is further identified in the word ‘vice’, and then clinched with ‘seduced’ in Line 2. There’s no preamble; Marvell is telling us that man is given over to selfishness and sensuous pleasures. Gardens were a big pleasure, for those who could afford them, in 17th century England.

‘Where nature was most plain and pure’, we humans set about ‘seducing’ it to make itself more attractive — for us, that is — as it was already more than attractive enough for itself. This is pretty much the central message of the poem. It’s hard to read it and not think of Milton and his Garden of Eden; it’s safe to say that any garden in the seventeenth century stands in somehow for the Garden of Eden. But this is a much more Draughtsman’s Contract garden, made by man to fit man’s conceits.

The poem lists the ways in which scheming humans have corrupted pure nature: we’ve enclosed the gardens, creating ‘pools of dead air’. Created fertiliser and ‘stupefied’ the plants, no longer capable of growing in plain natural soil. These nutrients have changed what the flowers actually are. The pinks have doubled in size — everything is about display — and they’ve forgotten what they used to be. Their scents are compared to perfumes, and in a glorious image, tulips have been taught ‘to paint’ — i.e., in the parlance of Marvell’s day, their cheeks — with those beautiful red and white striped petals suggesting the pale skin and rouge of Restoration society beauties. Make-up back then was not universal; ordinary women didn’t wear it. It was mostly thought not quite respectable, as being blatantly about making yourself sexy (a word they didn’t have back then).

The lines, ‘Its onion root they then so high did hold,/ that one was for a meadow sold’ refer to the famous Tulip Mania, when tulips were subject to a craze equal to any inflated finance bubble nowadays. Prices for even a single bulb rose so dizzyingly high that when they crashed suddenly, in February 1637, collectors were bankrupted overnight. This is nothing to do, of course, with the simple yet miraculous beauty of a flower. The poem goes on:

And yet these rarities might be allowed…
Had [we] not dealt between the bark and tree,
Forbidden mixtures there to see.

These lines refer to grafting, an age-old gardening technique that has produced many fruit and flower varieties we now think of as respectably ‘heritage’. Marvell frames it as a form of unnatural wizardry, and goes on:

No plant now knew the stock from which it came;
He grafts upon the wild the tame:
That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit
Might put the palate in dispute.

This reminds me uncomfortably of the laws against mixed-race marriages that appeared in both the British Empire and the post-Emancipation US a century or two after Marvell wrote. He can’t have had anything of the sort in mind; he was simply applying a mainstream puritan attitude to the business of gardening, in an intensely sophisticated metaphor, about sexual desirability.

And as for metaphors, let’s not forget that the Mower is the guy with the scythe. Beauty, corruption, sex, and death.

The poem is written in rhyming couplets, in an alternating line of iambic pentameter (five feet) and tetrameter (four feet). This is like the standard meter of hymns (and Emily Dickinson) but with one extra foot added to each line. It strikes slightly off kilter, especially without a melody to sing it to. The slight air of unease it creates, of discomfort, creates a perfect ground for a poem about meddling with nature. In each couplet the reader arrives at that point where the second line just won’t stretch to a satisfactory length, won’t somehow close properly. It’s bold in its simplicity. and one of only two poems Marvell wrote in this meter.

He maintains the conceit all the way through, never once mentioning the lady. But she, and his fears about rejection, are ever-present:

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…
While the sweet fields do lie forgot.

Here. the garden is our seraglio, and the gardeners are tyrants. (Interesting to note that fundamentalist Christianity, even in the face of catastrophic climate change, insists on the primacy of Man among all of nature. The Bible says we are in charge and there are still people who take that literally. The view is that everything is here to please humans.) When the mower talks about ‘eunuchs’, and ‘procreat(ing) without a sex’ this is the closest he comes to saying he fears rejection; of course no lover wants to feel actually biologically redundant. With his use of words like ‘eunuch’ and ‘enforced’ he introduces a sense of powerlessness. It’s the systemic, artificial powerlessness of a cherry that has no stone, the ‘enforcement’ of a mechanised reproduction. Nowadays we can easily picture an industrial dystopia, Brave New World, or Wall-E, where our humanity has been declared surplus to requirements. But Marvell was writing a century before the Industrial Revolution.

This poem keeps doing this, looping around from Marvell’s metaphor to different readings only available to us now, in the 21st century. Even 50 years ago no one would have seen in this poem the things we can see in it now. In 2021, of course, we have literal procreation without [a] sex. ‘Test tube babies’, as they were called — that is, IVF — are commonplace. We’ve meddled between our own bark and tree, just a little bit.

The public discourse in 2021 is riddled with toxic debates about what constitutes sex, what gender, what maleness, what femaleness, what lies between, what degree or kind merits a label — and what interventions are acceptable — and at the same time we have clampdowns around the world on women’s rights over their bodies. We could think a bit more about this word of Marvell’s, ‘enforced’. What is enforced, what’s tolerated, what’s embraced.

The world is so little like 17th century England now — except of course that in pockets it isn’t. Partly, fundamentalist religion still exists. (Partly it exists explicitly as a reaction to the scariness of the big wide world, the garden, in which anything goes.) Ideology, in short, is just as rampant now as it was during Cromwell’s Protectorate; public opinion is all, now, about where to draw the line, not whether the line should be drawn at all. There’s a faction for absolutely everything. I don’t think it is driven by social media, and Marvell’s poem makes me doubt it more. We’ve always been like this.

The Mower is an interesting figure: he argues for the wild profusion and spontaneity of nature, but appears to adopt a more conservative, rightwing (as we’d say) approach to it. Leave well enough alone, he says. Tolerance, now, here in Brexitland, means the embrace of all things and types, including the painted tulip. There’s no such thing as a return to absence; once you’ve thought of a thing, it exists.

Actually, the Mower does know this. At the end of the poem Marvell switches tack completely, and talks about what’s been lost: the ‘fauns and fairies’, who ‘the meadows till,/More by their presence than their skill’. In other words, the wild, pagan creatures, the spirits of nature, are still there, unseen by us, and they still give everything (its real) life. But wait! It’s not a subtraction at all. It’s the missing profusion of life, the kind of life that has meaning. And he says we’ve still got it:

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.

If we think about this passage in the poem’s intended light of an unrequited love, it seems to me the poet is reminding the lady that, instead of managing and manipulating the situation (as we might imagine a very urbane woman called Juliana doing), she could just let it happen. We know what he’s like. In ‘To his Coy Mistress’ he persuaded the girl by reminding her of ‘time’s wingéd chariot’, and this time he invokes the ancient gods, and the nymphs. A big conceit to set up!

But the thing that really strikes me is how this poem asks, right now, in our dark, troubled end-of-times moment, to be taken literally. In 2020, for example, nature rose up and bit humanity right in the bum. Viral pandemics are widely understood to be the result of mismanagement of the environment and we are paying the price. Looked at this way, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’ becomes almost unbelievably poignant. The innocent pastoral reframed as the beginning of humans’ (literally) ungodly meddling in nature. ‘No plant now knew the stock from which it came’: what was it but early GMO? Nowadays, ‘adulterate fruit’ is proof against insects, which are dying out; it destroys the soil through the intensive methods used to farm it; is of uncertain nutritional value because we’ve bred it for reasons to do with money rather than — well — purity.

So, if we take the longer view, when did our innocence — not nature’s — become corruption? Marvell sees this particular meddling, ‘between bark and tree’, as the final straw, the one thing that takes human treatment of nature beyond forgiveness. And our current craze for ideological purity is going to drive us over the edge, much te same way it drove Cromwell’s project over the edge. Sitting here in 2021, it looks more like the first straw.

We really need those gods, and fauns, and the glorious profusion they inhabit and create, and the wildness of that nature. In fact it contains more, not less. It keeps us human. In ways Marvell couldn’t even have imagined, he’s speaking to us, nearly four hundred years later. We can see ourselves in his enchanted mirror, and his words are of hope. Abundance is the way forward, and mystery will be the reward.

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