Andrew Marvell’s "Bermudas," Paradisal Places, and the Protestant Critique of Sacred Space

Abstract

In this article I look at Andrew Marvell’s “Bermudas” (1653-54), a work that continues to puzzle us. The poem describes an idyllic paradisal landscape, identified with the tropical Bermudas but which the reader knows belongs only to a cartography of the imagination. In what sense are we supposed to believe in this patently fictional paradise, and what is the relationship between the Bermudas of Marvell’s fiction and the islands of history? Here I suggest that an answer to these questions lies in Protestant attitudes toward space and the sacred. The Reformation challenged the idea that particular spaces contained any intrinsic holiness—the shrines of Catholicism, the churches of the Laudian era, and the temples of the pagans were all cited as idolatrous confusions of the holy with special places. Reading “Bermudas” against the backdrop of such critiques allows for an alternative perspective on its elusive symbolism. In Marvell’s time, the Protestant criticism of sacred spaces extended to the sacralization of localities by the godly, who in some cases believed that places (such as colonies in the New World) were marked out by providential favor. I suggest that in “Bermudas” Marvell extends the critique of special places to the providentialism of the godly mariners in his poem.