Abstract
In ‘The Garden’, Andrew Marvell devotes a lot of time to extolling the virtues of the solitude he experiences in the garden of the title. Despite Marvell’s insistence that he prefers solitude to ‘society’, at the end of the poem his attention comes to rest approvingly on a human figure: the Gardener. Reading ‘The Garden’ alongside ‘Damon the Mower’, this article suggests that Marvell’s sensually-charged engagement with the plants, trees, and fruits in ‘The Garden’ can be interpreted as a means of accessing and loving the Gardener himself. On one reading of ‘Damon the Mower’, the narrator caresses Damon through the landscape. Tracking similar themes in ‘The Garden’ suggests that something similar may be occurring in this poem, too.
Highlights
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
In ‘The Garden’, Andrew Marvell devotes a lot of time to extolling the virtues of the solitude he experiences in the garden of the title
‘Rude’, with its connotations of ignorance, harshness, lack of culture and irrationality,2 is opposed to a ‘solitude’ that is literally delicious to the taste buds; the garden is filled with delectable ripe fruits
Summary
Existing criticism has emphasised the ambiguity in Marvell’s pastoral poetry, suggesting that queer sexuality is expressed not homonormatively but as part of an interplay of a multivalent desire and rejection of desire that encompasses overarching heterosexual plotlines, an erotic and aesthetic love of nature, homoerotic. Critical studies of Marvell’s poetry have often noted the erotic way in which this poet describes the natural world, and I build on this to suggest that the speakers in both ‘Damon the Mower’ and ‘The Garden’ access human bodies through plant life. Guy-Bray draws on Thomas Browne’s statement that he wishes that humans could procreate as trees do, positioning human sexuality within ‘a larger love for beauty’, and concludes that in the Renaissance ‘we could see human sexuality itself as something that might not be restricted either to humans or to what we would call sexual acts’.14 He discusses how the plants in ‘The Garden’ have agency, and are able both to provoke and to feel lust: ‘Instead of wanting to procreate like trees, the speaker of Marvell’s poem wants to have sex with them. They cannot be described as purely or even primarily homoerotic
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