Myth and Anti-Myth and the Poetics of Political Events in Two Restoration Poems

Abstract

Myth and Anti-Myth and the Poetics of Political Events in Two Restoration Poems MICHAEL G. KETCHAM The Second Dutch War of 1665 to 1667 provided the occasion for a number of poems of political statement. One of the most influential of these poems, in unintended ways, was Edmund Wallers Instructions to a Painter in praise of the Duke of York's victory at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665. These Instructions prompted a series of opposition responses to Waller's royalist account of the war, billing themselves as the Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Advices to a Painter, and the Last Instructions to a Painter. These works emphasized the failures of English policy: York's fail­ ure to pursue and destroy the Dutch fleet after Lowestoft, the division of the English fleet and its defeat in the Four Days Battle, and the Dutch invasion of the Thames in 1667. Among these opposition poems, the Sec­ ond and Third Advices have been attributed to Andrew Marvell, and the Last Instructions to a Painter is undoubtedly his.1 The poems on the naval wars also include Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, the first part of which presents a Court view of the Four Days Battle. Annabel Patterson has suggested that Dryden's poem may be a Court re­ sponse to the attacks in the Second Advice and that the Third Advice, in turn, may be a reply to Annus Mirabilis, so that these poems may form a single set of proposals and counter proposals.2 Even without these spe­ cific connections, the poems belong to the same context of debate, and within this context of debate Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Marvell's Last 117 118 / KETCHAM Instructions form a particularly interesting pair of poems. The two have been often compared, usually to contrast Dryden's adaptation of epic tropes with Marvell's more detailed and more scurrilous account of political mach­ inations.3 These differences in style do not so much reflect different levels of poetic success, as some critics have suggested, as reflect contrasting poetic strategies used to defend alternative views of government: through the poems' rhetorical choices we see the strategies of the Court and Country accounts of the war, and we see different assumptions about the operation of government in time. Specifically, the mythology of Annus Mirabilis suggests that universal patterns define the laws of human government and guide the decisions of the King so that the conduct of the war is, in effect, insulated from opposition attacks. Marvell's Last Instructions, on the other hand, parodies such mythic tropes in order to remove the politics of the war from Dryden's Virgilian cosmos and return the operations of govern­ ment to history where the poet can offer advice and where there is the possibility of change. I In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden creates a mythology of fire and water, where by "mythology" I mean that strategy I mentioned earlier: using cos­ mic elements to suggest transcendental patterns that touch on the laws of human government. The Aeneid, of course, provided a model for fus­ ing the elements with the direction of human history, as we see clearly in Dryden's own translation of the Aeneid, some thirty years after Annus Mirabilis. One structure in the Aeneid is a repeated contrast between the anarchic passions and the forces of authority that drive human destiny, and Dryden's Aeneid renders these contrasts in emblematic scenes, such as the harbor where Aeneas' ship rests after the storm in Book I, or the first view from a hill of Carthage, described through Virgil's image of a beehive. A key scene, which Dryden chooses as a model for the sea fight in Annus Mirabilis, is the storm at sea. Juno, envious of Athena's power to burn the Grecian fleet and to burn its heroes, has the winds loosed from Aeolus' cave to bring a kind of anarchy to the world. Then Neptune, "fearing for his Wat'ry Reign . . . reard his awful Head above the Main . . . Serene in Majesty," and reasserted his "Royal Mandate" to "restor[e] the Day."4 Clearly, a passage like this makes natural forces, politi­ cal authority, and...