The Augustan Marvell: The Last Instructions to a Painter

Abstract

My purpose in the following pages is to speak on behalf of Marvell's major Augustan satire, Last Instructions to a Painter. If few have done so, it is not hard to see why. George deForest Lord sets the problem this way: how does one account for the fact that a lyric poet of unexcelled grace and sensitivity could have produced such a poem, . . . a poem that is often derisive, tendentious, cynical, and ugly ? 1 Many critics respond to the problem by accepting this disjunction for what it appears to be and excluding the poem from general discussions of Marvell's poems. Critics who take the poem seriously accept the disjunction too. They disconnect Last Instructions from the earlier work and concentrate on matters extrinsic to the poem: it is an expression of anti-government loyalism to the King; it is a poetic painting in the consciously grotesque style of satirical prints; or it is an important experiment in epic satire, leading to Dryden's far greater poems in that mode.2 It is, of course, all of these, but it is also a major public statement on political affairs by a poet whose true mastery lay in poems of meditation and retirement. Professor Lord argues that there is no true disjunction between the lyrics and the satires. An outer world of involvement and action continually exerts pressure on the retired, contemplative world of his lyrics-and sometimes it brutally breaks in. Marvell's gravitation toward action and involvement, which is