The English Landscape Garden in Andrew Marvell's Five Poems

Abstract

Landscape garden is a recurrent theme in the seventeenth century English literature, and a number of poets have made contributions to it. Among them, Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) in his five poems depicts the landscape garden, including the external world in nature and the internal mind of mankind. Focusing upon the landscape garden in Marvell's five poems, ”The Garden” (1662), ”The Mower, Against Gardens” (1664-1665), ”The Damon Mower,” ”The Mower to the Glo-worms” (1667) and ”The Mower's Song” (1668), this paper aims to explore the poet's philosophy of nature, especially his perspective of the relationship between nature and mankind. In these five poems, Marvell reveals his philosophy of nature which is composed of three dimensions-the pastoral, the Biblical and the mythological. He suggests that the philosophy of nature, in the frame of traditional pastoral, tends to be by no means a Dionysian libertinism but rather a Christian contemplation observed in ”The Garden.” In ”The Mower, Against Gardens,” he declares that a natural order rather than an artificial decoration in nature is important and deserves attention. The relationship between nature and mankind is illustrated in ”The Mower to the Glo-worms” and in ”The Mower's Song.”The author will apply the landscape theory to the discussion on these five poems and would argue that the relationship between nature and mankind under the plume of Marvell presents an ambivalent phenomenon: hostile but harmonious.