The Politics of Marvell's Horatian Ode

Abstract

Andrew Marvell's ‘AnHoratianode uponCromwel'sreturn fromIreland’ is the most private of political poems. It may be a solitary meditation; it may be written, after Horace, for a forward youth now unknown to us; but it scarcely seems addressed to the public audience of Marvell's tribute to Cromwell in ‘The first anniversary’. We enter an imaginative landscape beyond politics, outside the movement of history, where the figures of the ode – restless Cromwell, the royal actor, the clapping soldiers, the frighted architects, the tamed Irish, the luring falconer, the hunted Pict – appear stilled as upon some ancient vase. Yet the poem's transcendence of events need not be taken for detachment from them, nor its privacy for retreat. I want to suggest that the celebrated poise and urbanity of the ode have been created from energy and urgency of feeling. Marvell has given timelessness to a desperate and portentous moment in his country's history, the arrival of Cromwell in England in the summer of 1650. Language has been immortalized too: the language of ephemeral tracts and newspapers, which is close enough to the surface of the poem to suggest a younger Marvell as politically engaged as the restoration M.P. and whig pamphleteer.