Theme and Counterthemes in "Damon the Mower"

Abstract

N THE ART OF MARVELL'S POETRY, J. B. Leishman states that Marvell's initial impulse for writing Damon the Mower might have come from Randolph's Dialogue. Thirsis. Lalage.l However, aside from a general resemblance between Randolph's lover, who burns from the cold power of Lalage, and Marvell's mower, who is scorched by the icy Juliana, there is little similarity between Randolph's complaint and Marvell's enigmatic overturn of the pastoral genre. This is not to deny Randolph's influence but rather to suggest that Marvell's initial impulse came from some other source, specifically, I feel, from Stanley's Acanthus Complaint and its French original, Tristan's Les Plaintes d'Acante. But more important than trying to determine the starting point of Marvell's composition-a task impossible to accomplish with any certainty-is the analysis of how Marvell's poem differs from these works. Such an analysis reveals the complexity of Marvell's mind. One discovers that Marvell's great achievement in the pastoral lies not merely in the overturn and transformation of his sources but in his ability to treat different and indeed mutually contradictory traditions contrapuntally. One sees that whereas most seventeenth-century writers of pastoral laments are writing airs, that is, poems with a single theme, Marvell is, in fact, writing a fugue, an understated one to be sure, not a full-blown fugue to be performed at St. Peter's, but a fugue nonetheless. A typical fugue contains a theme (or subject) and one or more counterthemes (or countersubjects) that are pitted against each other. The contrasting strands are interwoven so tightly that the countersubjects seem almost as important as the subject itself. So, too, in Damon the Mower, there is a contrapuntal handling of contrasting elements.