ANDREW MARVELL'S POEM - THE DEFINITION OF LOVE

On the 8^th day  of the Blog chatter’s #WRITEAPAGEADAY, Here is a poem with love as the major theme.

 

Poet: Andrew Marvell

Poem:  The Definition of Love

 

 My love is of a birth as rare

As ’tis for object strange and high;

It was begotten by Despair

Upon Impossibility.

 

Magnanimous Despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing

Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,

But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing.

 

And yet I quickly might arrive

Where my extended soul is fixt,

But Fate does iron wedges drive,

And always crowds itself betwixt.

 

For Fate with jealous eye does see

Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;

Their union would her ruin be,

And her tyrannic pow’r depose.

 

And therefore her decrees of steel

Us as the distant poles have plac’d,

(Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel)

Not by themselves to be embrac’d;

 

Unless the giddy heaven fall,

And earth some new convulsion tear;

And, us to join, the world should all

Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

 

As lines, so loves oblique may well

Themselves in every angle greet;

But ours so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

 

Therefore the love which us doth bind,

But Fate so enviously debars,

Is the conjunction of the mind,

And opposition of the stars.

Andrew Marvell a great literary figure and a lyrist of sweetness and power, fell in with the fashion, and was astonishingly  successful in his Last Instructions to a Puritan; Advice to a Puritan : and Britannia and Raleigh.

Andrew Marvel a writer with a fine power was born on 1621, educated at Cambridge, became a tutor. In 1657 he became Latin secretary to Milton and Member of Parliament for Hull three years and retained it till death.

After restoration period, he wrote a contemptuous work on the Growth of Propery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677).  A collection of his poems appeared in 1680- 81. In technique he was admirable and while displaying no small measure of the charm and grace of the Cavalier lyrists, he unites with them a sobriety and restraint that are rarely found outside of Milton. Perhaps his finest poem is the noble Horatian Ode to Cromwell; while such verses as The Nymph,, Regretting the loss of her Faun, show him no less favourably in a lighter mood.