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Thanks, Edmund! -----Original Message----- From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edmund Hardy Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 10:01 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Introduction and Oops! Richard - > >>I think where Marvell is an interesting point of contact is in his... >longer reflections on the art of government and on the civil war - in verse >and prose.<< > >Could you point me to some of these, the poetry in particular? Thanks. Sorry, yes - In the two (Yale) volumes of prose are his epigrams which relate in form and style to the pointed summing up after a tale, and the poetry: gardening is everywhere a metaphor (of government, or the garden as spiritual retreat), in fact the landscape is imbued with moral and political resonance - so that Mark's suggestion is the best, Upon Appleton House, is an entire garden/estate to sit oddly looking out on the Rose Garden and Orchard of Saadi. Then also, a run of poems about mowers - The Mower to the glow-worms, The Mower's Song, The Mower against gardens... And dialogues between abstractions - usually spiritual vs worldly - 'A dialogue between the soul and body'. Then there are poems about Cromwell - 'The first anniversay of the government under his highness the lord protector, 1655' - which usually bring in sun, forests, and a nascent but recognizably modern republicanism - Interestingly for translation, Marvell probably wrote many poems in Latin first and then translated them into English. Also - not wanting to over-egg this theme but - the scattershot complexity of Marvell's thought into a long poem also suggests a similarity to me of Saadi's enormously diverse projects which come at the reader from all angles so that the truth, the point, is glimpsed somewhere in the middle. There's only one thing left: Marvellous! (sorry) Edmund