{"id":2716,"date":"2023-12-13T20:22:12","date_gmt":"2023-12-13T20:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2716"},"modified":"2023-12-13T20:22:12","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T20:22:12","slug":"andrew-marvells-the-mower-to-the-glow-worms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2716","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Marvell’s The Mower to the Glow-Worms"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mower to the Glow-Worms
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
\nThe nightingale does sit so late,
\nAnd studying all the summer night,
\nHer matchless songs does meditate;<\/p>\n

Ye country comets, that portend
\nNo war nor prince\u2019s funeral,
\nShining unto no higher end
\nThan to presage the grass\u2019s fall;<\/p>\n

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
\nTo wand\u2019ring mowers shows the way,
\nThat in the night have lost their aim,
\nAnd after foolish fires do stray;<\/p>\n

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
\nSince Juliana here is come,
\nFor she my mind hath so displac\u2019d
\nThat I shall never find my home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to try to explain for and to myself why I find such an apparently slight poem so hauntingly beautiful and, in its quiet way, so moving.<\/p>\n

A great deal is to do with the sheer perfection of its form. This includes very simple things, like the satisfying solidity of the 4×4 structure of its lines and stanzas, and of its progression through three parallel stanzas of address to one of statement. That wouldn\u2019t go very far in itself, perhaps. The wonder of the poem is the way this solidity of structure underpins something ethereally light, both in the shimmering near-evanescence of its suggestions and in the serenely contained, gravely uninsistent rising and falling of its cadences. I think the rhyme scheme Marvell uses here plays an important part. Unlike most of his other poems in iambic tetrameter, this one uses an ABAB scheme rather than couplets. This immediately produces a more complex musical pattern, and the wider spacing of the rhymes conduces to a more floating, tentative shaping of statements than the emphatic couplets of, say, \u2018The Garden\u2019:<\/p>\n

How vainly men themselves amaze
\nTo win the palm, the oak or bays,
\nAnd their uncessant labours see
\nCrowned from some single herb or tree.<\/p>\n

Here, there\u2019s a momentum to the statements, a sense of their thrusting forward to the rhyme. This fits the tone of mild, ironically astonished exclamation at this point in the poem and is effective in different ways at other points. What it doesn\u2019t do is let phrases hang in the air in a kind of radiant suspension as the phrases of \u2018The Mower to the Glow-Worms\u2019 do, at least as they sound to my own inner ear. I hear a pause after \u2018Ye living lamps\u2019, a pause giving space to the magical suggestiveness of those three simple words (reinforced by alliteration). Both the first two lines seem to me to divide into equal halves, each of four measured syllables that quietly release their glow of suggestions in the space created by the lingering focus on words and brief phrases. The aura of stillness around the whole stanza allows the evocativeness of the images and the reflections that flow from them to sink in in a lovingly reflective hush. If a stanza is like a little room, this is a room there\u2019s no movement through<\/em> although there is movement within<\/em> it, the movement of the glow worms, of the singing nightingale and of the concentratedly thinking (\u2018studying\u2019) poet to whom the nightingale is compared. Though it\u2019s reinforced by exquisite patterning of sound, this stillness is largely a matter of grammar, of the way a descriptive apostrophe is boxed off by stanza form and by the recursive movement of the next two stanzas, which don\u2019t move on from the apostrophe to the glow worms but repeat it in different terms.<\/p>\n

I said I found the poem quietly moving. It\u2019s difficult to pin down what touches the heart in it without sounding mawkish but one fundamental aspect is the sheer tender courtesy of its address to the glow-worms. Another is the yearning for an unobtainable peace and simplicity. Exploring how this works in the poem is like trying to thread a sewing needle in boxing gloves because it depends on such a delicately shimmering interplay of factors. One obvious element is the way the pastoral world it creates is seen as a place not just of harmony and mutual support but of loving sensitivity to others\u2019 needs. But it\u2019s also very clearly presented as a fiction, a beautiful dream. The extreme sophistication of Marvell\u2019s writing foregrounds the fundamental paradox of pastoral poetry, that it celebrates idealized rural simplicities from a courtly or urban perspective. So even in the first two stanzas, the pastoral world appears as something the poet and his readers yearn for and don\u2019t possess. The yearning itself has different levels, including, it seems, the poet\u2019s simple wish that he could write as beautifully as the nightingale sings. With the darkening progress of the poem, other motives come into play. Explicit, of course, is the idea that sexual love \u2013 whether thwarted or accepted[1]<\/a> \u2013 has irrevocably alienated the mower from his former unity with nature. Another flows from the idea that the pastoral world is safe<\/em> in its humility. \u2018Ye country comets, that portend \/ No war nor prince\u2019s funeral, \/ Shining unto no higher end \/ Than to presage the grass\u2019s fall.\u2019 If the Mower poems were written during Marvell\u2019s time at Nun Appleton, as is considered likely, the violence so remotely presented here includes the recent horrors of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. But such topical references aren\u2019t necessary to appreciate the ambiguous impact of the lines. The very fact of saying that these \u2018comets\u2019 don\u2019t<\/em> presage such things evokes the opposing idea of a world in which comets do<\/em> forerun disaster.<\/p>\n

Even mentioning such things risks falsifying the impact of the poem by crystallising ideas that achieve their impact by glimmering on the fringes of the reader\u2019s consciousness or attention – glimmering, shifting and interacting in elusive and impalpable ways. Focusing on them too explicitly might turn them into static presences in a way that would gradually paralyse enjoyment of a poem whose very life is in its mobile iridescence.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> If we do imagine that Juliana has \u2018displaced\u2019 him from bucolic harmony with the animals by accepting<\/em> his love we might compare his situation to that of Enkidu, the wild man in the epic Gilgamesh<\/em>, who becomes cut off from the animals when he has sex with a woman!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mower to the Glow-Worms Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late, And studying all the summer night, Her matchless songs does meditate; Ye country comets, that portend No war nor prince\u2019s funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grass\u2019s fall; Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-andrew-marvell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2717,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions\/2717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}