Last weekend, there should have been a newsletter post but I didn’t manage to write it because my attention was on other things. Having missed that post, I thought I’d just skip last week and send out the next post (probably about Sarah Hall’s short stories in Sudden Traveller) two weeks later, on 13 September. But I’ve changed my mind again.

The main thing taking up my attention last week was the poetry of Andrew Marvell. I’ve been trying to turn my thesis into something publishable and relatively accessible and, on about the fourth attempt, I’m finally getting somewhere. So, I was thinking mainly about Marvell. I’ve been searching through some of the things I wrote about his poetry in the early days of postgraduate study, before I had figured out what my “thesis” was. I had been under the impression that I hadn’t written anything at all about “To His Coy Mistress”, largely because there’s very little in it that is relevant to my topic (Marvell’s treatment of the theme of justice) and also partly because so much has already been written about Marvell’s best-known poem that I was unlikely to come up with anything new.

I was surprised to find that I had, in fact, written a bit about the poem. Apart from a brief comment on the couplet

Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power (ll. 39–40)

none of what I wrote back then is worth resurrecting, but I noticed something about the poem that had escaped me till now.

A while ago, I wrote on my personal site about second person pronouns in Marvell’s other best-known poem, “The Garden”. Although I had been familiar with that poem for decades, it had only just struck me that the shift from “thou/thee/thy” to “you” in the second stanza is a shift from singular to plural.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men. (“The Garden”, ll. 9–12)

The speaker begins by addressing “Fair Quiet” alone, but the “you” in line 11 is directed at “Fair Quiet” and “Innocence, [her] sister dear” together. That got me wondering whether Marvell had ever used the singular “you” in any of his non-satiric poetry.

In fact, he uses it quite freely, for example in “Clorinda and Damon” line 16, and “The Nymph Complaining” line 31. (It may be worth noting that, in both of these poems, “you” is spoken by a would-be seducer: Clorinda in the first and “Unconstant Silvio” who “soon had me beguiled” in the second.) But I missed somthing, presumably because I hadn’t looked in any detail at “To His Coy Mistress” for such a long time. In that poem, the speaker uses “you” and “thou” inconsistently.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find. I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews. (“To His Coy Mistress”, ll. 5–10)

The speaker returns to the more familiar form in line 14, with “Thine eyes” and “thy forehead”, but in lines 18 and 19, he has reverted to formality:

And the last age should show your heart.
For Lady you deserve this state;
Nor would I love at lower rate. (ll. 18–20)

Clearly, in this poem the “you/your” form is not a plural, as it is in “The Garden”. Rather, the speaker is alternating (perhaps wavering) between an intimate, confidential mode of address and a reserved, respectful one. Why might he be doing that?

When I wrote about Marvell and gender, I had this to say about “Clorinda and Damon”:

Marvell again engages in the detachment of a masculine role from a male and of a feminine one from a female in “Clorinda and Damon”. The carpe diem motif is usually encountered in the univocal utterance of a male persona, the woman’s voice remaining unheard. “Clorinda and Damon” (note that the young woman’s name comes first in the title, in contrast to “Ametas and Thestylis”, “Daphnis and Chloe”, or “Thyrsis and Dorinda”) is a dialogue in which it is Clorinda who urges her companion to “Seize the short joys then, ere they vade” (l. 8). Because only one voice speaks in Herrick’s “Gather Ye Rosebuds” or, indeed, in “To His Coy Mistress”, the reader is left with no clear sense of the effect that the attempt at persuasion has had on its addressee. Success or failure, this might imply, is not really the point. In Marvell’s dialogue, on the other hand, we do learn the result: Clorinda, far from having things her way, is instead won over to Damon’s point of view. (Kavanagh 2016, 213–4)

I now think I was unfair to “To His Coy Mistress” in stating that, because we only hear the man’s words, we don’t know how the woman has received his attempt at persuasion. His switching between the intimate and the formal, and back again, is most likely his response to what he perceives as her reaction. He is adjusting his tone according to whether he thinks she is being receptive to his arguments or resisting them. Having addressed her as “you” in lines 18 and 19, he is being familiar again a few lines later:

Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust … (ll. 25–9)

The impersonal “That” comes between “thy” in lines 25 and 26 and “your” in line 29, holding them apart as it were. The speaker is attempting to be at once forceful and delicate: he is talking about body parts — intimate, private ones — and their inevitable decay and decomposition. Nigel Smith cites the OED showing that “quaint” means both “proud” and “prim”, but adds “There is also a pun on ME ‘queynte’ (vagina)” (Smith 2007, 83 note to l. 29).

So, in speaking of “your quaint honour” (emphasis added) the speaker appears to be attempting to balance a rather brutal intimacy with a respectful deference. In the next verse paragraph he is back with “thy”: “thy skin” (l. 34), “thy willing soul” (l. 35) — which “transpires | At every pore with instant fires”. These are the last occurrences in the poem of a second person pronoun. In the remaining ten lines, all the pronouns that refer to the speaker and the woman he is addressing are first person plural:

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. (ll. 37–46)

This might be taken to suggest that the two parties are now a couple, that they have reached agreement and are acting as one. Alternatively, it could be that in desperation the speaker is behaving as if they were in agreement, but that his attempt at persuasion has come to nothing. Because of the “willing soul” and the “instant fires”, I’m inclined to prefer the first view, but either way we can’t say (as I thought before) that the reader learns nothing about the reaction of the poem’s addressee.

There is another poem by Marvell in which one character is addressed as both “you” and “thou”. In the first stanza of “The Gallery”, the speaker invites Clora to view his soul, whose “several lodgings” are “Composed into one gallery” where

… for all furniture, you’ll find
Only your picture in my mind. (ll. 7–8)

Having been “you” in the first stanza, Clora becomes “thou” in the rest of the poem. It becomes clear that in the first stanza, though speaking to and about a single woman, he is using the plural. She appears to him in a gallery of different images, alternating between the alluring and the frightening. She appears successively as “an inhuman murderess” (l. 10), “Like to Aurora in the dawn” (l. 18), “an enchantress” (l. 25), “Venus in her pearly boat” (l. 34) and, finally, in “the same posture and the look | … with which I first was took. | A tender shepherdess, whose hair | Hangs loosely playing in the air” (ll. 51–4). The enchantress has been shown

Vexing thy restless lover’s ghost;
And, by a light obscure, dost rave
Over his entrails, in the cave;
Divining thence, with horrid care,
How long thou shalt continue fair … (ll. 26–30)

The penultimate stanza (VI) is explicit as to Clora’s multiplicity:

These pictures and a thousand more,
Of thee, my gallery does store;
In all the forms thou can’st invent
Either to please me, or torment:
For thou alone to people me,
Art grown a num’rous colony … (ll. 41–46)

She is both singular and plural.

The next post in Talk about books will be two weeks from now, on or about 20 September. It’s likely to be about Sarah Hall’s Sudden Traveller. Till then.

Works cited: Kavanagh, Art. “Andrew Marvell’s Gender”, Essays in Criticism, 66.2 (2016), 198–220;
Smith, Nigel, ed. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, revised edition (Routledge, 2007).