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Essay on Introduction to Poetry
Introduction
Andrew Marvell was born on March 31, 1621. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman and after studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, Andrew embarked on a tour of the continent, while England was embroiled in a war. The war and the tour undoubtedly influenced his life and poetry. Andrew Marvell was to become one of the greatest metaphysical poets of his time, in addition to serving as a member of the parliament and the first assistant of John Milton (The Literary Encyclopedia).
Amongst Andrew Marvell’s noted poems are “To His Coy Mistress” (to which T. S. Eliot refers in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) and “The Garden”. Stanza six of “The Garden”, a poem by Andrew Marvell is as follows:
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Andrew Marvell wrote “The Garden” to put forward his point of view and then argue it logically. In “The Garden”, Marvell attempts to argue that being at one with nature and away from other people is the best way to live. However, it is illuminating to try and understand what Andrew Marvell meant by the verses that he had written in the sixth stanza of the poem. This very brief paper attempts to study these verses.
Verses of the Sixth Stanza of Andrew Marvell’s Poem “The Garden”
The lines of the sixth stanza refer in very cryptic words to the creative and the destructive functions of the mind. Andrew Marvell tries to the praise of idealized Nature and contrasts it with the fallen state of things under human domination, perhaps referring to the conditions of his time................
