Like Skillful Looms: Marvell, Cromwell, and the Politics of Weeping

Abstract

Recent work has illuminated the spiritual, eschatological, and gender dynamics of Marvell’s poetry of tears, but the politics of Marvellian weeping have yet to be tackled. Contextualizing the Cromwell encomia (‘The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector’ and ‘A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector’) amidst the man’s proclivity for weeping, this essay argues that Marvell poetically employs tears not just to embrace the vulnerability of the Lord Protector at the center of England’s new political settlement; he also attempts to bind moderate yet impassioned allies around a bourgeois Protestantism. The essay begins with a reading of ‘Eyes and Tears’ to establish the religious, economic, and ornamental dimensions of Marvellian weeping. ‘The First Anniversary’ echoes the aspect of luxurious display central to Marvell’s bourgeois Protestantism in ‘Eyes and Tears’, but it adds an emphasis on domestic productivity to suggest that private weeping can be publically beneficial. In this way, Marvell can speak to Cromwell as a well-known practitioner of weeping while also speaking to, and as, an audience of bourgeois Protestants, for whom religious devotion and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing endeavors. The essay concludes with a theoretical reflection on Marvellian weeping as affective politics, in which the externalization of internal emotion attempts to forge community. Ultimately, the affective politics of Marvellian weeping consists in publicizing private piety without forfeiting the sanctity of private life altogether.