Marvell’s “the unfortunate lover”

“The Unfortunate Lover” (1648–49) by Andrew Marvell has provoked a range of modern interpretations (Berthoff 1966; Patterson 1978; Stocker 1986; Enterline 1987; Klawitter 2009; Hirst and Zwicker 2012), with little consensus on its tone or purpose. Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of literature (1978, 1983) can help to clarify the structure and meaning of this challenging poem, while shedding light on some of the sources of its ambiguity. According to this theory, every poem derives from a sentence, phrase, or single word that need not appear in it directly. It elaborates that minimal starting-point (its “matrix”) by reference to clusters of verbal association already present in the reader’s mind – received ideas, common phrases, well-known passages from other works, literary conventions, and the like – that Riffaterre calls “intertexts.” Applying this thesis to Marvell’s “Unfortunate Lover,” it is possible to show how the poem expands and transforms the phrase fortune in love, which is echoed in the title, through two contrasting generic intertexts: heroic narrative and Petrarchan lyric. The former offers an exemplary representation of fortune itself, the power ruling the individual struggle against contingency, while the latter dramatizes fortune in the special context of love as the fickleness of a lady’s favor. Riffaterre holds that the poem’s initial expansion of its matrix (the “model”) governs the form of successive variants. In the case of “The Unfortunate Lover,” the first stanza constitutes the model – the original extended variant of the phrase fortune in love. The first two couplets repeat and develop the concept of love in the mode of pastoral allegory, while the third, through the conventional simile of a meteor, introduces the idea of fortune as it stereotypically applies to love in the form of passion’s inconstancy. The final couplet, however, raises a concern that seems out of place, prefiguring the clash of generic codes around which the poem is structured. It is not pastoral lovers who are traditionally expected to “make impression upon Time” (8) but the noble hero. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965516