Green Love: Lost in Marvell's “The Garden”

This chapter reads Marvell’s “The Garden” as a spiritual exercise, one concerned with dwelling in and loving the present. Considering “The Garden” alongside Stoic and Epicurean arguments, the chapter argues that the poem’s first four stanzas concern themselves with delimiting the present, and stanzas five through seven with dilating it in an experience of green love, of a liberating bondage in the garden’s present moment. In particular, stanzas five through seven fuse sequence with simultaneity, creating a poetic eternity in a way unlike both Stoics and Epicureans. Both seek to better live in the present by establishing a consistent and coherent, undivided sense of self, while Marvell creates a well-bounded, joyous present for an astoundingly inconsistent self: one uncommonly passive and yet uncommonly active, sensually embodied and yet hardly embodied at all, deeply withdrawn into himself and yet deeply embedded in the garden that he loves. Such opposed positions ought to, and do, occur successively in everyday life. Yet the poem’s speaker asserts that they occur at once, loving in the present as he lives in it: by being overwhelmed by, by overwhelming, and also by simply dwelling with, what he loves.