'A Certain Unceremoniousness'

“Would you anathemize, banish, imprison, execute us, and burn our books?” 

Of course they would, given half a chance. Pettiness, insecurity and hunger for power are a steady state in human affairs, even when merely latent. The cause du jour, whether communism, fascism or religious zealotry, is just an excuse. Our species is reliably savage. The passage above is from Andrew Marvell’s “A Short Historical Essay Touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion.” It’s not among his major works, which are his poems, but a reminder that moral progress is a myth and that 2021 could soon turn as barbarous as the English seventeenth century with its civil war and regicide.

 

The poet’s survival during this bloody period recalls Montaigne’s during the previous century’s religious wars in France. Marvell was a master of ambiguity and nuance, navigating the political and religious treacheries of his day. Take his poem “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” (1650). Is it pro-Cromwell or anti-Cromwell? Read superficially, the former seems the case. But Marvell is moved by the fate of Charles I:

 

“He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable Scene:

But with his keener Eye

The Axes edge did try:

Nor call’d the Gods with vulgar spight

To vindicate his helpless Right,

But bow’d his comely Head,

Down as upon a Bed.”

 

Among Marvell’s strongest modern admirers is C.H. Sisson, who calls the “Horatian Ode” the “greatest political poem in the language.” In the introduction to his 1980 translation of The Divine Comedy (Carcanet, 1980), Sisson writes:

 

“. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”

 

Marvell was born four hundred years ago today, on March 31, 1621. He died in 1678 at age fifty-seven.