Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
Did after him the World seduce:
And from the fields the Flow’rs and Plants allure,
Where Nature was most plain and pure.
He first enclos’d within the Gardens square
A dead and standing pool of Air:
And a more luscious Earth for them did knead,
Which stupifi’d them while it fed.
The Pink grew then as double as his Mind;
The nutriment did change the kind.
With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint.
And Flow’rs themselves were taught to paint.
[…]
‘Tis all enforc’d; the Fountain and the Grot;
While the sweet Fields do lye forgot:
Where willing Nature does to all dispence
A wild and fragrant Innocence:
And Fauns and Faryes do the Meadows till,
More by their presence then their skill.
Their Statues polish’d by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the Gardens stand:
But howso’ere the Figures do excel,
The Gods themselves with us do dwell.
Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Mower against Gardens’ contrasts two ideas about landscape and asks us to prefer one to the other. Artificial gardens, the mower argues, are a sterile product of perverted taste, while meadows are both beautiful and innocent. This contrast is established (in part) by Marvell’s use of rhyme.
Marvell manipulates English in a way which is difficult for modern poets to follow. One of the most influential ideas about poetry over the last two hundred years is that it should be written in the same sort of language which people usually use when talking to each other. Wordsworth and Coleridge announced that this was an important principle of their own poetry, and poets ever since have worked hard to avoid the sort of poetic diction which led Thomas Gray to write of boys who ‘urge the flying ball’ when he meant ‘play cricket’.
There are two rules which poets try follow in order to avoid ‘unnatural’ language. First, obscure words are avoided and spades are called spades. Second, the word order of sentences is kept as it is in normal speech.
To Andrew Marvell, writing in the 17th century, these two rules didn’t necessarily have to go together. As in this poem, he followed the first rule about vocabulary whilst feeling free to change the normal word order of sentences. Using everyday words keeps him safe from the overcharged and pretentious style Wordsworth disliked, but by allowing himself to depart from standard syntax Marvell is able to create important patterns.
Consider the first two lines:
Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
Did after him the World seduce.
A standard word-order for these lines might look more like this:
Luxurious Man seduced the World after him
To bring his Vice in use.
This would have been a more natural sentence for Marvell, just as it is for us today. However, by using a more unusual order, he has been able to finish the lines with the rhyming pair ‘use’ and ‘seduce’. This makes these to words stand out, and creates a link between them.
What is the result of this? It tells us that ‘use’ and ‘seduce’ are important words for the mower, and that he wants to connect them. In other words, he wants to suggest to us that people (specifically gardeners) use the earth to satisfy their own desires and that this is like the morally questionable activity of seducing somebody in order to gratify our sexual appetites. We’re strongly nudged towards this thought by the mower’s description of mankind as ‘luxurious’ and as concerned with ‘Vice’.
On the other hand, he describes how ‘Fauns and Faryes … the Meadows till’ in a line which is rhymed with ‘skill’. So whilst the gardener’s use of things is rhymed with seduction, agricultural labour outside the garden is associated with a positive concept of worthwhile, productive knowledge.
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