Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvellwas an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the love-song "To His Coy Mistress", to evocations of an aristocratic country house and garden in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden", the political address "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland", and the later personal and political satires...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth31 March 1621
The tawny mowers enter next, / Who seem like Israelites to be / Walking on foot through a green sea.
I would / Love you ten years before the flood, / And you should if you please refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews; / My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow.
Who can foretell for what high cause / This darling of the Gods was born?
Here at the fountain's sliding foot, / Or at some fruit tree's mossy root, / Casting the body's vest aside, / My soul into the boughs does glide.
I have a garden of my own,/ But so with roses overgrown,/ And lilies, that you would it guess/ To be a little wilderness.
Two Paradises t'were in one, to live in Paradise alone.
Fair quiet, have I found thee here / And innocence thy sister dear?
Ye living lamps, by whose dear lightThe nightingale does sit so late;And studying all the summer night,Her matchless songs does meditate.
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light The nightingale does sit so late; And studying all the summer night, Her matchless songs does meditate.
Had it lived long, is would have been Lilies without, roses within.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green glade ... Such was that happy garden-state, ...
Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run
Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide.