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Sunday 3 December 2017

"Nature as Poet's Muse" by Sameera Banu



The Garden




Introduction

          Andrew Marvell was a sixteenth century English Metaphysical poet. He Expressed his love for nature in the poem, "The Garden". The poet's  emotions and feelings are rendered through his words on nature. He very skillfully brings forth the beauty of nature, making one fall in love with it.


OBJECTIVE 


          Presently, man is destroying nature. But nature has been one of the greatest inspirations to artists all over the world. It inspired many poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Frost, Samuel Taylor  Coleridge among others. Many poets have glorified nature in their verses. John Keats personifies Autumn in his poem "Ode to Autumn" just as Andrew Marvell romanticzes Nature in his poem. He has fallen deeply in love with nature so much so that he thinks that to be nature is to be in paradise.

          Marvell wrote the poem "The Garden" during the time when the early foundations of Enlightment began to gain considerable influence among the English intellectual society. The use and celebration of "reason"and assertded "the goals of rational men with knowledge,freedom and happiness".

          Throughout the poem, Marvell uses the image of the garden and the shade. It symbolises a place of quite and innocence which he illustrates as an ideal environment for stimulating thought, progress and lesson.

          The garden begins with the speaker reflecting upon the vanity and inferiority of man's devotion to public in politics, war and civic service. The speaker portrays the garden as a space for "sacred plants" removed from society and its route demands.  He praises the garden for its shade of "lovely green" which he sees as superior to the white and red hues that commonly signifies passionate love.

          The speaker claims that when passion has run its course, love turns people towards a contemplative life surrounded by nature. He praises that abundance of routes and plants in the garden, imagining himself tripping over million and falling upon the grass. Meanwhile, his mind reiterates into a state of inner happiness, allowing him to create and contemplate "other words and other seas".

          The garden continues to illustrate nature as a catalyst for thought and progress in and make use of Biblical imagery. The temptation of the garden causing the speaker in the poem to literally "fallen on grass", but quickly transcation into the next stanza where it tells that he simultaneously escape from "pleasure less" and with draws into happiness of the mind. Marvell is describing with these lines  that instead of man's fall from Eden being a bad thing it was actually wonderful because  from the tree of knowledge man was deprived of the physical pleasure of Eden, but rewarded  with something much greater, the gift of knowledge.

          The garden,it seens is a super-relaxing place for our speaker-so relaxing infact thag the speaker get naked (exist the body)  and run around the point of comparing the soul to the bird. This breif movement where the soul escape the body are practices  for thw much longer separstion between soul and body deadth just as bird need to rest, prieen and prepared their wings for a lonv megration so, that speaker believes that the soul needs tims to prepare before the green repair comes a knocking.

          Marvell creates a sort  of imaginary  world where we have God as the gardener,  and the garden as Sundial, and bees as people. 

Conclusion

          Marvell is comparing human life to the short-lived bloom of flowers in a garden. He emphasizes just how brief our existence on the planet is. 


          Marvell suggest that nature provides a space that allows our minds to dissolve everything material into " A green thought" or in other words, a new idea. It is through these green or new, thoughts that we are able to sour into the trees, where nature provides us with a shady place of rest where we prepare our minds "for longer flights" to new ideas and even greater heights.