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| 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.
