Andrew Marvell
(1621-78)
Miscellaneous Poems (1681)
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. 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;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace
Now therefore, while the youthful glew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
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.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Hark how the mower Damon sung,
With love of Juliana stung!
While everything did seem to paint
The scene more fit for his complaint.
Like her fair eyes the day was fair;
But scorching like his am’rous care.
Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was,
And withered like his hopes the grass.
‘Damon the Mower’
‘The deathless fairies take me oft
To lead them in their dances soft;
And, when I tune myself to sing,
About me they contract their ring’
‘Oh what unusual heats are here,
Which thus our sunburned meadows sear!
The grasshopper its pipe gives o’er;
And hamstringed frogs can dance no more.
But in the brook the green frog wades;
And grasshoppers seek out the shades.
Only the snake, that kept within,
Now glitters in its second skin’
O thou that swing’st upon the waving hair
Of some well-filled oaten beard,
Drunk every night with a delicious tear
Dropped thee from heav’n, where now thou art reared.
Richard Lovelace, ‘The Grasshopper’
But ah, the sickle! Golden ears are cropped,
Ceres and Bacchus bid good night;
Sharp frosty fingers all your flow’rs have topped,
And what scythes spared, winds shave off quite.
Poor verdant fool! And now green ice!
Lovelace, ‘The Grasshopper’
That thence the royal actor born
The tragic scaffold might adorn,
While round the armed bands
Did clap their bloody hands.
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene;
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try.
Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.
An Horation Ode
So restless Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious arts of peace,
But through advent’rous war
Urged his active star.
…
The same arts that did gain
A pow’r must it maintain.
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays
‘The Garden’, ll.1-12
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach.
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Thomas, Third Lord Fairfax
(1612-1671)
…his private garden, where
He lived reserved and austere,
As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot,
Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould.
Horation Ode, ll.29-36
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told,
Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.
Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect;
That unto caves the quarries drew,
And forests did to pastures hew;
Who of his great design in pain
Did for a model vault his brain,
Whose columns should so high be raised
To arch the brows that on them gazed.
Upon Appleton House, Stanza I
Why should of all things man unruled
Such unproportioned dwellings build?
The beasts are by their dens expressed:
And birds contrive an equal nest;
The low-roofed tortoises do dwell
In cases fit of tortoise-shell:
No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.
[Stanza II]
Humility alone designs
Those short but admirable lines,
By which, ungirt and unconstrained,
Things greater are in less contained.
Let others vainly strive t’immure
The circle in the quadrature!
These holy mathematics can
In ev’ry figure equal man.
[Stanza VI]
Some to the breach against their foes
Their wooden saints in vain oppose.
Another bolder stands at push
With their old holy-water brush.
While the disjointed abbess threads
The jingling chain-shot of her beads.
But their loud’st cannon were their lungs;
And sharpest weapons were their tongues.
[Stanza XXXII]
His warlike studies could not cease;
But laid these gardens out in sport
In the just figure of a fort.
And now to the abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass,
Where men like grasshoppers appear,
But grasshoppers are giants there:
They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low than them