Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics by Faust Joan;

Author:Faust, Joan; [Faust, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Smoke and Mirrors: “On a Drop of Dew,” “Eyes and Tears,” “Mourning,” and “The Gallery”

The presence of self-reflective, self-containing, even self-constituting images have long been noted in Marvell’s works. John Carey names numerous examples of Marvell’s blending of containers contained and self-mirroring images: the “subtle nuns” (line 94) of “Appleton House” lock out the world while “hedg[ing]” in the “liberty” (100) of Isabel Thwaites; the River Wharfe on the Appleton estate is not contained by the meadow but “holds” the meadow out (633–34); the “Drop of Dew” is presented as self-containing—“Round in itself incloses” (6)—while it serves as “its own tear” (13); the fawn in “The Nymph Complaining” eats so many roses and lilies, he begins to mirror the “little wilderness” (74) of her garden, with “Lilies without, roses within” (92); Chlora in “Mourning” is both tear and weeper, “Herself both Danaë and the show’r” (20). Marvell’s technique fits E. H. Gombrich’s explanation of Escher’s famous self-reflexive / self-generating sketches, including a hand drawing itself: “What all these prints have in common is that they compel us to adopt an initial assumption that cannot be sustained as we try to follow it through.”1 (See figure 6.1).

Christopher Ricks agrees that Marvell’s images often defy visualization, citing specifically “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body,” in which the Soul complains that the Body “impales me so, / That mine own precipice I go” (lines 13–14). These images, argues Ricks, allow “balance and conflict; inclusion and yet exclusion; withdrawal and yet emergence; microcosm and yet macrocosm, self and yet all else.” In other words, these depictions blur themselves into the space between opposites, creating a liminal realm. Victor Turner, in fact, comments, “Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection.” To create this liminal effect, Marvell monopolizes on the historical, artistic, and symbolic significance of the very source of reflection: the mirror.2 In poems like “On a Drop of Dew,” “Eyes and Tears,” “Mourning,” and “The Gallery,” Marvell’s understanding of the liminal aspects of the mirror enable him to keep the reader in between a self-perpetuating tangle of reflections.

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