by Andrew Marvell

When I beheld the poet blind, yet bold,
In slender book his vast design unfold,
Messiah crowned, God’s reconciled decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heaven, Hell, Earth, Chaos, all; the argument
Held me a while, misdoubting his intent
That he would ruin (for I saw him strong)
The sacred truth to fable and old song,
(So Sampson groped the temple’s posts in spite)
The world o’erwhelming to revenge his sight.

Yet as I read, soon growing less severe,
I liked his project, the success did fear;
Through that wide field how he his way should find
O’er which lame faith leads understanding blind;
Lest he perplexed the things he would explain,
And what was easy he should render vain.

Or if a work so infinite he spanned,
Jealous I was that some less skilful hand
(Such as disquiet always what is well,
And by ill imitating would excel)
Might hence presume the whole creation’s day
To change in scenes, and show it in a play.
Pardon me, Mighty Poet, nor despise
My causeless, yet not impious, surmise.
But I am now convinced that none will dare
Within thy labors to pretend a share.
Thou hast not missed one thought that could be fit,
And all that was improper dost omit:
So that no room is here for writers left,
But to detect their ignorance or theft.
That majesty which through thy work doth reign
Draws the devout, deterring the profane.
And things divine thou treat’st of in such state
As them preserves, and thee, inviolate.
At once delight and horror on us seize,
Thou sing’st with so much gravity and ease;
And above human flight dost soar aloft,
With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.
The bird named from that paradise you sing
So never flags, but always keeps on wing.

Where couldst thou words of such a compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expanse of mind?
Just heaven thee, like Tiresias, to requite,
Rewards with prophecy the loss of sight.

Well mightst thou scorn thy readers to allure
With tinkling rhyme, of thine own sense secure;
While the Town-Bayes writes all the while and spells,
And like a pack-horse tires without his bells.
Their fancies like our bushy points appear,
The poets tag them; we for fashion wear.
I too, transported by the mode, offend,
And while I meant to praise thee must commend.
The verse created like thy theme sublime,
In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.

****

Matthew Harrison Writes: Marvell always writes with an eye on other poets–comparing his career to theirs, filching images, and parodying lines. I love this poem because here the encounter seems particularly genuine and revealing of both poets. Marvell’s worries in reading Paradise Lost fit in well with his own poetics of control, ambiguity, and even miniaturization, yet they describe the risks inherent in Milton’s ambition. His account of Miltonic majesty, delight, and horror captures the tone of Paradise Lost in familiar terms. I am struck, too, by Marvell’s anticipation of Harold Bloom:

“So that no room is here for writers left,
But to detect their ignorance or theft”

I’m curious what people think–is Milton’s accomplishment here an occasion for any anxiety for Marvell? Or does this record of Marvell’s encounter with a strong poet offer up another way of thinking about influence?

My own thought is that this poem bears many marks of Miltonic language and influence:
Where couldst thou words of such a compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expanse of mind?
Just heaven thee, like Tiresias, to requite…
Milton seems to be operating in these lines as an agent of expansion, pushing Marvell to write more strongly and boldly. But I’d be curious to know what others think.

By Sharon Olds

After Marcus Licinius Crassus
defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside
among them, if he walked that human
woods. I think he stayed in his tent
and drank, and maybe copulated,
hearing the singing being done for him,
the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one
remove, to the six-thousandth power.
And maybe he looked out, sometimes,
to see the rows of instruments,
his orchard, the earth bristling with it
as if a patch in his brain had itched
and this was his way of scratching it
directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,
and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,
and now had found redress for it,
and voice for it. I speak as a monster,
someone who today has thought at length
about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling
nothing while so much is being
felt, his hot lightness of spirit
in being free to walk around
while other are nailed above the earth.
It may have been the happiest day
of his life. If he had suddenly cut
his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would
have woken up to what he was doing.
It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other? But then he would have had
5,999
to go. Probably it almost never
happens, that a Marcus Crassus
wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused
to his living dream, lifted the flap
and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking
living field—his, like an external
organ, a heart.

Ivan Ortiz writes:

A friend of mine recently introduced me to Sharon Olds via this remarkable poem that I’ve revisited several times in the last month.  I’ve also been reading a ton about the dramatic monologue lately for one of my papers and I’ve been thinking about the limits of sympathy.  This poem wouldn’t technically qualify as a dramatic monologue since Marcus Crassus doesn’t actually perform himself for us, but what I find so fascinating about it is its cautious tiptoeing around the form, the speaker terrified about her own ability to enter the understanding of this historical “other.”  But, it is the second of the speaker’s fears that I found most interesting:

It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other?

The wickedness of Crassus’ deed is not what frightens the speaker the most, it’s the thought of him realizing what he’d done just as he’d done it that is utterly terrifying.  I found this move by Olds so brilliant because it’s much too easy to read about this Roman general and mark him as savage or wicked or heartless; it would be easier, it seems, for Olds to write a dramatic monologue and to perform this wickedness, as Browning does so expertly. For Olds, though the cartoon wicked is more easily digested than to think of a person who has just crucified 6,000 as someone with even the slightest potential for sentiment or sympathy.  And, in a way, this poem performs a double refusal of sympathy: Marcus Crassus fails to admit “the wild terror of understanding the other” and so does the speaker.  I think this poem might be suggesting that the extreme limit of sympathy is not necessarily, as in the dramatic monologue, an exercise of getting closer to the other, but in bringing the other closer to us.