Marvell’s Mower Poems as Alternative Literary History

• Main Author: Bradford Boyd
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2016-03-01
• Series: Marvell Studies
• Online Access: https://marvell.openlibhums.org/articles/2

Students of English pastoral—Raymond Williams, Frank Kermode, Helen Cooper, Sukanta Chaudhuri—have long assumed that the mode withers after the death of Marvell. This is mistaken; in fact, it flourishes in Restoration and Georgian Britain as mock-pastoral. Marvell, followed by Rochester, Swift, John Gay, Mary Wortley Montagu, and others, grafts Greco-Roman pastoral’s ironic, satiric energies back onto soft, “arcadian” English pastoral, restoring the mode’s premodern balance of 'buffo'/'serio', preeminently in the Mower poems. He recasts the farcical Polyphemus of Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses' (the archetypal pastoral lover in Theocritus’s 'Idylls' and Virgil’s 'Eclogues') as Damon the Mower, whose “polyphemic” plaints are at once poignant and comical. The pathos is not in the Mower’s erotic frustrations, however, but in his dispossession by changes to land tenure and agriculture after civil war (reactivating, again, Theocritus and Virgil, especially 'Eclogues' 1 and 9). Marvell and his mock-pastoral inheritors, then, represent not the end of pastoral but its renewal.