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The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell...: Verse (1872)
The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell Verse - 1872 Author:Andrew Marvell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ciality, and is a nflex of the same artificiality in the Gardens of his day that he condtmued. And yet beneath the conceit, when you come to look lovingly and li... more »nger- ingly, you find that it is sprung out of a vital thought or emotion or fancy, precisely as the clipped and shapen (misshapen) yews were really rooted in the rich mould, and really nurtured by celestial influences. . This holds also of his various Epitaphs, which, while they have in them conceits, are nevertheless full of real sympathy and tenderness. The figure of Noah's ' dove' going out of the Ark he uses to symbolise the forthgoing of a young soul in its whiteness ; and we take it to our heart at once.1 Fundamentally, the Poetry of Marvell is genuine as a bird's singing, or the singing of the brook on its gleaming way under the leafage. There is the breath and fragrance of inviolate Nature in every page of the ' Poems of the Country' and ' Poems of Imagination and Love,' and in 'Poems of Friendship'and State Poems such Thineing and aspiration as were worthy of their greatest themes; and I am here remembering, and wish it to be remembered, that John Milton and Oliver Cromwell and Blake are celebrated by him. My space is long gone ; I will allow the Archbishop of Dublin (Trench) and Dr. George Macdonald to speak of separate poems. Says the former, in his ' Household Book of English Poetry,' of ' Eyes and Tears :' ' I . have obtained room for these lines by excluding another very beautiful poem by the came author, his Sony of the Kmi- i1runts in Bermuda. To this I was moved in part by the faet that the Knig has found its way into many modern colleetions,—these lines, so far as I know, into none,—in 1 I hnd translated the whole of these Latin Kpitaphs, as well as certain Verses on the Louvre and other things ...« less