Marvell worships the quiet and innocence of the garden. It is his mental retreat, a place where he does not have to worry about the natural drives of man because they are satiated or non-existent. The need for food is taken care of by an overly generous nature in lines 34-38. The sex drive is elapsed and remodeled in lines 57-64. The garden offers all the peace and quiet one needs to be creative, as well as rewarding the narrator for renouncing the world of carnal desire and material greed (Friedman Critical 88).
Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” is a poem that through logical progression argues its already established point of view. It is a poem of meditation in a particular place, where the place presented influences the course of this meditative state. Even though filled with the imagery of nature the poem takes a rather pessimistic point of view, where it argues that total isolation from society and harmony with nature as the singular best way of living. Thus, the whole of the poem centers on the idea of wholesome nature in a world without the instruction of mankind. In the first three stanzas, the virtues of the garden are provided through comparison with the trial (and supposed pleasures) of the world of men, stanzas five through seven address the pleasures of the body, the mind, and the soul as they are gratified in the garden, stanza eight through nine returns to the gesture to Paradise. As this logical progression of argument moves in the poem, each part returns to the idea of isolation, or rather a solitary state of being of the speaker.
The poem opens up with the argument of the destructive function of civilization on nature, concentrating here specifically on the purpose of human efforts to seek recognition through destruction of nature. The opening lines take the argument of nature against men seamlessly: “How vainly men themselves amaze / To win the palm, the oak, or bays” (1-2). From he very first lines the reader can sense that inutility of labor is denigrated in favor of the leisured enjoyment of nature. In line 4, the speaker establishes the argument of the crown—which symbolizes the human longing for recognition. However, this crown is made out of a cut down branch or shrub and therefore shortening their life as they fade by being cut off from their natural source of life. Thus, the speaker argues against human destruction—the little crowns won by mans sense of purpose cannot even provide adequate shade, while “all flower and all treed do close / To wave the garlands of repose” (6-7). In effect, in the second stanza, the speaker speaks to the harmony he has found in the garden as he compares the world of men and that of nature: “Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, / And Innocence, thy sister dear?” (9-10). However, as he does so the speaker seem to fully inhabit neither of these worlds, and his praise of the garden is lessened by doubt—in the very stanza that should establish the garden’s virtues, the speaker cant even be certain that those virtues exist: “Your sacred plant, if here below, / Only among the plants will grown” (13-14). The words ‘if’ and ‘will’ signify that such was not yet achieved. However, the last two lines of the come back to the central idea of the negation of humanity: “Society is all but rude/ To this delicious solitude” (15-16) implying that the society is harmful to this perfect harmony of the garden.
The argument of the poem in the third and fourth stanzas still remains that of humanity against nature, however this time with an emphasis on sexual passions. Here, the pleasures of human erotic pursuit are found decidedly wanting when compared to the pleasures of the garden. The pleasures compared are of a kind: “No white nor red was ever seen / So amorous as this lovely green” (17-18). The colors of white and red are emblematic of female beauty (Rumrich, 554.9) and signals passion of the lovers that is seen in line 3 (‘Flame’), whereas the color green symbolizes quiet rural solitude (Rumrich, 554.1). Furthermore, the speaker argues that if any he will carve in the trees, it will their own: “Fair trees! wheres’e’er your own banks I wound / No names shall but your own be found” (23-24). The erotic is not rejected in the garden, but rather takes a different object (the trees). This conceit of provides the poem with its finest display of wit when the speaker turns to Greek mythology in the fourth stanza:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow.
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed. (29-32)
Daphne, while being pursued by Apollo in the heat of passion, cried for help and was turned into a laurel (Rumrich, 554.6). Similarly, while Pan pursued Syrinx, she was turned into a reed (Rumrich, 554.6). Thus, both Daphne and Syrnix were turned into a part nature. Furthermore, the speaker, through a grammatical shift of words (‘Only that’ and ‘but for’) expresses this transformation as though it was the god’s purpose for Daphne and Syrnx to be one with nature. Thus, far from being foiled by the metamorphoses of their victims, Apollo and Pan were after the plans all along. Therefore, the speaker is implying that there is more passion in nature than there is in “moral beauty” (27), which again brings the speaker to his central argument against civilization.
Stanzas five through seven address the pleasures of the body, the mind, and the soul, as they are gratified in the garden. “What wondrous life is this I lead!” (33), the speaker exults in the first line of the fifth stanza—there’s no longer any trace of the uncertainty which was found in the poem’s second stanza, no is there any presence, even rhetorically, of the world outside of the garden. Thus the speaker turns back to himself as he describes the richness of the garden. Here, gratification requires little or no action on the part of the speaker:
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; (34-38)
In this excerpt, luscious is an interesting word selection. The OED defines luscious as something of food or perfume, which is “sweet and highly pleasant to the taste or smell” (OED). Thus, luscious here does not describe something of an easeful subsistence, but rather it signifies a type of gluttony in which the speaker is engaged because of the fruitfulness of this garden. This image, therefore, becomes highly representative of the Garden of Eden. The final lines of the stanza clarify the detrimental effects: “Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass” (39-40). This bodily pleasure then overturns into the pleasure of mind in the following stanza (stanza six). The speaker turns to explain the joys of solitary mediation, as the mind “Withdraws onto its happiness” (42), rejecting the possibility of interaction with the real world—“The mind, that ocean where each kind / Does straight its own resemblance find” (43-44) for an entirely imaginary creation. Thus, for the speaker the world is purely expressed through the immense power of his imagination. In this poem the inner imaginative world of the speaker corresponds to the outer, however:
Yet is creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade. (45-48)
Thus, to the speaker the imaginative worlds are more real and powerful than the physical, and therefore in effect create a greater truth. Lines 47-48, explain that the calmness of the garden allows the speaker to destroy (‘annihilating’) all the previously preconceived notions of the mind. Accordingly, stanza seven then moves to make the argument of the pleasures of the soul. Here, the speaker suggests the action of some sort of spiritual experience: “Casting the body’s vest aside, / My soul into the boughs does glide;” (51-52). The soul is seen to freed of the body, as it is transferred into the trees where it is able “like a Bird” to sit and sing (53). Thus, the garden becomes a place of peaceful spiritual freedom, as the soul prepares itself for a “long flight” which can be understood as the journey to heaven (Rumrich, 555.7).
Having arrived at the soul, the only intensification possible in the poem’s last section (stanza eight and nine) is a gesture to Paradise and the concept of a return. In stanza eight, the speaker returns to his previously abandoned thought of the Garden of Eden in stanza five. However, here the speaker refers to the Garden of Eden as it was before the creation of Eve— “Such was that happy garden state, / While man there walked without a mate” (57-58), thus furthering his desire for a solitary life. Moreover, Garden of Eden metaphor also returns to the speaker’s argument of sexual passion in stanza three, where here without Eve there would be no sexual passion or temptation. Thus, by entirely rejecting society, this stanza extends the poem’s sticking anti-erotic posture—where man is truly prefect, even in a prelapsarian state, he would be allowed full autonomy, free from the necessities of sec and procreation. Therefore, the retreat to this state of the garden is a rejection of the entire world and satiety, and what is presented as a validating state of satisfaction of the speaker is doomed to last a short time, as it presumes that in a greater privilege is gained than from “a mortal’s share” (61). In the poem’s closing stanza, with its image of the flower dial, the speaker returns to the earthly reality. “How could such sweet and wholesome hours / Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!” (71-72), herb and flowers are transient, quickly dying things, unsustainable through seasons. Thus, the image of the floral clock signifies that time is not still, seasons change and the speaker is not in a timelessness of eternity (heaven) yet and therefore his stay in the garden must be similarly short-lived.