Though it is often referred to in the abbreviated form, “Horatian Ode,” the full title of Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode Upon Crowell’s Return from Ireland” is significant not least because of the importance of the word “Return” to the poem. It is held to be one of the peaks of English political poetry, admired because of the poise of judgment that allows Marvell to praise Oliver Cromwell while honoring the dignity of the beheaded King Charles without seeming to pander or hedge. He establishes a fulcrum upon which to balance competing claims in valid and mutually supporting tension. But this account of the poem, though true enough, makes too static a thing of the poem’s subject—or perhaps mistakes the subject in an important way. For the poem is not so much about the claims of Crowell as opposed to those of Charles, but it is about the inherent dynamism of Cromwell’s power. “Return” matters because there is a question of whether Cromwell will and can return: to the guidance of Parliament and to the principles that set him in motion in the first place. The poem is an attempt at honoring Crowell’s enormous energy, while also chastening it, suggesting its proper limits; but this suggestion is muted, of a piece with Marvell’s detached wit, which eschews strident certainty (of, say, Marvell’s contemporaries, Dryden or Milton) in favor of an apprehension of the possibilities latent in the world at any moment. Invested with possibilities of how else it might be in the future, and how else it may be perceived in the present, the world as Marvell imagines it resists definitive judgment, despairing or celebratory. This draws on Eliot’s rich and enigmatic statement that Marvell’s wit “involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.” Cromwell might be unable to yield; he might exceed the will and sway of Parliament; he might fatigue. Whichever the outcome, the poem does not seem concerned with how Cromwell will rule, whether justly or unjustly.

The poem opens with a confidence that belies its ambiguity:

The forward youth that would appear

Must now forsake his Muses dear,

Nor in the shadows sing

His numbers languishing.

’Tis time to leave the books in dust,

And oil th’ unused armour’s rust,

Removing from the wall

The corslet of the hall.

So restless Cromwell could not cease

In the inglorious arts of peace,

But thorough advent’rous war

Urged his active star.

And like the three-fork’d lightning, first

Breaking the clouds where it was nurst,

Did through his own side

His fiery way divide.

For ’tis all one to courage high,

The emulous or enemy;

And with such to enclose

Is more than to oppose.

The forward youth is not Cromwell, but the word “so” (“So restless”) suggests that we are to draw a parallel between them. Such a parallel, though, is somewhat strained, and what is most interesting, it is not apparent when we first read the first two quatrains that we ought to have Cromwell in mind yet: this forward youth at the “now” of the poem would instead seem to be someone who has joined the Army, inspired by Cromwell (at a stretch we might speculate that it is Cavalier who was opposed to Cromwell). When the “so” arrives, then, it is revealed that Cromwell is being compared to one of his own followers, even though Cromwell must have already been active if such a follower were to exist. In such a way “restless Cromwell could not cease”? But the “forward youth” has only just begun, so speaking of him being unable to cease feels wrongheaded; and then we might notice that “could not cease” suggests that Cromwell has already been in motion himself. His own motion seems to precede his setting out; he is always already restless. That is because his motion is innate to who he is; it is sui generis; so long as there is a Crowell, there is ceaseless energy: “Did through how own side | His fiery way divide”. In the self-division, he is all the more whole and contained. The famous ambiguity of “thorough advent’rous war | Urged his active star” allows that Cromwell may have been urged, beyond his own willing, by his “active star,” or else that Cromwell had such force of will as to urge his star and control his own fate. “For ‘tis all one” acknowledges that the courage of such men is above the distinctions of emulous and enemy, but the phrase “tis all one” suggests also the unity of purpose and motion. “With such to enclose | Is more than to oppose” presents another ambiguity. The surface meaning is ‘it’s harder to enclose the force of such men than it is to oppose them.’ This harmonizes with the repetition of “through,” the key preposition of the lines; Cromwell does not move against, he moves through; his trajectory cannot be understood in terms of countervailing pressures, since none can meet his. He even transcends his own limits. But a second meaning suggests that Cromwell not only moves “through” but works by enclosing his enemies: ‘with such men, rather than oppose others, they absorb them into their unity, enclosing them within who they are, and this is proof of their greatness.’ We might even return to the opening quatrains, to see “the corslet of the hall” as not only armor, but the hall itself, containing the youth within itself. “Removing from the wall | The corslet of the hall” would thus be read in apposition: the youth has removed himself from the wall, which is the corslet of the physical hall.

            The jostle of meanings, the free-play of readings that they allow (and encourage), is characteristic of metaphysical poetry, but it is also here a symptom of the poem’s subject: Cromwell pushes the words in so many directions—the poem itself is struggling to enclose him. But enclose him he does. These final lines are obviously self-referential: this is a poem that will attempt to limit Cromwell, without wanting to oppose him (and certainly without wanting to seem to oppose him). Perhaps that is why the self-referentiality is somewhat oblique, even in the opening lines: Marvell, no youth, has declined to forsake his Muses dear and remains happily in the shadows of the poem. The word “would” carries special weight: some “would” do this, but not all; it is one possibility among many, and we may hear something of a note of caution in the word, a willingness to accommodate other possible decisions, for those who would not “appear.” The additional irony, of course, is that in the very line, Marvell opens his poem and in so doing does appear, without leaving “the books in dust,” but adding to them, adding also to the inertia of “rust” and the stillness of “dust.” For this is a poem that, despite the restless momentum of its subject, refuses to hurry; it is Cromwell, and not Marvell, who in this poem might echo the lines Marvell wrote elsewhere, in “To His Coy Mistress”: “But at my back I always hear | Time’s winged chariot drawing near.” The Ode’s cadence is measured, its pacing assured, each quatrain coming to a decisive close, without turbulence. Once again, the poem is setting itself apart from, and against, Cromwell; its movement is not his. Marvell’s contrasting patience is felt in “Removing from the wall | The corslet of the hall,” where the urgency of advancing is countered by a noble stateliness that refuses to let itself be undone. The patience is not a rebuke against Cromwell; it is a suggestion of what how poetry might serve him, since without an attempt at enclosing him within its forms, encomium would be impossible.

            The “now” in the poem’s second line marked the urgency of the youth’s taking up arms; it also marked the occasion of the poem, the moment when the poet decides to remain in the hall, but to wield his pen in praising Cromwell. One way of reconciling the opening two quatrains with Cromwell’s career, the parallel established by “So restless Cromwell,” is to see Cromwell’s career, unceasing as it is, as a series of fresh departures; the urgency of “now” is always present in his mind, any moment of stillness and rest makes him feel that he has retired to the hall. He is always starting out. And we see the poem, despite its measured progress, doing the same, doubling back to Cromwell’s beginning:

Then burning through the air he went,

And palaces and temples rent;

And Cæsar’s head at last

Did through his laurels blast.

’Tis madness to resist or blame

The force of angry Heaven’s flame;

And, if we would speak true,

Much to the man is due,

Who from his private gardens where

He liv’d reserved and austere,

As if his highest plot

To plant the bergamot,

Could by industrious valour climb

To ruin the great work of time,

And cast the kingdom old

Into another mould.

Though justice against fate complain,

And plead the ancient rights in vain;

But those do hold or break

As men are strong or weak.

Nature that hateth emptiness

Allows of penetration less,

And therefore must make room

Where greater spirits come.

The first quatrain here is a continuation of Cromwell-as-lightning bolt; note again the word “through.” But then, as if acknowledging that the lightning cloud were mere conceit, Marvell concedes that there is another story “If we would speak true.” That phrasing is informal, mock-humble; but in Marvell’s hands, the conditional phrasing holds significance it elsewhere lacks. The truth about Cromwell is not necessarily the best way to give him his due. The truth is not necessarily true to what he is. The fictions of a poem, neither quite lies nor quite truth, are held out as more valuable than history if political power is to be appreciated for what it is—since what power is cannot be understood apart from what it might do and be. Mark Ford, in a podcast on the poem for the London Review of Books (co-hosted with Seamus Perry), points out that the “bergamot” was a royal plant, so that it could be Marvell was subversively winking at Royal ambitions. I prefer, though, to also hear a pun also in “plant,” so that we can read “supplant the bergamot,” so that he would supplant the old royalty with the new. The main course of the phrasing would seem to be: ‘Much awe and honor are due to the man who could begin in a private garden, where he lived in feigned quiet, as if his highest plot were [and this word is elided] to plant the bergamot, to climb so high as to ruin an ancient monarchy.’ But with the doubleness of “to plant the bergamot” we can trace another course: ‘Much awe and honor and honor are due to the man who in his private gardens had the audacity to act as if his plotting to supplant the bergamot, and set up his own claim to royalty, could actually grow into something capable, like a tree undermining the foundations of a house, or a vine tearing down its walls, to wreck the ancient battlement of the royalty.” Whichever we follow, the patterning of “garden” and “plant” to “climb” makes either Cromwell or his plot “to plant the bergamot” akin to a plant. The chasm between this image and that of the lightning, which would blast and rent trees, is enormous. Cromwell, we are to feel, is so expansive as to accommodate both possibilities; he is the product of his own garden, his public stature growing from his cultivation, and he is the lightning that shoots from the cloud. His greatness is such that all must give way before him. Nature hates emptiness, but hates even more greatly the interpenetration of substances, co-occupying the same space (“penetration”). The same cannot be said of poetry—and perhaps not of Crowell. “And therefore must make room | Where greater spirits come” means first that whoever occupied the space of power must yield before Cromwell, who is greater than they. At the same time, “greater spirits” could be taken to set Cromwell against “Nature” in its totality; he is so great that he cannot mingle with what is natural but must displace nature entirely. How would this be true? For one, it would mean he could be simultaneously botanical and meteorological, plant and lightning. Such a doubleness is unnatural, a wonder that can only be contained in the artifice of poetry, capable of imagining that which-is-not. This elevates Cromwell magnificently, since his dimensions can only be imagined; but it also subordinates him to the art of the imagination as a poet can practice it. He is not exactly at the mercy of the poem, but he depends upon its unnatural wit if he is to be known for what he is (which is, paradoxically, something that is-not).

            The transitions of the poem are abrupt, but it is possible to find relations between the various parts, and the image of Cromwell forcing others from the space of Nature, or else forcing Nature itself from its place, turns to the historical account of Cromwell forcing others from the field of battle. It marks also a stark move from fiction to history:

What field of all the civil wars

Where his were not the deepest scars?

And Hampton shows what part

He had of wiser art,

Where, twining subtle fears with hope,

He wove a net of such a scope

That Charles himself might chase

To Carisbrooke’s narrow case,

That thence the royal actor borne

The tragic scaffold might adorn,

While round the armed bands

Did clap their bloody hands.

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe’s edge did try;

Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite

To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head

Down as upon a bed.

This was that memorable hour

Which first assur’d the forced pow’r.

So when they did design

The Capitol’s first line,

A bleeding head, where they begun,

Did fright the architects to run;

And yet in that the state

Foresaw its happy fate.

These are, if not the most famous lines, the lines upon which the claims of the poem’s equanimity are staked: Marvell courageously recognizes King Charles I’s honorable conduct at the moment of his execution, his stoic acceptance of his fate. He is a “royal actor borne,” because he was carried from Carisbrook to the executioner’s block; but he was also born to the royal part he had to play, and he truly “adorns” the royal scaffold, elevating the spectacle above the cheap bloodlust of the commoners clapping their hands to see him executed. “Bloody hands” recognizes the slaughter that the “armed bands” have undertaken on the field of battle, but also accommodates a thought of blame. What matters most for my purposes is that the final description of Charles as he “bowed his comely head| down as upon his bed” is not only delicate and gracious but it presents Charles doing something that is totally alien to Cromwell: coming to rest and accepting his rest. “Down as upon a bed” is how he bows his head, but also pictures his head as itself featherdown, at one with the bed, enticing others to rest on the memory, as Marvell himself, for a moment, does. Charles’ dignity has something to do with his being able to rest and to his resting so beautifully; indirectly it is a testimony to the nobility of calm that could never be Cromwell’s. It contrasts with the frenzy of the “architects” as they “run”; Cromwell would not have run from the bleeding head, but from the calm resignation at ceasing? Yes, by this poem’s lights. “It’s happy fate” returns us to the present of the poem, “the now” that opened it echoed once more in Cromwell’s return from Ireland; the “forward youth” perhaps inspired by these victories to join in the next conquest:

And now the Irish are asham’d

To see themselves in one year tam’d;

So much one man can do

That does both act and know.

They can affirm his praises best,

And have, though overcome, confest

How good he is, how just,

And fit for highest trust;

Nor yet grown stiffer with command,

But still in the republic’s hand;

How fit he is to sway

That can so well obey.

He to the Commons’ feet presents

A kingdom for his first year’s rents;

And, what he may, forbears

His fame, to make it theirs,

And has his sword and spoils ungirt,

To lay them at the public’s skirt.

So when the falcon high

Falls heavy from the sky,

She, having kill’d, no more does search

But on the next green bough to perch,

Where, when he first does lure,

The falc’ner has her sure.

If the lines on Charles exemplify Marvell’s prudent poise, these display his anxious caution: “How fit he is to sway | That can so well obey.” This couplet closes the third quatrain, each of which is an attempt at praising what one hopes the reality will be; it is political advice disguised as flattery. In them, Marvell hopes to sway by obeying—and so demonstrates how he hopes Cromwell will relate to Parliament, respecting its authority, swaying it by his example and directing it by gaining its confidence in adhering to its commands. But it’s the next section that elaborates most suggestively on the relationship, with Cromwell as falcon and Commons/public as “falconer.” Cromwell is a female falcon, true to the sport, but suggestive also of how much he contains, capable of being seen as both male and female, self-impregnating, self-generating, self-seducing and so on. Though I suspect “falls heavy from the sky” suggests the bird drops heavy with its prey, “falls heavy from the sky” implies also a precipitous drop, like the bolt of lightning, menacing in its velocity and aim. The fact that it has already killed, and has done with killing for the time being, is mentioned in a clausal aside, as if it did not matter; but it matters tremendously, it is the point of Cromwell’s movement, and to make it seem secondary is both to make the falconer seem obtuse and to register that Crowell does not reminisce over past glories, but looks ahead. Nothing about the control of the falcon in these lines is easy: “where, when he first does lure,” moves cautiously, so that even if he achieves his control, after “first” luring her, the ”first” allows that it might not always be so easy, and “has her sure” admits that it might not be so sure a thing. The falcon consents to the control; she remains a falcon. These lines establish the full significance of the word “Return” in the title: no “Return” to the Commons is automatic. The balance of power is recognized earlier: “And, what he may, forbears | His fame, to make it theirs.” It is not their fame but depends upon his yielding it; “what he may” means that it is up to him to decide whether to forebear, and means also that he gives as much of the fame as he can, which is not necessarily very much. “Forbears” falls at a line ending, an enjambment that holds forth the possibility that Cromwell might forebear a great deal, anything at all and as he sees fit (“what he may”), but then the enjambment closes on “His fame,” which, though not nothing, is not his power, and cannot fully be given over, attaching as it does to his person and his name. The falcon has a great deal more sway than those she would seem to obey. The word “presume” in the next line is biting:

What may not then our isle presume

While victory his crest does plume!

What may not others fear

If thus he crown each year!

A Cæsar he ere long to Gaul,

To Italy an Hannibal,

And to all states not free,

Shall climacteric be.

The Pict no shelter now shall find

Within his parti-colour’d mind;

But from this valour sad

Shrink underneath the plaid,

Happy if in the tufted brake

The English hunter him mistake,

Nor lay his hounds in near

The Caledonian deer.

But thou, the war’s and fortune’s son,

March indefatigably on;

And for the last effect

Still keep thy sword erect;

Besides the force it has to fright

The spirits of the shady night,

The same arts that did gain

A pow’r, must it maintain.

It is an error to presume too much, when it is his crest that is plumed by victory; and if the word “crest” had not already tipped the hat, so to speak, “crown each year” winks at Cromwell’s ambitions, as Caesar does in the next line, though Hannibal immediately pulls in another direction, as if what is one man’s Rubicon is another man’s Alps, a limit too far. The falcon is perched on a branch, but already the expectation, and the need, is that Cromwell will continue, each year bringing new conquests. And this, the poem knows, comes with a cost. In the second to last quatrain, solemnly exhorting Cromwell to continued success, two words flicker. The first, “indefatigably” grants how tiring the enterprise is. Cromwell does not tire—but he might, the word says. In “still keep thy sword erect,” the word “still” means continuously and always. Though nothing in the context makes it a sexual pun, the thought of an erect sword, and a metaphysical poet, does not exactly preclude the thought, and with it the thought that an erect sword cannot be endlessly maintained. The second word is “last” in “last effect”: it means chiefly the finishing effect, the final flourish, but it hearkens to an ending, even as the poem draws to an end, and in so doing it opens a new vista of uncertainty: how and when will Cromwell’s ceaseless motion end? The question is kept alive and kindled in the final quatrain, which rings with the same Horatian note as the end of Milton’s Sonnet XVII, “Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son.” Milton closes that sonnet with the perfectly ambiguous phrase, “He who of those delights can judge, and spare | To interpose them oft, is not unwise.” “Spare” can mean forebear or afford: he is not unwise who can allow himself to enjoy those delights or he is not unwise who can stop himself from doing so. There is no such semantic ambiguity in Marvell’s last couplet, but we might nonetheless hear in them a balancing of judgments that pull in opposing directions: the need to exercise the arts of power to maintain power are necessary and forgive what may be seen as excesses, so that the line serves as a warning to those who would underestimate Cromwell and his potential for violence; or else the lines are a warning against Cromwell, that, despite seeming tireless, his efforts might prove exhausting, and that he cannot allow himself to flag if he is to stay in power, since all power, even his, depends on a precariously maintained artistry. The lines also share with Milton’s closing couplet the enjambment that resolves unexpectedly: in Milton, “spare | to interpose” and in Marvell “did gain | a power.” Whereas in Milton the enjambment trembles with the ambiguity that the two verbs yield, in Marvell the surprise is achieved by the sequencing of means and ends. We might expect that the artistry would arise from a power innate to a person, or that a power would be known in the performance of artistry, but here instead, the artistry arrives at “a power,” something after and apart from it. There is a glimpse, between “spirits of the shady night” and “arts that did gain,” of witchcraft, of Cromwell not simply as unnatural, but as having transgressed the natural order. Having crossed the threshold, the lines say, Cromwell cannot go back; having gained so much, he has been in some way lost. But this sense is faint in the lines. More prominently, the arts that can gain a power include Marvell’s own: his power, the power of the poem “a power” alongside Cromwell’s. That it breaks off with the word “maintain” is a refusal of any final resolution or closure: that the poem does not maintain its own power might be a sign that Cromwell ought not to either, or might be a suggestion that such things fall away, unresolved, even at a moment of deepest determination. Cromwell’s political career was, Marvell suggests, animated by a sense of his own necessity, of his being the only law to which his deeds could answer; but, for Marvell, necessity is only one possibility, to be held in suspense among others, including the sudden cessation of what has been most difficult to slow and bind.

 

--By Owen Boynton