With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands Young love is fresh and exciting and keenly felt – but will that initial fervour and passion wear off? And what if one is left abandoned by love, and by one’s lover? This is the subject of this wonderful Andrew Marvell poem, which, like ‘The Definition of Love’, examines the less sanguine side of love. This poem reflects Marvell’s evolving attitude towards Cromwell at this time.īut soon these flames do lose their light, (Horatian odes are often marked by their emotional restraint.) The even-handedness with which Marvell views Cromwell and the recently deceased king in this poem can partly be attributed to Marvell’s Royalist sympathies, until as recently as the year before he wrote ‘An Horatian Ode’. So Marvell describes the execution of King Charles I in this fair and even-handed ode to Oliver Cromwell, which also praises the courage and fortitude of the doomed king, who had been executed the year before Marvell penned this poem. ‘ An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. The garland of flowers which the poem describes also serves as a metaphor for the poem itself: Andrew Marvell the poet is writing a poem about the act of making a garland, both acts of creativity, both designed to glorify God. Like much poetry written by the Metaphysical Poets, ‘The Coronet’ uses an extended metaphor – here, that of the crown, or garland, or ‘coronet’ – to discuss the poet’s attitude to Christ. That once adorned my shepherdess’s head … I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers),

I seek with garlands to redress that wrong: When for the thorns with which I long, too long, The mower praises the glow-worms for providing light, but laments the fact that their light is wasted because the speaker’s mind is not on the task of mowing the grass – his mind is distracted or ‘displac’d’ by thoughts of Juliana, the woman he loves. This was one of a series of ‘mower’ poems Marvell wrote. As the title of the poem suggests, ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’ is spoken by a ‘mower’ (traditionally, one who cuts the grass with a scythe), who addresses the glow-worms lighting the mower’s way through the field. Its celebrated lines about ‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’ are especially memorable and evocative. This is one of Andrew Marvell’s most famous poems, and takes the form of a meditation in a garden this setting has led critics to interpret the poem as a response to the original biblical garden, Eden, while other commentators have understood the poem as a meditation about sex, political ambition, and various other themes.

George herbert famous poems