Andrew Marvell (Introduction)

Andrew Marvell's birth on 31st of March 1621 and his death on 16th of August 1678. He was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the love-song “To His Coy Mistress”, to evocations of an aristocratic country house and garden in “Upon Appleton House” and “The Garden”, the political address “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”, and the later personal and political satires “Flecknoe” and “The Character of Holland”. Andrew Marvell was born in Winestead, East Riding of Yorkshire on 31 March 1621. He was the son of a Church of England clergyman also named Andrew Marvell. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. Aged 13, Marvell attended Trinity College, Cambridge and eventually received a BA degree. A portrait of Marvell, attributed to Godfrey Kneller, hangs in Trinity College's collection.

From the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell probably travelled in continental Europe. He may well have served as a tutor for an aristocrat on the Grand Tour, but the facts are not clear on this point. While England was embroiled in the civil war, Marvell seems to have remained on the continent until 1647. During his visit to Rome in 1645, he probably met the Villiers brothers, Lord Francis and the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, as well as Richard Flecknoe. He later wrote a satirical poem about Flecknoe. His travel route is unclear, except that Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages French, Italian and Spanish. His first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I’s execution on 30 January 1649. His “Horatian Ode”, a political poem dated to 1650, responds with sadness to the regicide, despite the overall praise towards Oliver Cromwell’s return from Ireland. Circa 1650–52, Marvell served as tutor to the daughter, Marry, of Lord General Fairfax Thomas Fairfax, who had recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary army to Cromwell.                                                                                        

During this period, Marvell lived at Nun Appleton Hall, near York, where he continued to write poetry. One poem, “Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax”, uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax’s and Marvell’s own social situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known metaphysical poem he wrote at this time is "To His Coy Mistress". Apart from it, he had been separated his poems into some categories as first “The Nature Poems”, in this “The Garden”, “Bermudas”, “Upon Appleton House” ,as second “The Mower Poems”, in this “Damon The Mower”, The Mower’s Song, The Mower Against Gardens, The Mower To The Glo-Worms, as Third “The Religious Poems” in this, Eyes and Fears, Soul and Body, The Resolved Soul and Pleasure. As Forth “ Love Poems” in this category, Young Love, The Unfortunate Lover, The Definition of Love and To Coy His Mistress and as Fifth Category he had also written some “Political Poems”.