Loving Gardens, Loving the Gardener? ‘Solitude’ in Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’

In ‘The Garden’, Andrew Marvell devotes a lot of time to extolling the virtues of the solitude he experiences in the garden of the title. Despite Marvell’s insistence that he prefers solitude to ‘society’, at the end of the poem his attention comes to rest approvingly on a human figure: the Gardener. Reading ‘The Garden’ alongside ‘Damon the Mower’, this article suggests that Marvell’s sensually-charged engagement with the plants, trees, and fruits in ‘The Garden’ can be interpreted as a means of accessing and loving the Gardener himself. On one reading of ‘Damon the Mower’, the narrator caresses Damon through the landscape. Tracking similar themes in ‘The Garden’ suggests that something similar may be occurring in this poem, too.

the rest of Milton's poem as Adam and Eve struggle to reconcile the affirmation that they are 'happie' as they are with the notion that they might be 'happier' if they strove for more. If Marvell's Eden has Miltonic echoes, it is worth noting that it represents a distancing from Milton, too. Matthew Augustine argues that Marvell sought an 'idiosyncratic liberty' in solitude, removing himself from the political furores surrounding him, which included accusations that he and Milton were lovers, furores exemplified by the 'busie Companies of Men' he eschews in 'The Garden'. 5 In the eighth stanza of 'The Garden', the speaker breaks apart the word 'helpmeet', the Biblical word for Eve, filling it with negation and hypotheticality: 'After a Place so pure, and sweet,/What other Help could yet be meet! ' (8.3-4). Adam does not need a helpmeet or mate, because everything is perfect as it is: Eve's 'help is not 'meet' (appropriate). The speaker's exclusion of a female companion from 'The Garden' can also be described as in keeping with the pastoral genre. Within this genre's conventions, an insistence on the enjoyability of solitude-defined as the absence of female company-is identifiable as a trope to indicate that the male speaker of 'The Garden' has a balanced mind. Writing of the Tudor poet Thomas Howell (fl.
1560-81), Elizabeth Heale argues that women were frequently excluded from pastoral because this genre centres around the male poet's control over his own mind and over the poems he uses partly to construct and present his selfhood; women are 'that which most threatens the gathered and well-framed male self'. 6 Though the genders 5 In his discussion of Marvell and Milton, Matthew Augustine argues that Marvell turns to solitude to avoid the politicised furore around his writing, against those 'who want at every turn to associate or identify him with certain "busy companies of men"-with republican juntos and enthusiastic sects-Marvell writes himself into "delicious solitude," into singularity, refusing identification with anything beyond the specific terms of his defense of toleration or without the specific occasions and conditions of his writing'. See Matthew Augustine, 'The Chameleon or the Sponge?: Marvell, Milton, and the Politics of Literary History ', Studies in Philology 111, no. 1 (2014): 147. Augustine writes that though 'Miltonized' by his critics, Marvell should, be read in his own right: 'Rather than "veneration of Milton", we find calibration and unease here; friend to toleration though he may be, almost everywhere in these pages we see Marvell opening up distance and difference not just from Milton but from the radicalism of the 1640s and 50s' (146). 6 Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 19. Heale also maintains that this is ' a tension that is apparent in all the male-authored early Elizabethan collections: on the one hand the writer is displayed as a man of moral weight and virtue, able to receive and give good counsel and turn a pithy distich, on the Seymour: Loving Gardens, Loving the Gardener? 'Solitude' in Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden' 4 of neither the speaker not the Gardener in 'The Garden' are explicitly defined, critics tend to lapse into male pronouns when discussing these figures in the poem. They readily fill the poem's uncertainties with the certainty that the speaker shares the gender ascribed to the poet and to the traditionally male pastoral narrator identified There is also, in the implied comparison between a human 'Help … meet' and the 'Place so pure, and sweet', a sense of equivalence. There is something about the garden that makes it similar or comparable-and, crucially, preferable-to a female human helpmeet. In keeping with the statement that society is 'rude' compared to the cultivated garden, the speaker links horticulture with human intelligence and culture.
The garden is a site of ' cultivation' and ' culture' in several senses of the word. in "The Garden" is directed towards real plants rather than toward human beings, who could be said to resemble those plants in one way or another' such that 'the apples, grapes, melons, and grass of the garden do not stand in for human flesh or human attitudes toward sexual experience but should rather be understood as the real objects of the poet's desire'; 'in the Renaissance, the resemblances between human and animal sexuality were more seriously pondered' than they are today and 'both the boundaries among various kinds of living organisms and the boundaries that structure our contemporary sexual taxonomy were largely unfixed'. 13  ambiguous. It is not clear whether this is the retreat from feelings of love exhausted by passion, or whether it is a retreat for a personified Love to enjoy himself. Though the word 'heat' most obviously implies a burning passion, it can mean a preliminary race before the real race, 18 which lends strength to the idea that unfulfilling and preliminary passions are experienced outside the garden in preparation for the experience of true Love within. This notion that life outside the garden is merely an unsatisfactory initial trial is also present in the word 'rude' as applied to society in the first stanza; in Marvell's time 'rude' could also mean 'preliminary'. 19 Society and its crude engagements is a 'rude' state before the more cultured state of solitude and the more fulfilling engagements that this brings.
Solitude does not limit the speaker's possibilities but rather opens out the possibility for a range of engagements. Ambiguity and multifariousness are central to these engagements, many of which queer the speaker's relationship to the natural world and to the Gardener. Crucially, they cannot be described as purely or even primarily homoerotic.

II. The identity of the Gardener
The identity of Marvell's Gardener is ambiguous, echoing an ambiguity in Eden itself.
The creator of the garden of Eden was God ('God Almightie first Planted a Garden', as Francis Bacon famously states), 20 and so he is the first gardener. However, Adam and Eve are also placed in Eden as gardeners, 'to dress it and to keep it' (Genesis 2:15).
The Edenic garden thus admits the possibility of both human and divine gardeners.
Marvell's garden is not presented as Eden itself; rather, it is Eden-like because it is a  Rather than simply being passively shaped and entered by the speaker, the Gardener, and/or a deity, the garden also seems imbued with the power to shape itself. In stanza 1, in contrast to the 'uncessant Labours' of humans who weave crowns of palm, oak and bay, these trees 'prudently their Toyles upbraid' (1.1-3, 6). As well as indicating that the trees criticise humans' efforts to turn their leaves into decorations, the word 'upbraid' establishes that the trees counter the humans' plaiting and weaving action with their own. The garden's superior ability to shape itself is reaffirmed later in the stanza when the plants fashion themselves into a crown not of competition but of peaceful rest, ' all Flow'rs and all Trees do close/To weave the Garlands of repose' (1.7-8). The garden offers itself as a costume or ornament for the peace-loving speaker to wear. Crucially, we might wonder whether the perfectly woven and plaited garden is achieved through nature alone or whether we detect the Gardener's guiding hand and creative mind from the outset.
The speaker's intentionality is met with a creative intentionality inherent in the garden. But, this engagement with the garden is not just one of mutual creativity and intentionality but also of sensuality. The speaker's acknowledgement of the Gardener's presence is preceded by a sensually charged description of the garden in stanza 5. In contrast to the existential drama of Eden, the 'fall' precipitated by the speaker's engagement with the fruits of his garden is a literal, gentle, painless and seemingly sinless 'stumble': The verb 'reach' emphasises the prying, over-anxious element to the peach and nectarine's curiosity, whilst their spherical shapes pressing into the narrator's hands suggest a sensual encounter with any rounded human body part that might jump into the reader's mind.
In this stanza, the garden reveals itself as a giant body, eager for the speaker's touch and eager to bring him enjoyment through contact with him. An ingenious, creative, ' curious' mind seems to be propelling this body, and it is met with intoxicated delight by the speaker, who revels in not just touching and tasting but also inhabiting and 'wearing' different aspects of the landscape, from the garlanded leaves to a fabulous preening bird. Though it is most concentrated in stanza 5, this sense that the garden is a site of erotic love is present throughout the poem. In stanza 4, for example, he suggests that Pan and Apollo were more inflamed by Daphne and Syrinx And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed. (4.5-8) This is seen in previous stanzas, for instance in the statement that the fresh verdancy of the vegetable kingdom is much more erotic and beautiful than the blushes of human flesh: 'No white, nor red was ever seen/So am'rous as this lovely green' (3.1-2). The speaker's acknowledgement that this garden was created and shaped by the ingenious artistry of the Gardener adds another layer to this eroticism: does he imagine accessing the Gardener's body and mind through the garden? As the speaker's 'soul' enters into various plant and animal life in the landscape, tries on 'the Garlands of Repose', and grabs at perfectly ripened fruit, what does it mean to consider that there may be another human being guiding and motivating the garden's reciprocal movements?
The garden's attractions, though desirable in their own right, are from the outset of the poem imbued with hints of human intentionality and become increasingly anthropomorphic as the poem progresses. The suggestion that the speaker may be accessing the Gardener through his garden, and that the Gardener is the driving force behind the garden's exertions as it pays a gently caressing and then insistently erotic attention to the speaker, is strengthened when we compare 'The Garden' to another poem by Marvell: 'Damon the Mower'. The way that Damon (and, ultimately the narrator) chooses to describe his engagement with the landscape suggests that the sun, the morning and the evening have human characteristics. As in 'The Garden', the joys of touch and taste mingle with kinetic delight: the landscape moves to interact with Damon's body. Rather than passively wetting Damon's feet, the evening performs an intentional action that is caring and even worship-like: bathing. The morning is like an apothecary or brewer, carefully ' distill[ing]' concoctions onto Damon's skin. And, the sun does not evaporate his sweat but 'lick's' it. This word is striking, as it is relatively rare in the period to use the word 'lick' to describe the sun evaporating liquid. Another example is Marvell's fellow Yorkshireman, Captain Luke Foxe, who describes seeking the northwest passage in North-West Fox (1635): '… this morning the Sunne lickt up the Fogges dew, as soone as hee began to rise, and made a shining day of it'. 26 To lick is, specifically, to use a tongue to wipe or drink from a surface, though it can also simply be used of the lapping motion of a flame. 27 All of these meanings are in play: the sun is literally a hot fire that plays upon Damon's back and evaporates the sweat on it. But, there is also an erotic personification: the sun is male ('himself', echoing the 'his' used of the sun in 3.6, the same gender Foxe ascribes to the sun) and queerly licks Damon's skin. The word 'sweet' in the following line strictly belongs to the noun 'Ev'ning'. However, its half-rhyme with, and position just above, the word 'sweat' gives a sense of how Damon's sweat will taste: 'sweet'-delicious like the 'wine' crushed from the fruits in 'The Garden'. There is potentially an implied intentionality and deliberation on the sun's part: it is plausible to interpret the first two lines quoted as the sun noticing that Damon has been heated by toil and therefore licking his back, either because the sun wants to be helpful, or because he finds the idea erotically enticing.

III. Damon the Mower
Marvell also uses the word 'lick' in 'Upon Appleton House', 28 and again the word is the crux of a physical engagement with a quasi-personified nature: 'Ivy, with familiar trails,/Me licks, and clasps, and curles, and hales' (lxxiv.5-6). The image of licking a back appears in this poem too, though here the landscape licks its own back: the river (' our little Nile') lies in the meadow and … its muddy back doth lick,

Till as a Chrystal Mirrour slick;
Where all things gaze themselves and doubt If they be in it or without. (lxxx.3-6) There is a confusion between subject and object at the start of the passage quoted: does 'its' refer to the river licking itself, or to the river licking the meadow? This confusion is echoed by ' all things', who are unsure whether they have been incorporated into the 'Mirrour' of the river-meadow or whether they remain objects in their own right: they 'gaze themselves and doubt/If they be in it or without'. Highlighting the homoerotic connotations of the sun and of mowers' sweat throughout Marvell's poetry, Hammond describes the sun's lick in 'Damon the Mower' as ' an obviously homoerotic gesture', and the sun's ability to gaze on himself in the river at Nunappleton as ' overtly a moment of homoerotic and autoerotic rapture'. 29 These moments are more unstable and ambiguous, though, as it is not clearly defined who is desiring whom and who 28 Andrew Marvell, 'On Appleton House; To My Lord Fairfax', Miscellaneous Poems M2v-P3r. Future references to this poem are in the form of in-text stanza and line numbers. 29 Hammond,197,187. Seymour: Loving Gardens,Loving the Gardener? 'Solitude' in Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden' 16 is acting on whom. As we have seen, in 'The Garden', it is often unclear who is driving these sensual natural encounters: they may be animated by the speaker, the poet, the Gardener, or the garden itself-or all of these actors at once.
One way to read 'Damon the Mower' is as the speaker imbuing the landscape of the poem with his own desires and intentions, using it to caress Damon. We have seen that the speaker can be said to enter into and 'wear' the landscape in also suggests that Damon can be seen as ' a false and even anamorphic image of the speaker, so misguided that we must be introduced to him by an omniscient narrator in the first and tenth stanzas'. into this analysis: a desiring figure who is present in the poem but not explicitly mentioned. There are several figures that might occupy this role of the unmentioned desirer: the reader is one, and another is the speaker himself.

IV. Conclusions
Marvell is not alone in Paradise. In 'The Garden', he speaks of solitude but moves on to warm praise for the skilful Gardener. He does not like 'busie Companies of Men', but he does allow his attention to rest approvingly on this one single person. His appreciation for the Gardener is not overtly queer, but reading 'The Garden' alongside 'Damon the Mower' illuminates a similar approach to desire in both these poems. In both, desire is diffuse and various, suffusing the entire landscape of the poem and coming to rest on different specific objects and human or quasi-human agents. In 'Damon the Mower', the narrator uses the landscape to caress Damon's body, or at the very least approvingly imagines it doing so, which raises the idea that in 'The Garden', the speaker's erotic engagement with the landscape is part of his appreciation of the Gardener. As the peaches press themselves into the narrator's mouth and as he falls prostrate onto the grass, is he loving the landscape alone, or is he using the landscape as a vehicle for imagining contact with the person behind that landscape: the Gardener?
Gavin locates a tendency to excess or 'surplus' in 'The Garden' ('The pun that "Two Paradises 'twere in one/To live in Paradise alone' is an instance of a recurrent idea in Marvell, that of the condition of sufficiency which still admits a surplus-as if an ideal state could be more like itself'). 36 This excess is not necessarily sexual but what it does emphasise is that there is more than one meaning, type of desire and way of enjoying oneself in 'The Garden'. Any homoerotic desire for the Gardener is set against a backdrop of overdetermined desires: religious, solitary, nature-loving.
And as Andrew McRae writes, 'nature is rarely-if ever-just nature for Marvell. In the tradition of pastoral poetry, the natural world provides an avenue, with its own rich and highly stylized stock of imagery, for reflecting on wider issues of human life, ranging from love and sexuality through to matters of state'. 37 Whether the plant 36 Gavin, 241. A kinetic landscape that appeals multimodally to the senses, assumes human traits, and as the speaker's imagination roams through and explores different modalities of desire, he comes to rest on the Gardener.