Like Skillful Looms: Marvell, Cromwell, and the Politics of Weeping

Recent work has illuminated the spiritual, eschatological, and gender dynamics of Marvell’s poetry of tears, but the politics of Marvellian weeping have yet to be tackled. Contextualizing the Cromwell encomia (‘The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector’ and ‘A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector’) amidst the man’s proclivity for weeping, this essay argues that Marvell poetically employs tears not just to embrace the vulnerability of the Lord Protector at the center of England’s new political settlement; he also attempts to bind moderate yet impassioned allies around a bourgeois Protestantism. The essay begins with a reading of ‘Eyes and Tears’ to establish the religious, economic, and ornamental dimensions of Marvellian weeping. ‘The First Anniversary’ echoes the aspect of luxurious display central to Marvell’s bourgeois Protestantism in ‘Eyes and Tears’, but it adds an emphasis on domestic productivity to suggest that private weeping can be publically beneficial. In this way, Marvell can speak to Cromwell as a well-known practitioner of weeping while also speaking to, and as, an audience of bourgeois Protestants, for whom religious devotion and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing endeavors. The essay concludes with a theoretical reflection on Marvellian weeping as affective politics, in which the externalization of internal emotion attempts to forge community. Ultimately, the affective politics of Marvellian weeping consists in publicizing private piety without forfeiting the sanctity of private life altogether.

however, does not consider why Marvell compares silver threads to grievous tears in appealing to this audience, nor does he consider their feminization. By depicting the weepers of 'The First Anniversary' as embroiderers, Marvell situates them in a trade that makes both their gender and artisanal identities ambiguous; the distinction between professional (mostly male) and amateur (mostly female) embroiderers grew more rigid throughout the seventeenth century, but embroidery was still predominantly associated with women, particularly of the gentry, merchant, and artisan classes. 8 The comparison of embroidery to weeping strengthens the former's feminine character, suggesting that the poem's skillful looms, like Marvell seeking employment with the Protectorate regime, are amateurs with professional aspirations. When we recognize that, in early modernity, a nascent bourgeois class was primarily an amalgamation of masculine identities-the 'good Christian', ' economic man', and 'substantial tradesman' managing their homes as productive units of worship and business-it becomes apparent that Marvell's feminization of the poem's propertied, fashionable audience leverages the domestic productivity of embroidery to render weeping a similarly productive private activity. 9  Anniversary''s comparison of itself to a tapestry does more than offer reassurance against sectarianism; it provides a model whereby private weeping can be productively publicized in Protectorate England, an era in which public religious profession was to be carried out with 'sobriety'. 10 As items of luxurious display, tears do not betray the effeminate hypocrisy of their shedders so much as they index the deeply interwoven, mutually reinforcing threads of private piety and domestic productivity constituting their subjectivities. 11 Before discussing the politics of weeping in the Cromwell encomia, this essay begins with a reading of 'Eyes and Tears' to establish the religious, economic, and ornamental dimensions of Marvellian weeping. As recent scholarship has made clear, 'Eyes and Tears' marks an important development in the poet's thought concerning the relationship between temporal and spiritual order. For Gary Kuchar, the poem negotiates between Catholic and Laudian exemplars of the weeping genre, and it comes to view the difference between worldly and spiritual order as a constitutive hinge. More recently, Brendan Prawdzik argues that 'Eyes and Tears' evinces an 'Ecclesiastean skepticism' promoting ' engaged labor that is also humble, seasonable, and ordinary'. 12 Kuchar and Prawdzik's respective emphases on world-spirit relationeconomic and political privileges located there) and the men-such as Marvell-whom they employed to solicit their "business"'. In this schema, Marvell maps private weeping onto both householders engaged in economic production and himself as one of their employees. Gendering such production and employment feminine not only reworks femininity into a positive association; it includes women as household producers (and, perhaps, household employees Marvell,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77] For Michael Walzer, conscience and work supplied the basis for 'the new politics of revolution', but it also provided ' an internal rationale for the diligent efficiency of the modern official and the pious political concern of the modern bourgeois'. ality and engaged labor support my discussion of Marvellian weeping as indicative of the poet's bourgeois Protestantism, which values tears as material signifiers of private piety that can edify the public. Similar to 'The First Anniversary''s image of tears-as-silver thread in a tapestry, the image of tears-as-pendants in 'Eyes and Tears' appeals to bourgeois Protestants in its synthesis of religious devotion and luxurious display.

These Pendants of the Eyes: The Bourgeois Protestantism of 'Eyes and Tears'
A year or so after the Restoration, Abraham Cowley describes how many became aware that Cromwell's 'unmanly tears' were nothing more than political theater, ' as if a Player, by putting on a Gown, should think he represented excellently a Woman, though his Beard at the same time were seen by all the Spectators'. 13 Cowley's comparison of a tearful Cromwell to an actor adorning a gown exemplifies how hypocrisy and femininity were often interchangeable accusations levied at 'pious' weepers. As we will see, Marvell recuperates tears as feminine display by displacing them from the stage to the household. In 'Eyes and Tears', weeping is bourgeois insofar as tears are luxurious ornaments, but it is also Protestant, insofar as the speaker demonstrates vigilance in scrutinizing tears as material, spiritual, and poetic signifiers.
Once considered a resolutely Catholic form of sacramental penitence, weeping is now understood to have been a prominent, but contested, form of private prayer in early modern Protestantism. 14 Because tears were simultaneously understood as divine gifts and human creations, weeping helped Protestants distinguish true from false repentance, even if it did not cause such repentance. The rise of pious weeping in Reformation England surely owes much to Protestantism's de-emphasis of sacra- that Catholic preachers of the high Middle Ages were similarly preoccupied with hypocrisy and exaggeration as it pertained to penitent weeping, even as they encouraged their parishioners to shed tears. In this respect, Catholic and Protestant notions of weeping are not so different. But the public weeping of medieval devotion became less common in Reformation Europe and England, and the problem of hypocrisy shifted away from excessive and towards public weeping. 15 Though sermons and funerals were acceptable occasions for weeping, elite and popular Calvinism argued that tears emerging from physical pain or earthly loss possessed no inherent spiritual value. Thus, it was better for Protestants to shed tears in private, lest they be accused of hypocrisy.
Protestant weeping was heavily gendered. Because women and children tended to weep more than adult men, worldly tears were often consigned to the former, and the latter faced charges that their 'pious' tears were womanish, childish, or both. 16 Elaborating the gendered nature of Protestant weeping helps scholars recognize how readings of 'Eyes and Tears' that describe the poem as secular in its depiction of female weeping often miss its engagement with the fluid intersection between Catholic and Protestant worship. Catholic poets indebted to Southwell usually reached the same devotional conclusions as their progenitor, but they often shifted their focus to questions of feminine subjectivity and the dichotomy between public, ' external' emotion and private, 'internal' emotion. Such shifts led Protestants to moralize and satirizize the poetry of tears tradition, but they nevertheless found appealing its emphasis on divine agency. 17  is fettered by these chains, thus indicating that Marvell is not critiquing so much as reappropriating this 'Catholic' image so as to depict how the Magdalene's tears, embodying her sins, materially script Christ into his role as humanity's redeemer.
Christ's absolution of the Magdalene's sins plays out in the episode at the house of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7: 36-50, in which she bathes Jesus's feet with her tears.
Simon questions Jesus's prophetic abilities, but Jesus responds that the sins of this woman have been forgiven, partly because of her faith and partly because of her demonstration of hospitality. The scriptural subtext of the Magdalene stanza thus evinces the poem's interest in godly conduct within the household. There is value in publicizing private tears, just as scripture makes the Magdalene's tears known to a Christian audience. 22 As the poem adopts a more public voice in its concluding stanzas, the speaker brings himself to the brink of opening the ' double sluice' of his eyes, allowing them In keeping with its reflexivity, 'Eyes and Tears' ends on a Protestant compromise between pious weeping and poetic language as a substitute for pious weeping. 24 It is significant that this compromise plays out at precisely the moment in which the speaker directly addresses an audience: the moment in which he shifts from a private to a public voice.
If the speaker struggles to weep, perhaps it is because, earlier in the poem, he reveals himself to be too much a creature of the world, prone to conceptualizing the relationship between affect and tears in economic, rather than religious, terms: Two tears, which Sorrow long did weigh Within the scales of either eye, And then paid out in equal poise, Are the true price of all my joys. (ll. 9-12) The speaker sees himself purchasing joys from sorrow with his tears. Nigel Smith suggests that this mercantilist exchange is indeed pious, signifying ' a penitent sense of redemption through sacrifice'. 25 The following stanza, however, complicates this exchange as one and done, for tears return to the speaker: What in the world most fair appears, Yea, even laughter, turns to tears; And all the jewels which we prize, Melt in these pendants of the eyes. (ll. 13-16) 23 Kuchar,Religious Sorrow,120. 24 Protestants often navigated the gendered problem of weeping (penitent tears were often construed as shamefully womanish, but an inability to weep indicated hardness of heart) by 'turn[ing] weeping into a metaphor', especially through poetry. See Ryrie,192. 25 See Smith's annotation in Marvell,Poems, This stanza seems to chastise vain materialism; worldly objects are only 'fair' on the level of their appearance. But curiously, Marvell retains the same material conceit in describing the melting of the literal 'jewels' in the speaker's field of vision within the figurative jewels-'pendants'-of the speaker's tears. These tears, worn by the speaker's eyes as luxury items, exemplify the fluid threshold between worldly and spiritual value. As Joan Hartwig argues, they transform ' a sense of plentitude in this world' into 'something of greater value, a joy that is unbounded by sorrow because the weeping eye has transformed joy and sorrow into the same feeling'. Kuchar sees the unification of joy and sorrow in these stanzas as translating the gendered representations of purification in the tradition of spiritual alchemy into experiential terms so as to advance a 'mysteriously contained celebration of grief'. 26 But because such purification occurs while retaining the poetic conceit of the jewel, it seems that Marvell is equally interested in turning tears into luxurious ornaments signifying humble materialism beyond effeminate hypocrisy. The shift in the poeticization of tears occurring across these two stanzas-from currency exchanged for joys to ornaments signifying joy-sorrow hybridity-utilizes the metaphoric field of economy to detail a subtle move towards greater spiritual understanding.
The image of tears-as-pendants evinces Marvell's bourgeois Protestantism because it reconciles the pious potential of weeping with weeping's unavoidable association with gaudy, ' effeminate' display. It achieves this reconciliation by embracing tears as outward displays while paradoxically juxtaposing them to the vain objects of sight; though tears are figured as potential objects of ocular vanity, they emerge from the dissipation of such vanity. Thus, Marvell makes weeping appealing to a fashionable audience by utilizing an image of fashion to depict the subject's transcendence over worldly vanity without rejecting worldliness outright.
In its image of tears-as-silver thread in a tapestry, 'The First Anniversary' echoes the aspect of luxurious display central to Marvell' and Tears', but it adds an emphasis on domestic productivity to suggest that private weeping can be publically beneficial. In this way, Marvell can speak to Cromwell as a well-known practitioner of weeping while also speaking to, and as, an audience of bourgeois Protestants, for whom religious devotion and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing endeavors. Cromwell's tears as nothing more than political dissimulation. 30  The sectarians could be found '[r]ejoicing when [Cromwell's] foot had slipped aside' because they erroneously expected their 'new king' (Christ, but also Harrison) might 'the fifth scepter shake,/And make the world, by his example, quake ' (ll. 296-98). 41 The poet and company, however, render the coaching accident productive:

Employing Tears in Protectorate England
So with more modesty we may be true, And speak as of the dead the praises due: earth with a legacy they are not yet ready to handle: 'We only mourned ourselves, in thine ascent,/Whom thou hadst left beneath with mantle rent ' (ll. 219-20). In this way, they take a cue from Cromwell himself, who gave up his 'privacy so dear' to become 'the headstrong people's charioteer' while modestly refusing the crown (ll. 223-28). As Laura Knoppers argues, this episode 'foregrounds and problematizes the process itself of constructing a Cromwellian image', though it insists that the right interpretation is 'Cromwell is not a king'. But it also represents, as Norbrook suggests, 'the kind of poetry that it would have been necessary to produce had Cromwell perished in his coaching accident'. 45 It is thus crucial that the heart of 'The Finally, 'with such accents, as despairing', the first man mourns in words: '"Why did mine eyes once see so bright a ray;/Or why day last no longer than a day?"' (ll. 338-40). Without knowledge of the cycle of days, the first man feels the intensity of existential despair. But Marvell's tautological repetition of day pokes fun at the sectarians; waiting for 'the day' of Christ's return, they will experience nothing but the ordinary cycle of days. Weeping, often considered by Protestant hardliners to be the effeminate antithesis to masculine fortitude, 47  'guide us upward through this region blind': 'Since thou art gone, who best that way couldst teach,/Only our sighs, perhaps, may thither reach' (ll. 302-4).

Glitter In Our Joy: Marvellian Weeping as Affective Politics
As I have argued throughout this essay, Marvell's transformation of the femininity of weeping into an indicator of private piety and domestic productivity responds to weeping's strong association with Cromwell throughout revolutionary England.
In concluding, I would like to follow Matthew Augustine's lead in moving 'beyond politics' and exploring how a ' critical sensibility' regarding the ' events' staged by Marvell's poetry can help scholars avoid reducing the politics of Marvell's verse to its immediate and textually demonstrable contexts, in the interest of constructing a broader concept of the political. 52 To this end, one might notice that the two poetic ' events' primarily dealt with in this essay-tears-as-jewels melting into pendants ('Eyes and Tears') and tears-as-silver threaded into a golden tapestry ('The First  Books 30, no. 12 (2008): 24-25. categorization of pre-Enlightenment weeping as ' antisocial' skips over the vexed contours of privacy and publicity in early modern Protestant devotion. 53 Marvell's iteration of gratia lacrimarum, particularly with the pendants of 'Eyes and Tears', taps into the etymological origin of the English word 'joy' as it derives from the Latin 'gaudere', which provides the origin of the English 'gaudy', a word usually describing ornate jewelry. For Brinkema, the link between 'gaudy' and 'gaudies'-the beads on a rosary-indexes a conception of affect in which 'joy's merriment hovers in the pleasure or gladness in the glittering surface of things'. 54 As ornaments emanating and reflecting light, Marvell's pendants are a complex overlay of exteriority and interiority: they are adorned on the outside of the body, and their own interiority is opaquely visible yet ultimately opaque. To say that joy hovers on the glittering surface of tears is not to say that weeping transforms sorrow into joy, but that weeping produces a tearful surface wherein joy can be discovered. 55 In this way, Marvell's poetic deployment of gratia lacrimarum does not use the image of the pendant to illustrate how tears publicize a profound interior piety; the pendant contains the private-public dichotomy, thus suggesting that tears produce joy by publicizing interplays between privacy and publicity while ultimately leaving private the interior piety of the adorner.
Brinkema's treatment of tears not as an expression of interiority but as ' a self-folding exteriority that manifests in, as, and with textual form' 56 dovetails with Marvell's interest in the relationship between weeping and poetry, especially as it plays out in 'The First Anniversary''s iteration of gratia lacrimarum, in which tears glitter like the submerged thread of silver in a golden tapestry. Tears certainly manifest in the poem: as a response to Cromwell's accident affording the poet an opportunity to 53 Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 5-9. 54 Brinkema,243. 55 In his discussion of 'The First Anniversary''s architectural depictions of the Protectorate government, Michael Schoenfeldt argues that Marvell's visual sensibility pays particular attention to surfaces and 'the evanescence of beauty' in constructing poetic images of concordia discors. The glittering surfaces of tears, I would add, similarly provide Marvell poetic material from which to balance religious, political, and gender tensions. See Michael Schoenfeldt, 'Marvell and the Designs of Art', The Cambridge imagine an alternative past allowing him to refashion the prevailing scripturalism of the present. In this sense, Marvell is attempting to convince readers that there is a real contingent of Protectorate faithful weeping with the skillful looms in the poem itself. But by claiming that he ' employ[s]' grievous tears to 'interweave' the ' one sorrow' of Protectorate England's first year amidst his 'yearly song', Marvell is also suggesting that tears manifest as the poem itself; as they 'glitter in [their] joy', the weeping faithful shine like the thread of Cromwell's accident within the poem itself.
Thus, 'The First Anniversary' renders nearly synonymous the weeping of the faithful and their poeticization of Cromwell's vulnerability as self-folding exteriors: as inherently public phenomena containing private folds. 57 The affective politics of Marvellian weeping, then, consists in publicizing private piety without forfeiting the sanctity of private life altogether. Marvell values the privacy of weeping in Protestant thought and worship, but he reconciles this valuation with his equally strong insistence that weeping is the 'noblest use' of human eyes ('Eyes and Tears', l. 46). The employment of tears seems to contradict the entire premise of gratia lacrimarum, in which tears are gifts conferred by God and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, Marvell employs gratia lacrimarum as poetic gifts to his readers, gifts that validate tears as human adornments and creations while confronting inevitable accusations of dissimulation. In an article on early modern crocodile tears, Joseph Campana explores the tension between affect and ethics created by the question of animal weeping: 'The rush to distribute affect, emotion, cognition, and speech to nonhuman creatures seems to imply a countervailing desire to strip capabilities from the human, as if to turn away from reason and sentience is to turn towards 57 My analysis of Marvellian weeping thus supports James Kuzner's theoretical argument that Marvell's poetry complicates the binary between the republican, bounded selfhood of modernity and the royalist, vulnerable selfhood of early modernity. In focusing on weeping, which Marvell conflates with poetic utterance, I suggest that paralinguistic affective expressions exist as, alongside, and in tension with what Kuzner calls 'transubstantial words', utterances attempting to produce material effects on bodies. At least in the Protectorate era, Marvellian tears dovetail with poetic utterance in a manner that accommodates royalism and republicanism but that also gestures beyond, to a vulnerable but productive populace simultaneously interested in edifying the public and protecting privacy. See happiness'. 58 Marvell would certainly agree; weeping is the noblest use of the eyes because ' only human eyes can weep' ('Eyes and Tears', l. 48). But weeping does constitute a turn towards happiness, joy, and peace when early modern affect and ethics are situated in religious contexts. For Marvell, the joy of weeping resides in publicizing privacy to the appropriate degree. Like skillful looms in the privacy of their homes weaving a tapestry meant for public display, Protestants can publicize their private weeping in a manner that enriches-even beautifies-the public.