2 - Religion and Pleasure

Summary

One important biographical fact (or rumour) so far omitted from this story is that, as a Cambridge undergraduate, Marvell had a personal encounter with Roman Catholicism. Thomas Cooke related in his 1776 edition that soon after Marvell's arrival at Trinity College:

his Studys were interrupted by this remarkable Accident. Some Jesuits, with whom he was then conversant, seeing in him a Genius beyond his Years, thought of Nothing less than gaining a Proselyte. And doubtless their Hopes extended farther. They knew, if that Point was once obtained, he might in Time be a great Instrument towards carrying on their Cause. They used all the Arguments they could to seduce him away, which at last they did. After some Months his Father found him in a Bookseller's Shop in London, and prevailed with him to return to the College.

And Cooke's anecdote was confirmed by the later discovery of a letter from the vicar of Welton to Marvell's father, reporting on a similar experience in his own family and asking for advice as to how to handle it. (Kelliher, p. 25)

This youthful truancy, which is how Andrew Senior evidently saw it, would not be of much interest were it not for the fact that, of the eight devotional poems that introduced Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems to the Restoration reader in 1681, three (or four, if one counts both the English and Latin versions of ‘On a Drop of Dew’) have Roman Catholic antecedents. Yet they share the privileged space of the volume's opening pages with ‘Bermudas’, whose imagined context is the flight of puritan settlers to the New World; and introducing all the devotional poems is ‘A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure’, whose opening lines not only celebrate a plain style of religious experience, but might also be considered a symbolic retelling of Marvell's juvenile truancy: of Jesuit seduction countered by paternal, puritan restraint.

Courage my Soul, now learn to wield

The weight of thine immortal Shield.

Close on thy Head thy Helmet bright.

Ballance thy Sword against the Fight.

See where an Army, strong as fair,

With silken Banners spreads the air.

Now, if thou bee‘st that thing Divine,

In this day's Combat let it shine:

And shew that Nature wants an Art

To conquer one resolved Heart.

(PL1, p. 9)