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Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 6, No. 2 | Winter 2014 THE INSTABILITY OF MARVELL’S BERMUDAS BY TIMOTHY RAYLOR I How should we take Bermudas?1 Is it a straightforward propaganda poem, commemorating the commencement of the godly governorship of the newly appointed Somers Island commissioner and erstwhile colonist, John Oxenbridge? Or is the poem shot through with doubts and questions—with ironies that call into question the actions and purity of motive of its singing rowers? Both positions have been urged: the former especially in the nineteenth century, when Marvell came first to critical notice; the latter more commonly in the twentieth. The eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1853-60), for example, cited the poem approvingly as “one of the finest strains of the Puritan muse.”2 But in the twentieth century challenges to the propagandistic reading came from two directions. One was the New Criticism, with its tendency to read any narrative frame, any instance of playful wit, as debilitating irony—an approach to which the poem lends ample ammunition. The second direction was historical. As the early history of the Bermuda colony came to be better understood, the gap between that history—natural, economic, and religious—and Marvell’s poetic recreation of it came to appear so pointed as to be explainable only in terms of an ironic counter-narrative.3 From the natural and economic historical points of view, high hopes of vast resources were soon dashed. From the point of view of religion, the colony was not predominantly or even notably Puritan, and although we find a small tradition of Puritan ministers, including Oxenbridge himself, making their way there during the century, the Bermudas were settled in the first instance largely by economic migrants. (The first settlers were shipwrecked on their way to Virginia, not Massachusetts.) Despite the strength of its challenges to the propagandistic reading, the ironic reading never gained universal acceptance. And the move, in the 1980s and 1990s, to a more historically and ideologically alert criticism led to a resurgence of Puritan readings of the poem: readings buttressed by careful contextual scholarship.4 And yet the ironic reading has not been completely dispatched. In 1996 John Rogers could describe the poem, in an exemplary statement of the strong version of the ironic reading, as a “parody of Puritan utopian providentialism.”5 The increase in our contextual knowledge has not yet allowed us fully to resolve the problems with which the poem presents us. And doubt about one’s reading of the poem appears to be an occupational hazard of any serious attempt to get to grips with it. One may concur with Philip Brockbank, who noted in his York tercentenary lecture on Marvell that “there is a sense in which, whatever our knowledge of Bermudan history, the poem has always pulled both away from and towards our dashed expectations.”6 Brockbank’s point is borne out in the work of that doyenne of Marvellians, Rosalie Colie. In an article of 1957 Colie presented Bermudas as a rich but fundamentally unproblematic presentation of what she termed “The Puritan paradise.”7 But when after a dozen years of intensive work on Marvell she came to publish her magnificent book-length study of his poetry, Colie changed her tune: “We know [she wrote] a great deal about the poem and its content, perhaps even its occasion … What we do not know, though, is what is going on in this poem.”8 In this article I make no claim to solve, once and for all, the question of what is going on in Bermudas. My goal is more modest. I aim first to show that the problem 3 Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 6, No. 2 | Winter 2014 is real and is of long standing, although it has been largely hidden, for much of the poem’s textual and critical history, from scholarly view; it is, in other words, no mere chimera generated by mid-twentieth-century critical practices. Having sketched that textual history, I show that two details from the text which seem, at first sight, to function ironically may, if placed in the wider context of Marvell’s work, lend support to the Puritan reading. II Let us look first at the propagandistic, Puritan reading of the poem. According to this version, Marvell offers us an earnest celebration of a paradise found: a new Eden located by the operation of divine providence working through human agency. The singers, for instance, row not in order to propel the boat, but to keep time with their singing; the work of their voices in praising and not that of their arms in rowing, is the efficient cause of their propulsion. This, or something like it, was the dominant reading of the poem from the early nineteenth century up through the middle of the twentieth century. It is founded on such features of the text as its psalm-like form, its singers’ praise of the liberality of the creator, and their emphatic hope of spreading the gospel throughout the Americas. And it is endorsed by the frame narrative’s approval of the singers’ “holy” and “cheerful” note. And yet this reading is disturbed by some gaps and tensions. Who exactly are the rowers? Why are they rowing and where are they going? If they are Puritans, why do they seem so self- absorbed?9 So focused on the material riches (e.g. the ambergris of line 28) and the carnal comforts so provocatively and forcefully impressed upon them (“He makes the figs our mouths to meet”)? There seem here to be rather too many of the sensuous allurements of an alternate tradition of earthly paradises: the classical and romance tradition of the Fortunate Isles. And if the poem is an earnest celebration of a paradise found, why is the islands’ natural superabundance presented so comically (“throws the melons at our feet”)? Why, finally, are the sentiments expressed in the rowers’ song not clearly endorsed by the winds of the narrative frame, which listen but which do not respond? Such questions cannot be ignored. During the nineteenth century, such questions about the poem were addressed primarily by editors rather than by critics. And they were addressed by editorial interventions that mitigated or resolved them. The inter-involved questions of the identity of the rowers and the direction and purpose of their rowing were decisively dispatched by Thomas Campbell in the text printed in his popular anthology of 1819, Specimens of the British Poets. Campbell solves such problems by retitling the poem, heading his version “The Emigrants,” thus settling at one stroke the matter of who the rowers are and the question of where they are headed: they are migrants from England, headed to the new world.10 With this stroke he also solves the problem of why they are rowing: they are propelling themselves—like some unexpectedly early entrants in the Talisker Whisky Challenge—westward across the Atlantic. Campbell’s solution may have been historically inaccurate and nautically implausible; but it was efficient, and it was influential. Campbell’s Specimens was widely distributed, and nineteenth-century readers were more likely to encounter the poem in some variant of Campbell’s version than in the more accurate, but less readily available, editions of Cooke (1726, reprinted 1772), or Thompson (1776), or in the privately printed collection of Grosart (1872- 75), of which only 156 copies were issued. Campbell’s retitling was adopted by subsequent anthologizers and critics.11 In the “Selection” of poems appended to his 1832 Life of Marvell, John Dove prints the poem under Campbell’s title. To this he adds a clarifying headnote identifying the singers and the occasion: “The following stanzas are supposed to be sung by a party of those voluntary exiles for conscience’ sake, who, in a profligate age, left their country, to enjoy religious freedom in regions 4 Andrew Marvell Newsletter | Vol. 6, No. 2 | Winter 2014 beyond the Atlantic.”12 Dove’s title and headnote were reprinted in the 1835 edition of Hartley Coleridge’s version of the Life.13 Robert Chambers includes the poem under the still more precise title “The Emigrants in the Bermudas” as one of four samples of Marvell’s work in his Cyclopaedia (1844).14 And so the poem is identified in comments by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier, of 1848 (“The Bermuda Emigrants”), and by Mrs. S. C. Hall in Sharpe’s Magazine for 1852.15 Under versions of this title, the poem became widely known. George L. Craik, writing in 1844-45 hailed it as a work “familiar to every lover of poetry”; according to Craik, its title was “Song of the Exiles.”16 Lovers of poetry were also furnished with a version of the poem in Palgrave’s immensely popular Golden Treasury (1861)—surely the work in which the greatest number of Marvell’s later nineteenth-century readers encountered the poem. Palgrave prints it as “Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda.”17 It was widely-enough distributed under this title for Archbishop Trench to justify excluding it from his 1868 anthology of English verse on the grounds that it was so well known.18 Campbell’s retitling also fortified the Puritan reading of the poem by allowing commentators to resituate it historically. Thus, in his rather belated review of Dove’s biography, published a dozen years after its appearance, Henry Rogers identifies the rowers as the Pilgrim Fathers—apparently spotted by Marvell during some hitherto unsuspected southern detour.19 Even in the twentieth century, such associations held.20 Traces of it can be found as recently as 1977, in Bruce King’s account, which describes the body of the poem as “the Pilgrims’ song.”21 But retitling alone did not suffice to stabilize the Puritan reading of the poem.