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Andrew Marvell's "Little T.C.": Ekphrastic Poem Or Political Commentary?

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Andrew Marvell's Andrew Marvell's "Little T.C.": Ekphrastic Poem or Political Commentary? George Klawitter Somewhere in Yorkshire there hangs a painting of a little girl resting in a bed of flowers. The painting is old, unsigned, and has no indication on the back as to the identity of the subject. It is, of course, a painting of little Theophila Cornewall, great-grand-daughter of the eminent jurist Sir Edward Coke. We should not be surprised that the painting has not been discovered: over three hundred years passed be­ fore the Lothian portrait ofJohn Donne was found, mislabeled as "John Duns Scotus" even though the portrait looked nothing like a Franciscan theologian. So where is the oil of Little T.c.? Was it passed generation to generation until it ended up in some beloved servant's hands, a gift for service? Is it hanging in some cottage parlor, a revered enigma? Was it lost in a fire? Wherever it is, it originally inspired in Andrew Marvell a wonderful little poem that continues to amaze and amuse readers centu­ ries after its being penned. That the poem could be ekphrastic seems obvious, but analy­ sis of its painterly qualities has never been vigorously pursued, readers distracted, perhaps, by the delicate scent of a predatory narrator hiding behind a tree and scribbling sensuous iambics about a little girl. The cult of the Marvell voyeur never seems to die, whereas, in reality, the narrator of the poem may be driven more by the excellent quality of the paint­ ing than by salivation over an underaged noli me tangere. Timothy Raylor notes elsewhere in this journal issue that readings of this poem before the 1970s never considered its prurient flavor (160). I myself recall sit­ ting circa 1979 in John Wallace's graduate seventeenth-century litera­ ture seminar and snickering with other students over this poem. Wallace stopped his lecture and asked us what the problem seemed to be. When it was explained to him that the poem seemed pederastic, he was miffed and would not entertain the notion. Behind any strongly imagistic poem, of course, is the Horatian dictum "ut pictura poesis," but the strength of the imagery in this little poem cannot stop with excitation of the senses, the purpose of any basically sound poem that follows Sir Philip Sidney'S sine qua non for poetry: imagery (87). No, the Little T. C. poem goes beyond imagination because we can posit for it an actual mise-en-scene: the narrator (Marvell?) plants himself in front of an actual portrait and proceeds to meditate on its subject and meaning. The first clue that the poem is ekphrastic comes in the title. Marvell calls his poem a "picture," a term that has, of course, been gen­ erally taken to mean that the poem is a word-picture of little Theophila, whereas Marvell is probably using the word quite literally: he is recre­ ating an actual oil painting of the girl, impelled not only by the arrest- EIRe 37.2 (Winter 2011): 155-160 156 ing quality of the painting, but also by its subject, whose grandmother drowned crossing the Humber with Marvell's father in 1639. The paint­ ing and the poem, or rather the painting depicted by the poem, is there­ fore a tribute to both the girl and the Cornewall family, who enjoyed close ties to the Marvells. A second indication that the poem is ekphrastic comes with the use of direct address: "see" (lines 1, 14) appeals to the audience without mediation, as imperiously as a narrator in a Browning dramatic mono­ logue. We are asked to view not the girl so much as the painting of the girl. This choice is the function of the first two stanzas, which lull us into the painting, Marvell's narrator the docent, we the educable tourists. There is direct address in stanza three as well, but it functions differently. Once Marvell has hooked us voyeurs in the first two stanzas, he is ready to take us into his intimate confidence when the repeated phrase "let me" (lines 17, 23) comes across more as a wishful sigh than as a command. The first of these intimacies is nothing more than a hope that the narra­ tor can fuse himself with the eyes in the portrait, eyes that seem to trans­ fix him into a prayer that he might "parlay" with Little T.c., before she lures lovers with her eyes only to frustrate those same lovers later with her cold disdain. As Joan Faust argues elsewhere in this journal issue, the little girl is being appreciated at a "liminal" stage in her life, i.e., a period of sexual transitioning (144). Trying to read Marvell himself into the narrator may be danger­ ous, but no matter how a reader tries to separate one from the other, an author is bound to insinuate himself someway, if ever so slightly, into the reading of a poem. Although little has been hypothesized about Mar­ vell's sexual activity or abstinence, Paul Hammond remaining the brav­ est voice to date, there has been some comment on the matter of the self-imposed sexual abstinence of Marvell's friend, John Milton. John Rogers has noted that in the 1630s Milton embraced celibacy as a way of identifying with, of all things, the sexual desensitizing of Christ's cir­ cumcision: "a ritual of obedience that may well please God by mor­ tifYing carnal lust, one additionally associated with a literary process of pious de-eroticization, would inevitably hold a special interest for a poet courting literary greatness by means of the work-both personal and literary-of sexual abstinence" (202). Of course, Andrew Marvell throughout most of his life never courted poetic greatness. Not until the settled parliamentary career of his Restoration years did he attempt a Parnassian name, and that through satire, not lyric. Moreover, the lyric voice of his youth was often far removed from anything lofty or reli­ gious: many poems that he generated would have been considered silly or frivolous by the great John Milton. We cannot, therefore, draw any conclusions from or posit any basis for the seeming lack of a sexual life in the poet from Hull in order to understand him as the narrator of "Little T.c." Although most readers can agree with Nigel Smith that "Marvell's collection of lyric poems contains markedly alternative and even devi­ ant versions of heterosexual love" (341), Murray, on the other hand, en­ tertains the notion that Marvell may have been homosexual (249). The poem, then, becomes for readers a secondary prop to sexual activity that .
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