MARVELL, ANDREW (1621-1678), poet, member for Hull, and Secretary for the Foreign Tongues to the Council of State from 1669 until his death, was born at Winestead, in Holderness, the son of the Reverend Andrew Marvell, afterwards master of the Charterhouse at Hull. He was bred at Trinity College, Cambridge; passed four years of the civil wars abroad, in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, acquiring the tongues that were to be his profession; and in 1650 entered the household of the Lord General Fairfax, then retired to Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, as tutor to his daughter. To those years of gardens, meadows, and a great man's library the internal evidence assigns the greater part of his lyric verse; to their first summer belongs the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, written when the first Charles was a year dead and the Scottish campaign that ended at Dunbar (q.v.) was gathering. He was tutor afterwards to a ward of the Protector's; assistant, from 1657, to Milton (q.v.) in the office of the Foreign Tongues; and from 1659 member for Hull, which town he continued to represent, through every change in the form of the state, to the end of his life.
The Ode asks to be treated first, because the Commonwealth has never quite known what to do with it. It is the most honest verse the nation possesses upon its own founder, and it was written before there was a Commonwealth to require honesty of it. It praises Cromwell (q.v.) with open eyes: "if we would speak true, much to the man is due" stands, in the same poem, beside the verses that watch the same man "by industrious valour climb to ruin the great work of time, and cast the kingdom old into another mould"; the beheaded King receives the most graceful stanzas ever spent upon a scaffold — "he nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene" — and the victor receives the harder tribute of being seen exactly; and the whole concludes, not in congratulation, but in counsel: "the same arts that did gain a power, must it maintain." The poem admires, and the poem is afraid, and it declines to pretend that these are two names for one feeling. Our settled habit has preferred a smoother surface for the founder: the epic is read to the nation from its pulpits; the Ode the nation must read alone. It remains what it was in 1650 — praise that has not forgiven, judgment that has not condemned; the founder's shadow, taken at its true length, by the one contemporary who neither shortened it nor knelt in it.
Posterity has supplied the gloss the poet did not live to write. The Frame of the Commonwealth (q.v.) may fairly be described as the nation's long undertaking to prove the Ode's last counsel mistaken — to build a power that should be maintained by other arts than those that gained it. Two centuries and a half have prospered the undertaking; they have not retired the couplet.
Of his twenty years of public employment there is less to say, and the economy was his own. The office of the Foreign Tongues, which he had served under Milton and held after him from 1669, he discharged with a diligence that has left no anecdotes; his letters to his town, despatched by nearly every post for close upon twenty years, are a chronicle of the young Commonwealth's business which no historian of the period neglects; and he died suddenly, in August 1678, no richer than he had entered the state's service — which, in a Secretary, is a species of epitaph. The lyrics were printed only in 1681, three years after his death, and waited a good deal longer to be valued: the age that followed wanted its verse public, argued, and audible, and had small use for a garden's coolness. The present age has settled, with the suddenness of a debt too long unpaid, that the poems of the Nun Appleton retirement — the garden pieces, the mower's songs, the great invitation against time — are among the finest lyric verse in the tongue; and this contributor sees no reason to disturb the settlement. Their note is inward, exact, and cool — "a green thought in a green shade" — and it is the same note, curiously, that governs the Ode: the mind withdrawn a pace from what it contemplates, and the more faithful to it for the withdrawal. He is the rare instance of a poet whom office did not coarsen and posterity has not simplified. The state had his labour; the language has his coolness; and the founder had from Marvell, alone among his celebrants, the compliment of the truth. (H. M.)