Unabashedly Bookish

[#1]

This week I want to turn to Andrew Marvell, who died in August 1678, three years before his collected poems were published from a manuscript in possession of Mary Marvell, who asserted she had been Marvell's wife, and "To His Coy Mistress," as well as a number of other poems, first became available to the general reading public.

Since the publication of J. V. Cunningham's Tradition and Poetic Structure (1960), readers have commonly assumed that the phrase "vegetable love" in "To His Coy Mistress" can be explained with reference to Aristotle's "doctrine of the three souls: the rational, which in man subsumes the other two; the animal, which men and animals have in common and which is the principal of motion and perception; and, finally, the lowest of the three, the vegetable soul, which is the only one the plants possess and which is the principle of generation and corruption." Situating the phrase with the Aristotilean tradition has been helped along by the Norton anthologies, which have carried a footnote referring to Cunningham's reading for decades and thereby made sure that each generation of new college students makes the association between vegetable love and vegetable soul..

The phrase "vegetable love" certainly does bring to mind Aristotle's vegetable soul, but the doctrine of the three souls doesn't fully explained the significance of Marvell's conceit. The conceit seems to be more closely related to what could be called, following Cunningham, the doctrine of the three loves. According to this doctrine, there is a "natural, [a] sensible, and [a] rational love," to borrow Robert Burton's description in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Natural love is a principle that determines that a body tends to be attracted to bodies with which it shares a natural sympathy; sensible love, also a product of sympathy, is that love which people have in common with "brute beasts" and is produced for "the pleasure they take in the act of generation"; rational love "is proper to men . . . and appears in God, angels and men."

The doctrine of the three loves seems more relevant to the context of Marvell's poem because natural love "is especially to be found in vegetals," a notion that would explain what led Marvell to associate the word "vegetable" with love, and also because it may help us to understand what the poem's speaker means when he informs his mistress that "My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow." The sympathy that allows love to emerge between two beings causes them to alter each other, as Michel Foucault points out in The Order of Things when he observes, during a discussion of the notion of sympathy, that objects such as "mourning roses that have been used at obsequies," according to Renaissance thinkers, are altered by the mourners with which they have been in contact such that they acquire the ability to "render all persons who smell them ‘sad and moribund.'"[1] If Marvell's "vegetable love" is what Burton calls natural love, his speaker is implying that he and his mistress, if they had "world enough, and time," could find themselves in a world that would be sympathetically transformed by his love; a unity between the world and the two lovers would then be established.

But why doesn't Marvell use the word "natural" rather than "vegetable"? He wants, I would argue, to allude not simply to natural love but also to the doctrine of the three souls and to draw out the green connotations that Cunningham reduces to an absurdity with his image of "an expansive cabbage." The result is that Aristotle's concept of the vegetable soul, which is the lowest of the three souls and a principle of corruption, is transformed into a pastoral principle, which perfects rather than corrupts. Vegetable love is a metaphysical principle that would become, if the mistress' ideals could be realized, suffused throughout the whole world, transfiguring it into a second paradise. Marvell's speaker is suggesting that to give his mistress what her coyness implies she wants, his love would need to be strong enough to produce a paradisial world, where the pleasures of sex would become, as they were for the archetypal pastoral lovers Adam and Eve, innocent, a green love in a green world, if you like.

Incapable of reproducing paradise on earth, the poem's speaker pushes for the mistress to accept a quicker path to it, tearing "our pleasures with rough strife,/ Thorough the iron gates of life," at least if we accept the folio reading and regard the gates as those that lead out of this world into the paradisial garden of the afterlife.

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Note

[1] Foucault's chapter on the Renaissance contains one of the best discussions of the period's magical thought, specifically because Foucault is interested in underlying assumptions, not surface expressions.