The Referential and the Fictional in the Nature Poetry of Andrew Marvell

Abstract Andrew Marvell has often been characterized as a poet of ideas, but the role of ideas in his poetry is notoriously hard to evaluate. In this article I address the question of the intellectual coherence of Marvell’s nature poetry by focusing on the role of natural language. The paradisal ideal of a language of nature features in passages of Upon Appleton House and in The Garden. In both cases the author poses as an Adamic truth-teller, someone who can communicate with the animals and read the symbolic meaning of the plants. A basic contradiction arises from this scenario, however, given the contamination of the poet’s language with elements of pagan myth and the fictions of poetic metaphor. The poems in question stage a contest between the ideal language of nature on the one hand and poetic language on the other, between the Adamic claim to name the features of the natural world and the tendency of poetic language to convert these into figures of speech.