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Marvell's ‘Bermudas’ and the Puritan Paradise

1957; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2857502

2326-294X

Rosalie L. Colie,

Historical Studies of British Isles

It is often difficult to remember that Andrew Marvell the poet was also a polemical Puritan and practical politician, so little do his surviving poems reflect his public activity. Least of all, one would think, could his Garden poems, where his private intentions seem most highly developed and his general Neoplatonism most sharply particularized, yield up any reference to his Puritan life. But when we examine his ‘Bermudas’, one of Marvell's subtlest shorter poems and strikingly close to ‘The Garden’ in both its imagery and its implications of paradise, we cannot fail to realize its background of English expansion into the New World and of the religious drives that sent Englishmen oat from their island into harsher climates in the expectation of some sort of practical Eden. Marvell's song is the song of praise of his mariners to the God that led them ‘through the watry Maze’ to another island, long hidden from their knowledge and far kinder than England itself.