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Marvell's ‘Bermudas’ and the Puritan Paradise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Rosalie L. Colie
Rosalie L. Colie*
Affiliation:
Barnard College
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Summer 1957 , pp. 75 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1957

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References

1 For a study of this subject, see Newton, Arthur Percival, The Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans (New Haven and London, 1914)Google Scholar and Wright, Louis B., Religion and Empire. The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion. 1558-1625 (Chapel Hill, 1943).Google Scholar

2 Marvell, Andrew, ‘Bermudas’, Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. Margoliouth, H. M. (Oxford, 1952), 1, 17–18.Google Scholar Marvell worked within a tradition of placing the millennial paradise in England itself, as he himself did in ‘Upon Appleton House’; so that the application to Bermuda of the attributes of paradise was in a sense an extension of native tradition. See Bennett, Josephine Waters, ‘Britain among the Fortunate Isles’, SP, LIII (1956), 114–140 Google Scholar; for Marvell, p. 131.

3 See Norwood, Richard, The Journal of Richard Norwood Surveyor of Bermuda, introd. by Craven, Wesley Frank and Hayward, Walter B. (New York, 1954), p. 19 Google Scholar; Lefroy, J. H., Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands 1515-1685 (Hamilton, Bermuda, 1932), 1, 706–707 Google Scholar; and Prynne, William, A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious … New-Lights … Whereunto some Letters and Papers lately sent from the Sommer Islands, are subjoyned…. (London: John Macock for Michael Sparke senior, 1645)Google Scholar [Letter signed ‘Richard Beake’], p. 4. Oxenbridge's colonizing work was A Seasonable Proposition of Propagating the Gospel by Christian Colonies in the Continent of Guaiana [?London, 1670].

4 Marvell, , Poems and Letters, 1, 132–133, 133-135.Google Scholar

5 Smith, John, The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (Richmond, Virginia, 1819), II, 112.Google Scholar

6 Waller, Edmund, Poems &c. (London: T. W. for Humphrey Mosley, 1645), p. 52.Google Scholar

7 Hughes, Lewis, A Plaine and True Relation of the Goodnes of God towards the Sommer Hands, written by way of exhortation, to stirre up the people there to praise God (London: Edward All-de, 1621)Google Scholar, Sig. A3. For Hughes, see Wright, pp. 112-113; Cole, George Watson, Lewis Hughes, the Militant Minister of the Gospel and His Printed Works (Worcester, Mass., 1928)Google Scholar and Craven, W. F., ‘Lewis Hughes’ “Plaine and True Relation of the Goodnes of God towards the Sommer Islands” ’, William and Mary Quarterly, xvii, 1937.Google Scholar

8 Hughes, A Plaine and True Relation, Sig. A3.

9 Ibid., Sig. B3.

10 Bermuda in Poetry 1610-1908, sel. and ed. Frederick Charles Hicks (Hamilton, Bermuda, 1915), p. 12. Cf. also Alexander Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia [1613] (Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, n.d.), Epistle Dedicatorie [by William Crashawe].

11 Norwood, Journal, lxxxi.

12 Silvester Jourdain, A Discovery of the Barmudas: Otherwise Called the Ile of Divels [1610] (Aungervyle Society Reprints), II, 282.

13 See in particular Lewis Hughes, A Letter Sent into England from the Summer Ilands (London: I. B. for William Welby, 1615) Sig. A3: “The King of kings hath kept these Ilands from the King of Spaine and all other kings in the world ….’