Allen Ginsberg continuing – on Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden”
“How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the oak, or bays,/And their incessant labours see/Crown’d from some single herb or tree,Whose short and narrow verged shade/Does prudently their toils upbraid;/While all flow’rs and all trees do close/To weave the garlands of repose.”
AG: That is to say, all these people struggling in the city (it’s the beginning of the city again, and it’s.. he’s paralleling that poem that we read before by (Abraham) Cowley about “the crowd, and buzz, and murmurings,/Of this great hive the city.” – “Ah, yet, ere I descend the grave/May I a small house and large garden have” – remember?)
And continuing that same them – “prudently their toils upbraid” – (meaning the toils in the city, and he’s saying how stupid are people who want, you know, just a laurel or poetry laurel, laurel for poetry, when they could have a whole garden, the entire earth, all of nature, if they’d only retire from the cities and get into a garden of their own, and get out of the wreck and toil and politics and labor of building the Industrial Revolution and England and empire. So that’s understood? Is that all clear? Is there any cloudy spot in that? – “narrow-verged” just means cut the verge, narrowed-down (as you can see in the notes – “incessant labors”, it says “unceasing”)
“How vainly men themselves amaze” – that’s pretty funny – “How vainly men themselves amaze” – “vainly’ meaning it’s all in vain”, hopelessly, how hopelessly people get themselves all het up (‘men themselves amaze” – “How vainly men themselves amaze” -I like that..It’s like men putting themselves in a maze but also men amaze themselves. They wake up fifty years later and find out they were wrong all along . So, begin again.
{Allen, at approximately seventy-three minutes in, begins again reading Marvell’s poem, “The Garden” ] – “How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the oak, or bays,/And their incessant labours see/Crown’d from some single herb or tree,/Whose short and narrow verged shade/Does prudently their toils upbraid;/While all flow’rs and all trees do close/To weave the garlands of repose”
“Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,/And Innocence, thy sister dear!/Mistaken long, I sought you then/In busy companies of men;/Your sacred plants, if here below,/Only among the plants will grow./Society is all but rude,/To this delicious solitude.”
“Your sacred plants, if here below,/Only among the plants will grow” – (“sacred” meaning “cuttings”? – Well, in any case, the plants of Quiet and Innocence can only grow with the regular earth plants in the actual garden, they’re not going to be found up in a city or up in heaven, (or up in the air, they’re going to be grounded)
“No white nor red was ever seen/So am’rous as this lovely green” – (that’s the Wars of the Roses – the whites against the reds, politics, the different colors of politics – No red, white nor blue was ever seen so horny as this lovely green, so vigorous as this lovely green, I should say) “No white nor red was ever seen/So am’rous as this lovely green/Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,/Cut in these trees their mistress’ name;/Little, alas, they know or heed/How far these beauties hers exceed!/Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound,/No name shall but your own be found.”
“When we have run our passion’s heat,/Love hither makes his best retreat./The gods, that mortal beauty chase,/Still in a tree did end their race:/Apollo hunted Daphne so,/ Only that she might laurel grow;/And Pan did after Syrinx speed,/Not as a nymph, but for a reed.”- (Now you can get the shots, the Apollo hunting Daphne and Pan after Syrinx in the footnote to , in the original myths in Ovid’s Metamorphosis – “The nymphs frustrated the pursing gods by turning into the plants’ names. In Marvell’s version the gods caused or attended the transformation” – Well, okay, so, but the trouble is to read it properly. you’ve got to read it sequentially, so I‘ll just read that again (because the next stanza gets really funny – well and it repeats that theme we got from “Bermudas”– all the melons coming forward -(“He makes the figs our mouths to meet/ And throws the melons at our feet”) ).
“When we have run our passion’s heat,/Love hither makes his best retreat./The gods, that mortal beauty chase,” – (The gods, who chase after mortal beauty (because they’re gods!) – “The gods, that mortal beauty chase,/Still in a tree did end their race:/Apollo hunted Daphne so,/Only that she might laurel grow;/And Pan did after Syrinx speed,/Not as a nymph, but for a reed.”
“What wond’rous life in this I lead!/Ripe apples drop about my head;/The luscious clusters of the vine/Upon my mouth do crush their wine;/The nectarine and curious peach/Into my hands themselves do reach;/Stumbling on melons as I pass,/Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.”
“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,/Withdraws into its happiness;/The mind, that ocean where each kind/Does straight its own resemblance find,/Yet it creates,/transcending these,/Far other worlds, and other seas;/Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade.”
“Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,/Or at some fruit tree’s mossy root,/Casting the body’s vest aside,/My soul into the boughs does glide;/There like a bird it sits and sings,/Then whets, and combs its silver wings;/And, till prepar’d for longer flight,/Waves in its plumes the various light.
“Such was that happy garden-state,/While man there walk’d without a mate;/After a place so pure and sweet,/What other help could yet be meet!/But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share/To wander solitary there:/Two paradises ’twere in one/To live in paradise alone.”
“How well the skillful gard’ner drew/Of flow’rs and herbs this dial new” – (The clock) -“Where from above the milder sun/Does through a fragrant zodiac run;/And as it works, th’ industrious bee/Computes its time as well as we./How could such sweet and wholesome hours/Be reckon’d but with herbs and flow’rs!
So that’s quite something. The great line is of course – The mind – “Yet it creates, transcending these,/Far other worlds, and other seas;/Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade.”
And the meter of that is da-da da da da-da da da
“To a green thought in a green shade” . And the color there again is that holographic phanopoeia (that is that “casting an image on the mind’s eye”), but what is that “green thought in a green shade” ? – It’s just someone dozing under a tree, dreaming of other words and other scenes.
So, the other thing I like in this is “There like a bird it sits and sings/,Then whets, and combs its silver wings;/And, till prepar’d for longer flight,/Waves in its plumes the various light” – It’s a little bit like the lilt of “And all the way to guide their chime,/ With falling oars they kept the time”- That’s that pretty rhyme he’s got, that’s perfect. Well, does that make any sense to anybody?
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately seventy-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately eighty minutes in]