앤드류 마블과 시적 상상력

Abstract

During his career as a poet, Marvell has struggled to create poetic imagination like other seventeenth-century poets. In a poem "On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost," Marvell hints at his devoted application of Milton's imaginative heights and depths to the composition of his own ambitious poetry. Poetic inspiration is the most important issue that should be tackled to dvance his lyrics to lofty and sublime poetry. Marvell enters a garden to build up the capacity of the poetic imagination through reflecting and imitating the garden as a typical embodiment of Nature. The garden represents those physical, mental and spiritual levels of apprehension that function harmoniously as an integrated mode of consecrated enlightenment essential for poetic imagination. In the garden Marvell hopes that problems of excessive desires and the tension of binary opposition can be solved, because these conflicts are two main obstacles to poetic inspiration and its proper workings. In the process of purifying destructive desires and establishing an organic relationship between wholeness and fragmentation, Marvell, turning into a soul-bird, successfully takes his imaginative flights into Paradise before the Fall. Even though he discovers original imagination and its powerful creativity that God or Adam employed in Eden, Marvell is aware that he can stay there only temporarily in imagination due to the intangibility and impracticality of Paradise. On this point Marvell experiences the realistic and perfect garden in the center of which a floral sundial is located as God the skillful Gardener designs and creates. In this garden the industrious bee produces honey of providing energy in the harmonious interaction with the “fragrant Zodiac” of flowers. The work of the bee is productive and wholesome in that it is progressed self-sufficiently with the time of the sundial. The fulfilling activities of God and bee can be understood as models of Marvell's attempts to complete his poetic imagination. God's downward flight and the bee's horizontal flight paradoxically can help Marvell soar toward heaven and its divine embodiment of imagination. Marvell might succeed in his imaginative adventurous flight as Milton did. However, Marvell recognizes that embers of his desire are still smoldering and that the duality of part and whole, soul and body, is waiting for him in the society outside the garden. Here lies Marvel's anxiety in restoring the lack of poetic imagination: all that he can do is just “wav[ing] in its plumes the various light” with the preparation for a “longer flight.”