ENG 111W Hesoid, Webb Marvell Poems PDF

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Stephen Collis...

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HESIOD’S WORKS AND DAYS -

A Greek poem written around 700 BCE.

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it is a sort of farmer’s almanac—a poem of agricultural instruction and advice for leading the good life. Rural life is not really idealized here, in this forerunner of pastoral poetry; it is simply assumed to be the norm.

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He imagines a Golden Age as a time when “men lived like gods,” “untroubled by work and woe.” “All they did was take pleasure in festivities.”

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In the iron age: “Zeus will destroy the age of humans.” And what does this destruction look like? “Justice for them is nothing but the fist, / and so one man destroys another man’s city”—a world where it is “Better to be doers of evil deeds and lawless violence,” “But if justice lies in the fist, then shameless / is what they shall always be.

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Pastoral poems written between 42 and 37 BCE, during a very turbulent time in Roman history—a time of civil war, the end of the Roman Republic, and the birth of the Roman Empire.

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“A new begetting now descends from Heaven’s height”—“look with blessing on the boy / Whose birth will end the iron race at last and raise / A golden through the world.” And what does this new golden age consist of? Plenty and leisure.

Golden Age -

Utopian thought tends to be secular, but it has roots in spiritual visions of Eden and Paradise—of better worlds in the past, or possibly still in the future.

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The “good place” is not of this world, but of a world to come, after death

PLATO’S REPUBLIC (380 BCE) -

An attempt to theorize an ideal (he says “just”) “republic.” Plato focuses mostly on education: how to train the best leaders or “guardians” of the people. They should be trained equally in mind and body, women and men the same; wives and children would be shared, and no private property held amongst the “guardians.”

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What Plato bequeaths to the intellectual tradition is the notion that human society can and should be organized rationally, governed by ideas of perfection, with everyone harmoniously fulfilling their designated role. Plato also notes that all known forms of government—oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny—ultimately fail and collapse. Some new form is needed, one based on reason and order, peace and prosperity.

Poetic Gardens:Webb & Marvell The orderly garden -

A vision of the garden as “an ideal order: caring patriarchs, producing an order in the face of potential chaos” (Adrian Franklin, Nature and Social Theory 174).

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In the orderly garden, the human built world and the natural world meet, and are seen to form a carefully structured whole.

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The garden, for an early modern English writer like Marvell, would inevitably hearken back to the Garden of Eden—a time of peace, ease, and unity with god. A time before the Fall.

Thomas More on Utopian gardening: -

“They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have both vines, fruits, herbs and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered and so finely kept that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so fruitful and so beautiful” (77).

An essay on Webb and Marvell: Phyllis Webb’s poem “Marvell’s Garden” is a direct response to the seventeenth century poet Andrew Marvell’s poem, “The Garden.” Webb’s speaker repeatedly refers to a “contradiction” they feel, as they are both repelled by, and attracted to, the ideal garden described in Marvell’s poem. Marvell’s garden is one of a particularly male, patriarchal “solitude,” imagining a perfect Garden of Eden state, before the creation of Eve, when Adam presumably was closest to God. Webb, a twentieth century poet of a more feminist (not to mention secular) sensibility, responds by leaving male, patriarchal figures “outside” her garden walls. But Webb does not offer a simple rejection of Marvell’s patriarchy. In this paper I will explore Webb’s complex response to Marvell, noting that what she winds up articulating is a state of irresolvable “contradiction” that, in the end, is characteristic of the female poet’s position historically....