World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray Page A

personal blow but also an omen for the future. Presumably Marvell and his friends at the centre of the administration would have made their calculations. In the wake of the fall of a strong political leader, powerful undercurrents start to run. The Royalists, waiting in the wings, would have taken heart. Doubts about the ability of Cromwell’s son Richard to take over would surface. Almost a year to the day after entering government service, Marvell’s patron had been whisked away, and the future, suddenly, would look less hopeful. New political masters might want to install their own civil servants and his past associations might tell against him. In spite of those alliances, at heart he was not a revolutionary and would, in an ideal world, have chosen the path of supporting a constitutional monarchy. He could live with a restoration, but would it want to live with him?
    Whatever his thoughts about his personal prospects, Marvell must have known that a panegyric would be expected of him. From the poem that emerged it seems likely that he needed no external prompting, for it is one of the few from Marvell’s hand that contains any expression of direct, personal feeling. It was almost certainly written in the immediate aftermath of Cromwell’s death because a volume of tributes, including Marvell’s, was entered in the Stationers’ Register by the publisher Henry Herringman on 20 January 1659. It was called simply ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’.
    Once again the Cromwell of this poem is represented as the reluctant actor who would have preferred a quiet life but whom ‘angry Heaven unto War had sway’d’. It recounts, in dignified, moving couplets, the known public events leading up to his death, including the death of his daughter and his love of her and the presaging storm of the night before his death. His victories at Dunbar in 1650 and Worcester in 1651 – both of which shared the date of his death, 3 September – are recalled. Marvell’s fatalism has already been noted. It was a complex thing that resulted in a tendency both to defer to the present power (first Cromwell, then Charles II) and to justify apparent shifts in allegiance (though, of course, Marvell became part of the Parliamentary Opposition to Charles, even if he did not challenge his kingship) by arguing that it was not his business to challenge the legitimacy of rulers. Loyalism rather than consistency was his standard of value. Thus, Cromwell is seen once again as an inevitable force, blessed by the stars, and, through the pathetic fallacy, his death marked by the sympathetic natural elements:
    O Cromwell, Heavens Favorite! To none
    Have such high honours from above been shown:
    For whom the Elements we Mourners see,
    And Heav’n it self would the great Herald be;
    This is, of course, a public funeral elegy and a certain excess of praise is demanded by the genre. Copious allusions to classical models such as Virgil’s Georgics abound and Cromwell is celebrated in terms that suggest that his valour exceeds anything in the Arthurian legends and his piety that of Edward the Confessor. His sanctioning of religious war is approved (‘He first put Armes into Religions hand’) and his magnanimity is asserted. Towards the end of the poem a more personal note enters (‘All, all is gone of ours or his delight’), suggesting that the poet is writing from personal and intimate knowledge of Cromwell. Not in the remotest sense a confessional poet, Marvell here nonetheless lets his personal emotions show at last:
    I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes,
    And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes:
    Those gentle rays under the lids were fled,
    Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed;
    That port which so majestique was and strong,
    Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along:
    All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan.
    How much another thing, no more than