I’ve heard it said, or maybe I read it somewhere, that travel is good therapy for an ailing marriage. There’s something romantic about leaving jobs, kids, and friends behind and going to some place where it’s “just us two.” “A romantic paradise,” the travel agency ads claim about almost anywhere. Travel strips us down to our ontic necessities—which is why some people don’t travel well: they need everything. For those who can get by on a toothbrush and a change of underwear, any cheap motel room can become a “bower of bliss,” an erotic Eden. Add a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine and even St. Paul would have a difficult time getting the couple to listen.
The traveling couple’s motel room is emblematic of gardens as ontic cloisters, enclosures and wardens of states of being. These gardens, they’re all over the map, from the hellish-obsessive delights of Bosch, to the sublime intellectualizing and celebratory seductions of Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam.” I can only imagine reading Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in a garden or–for a walk on the wild side–a more untamed setting. If, that is, I wanted to partake of the poem’s carpe diem effect and make hay while the sun shines. What all these gardens have in common is the protective enclosure they provide for the acting out of human desires: this is the basis of their delight.
Gardens delight because they map our desires, obsessions, and addictions: they exteriorize the undiscovered country of the unconscious. Gardens enchant because they hug the border–a border we’re always struggling to forget even as it insistently presents itself in uncontrollable growths of hair, waves of mucus, and spills of gravity-between wild and tame. Wild things like fairies, gnomes, and snakes may enter a garden and be suffered to live–and may even be expected to lead the way. Gardens are scenes of betrayal, as of Eve and Jesus, and betrothal, as of Romeo and Juliet. In the garden, language is ripped and rent even as it is constructed and channeled.
Carl Jung says that a garden is a temenos (118), “a taboo area where [we] will be able to meet with the unconscious” (54). The area is “taboo” because, like the Hebrew name of god, it is an originary mark, “the sulcus primigenius or original furrow” (ibid.), the entrance to the womb. The furrow is the transcendent mark that transforms garden into city: the walls of the city form a protective temenos (82), as do the walls of a garden. In the garden, the laws of god, of the wild, are interpreted and tempered by the will of man.
Gardens are ontic cloisters, in not only a temporal sense (they must be attended, their secrets discovered, as well as tended more mundanely) but in an a-temporal sense, implying immortality and the timelessness of death and solitude, as well. For when “all flow’rs and all trees do close” over a grave, then we have achieved the final temenos “of repose” (“The Garden,” ll. 7-8). For Marvell, the garden becomes a motel room for one, and although there is no need to read the first stanza of “The Garden” so strongly as I just did, the retirement that is properly read there does mark a kind of death: the death of the public self. Death is birth, of course, and into the protective garden emerges the self shed of “the body’s vest” (51), free of its masks of community and difference, be those Roman Catholic or Protestant, Royalist or Cromwellian.
In “The Garden,” as well as the Mower poems, Marvell celebrates death and the meeting with the unconscious. He does this in one of two ways. Here, in “The Garden,” it is a celebration of celibacy and solitude that wins the day, while in the Mower poems, it is erotic death, betrothal followed by betrayal, that rules the roost. The Mower poems are priapic, a celebration of the god Priapus’s “pleasure in what is natural, earthy, bawdy and lusty” (Sebrell 75). In “The Garden,” however, Marvell has discovered “a magic circle” that has been “mark[ed] off” by a strongly implied “snake” (Jung 81). In stanza 5, with its edenic fruits—“apples,” “clusters of the vine,” “[t]he nectarine, and curious peach,” as well as “melons”—the poet, “[s]tumbling,” takes a fortunate tumble into a desireless state where, “[e]nsnared with flowers,” he lands “on grass” (34-40). The snake, as a hidden or undiscovered aspect of the Self, acts as a sort of uncaused cause in the poem, such that the fruits of the garden “Into my hands themselves do reach” (38).
The ontic cloister provides “delicious solitude” against “rude” “Society” (16, 15). If for no other reason, Society is “rude,” and rude here has the sense of “unfinished,” as if a carpenter has left his cabinets unsanded and the housewife gets splinters every time she goes for jam, because all work is in vain: “How vainly men themselves amaze / To win the palm, the oak, or bays,” but despite their best efforts, time “Does prudently their toils upbraid” and time’s insistent leafage over them “do[es] close” (1-2, 6-7). The jungle overgrows all marks of man, and in the end (or anyway, before long) “No name” but that of the garden primeval “shall… be found” upon the “barks” of the trees (24, 23). Se secluded, so isolated is this garden that the gods themselves become trees (stanza 4). Indeed, after “Annihilating all that’s made” all that is left is “a green thought in a green shade” (47-48).
In this extreme solitude, the self, the poet, becomes hermaphroditic. He is transformed from one who “there walked without a mate” (58) to one who is composed of “Two paradises… in one” (63), and is thus able to thrive “in paradise alone” (64). The poem’s “other,” its interlocutor, is the poet’s Self becoming the divested “soul” (51-52)—for “What other help could yet be meet” (60)? From the “fountain’s sliding foot” (49) the “soul into the boughs does glide” (52) and makes ready for a “longer flight” (55). A longer flight—not to where but into when, for “sacred plants” (13), such as “herbs and flowers” (72), tell time better than humans, better even than the bees. We tell the bees everything important, or so goes an old folk custom, and here in the garden the logic becomes clear: the bees are our equals, they “Compute… time as well as we” (70). But Marvell’s self is moving beyond time; the poet is stepping off the great wheel of being. The poet has demanded “Stop the world, I want to get off,” and so he does, “To live in paradise alone” (64).
Works Cited
Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen/Princeton U. Press, Princeton, 1968.
Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Story Donno. Penguin, New York, 1972.
Sebrell, C.L. “Marry the Gardener!” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture. No. 60 (Fall 1996), pp. 75-82.
