Marvell and an oak tree sittin' in a tre-—heyyy, wait a second… that's not right. Except that in "The Garden," it's pretty much exactly right. Our speaker is obsessed with the garden. He loves it. But is the speaker arguing that nature is a necessary escape from the real world, or that his life in the garden should become an everyday reality? And what do you make of the fact that this poem is a pastoral, and the natural world described by the poet is too perfect to exist in real life?
Questions About Man and the Natural World
- Where is the speaker when the poem begins? During the poem? When it ends?
- How does Marvell make his garden seem simultaneously natural but also ordered and comfortable?
- What makes "The Garden" a pastoral as opposed to a poem about nature? Does it have to be a pastoral? Why or why not?
Chew on This
The superiority of nature championed by the speaker is true for the specific individual in question but Marvell does not mean to say that it is true for everyone. Different strokes for different gardeners.
The passages praising nature in "The Garden" are ironic because everything the speaker is celebrating was put there by the society he condemns. We mean, doesn't he know there's a difference between a cultivated, manicured garden, something that was clearly designed by humans, and a forest? (Hint: there is.)