Marvell, the Dutch, and (Bodily) Union with Scotland

• In Event: Marvell II: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics in Marvell

Abstract

In Last Instructions, Marvell agonizes over the court’s excesses and misplaced priorities, which have, in effect, displaced the English from their island. Marvell implies that the English countryside remains mired in stasis. Invasion of England was inevitable as the people’s sense of their topography was incommensurate with modern practices. The Dutch, though, have a keen sense of their land, for they have to resettle it repeatedly to recover from floods and painstakingly gain land from the sea. I argue that Marvell depicts the Netherlands as a model to reorient the British. In this essay I describe the ways in which Marvell suggests reterritorializing England to foster national identity by attuning the English to the interconnections among biological, ecological, and political systems.

Author

• Denys Walter Van Renen, University of Nebraska–Kearney