Jan 31, 2009
Andrew Marvell Does His Own Horny Garden
The speaker of Andrew Marvell’s 1681 poem “The Garden” explicitly exiles women from his garden, asserting that for Adam to have “live[d] in paradise alone” would have been “two paradises” “in one.” What need had Adam of a woman, he asks, ensconced in “a place so pure and sweet” as this “happy garden-state”? He derides the red and white of female genitalia in favor of the garden’s lovely green and rewrites the myths of Apollo and Daphne and Pan and Syrinx to rob the women of their wiles. In his new version, our male gods, instead of being dismayed when their female quarry transform into plant life to escape them, are eminently pleased—these men prefer plant life to Daphnes and Syrinxs:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
What need have we of these hussies, asks Marvell’s speaker, when we can be with laurels and reeds?
Although the speaker excludes women from his garden, he then—reflecting Apollo’s and Pan’s preferences for flora over females—engages in a figurative sexual intercourse with the garden itself. But he isn’t the initiator. It’s the garden that starts to get horny, dropping ripe apples about his head and throwing melons in his path. Marvell reciprocates the garden’s advances, embracing the “nectarine and curious peach” as they “[i]nto [his] hands themselves do reach” and ravenously consuming the “luscious clusters of the vine” which “upon [his] mouth do crush their wine.” Having penetrated the garden and become ecstatically “ensnared with flowers,” he finally, blissfully, falls to the grass in postcoital stupor.
wtf is thiss??? horny garden u perverts…