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the line for contemplation, may have been not an evasion but a gesture of aesthetic responsibility. Two centuries later another English poet, Matthew Arnold, would argue that a society in the process of rapid change needed at least a few voices prepared to step back from the immediate call to ‘lend a hand at uprooting certain definite evils’ 9 and to reflect, not as a means of shaking off their responsibilities to act, but to allow the sort of profound critical reflection that would make subsequent acting more effective. It has been suggested that the characteristic motion of a Metaphysical poem is to create images or conceits that juxtapose apparently discordant things (‘The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,’ complained Dr Johnson in his Life of Cowley ). 10 It is possible – but also possibly too fanciful – to suggest that a society riven by war and unexpected violence might prompt an objective correlative in poetic technique, an attempt at the level of art to manage these disturbing dislocations.
    At a more immediate level, a country in the grip of civil war, with its constant demand to take sides, to resolve issues by declaring one’s wholehearted support for this or that faction, might prompt the artist to reassert a notion of poetry as something other than propaganda for one or other faction, to recover the sense of it implicit in Wallace Stevens’s assertion: ‘The poem is the cry of its occasion.’ Complexities of this kind, issues of artistic principle and conscience, would have run through Marvell’s mind as he approached the subject of treating the most powerful man in the mid-seventeenth-century state.
    Marvell’s great poem, as its title clearly signals, is modelled on the Odes of Horace, perhaps the most potent single influence on a poet saturated in Latinity. The classical precedent gave the poem a ready-made shape, a stock of usable images, a framework of decorum, that a skilled poet like Marvell could use as a starting point to launch his own individual variations. The poem has a dramatic structure that allows the contradictions of Cromwell’s career to be held up for examination and contrasted with those of his opponents. Unlike Marvell’s later, and lesser, poems on Cromwell, it does not consist of statement. The Horatian precedent also helped Marvell to attain some distance and avoid the risk of sycophancy or servile praise of the regime.
    The very opening lines of the poem refer, in characteristically Marvellian fashion, to the tension between the contemplative and the active life, the need for even the learned young scholar to ‘forsake his Muses dear’ and take up arms. Cromwell too, the country gentleman from the Fens, had to abandon his ‘private Gardens, where/He liv’d reserved and austere,/As if his highest plot/To plant the Bergamot’ to fulfil his destiny. Marvell represents him as a natural force, uncheckable like a thunderbolt:
    So restless Cromwel could not cease
    In the inglorious Arts of Peace,
    But through adventrous War
    Urged his active Star.
    And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first
    Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
    Did thorough his own Side
    His fiery way divide.
    After this, all Cromwell’s actions are seen as inevitable, righteous, ordained by a historical necessity to ‘cast the Kingdome old/Into another Mold’ in spite of the pleas of constitutional monarchists – which Marvell might have been at heart – that the ‘antient Rights’ were a prohibition against regicide. In the most morally unattractive passage of the poem, Cromwell is shown as the embodiment of a principle that might is right, a seventeenth-century Stalin. Just as nature abhors a vacuum so everything must cede to Cromwell’s exerted power, because it is power, and ‘must make room/Where greater Spirits come’. Yet these lines are immediately followed by a