@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-font-kerning:1.0pt;mso-ligatures:standardcontextual;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}In the penultimate section of “The First Anniversary,” the attack on the Fifth Monarchists, Andrew Marvell develops an extended comparison of Cromwell to Noah that renders the Protectorate’s sectarian enemies “a Chammish issue.” This essay argues that this comparison is a moment of involuted, rebounded, doubled, and short-circuited racialization, at once participating in a project of early modern race-making and revealing that project to be unstable and incoherent. It thus brings premodern critical race studies into conversation with a long tradition of formal analysis of Marvell’s stylistic reversals by such critics as Christopher Ricks and John Carey to produce a new reading of Marvell’s condemnation of the Fifth Monarchists and its significance for the poem’s vision of integration into the church-state under Cromwell.

By reading the Chlora of Marvell’s “Mourning” as Mary Kirke, the married mistress of Francis Villiers, this essay utilizes Marvell’s depiction of Kirke in “A Poem Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers” as an intertext for “Mourning.” Focusing on the turn from mourning to rejoicing in both poems, it shows how Marvell’s critique of Cavalier joy in the Villiers elegy, exposing its violent narcissism and incoherent amorousness, informs a similar critique in “Mourning,” made through the figure of a weeping Chlora-Kirke. The poem critiques the Cavalier ethos by having male observers project onto the lachrymose Chlora-Kirke their own notion of lusty joy, which had lost its pretensions to military glory by 1648. Such an argument reveals the misogynistic paradox at the heart of the Cavalier ethos: adulterous relations are valorized, but women’s tears are compulsively scrutinized, so Cavalier mistresses are unable to mourn the death of their lovers even as the culture makes it seem possible. The essay concludes by suggesting that Marvell’s depiction of Chlora-Kirke’s tears in “Mourning” informs the poet’s experiments with the gendered dynamics of weeping in his Commonwealth encomia, including Upon Appleton House and The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness the Lord Protector, as he grows tired of negatively associating women with weeping.@font-face{font-family:Arial;panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073711037 9 0 511 0;}@font-face{font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-font-charset:78;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:"Lato Light";panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman";mso-font-charset:77;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-format:other;mso-font-pitch:auto;mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}p.Default, li.Default, div.Default{mso-style-name:Default;mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Lato Light","sans-serif";mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"Lato Light";color:black;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}@font-face{font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-font-charset:78;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}@font-face{font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-font-charset:78;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1791491579 18 0 131231 0;}@font-face{font-family:"Lato Light";panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;mso-font-alt:"Times New Roman";mso-font-charset:77;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-format:other;mso-font-pitch:auto;mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:auto;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-520092929 1073786111 9 0 415 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoPapDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}Reception studies of Marvell have examined his political and high-cultural legacies but neglected comparatively low-cultural prose genres such as science fiction and fantasy. Between 1950 and 2020, “To His Coy Mistress” was by far his most influential work in these realms, generating thirty-five titles—two of them including Marvell’s name, one making him a character in the story. Most treat the poem as a romance in embryo, with sublimely vast scales of time and space subtending the adventures, separations, and reunions of loved ones. In short, the Coy Mistress is thought to give in. As a group, these texts mark out a new subfield and provide a case study in reception, engaging with the poem in ways ranging from the superficial to the modest to the substantive. Implicitly treating “To His Coy Mistress” as a thought experiment not unlike those of science fiction—and sometimes even as proto-science fiction—they raise questions about intertextuality, de-metaphorization, realism, and science in both early modern and modern literature; about the survival of the former in the latter; and about the methodology of reception study itself.

This article considers ecocriticism’s reception of Andrew Marvell and suggests ways forward for thinking about Marvell and ecology. It questions ecocriticism’s commitment to a progressive framework that fulfills early modern ecocriticism’s hope that pre-Romantic literatures can demonstrate proto-ecological ethics. Instead, I argue that Marvell’s poetry intuits emergent systems and their relationships. In essence, Marvell does not herald progress but rather bears witness to a universal decline. The rift at the heart of human experience in Marvell corresponds with the splitting and suspension of the subject across vast distances, this suspension being a consequence of the historically widening divide between the site of individual agency and the material consequences of that agency. Nonetheless, natural phenomena continue to interact with the poet, attesting to the agony of the internally displaced subject and offering, as tangible connections between the human and the land, some still-unknowable hope. As such, the poetry addresses historical developments that precede modern capitalism and the corresponding emergence of presentist ecocriticism.