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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

As in Tasso’s text, Marvell’s description of the pleasures of the green
world, his a empt to convince himself and his audiences of the pleas-
ures away from the struggles of the city, cannot stay in the moment of
release; his images turn rapidly into moral abstractions. “The Mind”
quickly slips ideas behind or alongside sense images:

Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade. 12

The mind transcends by withdrawing, and nothing remains of the sense
pleasures except a green shade. Frank Kermode, in 1952, pointing to
this reversal, called the poem an anti-pastoral, noting that it fails to
achieve the escape, the innocent simplicity it praises at the start. Citing
different sources, Geoffrey Hartman, in 1970, agreed that the poem fails
to remain at peace with the sensual pleasures it offers; it can’t help con-
verting its sense images to symbols. This toggle is true of many non-
pastoral texts as well: most lyric poems manifest this basic aspect of
brain function, making clear that the concrete imagery of poetry in all
genres is turned easily into ideas and ideals. It is normal brain function
that encourages this. Terence Cave’s breakthrough was crucial. In his
1988 study, Recognitions, he describes a specific and recurrent rhetorical
trope, anagnorisis, that resolves the plot complications of pastoral ro-
mances, allowing the lovers to be united, but at the same time keeps the
story from ending on a note of pure sensuality. Think of Longus’ Daph-
nis and Chloe, or Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and Cymbeline:
after evils and errors, mistaken identities, intended and unintended de-

12 Stephen Greenbla , ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed,
(New York: Norton, 2006), 1711.

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