Analysis Of Marvell s An Elegy Upon The Death Of My...

Marvell s earliest surviving verses lead to no conclusions about his religion and politics as a student. Two of his works were published in 1637 by Cambridge poets in honor of the birth of the first child of Charles I. One of the poems was in Greek while the other Ad Regem Carolum Parodia in Latin, the latter of which is considered to be a parody of Horace’s Odes 1.2 in language, structure and meter. Marvell praises the grandeur and fertility of the King in the wake of the plague in Cambridge in 1636, mirroring Horace’s hails of Agustus as the saviour during the flood of Tiber. Marvell’s Greek piece, on the other hand, claims that the birth of the King’s fifth child had exonerated the number five of all ill omens sincethere had been many attempts to assassinate James I on 5 August 1600 and 5 November 1605. An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers was first published in the H. M. Margoliouth edition (1927) from an apparently unique pamphlet left to the Worcester College Library by George Clarke (1660-1736) with an ascription of the poem to Marvell in Clarke s hand. Villiers (1629-1648), posthumous son of the assassinated royal favorite George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, died in a skirmish against Parliamentary forces. Here Marvell bemoans not just the death of a Royalist, but makes a martyr of a Royalist killed in military action against the revolutionary government. Fame had Much rather told How heavy Cromwell gnasht the earth and fell. / Or how