Andrew Marvell: 400 Years On Angela Leighton (2006)
Oli Sharpe
Angela Leighton (2006) describes her creative response to the 400th anniversary of the birth of Andrew Marvell. 31 March 2021 is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Andrew Marvell (1621–78), poet and politician, onetime student at Trinity, friend and secretary to Milton, ambivalent supporter of Cromwell, diplomat and possible spy, and for nearly twenty years, MP for Hull – to put a complex and sometimes mysterious life in a nutshell.
We know that Marvell was accepted as a sub-sizar, the lowest denomination of student who would have worked for his board and fees by carrying out menial tasks for other students or Fellows. We know that he took his BA four years later having been awarded a scholarship. We also know that for some mysterious reason he was required to leave in 1641 before taking his MA, either because he was not ‘keeping his days’ in residence, or for some more heinous crime, for which the records are missing. But it was another event of that same year which intrigued me. I had long known Marvell’s great love, or rather seduction, poem, ‘To his Coy Mistress’, and the section beginning ‘I by the tide / Of Humber would complain’ ‒ lines that haunted me as I mulled and prevaricated. But it was the knowledge that, in January 1641, his father drowned crossing the Humber estuary on a barrow boat, and that his body was never found, which became the seed of what I would write. I wondered if being ‘by’ that tide could be entirely innocent, and I began to imagine the elegy Marvell might have written, about the father whose death left him an orphan, largely penniless, and perhaps contributed to whatever
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When I was asked to contribute a poem about Marvell to a new collection, I was deeply unsure. Commissioned poems often don’t work, and in any case I was not a Marvell scholar. But something gave me pause. I knew Marvell’s home city well, having taught in Hull for many years; I had visited the sixteenthcentury brick grammar school which he attended as a boy and where his father was Master; I had taken the same route south to Cambridge on the old Roman road (Ermine Street), and of course I’d come to the College he also attended, at the surprisingly young age of twelve. Great Court and Nevile’s Court would have looked much as they do now, but without the Wren Library.
