＂새로운 해시계＂로서 정원 바라보기:『정원』에 나타난 역설

Abstract

As with many of his poems, Andrew Marvell puts forward his point of view and then argues it logically in “The Garden.” This study aims to analyze various paradoxes implied in the logics of the poet. Located in a paradise of delights, the poet in the garden contemplates nature, society, fall, and Adam. The scene of “The Garden” is one of leisure and nature’s fecundity, but most of all, of solitude. The beginning of the “The garden” seems to take up a seamless argument that the leisured enjoyment of nature should be preferred to the futility of human labor. In the first four stanzas, the virtues of the garden are proved through comparison with the pleasures of the world of men. However, the tone of the poet makes it unclear as to whether the poet really shares the same views. As the poet compares the two worlds, the poet seems rather to fully inhabit neither of these worlds like a bird on a bough, which is poised between the white light of eternity and the varieties of color that light assumes in the creation, and the poet's praise of the garden is mitigated. Though the poetry begins with an assurance that being in the garden and away from other people is the best way to live, the second stanza plays wittily on the plants as virtues and on the old paradox that solitude is more pleasantly companionable than company. The poet even insists an odd paradox that trees are more amours than the loved lady. However, the amorous pleasures are not rejected in the garden, but merely take a different and decidedly unusual object: fair trees. This conceit provides the poem with its finest display of wit and also disrupts the poet’s credibility by introducing elements that make “The Garden” a poem impossible to read straight. When the poet addresses the pleasures of the body, the mind and the soul as they are gratified in the garden, negative elements are implied in his praise. In the end, the poet calls the garden a new kind of sundial which reckons hours much more sweet and wholesome. Its face consists of flowers and herb, which yield sweetness and light. However, flowers and herbs are transient, quickly sagging plants, unsustainable through seasons. The tone of the poem, the ridiculousness of its drunkenly stumbling poet, and implied paradoxes deflate the desirability of so perfect a withdrawal from the human world and make this poetry seriously witty and playfully philosophical.