Having reached the end of this brief introduction to Marvell, I must now partially repair my neglect of several marvellous poems, some of which are different enough from those discussed in the preceding chapters as to complicate Marvell's image still further. I would not, of course, want my redefinition of Marvell's achievements and preoccupations to divert readers away from the poems that are still most frequently anthologized, most likely to be taught, most fought over in rival interpretations, merely because I believe T. S. Eliot was mistaken in his estimate of what was ‘really valuable’ in Marvell's canon.

In fact, my delay in reaching these poems may have been beneficial, since all of the foregoing should help to explain, if never satisfactorily to define, the unique mixture of precision and mystery which has made certain poems so much the object of critical desire. The question of whether they are the most characteristic of his peculiar talents or, by other standards, slightly eccentric, off-duty, as it were, can now give place to the less tendentious question of whether we can understand them better in the context of his whole career. Take, for instance, the enigmatic sadomasochism of ‘The Unfortunate Lover’, with its mother ‘split against the Stone, | In a Cesarian Section’, and her bleeding son transformed into heraldry: ‘In a Field Sable a Lover Gules’; the surrealism of the poem's account of the lover's heroic struggle with forces beyond his control is more intelligible as the imagination's response to the civil war than as a formal exercise in emblematics, not to mention a ‘real’ love poem (which would have to be homoerotic). The paradox of the Unfortunate Lover is that there is no relationship mentioned or even figured in the poem, and his solitariness as the centre of the storm, the eye of the hurricane, is what makes his suffering heroic. Who, then, speaks of him as ‘my poor lover’, the reader must inquire, and, deprived of any basis for a commonsense answer, begin to wonder about other kinds of meanings.