Marvell Against Mourning

Andrew Marvell has several poems about “mourning” to his credit, most notably his funeral elegies for Francis Villiers, Henry Hastings, and Oliver Cromwell, which memorialize the deceased by deploying tropes of bereavement, grief, and consolation––that is, the stuff of elegy. Curiously, his short lyric “Mourning,” while likewise steeped in elegiac signifiers, scarcely traffics in the work of mourning. Instead, the poem acknowledges an alternative paradigm of mourning, shaped not by a psychoanalytic narrative of loss and restitution but by visually arresting permutations of the tear. The work of “Mourning,” thus rendered, is to measure the sincerity of a woman’s grief based on the quality of her tears, the volume and opacity of which make this work often seem a fool’s errand. In this paper I suggest that modern and contemporary discourses of memorial and elegy, which are marked chiefly by resistance to the consolatory imperative, may serve as a useful framework for seeing how Marvell treats the situation of grief in “Mourning”. Specifically, I look to the concept of “anti-mourning” as developed by the art historian Margaret Iversen, who in turn bases her formulation on Roland Barthes’s photographic theory of the studium and punctum. Anti-mourning, in its stress on leaving open the wound of melancholia, on resisting figurative and compensatory consolations, has useful implications for Marvell’s poem. It can help us understand the poem not as a case study in hermeneutic futility––or worse, casual misogyny––but rather as a pointed, elegant critique of the symbolic order of elegy.