Today’s Poem: You, Andrew Marvell

Archibald MacLeish feels time’s wingèd chariot

J.M.W. Turner, Sunset, c. 1830 (Wikimedia Commons)

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You, Andrew Marvell

by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on . . .
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Archibald MacLeish was always clever. And the heights that cleverness allows, the limits cleverness imposes, might be measured by MacLeish’s work as a poet.

I don’t mean that as scorn. The undeniable fact is that MacLeish (1892–1982) had as successful a career as a 20th-century American man of letters could have. For that matter, “You, Andrew Marvell” is a genuinely successful poem. But it is the poem’s cleverness that catches the reader’s attention.

The cleverness begins with the title of Today’s Poem: “You, Andrew Marvell.” MacLeish expects us to hear the name “Andrew Marvell,” otherwise unmentioned in the poem, and recall Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress” — specifically the couplet: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”

Marvell was expressing the we-all-must-die motif as Time’s catching up to us, in service of urging a woman to sleep with him. But MacLeish drops the seduction and converts the wingèd chariot into the transit of the sun from east to west, as though, moving across the globe, the sun pulls forward the line that divides day from night. Time is geography, and death is night.

The 1930 poem is nine quatrains (with an extra line break inserted in the final stanza to aid the narrative’s return to the position of the speaker in the opening stanza), in tetrameter verse rhymed abab. And the speaker, lying prone at noon, his back to the sky, feels the sun — along with history, night, and death — move across his back. Ecbatan and Kermanshah are ancient Persian cities. The “edge / Of evening” then moves through Baghdad, Arabia, Palmyra, Lebanon, Crete, and Sicily. Then “Spain goes under and the shore / Of Africa . . .”

And finally “the long light on the sea,” till we reach MacLeish, feeling on his back time’s wingèd chariot in the declining sun, while “The shadow of the night comes on.”

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