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This article describes a Marvellian spirituality that remains generally continuous despite an evolving theological outlook. It contends that Marvell’s poetry dramatizes the persistence of Original Sin within vulnerable and impermanent green enclosures; thus, the subject must always return to an inexorable history and materiality in which spirituality is grounded. The article considers Marvell’s skepticism and unusual conception of eschatological time, these being informed by the Book of Ecclesiastes. For Marvell, meditation on history remains bound up not only with spirituality but also with sensory perception — in particular, with the optical and tactile senses of water. The article concludes with a comparative analysis, of Marvell’s “Eyes and Tears” and Richard Crashaw’s “The Weeper,” that redefines Marvell as a deliberately anti-metaphysical poet.

This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Marvell Studies, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

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Scholarly approaches to Milton's interest in drama have missed how theater represents for Milton the ethical challenge of negotiating poetic identity with a reading and viewing public. This article locates Milton's Lady within complementary discursive contexts that efface female agency through either virulent anti-feminism associated with theater or dualistic idealizations that elevate the soul while denigrating the agential body. The Maske 's staging of an emergent woman imperiled by the visual and discursive field is in part a test case for a public poetry. By way of the "Maske of Cupid" in Faerie Queene 3, Milton constructs Sabrina's paradoxical function as "uncontrouled worth" enabling the paralyzed Lady by offering a spectacle of an inviolably chaste body that can enter social circulation and work to reform it while evading its distorting power. Nonetheless, Sabrina's ghostly ephemerality and the evident constraints on the Lady's agency suggest why public drama for Milton henceforth would be indefinitely deferred but never staged.