When Andrew Marvell wrote “The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector” in late 1654 or early 1655, a little more than a year after Cromwell established the Protectorate, he faced a thorny rhetorical problem: in what political—and, by extension, in what literary—terms should he praise Cromwell? Britain, like other European monarchies, had a strong tradition of royal panegyric, which had reached a fever pitch under Charles I. But Cromwell could not simply be depicted as a king by another name. Instead, Marvell had to find a way to celebrate Cromwell as a figure who was monarchical but not a monarch, princely but not a dynastic ruler. From beginning to end, the poem is shaped around this perplexity. Cromwell “seems a king by long succession born, / And yet the same to be a king does scorn.”1

Nearly four centuries after Marvell wrote, the poet’s problem has become the critics’. As usual with this slippery writer, it is easier to identify the literary dilemmas that structure his work than to come to any agreement about how, or indeed if, he resolved them. Recognizing the impossibility of arriving at a settled interpretation of Marvell’s Cromwell at the turn of the last millennium, Joad Raymond attempted to resolve the poem’s ambiguities in a different way, by displacing Cromwell from its center.2 After all, Raymond pointed out, the subject of the poem’s title was not actually the Lord Protector, but rather the government of the Lord Protector, which Raymond took to mean The Instrument of Government, England’s new constitution. “The poem,” Raymond writes elsewhere, “is not a panegyric for Cromwell.”3 His discussion, grounded in a minute knowledge of the debates surrounding the Instrument of Government and the Cromwellian Protectorate, demonstrated how Marvell’s poem mirrored and refracted the rhetorical contests of the moment. But his attempt to square the poem’s hermeneutic circle by framing it around the government, rather than its leader, was less successful. Cromwell is too evidently at the heart of “The First Anniversary” to be excised. The poem may not be only a panegyric for Cromwell, but it surely is one.

No wonder, then, that Raymond’s analysis, for all its brilliance, did little to stem the flow of interpretations. In the quarter of a century since he wrote, other scholars have proposed various solutions to the poem’s central dilemma. My purpose in this essay, however, is not to resolve the ambiguity in Marvell’s treatment of Cromwell. Instead, I seek to provide it with an essential context, so far missing from discussions of the poem, and indeed from wider discussions of seventeenth-century poetry. Like Raymond, I find a vital clue to that context in the poem’s title. What kind of panegyric is Marvell’s “The First Anniversary”? One answer, like Poe’s purloined letter, has long hidden in plain sight: the poem is precisely what it claims to be, an anniversary—that is, a commemorative poem originally associated with the anniversary of deaths, but gradually taking on a wider application. What this means, to begin with, is that we have been reading the poem’s title wrong. We have been understanding it in analogy to lyrics such as “The Garden,” “Bermudas,” or “Eyes and Tears,” which give us the poem’s subject. But we should be reading it in parallel to “A Dialogue Between Soul and Body,” “Edmundi Trotii Epitaphium” and above all, “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” in which both the type—dialogue, epitaph, and ode—and subject of the poem are part of the title. In contrast to lyric, including the poem’s genre in the title is typical of public poetry. In particular, poems that are likely to circulate on their own—like “The First Anniversary”—often announce their genre to the public, orienting readers who might encounter them without other context. To understand the poem, then, we have to understand the anniversary in both literary and chronological terms. Calling attention to this largely forgotten literary genre is part of the purpose of this essay.

One dimension of the poem, in particular, comes into relief when “The First Anniversary” is understood as an anniversary: its attitude toward historical time. As virtually all of its commentators have observed, the poem engages in what is, even for the horologically obsessed Marvell, an extraordinarily dynamic and multifaceted representation of time, which organizes its opening and conclusion, as well as many of its most memorable lines. As John M. Wallace remarked long ago, the unity of the component parts of “The First Anniversary” is “assured not only by their relation to Cromwell but by their preoccupation with time.”4 The poem’s politics and its temporality are inextricable: Marvell was supremely conscious that he wrote at a revolutionary historical juncture when rival political agendas gave rise to competing visions of the past and future. Was England to remain within the cycles of dynastic rule that had defined its history and guaranteed continuity between past and present? Or was it to launch into the uncharted waters of a modernity defined by the unknown and unknowable character of a progressive future? Nothing less was at issue. In the anniversary, he found a genre and occasion that allowed him to explore the implications of this question.

The reason for this is embedded in the genre: as an “anniversary,” the poem adapts a form that is oriented to an older mode of chronology organized around persons and regnal dates to the new, more linear historical and chronological modes emerging in the modern era with the advent of “homogeneous, empty time,” in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase.5 To celebrate a figure such as Cromwell, at once a historical force and a human being, the two modes must be bridged, but their tensions cannot be fully resolved. But that is not a mark of failure. On the contrary, these tensions are part of the poem’s enduring interest, for while they emerge from Marvell’s revolutionary political moment, their implications extend well outside it. One of the major functions of literature in modernity has been the imperfect negotiation between an experience of time based on human lives and life cycles—our own sense of the world—and an impersonal, progressive chronology based on the numerical succession of dates. Marvell shows how, and when, literature began to take on this role.

Anniversaries: From Word to Genre

To understand the genre of the anniversary poem, we have to begin with the history of the word. “Anniversary” was imported into English from the Latin “anniversarium,” but prior to its introduction into the vernacular, it had undergone an important modification. In antiquity, the word was not a noun but an adjective simply meaning annual. The Romans, of course, had annual celebrations: as Denis Feeney has shown, Rome was a calendrical culture, shaped deeply by Caesar’s calendrical reform; as a result, the Roman “anniversary mentality is surprisingly rich and far-reaching.”6 They certainly had anniversary poetry, as readers of Ovid’s poem Fasti will be aware. But the Romans used other words, such as dies natalis, birthday, to describe their annual commemorations. An “anniversary” became an event, and a noun, only in the medieval era, when it came to refer to masses and rituals to commemorate the anniversaries of deaths.7 From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, masses in commemoration of the dead remained the word’s primary sense. In Catholic countries, an anniversarium was still an annual mass for the dead in early modernity: Alfonso Pérez de Lara’s De Anniversariis et Capellaniis (1610), for example, was a treatise on masses for dead patrons and chaplaincies.8

When the word “anniversary” passed into English, it initially tended to refer to such masses. Writing in 1565, the English Cardinal and Counter-Reformation polemicist William Allen complained that Protestants believed that the Catholic Church “inuented Anniuersaries, monthes mindes, and yearly offeringes, for theire own gayne.”9 Even when the word began to be used more loosely, especially by Protestant writers, its history shaped the word’s meaning. By the time Thomas North translated Plutarch as writing, “the PLATAEIANS bounde them selues yearely to kepe solemne sacrifices and anniuersaries for the soules of the GREECIANS that were slaine in their territories,” the word’s usage had clearly broadened.10 But it was still applied in a kind of analogy with the medieval mass, merely substituting the rituals for the dead of one civilization with those of another. Throughout the sixteenth century, the commemoration of the dead remained the word’s primary signification, and it can be seen in this use well into the seventeenth century.

At the same time, the word was slowly acquiring new, interrelated senses, as its meaning began to encompass other annual events. Most important among these were coronations. It is easy to see why the term moved from one kind of observance to the other, for the two kinds of anniversaries overlapped. Like the commemoration of deaths, the anniversaries of coronations focused on the life cycle or career of a particular individual, and since one monarch succeeded another only after death, they were timed to mortality. They were also cyclical, recurrent events, beginning again with every new monarch or with every new year. Together, they formed the two central modes of premodern dating, since the timing of events was routinely understood in relation to regnal years and ritual years. Prior to the late Middle Ages, virtually no one used A.D. dates routinely; their widespread adoption began only with the Renaissance. Even then, as J.R.R. McConnel observes, though the early modern elite were beginning to date their letters and documents with the day, month, and year, “dates still played a limited role in most ordinary people’s lives as late as the eighteenth century. Instead, time was given tangible meaning through the festivals and rites of the ritual calendar.”11 All dating thus relied on synchronizing one notable event with another: a battle with the accession of a king; a marriage with the martyrdom of a saint. To situate something in time was to connect it with some other moment of significance. “Every chronological statement,” David Asheri writes, “is, in a sense, a synchronism.”12 Above all, it meant synchronizing a given event with the history of persons and their lives. When men and women used the regnal year to date laws or chronicles, or the ritual year to date events in their own lives, they implicitly relied on biography and the life cycle as temporal measures.13 In premodern Europe, even A.D. dates, tracing their point of origin to the birth of Christ, could fall under this description. One indication of how much human meaning the A.D. dating system retained through the Renaissance is the fact that it did not apply, even in reverse, to the pre-Christian era, for B.C. dates did not come into use until the seventeenth century, following proposals in the French Jesuit scholar Denis Pétau’s 1627 Opus de doctrina temporum.14 Instead, they were dated with reference to the multiple, overlapping schemes that the Greeks and Romans had used themselves. It was only gradually, as dates came to seem more like a neutral numerical system, unspooling evenly and inexorably across a universal time, that it became easy to apply them to divergent periods, subsuming the whole globe—past, present, and future—within a single dating system.15

The literary form of the anniversary emerged from, and participated in, premodern schemes of chronology centered on persons. Most obviously, it arose from the ritual anniversary of the death. In the sixteenth century, the “anniversarium” poem was part of the vast, complicated set of elegiac microgenres that shaped so much of the period’s occasional writing.16 Unlike elegiac forms written immediately following the death, it was written a year after the death of its subject, or else produced repetitively for multiple years after a death, and this temporal orientation changed its emphasis. According to Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices Libri Septem, it was identical to an epitaph with one exception: it omitted the mourning, “because no one, indeed, mourns the dead after a year or two years.”17 The anniversarium was thus a particularly potent form of panegyric. Scaliger did not mention the analogy to the anniversary mass, but his readers would hardly have needed to be reminded, for this was still the word’s primary sense. As the genre passed into English, its meaning, like that of the word “anniversary,” would also become more diffuse. But, again like the word, it would long remain intermeshed with an older chronological model, in which the experience of time was understood in relation to significant events rather than to numbers, and in which the recurrent benchmarks of the life cycle played a shaping role.

Donne and the English Anniversary

It was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that the anniversary became a genre of English verse. The first printed poems to use the title in English are still the most famous: Donne’s Anniversaries, his daring, outrageous elegies for the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Drury, the only child of his patron Sir Robert Drury. The only major poems Donne put into print in his lifetime, the Anniversaries were among his signature achievements. They had an even wider reach than his exceptionally widely circulated manuscript verse; even after his poetic corpus was printed, they were among his most notable poems not only because they showcased his characteristic wit, but also because they set out a literary path for other poets. Writing after Donne’s death, Jasper Mayne sought to “To weepe lines, learned, as thy Anniverse,” proposing the Anniversaries as the only fitting model for the poet’s own elegy.18

It is true that when the first of the two poems was published in 1611, it was not initially presented as an anniversary. It was, rather, an anatomy, “The Anatomy of the World,” and in keeping with the genre, it offered a witty dissection of the fate of a fallen world after the departure of the young Elizabeth.19 It was only a year later, with the publication of the “Second Anniversary” in 1612, that it was printed as an anniversary, much as the First World War received its name only with the outbreak of its sequel. Yet the term “anniversary,” understood as a generic classification as well as title, was not just a later addition to the poem. The first readers could easily perceive that it was a poem of praise in commemoration of the dead Drury, meant to be repeated annually. As Donne writes,

Accept this tribute, and his first year’s rent

Who till his dark, short taper’s end be spent,

As oft as thy feast sees this widowed earth,

Will yearly celebrate thy second birth,

That is, thy death; (447–451)20

That is, from the start, the poem promised the annual renewal of its “tribute.” It was also singularly concerned with timing. By making “thy feast,” that is, the feast day of St. Elizabeth, the occasion of the poem’s repetition, Donne shifted the date away from Drury’s actual death. Instead, he chose to draw attention to its connection to the ritual calendar and, implicitly, the ceremonies that had long defined the year in Catholic Europe.

The “Second Anniversary” took up the relationship between Donne’s poem and the masses of a Catholic past more directly. Alluding to his residence with the Drurys in France, Donne writes,

Here in a place where mis-devotion frames

A thousand prayers to saints whose very names

The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knows not yet,

…

Immortal maid, I might invoke thy name.

Could any saint provoke that appetite,

Thou here shouldst make me a French convertite.

But thou wouldst not, nor wouldst thou be content

To take this for my second year’s true rent,

Did this coin bear any¯other stamp than his

That gave thee power to do, me to say this: (511–521)

In invoking a Catholic framework, Donne acknowledges his use of a pre-Reformation form even as he gives it a new imprimatur. For some readers, Donne’s playful use of the Catholic past touched a nerve. Ben Jonson famously remarked that “if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something.”21 His comment has been read as a criticism of Donne’s hyperbolic panegyric, which it certainly was. But it should also be understood as a critique of Donne’s adaptation of a framework drawn from England’s Catholic past to the needs of an Anglican—or indeed secular—present.

Bearing this in mind helps to clarify Donne’s representation of time in the poems. Throughout his verse, he was superbly attuned to questions of temporality, and often played with the alignment or misalignment of chronologies: the recurrence of the week, month, year, as opposed to the irreversible linearity of salvific or historical time; secular as opposed to sacred time; the finite human life as opposed to the ongoing progress (or collapse) of the shared human world. All of these contexts are at play in Donne’s Anniversaries, but they are framed by a set of problems raised by the anniversary poem itself. Anniversaries are part of a repetitive, cyclical, and ritualistic mode of marking time, in which time is associated with persons. Hence Drury is a saint, especially in the “First Anniversary,” or a monarch, especially in the “Second Anniversary.” In both cases, she is a figure whose death alters the course of chronology. “Some months she hath been dead (but being dead, / Measures of times are all determinèd)” (39–40), Donne writes. That is, time cannot be measured without the yardstick of her life. It sounds like playful hyperbole, but we can imagine a sense in which it is literally true if we consider how saints’ days and, especially, regnal years serve to demarcate time.

Yet Donne was also aware that the anniversary had a temporality of its own, or, perhaps, a meta-temporality: with the Reformation, the anniversary mass became historical, part of a mode that no longer fully applied to the English present. We know that precisely such chronological distinctions, which divided Catholic Europe from Anglican England, were on Donne’s mind as he composed these poems. Just before writing the “First Anniversary,” he had published an anonymous prose satire, Ignatius his Conclave (1611). In a passage in that work, he referred to the Gregorian calendrical reforms of 1572, which altered Europe’s calendar, but which England refused to accept, meaning that it was ten days out of step with the Continent for the better part of two centuries. By the addition of ten days to the calendar, “the peace of the Church, & Civill businesses have been egregiously troubled,” Donne wrote. And, he added, “nor hath heaven it selfe escaped his violence,” since the saints’ days were altered, dragging the unfortunate saints down from heaven to perform their miracles ten days ahead of schedule.22 Doctrinal disputes were also, for Donne and his contemporaries, calendrical disputes. In the case of the Gregorian reform, it was England that was conventional, Europe that was radical. But the very dispute called attention to the historicity not only of events but of chronologies and calendars themselves. Donne turned the same, newly historicized sense of chronology to the anniversary. As a genre, it participated in a temporality grounded in the cycles of the human life, the ritual year, and (implicitly) regnal chronology, even as the supersession of the anniversary as a funeral mass in the world of Protestant England indicated its replacement by a different form of historical time. The very genre was a Donnean paradox in miniature, only waiting to be unfolded.

Donne’s Anniversaries had a lasting impact on the verse of the seventeenth century. As Barbara Lewalski’s study of the Anniversaries demonstrated long ago, allusions to the poem can be found across the elegiac tradition, and especially in elegies for women.23 Their influence was not only far reaching, but long lasting: writing in the final decade of the seventeenth century, John Dryden claimed to have “followed [Donne’s] footsteps in the Design of his Panegyrick” in Eleonora: A Panegyric, a belated elegy for a woman he had never met.24 Marvell himself alluded to the poems in his “Epitaph upon Frances Jones,” as Nigel Smith notes in his edition; he may also have echoed them in his Horatian Ode.25 But Donne’s poems also had a different, more concentrated legacy in the genre of the anniversary. Following Donne’s publication, the anniversary as a literary genre sprang into life in English. In the seventeenth century, two kinds of works were typically entitled “anniversaries”: poems and sermons. Both were occasional forms, enmeshed in a culture of public commemoration. Needless to say, the use of the calendar to memorialize and propagandize was much deeper and wider than any one genre.26 Yet the anniversary remained more distinctive, and more discrete as a form, as its shared network of allusions suggests. Even anniversary sermons often referred to Donne’s Anniversaries and the anniversarium genre, especially early in the century. Daniel Price’s first and second anniversary sermons on the death of Prince Henry, delivered just a year after the publication of Donne’s Anniversaries, drew on Donne’s language, easily adapting his hyperbolic praise of the daughter of a private household to the death of a future monarch. In the poems entitled anniversaries, a lineage traceable back to Donne, and through Donne, to the anniversarium and its host of associations, is unmistakable. Some were memorial poems for women, such as James Maxwell’s anniversary on the death of Anne of Denmark, Carolanna, published in 1619. Likewise, Richard Brathwaite published two annual elegies for his wife, Anniversaries upon his Panarete, in 1634 and 1635. He may have been influenced by the posthumous publication of Donne’s poetry in 1633, which would have brought new readers to the Anniversaries.

At the same time, the public celebration of anniversaries of coronations and other political occasions encouraged writers to use the anniversarium for ideological ends. In the 1630s, Alexander Gil the younger, Milton’s radical acquaintance, wrote three anniversaria for Gustavus Adolphus, annual elegies praising the dead king and, not incidentally, signalling his sympathies with an activist, pan-European Protestantism.27 Following the execution of Charles, a new genre of anniversary poem appeared: the royalist anniversary elegy, such as “The XXXth of January. Or, an Anniversary.”28 Oriented toward action, the poem urged revenge rather than grief, embedding the genre within Civil War political struggles. By the middle of the seventeenth century, then, this minor genre had an extraordinarily dense set of associations. In commemorating deaths, anniversaries participated in chronological schemes organized around the sanctified lives of persons, making them a natural fit for Royalist verse. But ever since Donne had brought the genre into English, it was also capable of taking on an ironic inflection, at once relying on and calling into question the validity of honorific temporal models anchored in the past. The genre itself, in short, offered a powerful vantage point for considering questions of time and history.

Marvell’s “The First Anniversary”

In writing a poem celebrating the first anniversary of the Cromwellian Protectorate in 1654, Marvell had to negotiate an exceedingly complex occasion. He had to praise a new regime that was subject to hostile critique from multiple, competing factions, headed by a figure whose credentials were, to put it mildly, still contested.29 The future of the new government would have seemed very uncertain indeed. In titling his poem the “The First Anniversary”—emphasis on first—rather than simply The Anniversary, Marvell gestured to the inevitability of the government’s future: this was to be the first of many. But, by the same token, “first” also drew attention to its novelty and fragility. In addition, the occasion was still shadowed by death. As Blair Worden points out, “the political ‘anniversaries’ marked by previous poetry of the Interregnum had been those of the regicide,” and “the Commonwealth had dated the years of its rule as ‘first’ and ‘second’ and so on” from the date of Charles’s execution.30 A palimpsest of the older anniversaries would surely have been visible beneath the new. As the poem’s many commentators have shown, in “The First Anniversary,” Marvell “manoeuvres in a rhetorical minefield set with the explosive claims and arguments of Cromwell’s enemies.”31

Marvell was not the only poet to navigate this dangerous terrain. Payne Fisher, a former Royalist who became Cromwell’s Latin poet laureate, also wrote a poem entitled anniversarium for the same occasion. Marvell, as Victoria Moul has demonstrated, was a close reader of Fisher’s work, and there are many resonances between Fisher’s panegyric and Marvell’s.32 The poems share an overlapping repertoire of images, with a particular focus on water, including the ship of state, and a repeated emphasis on England as an island nation. Up to a point, they have a similar political stance, grounded in an imperial and expansionist vision of Cromwellian Britain, and as a result, they both emphasize the reception of Cromwell abroad. For Fisher, Cromwell is a prince along the lines of Augustus, bringing peace to the whole world through its conquest (“he will bring peace, such as Rome had under the Sabine king, or the world had under Augustus Caesar.”)33 Moul argues that both poems are also working within the same genre: not the anniversarium, as I have argued, but Claudian panegyric, modeled on the fourth-century Latin poet Claudian, especially his praise of the military commander Stilicho.34 There is a strong case for seeing both poems, but Fisher’s in particular, as drawing on a Claudian tradition, for “like Cromwell, Stilicho was a de facto ruler who was explicitly not a monarch.”35 In demonstrating the relevance of Fisher to Marvell, Moul has brought to light a previously hidden aspect of the literary history of the Protectorate.

But the contrast between the two poems, written to commemorate the same occasion, is as instructive as their similarities. Fisher, unlike Marvell, was not concerned with questions of temporality. The questions of time, chronology, periodicity, and futurity that, for Marvell, are intertwined with any representation of political power are almost wholly absent from Fisher’s verse. Insofar as Fisher reflects on time at all—in the comparison of Cromwell to classical rulers or in the prospect of an eternal empire—it is as a natural consequence of Cromwell’s power, not a problem for it. For Fisher, the anniversary was an occasion, but it was not a genre. For Marvell, by contrast, the genre saturates the poem. In other words, “The First Anniversary” not only referred to the first anniversary of the Protectorate, but also to Donne’s “First Anniversary,” as well as to poems such as “The XXXth of January. Or, an Anniversary.”

Reading the poem in these terms helps to explain its preoccupations. Most obviously, Marvell’s use of the anniversary genre clarifies a choice that has long puzzled readers. At the center of the 402-line poem, between lines 175 and 220, Marvell describes Cromwell’s near-fatal coaching accident, launching into a fantasy of his death and its implications. Scholars have proposed a range of explanations for the poem’s pseudo-elegiac core.36 But the simplest, surely, lies in the anniversary as an elegiac genre. By depicting Cromwell as dead, if only counterfactually, Marvell was reflecting on the history of his genre—a typical Marvellian stance. He was connecting its still-conventional associations of death with its newer associations with coronations or major political events. As if to draw attention to the passage’s genre, the lines contain dense intertextual references to previous elegies. Cromwell ascends to “the kingdom blest of peace and love” (218) in a conspicuous reference to Milton’s Lycidas. When Marvell describes how nature responded to Cromwell’s putative death, he writes, “It seemed the earth did from the centre tear; / It seemed the sun was fall’n out of the sphere” (205–6), calling to mind Donne’s well-known lines, “The element of fire is quite put out, / The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it” (206–8). Structuring the poem around a miniature elegy was rhetorically useful, as well as witty, for in elegies, death was always understood to license hyperbolic praise. As Marvell writes, “So with more modesty we may be true, / And speak as of the dead the praises due” (187–88). Cromwell could be the subject of anniversary praise in a double sense, as the departed spirit whose loss doomed England and as the new prince who redeemed it.

But Marvell’s use of the genre goes well beyond any given episode. It shapes the poem’s central dilemma: the depiction of Cromwell as a ruler yet not a monarch. From the poem’s first lines to its conclusion, Marvell indicates that one way of differentiating Cromwell from kings is in the relationship of each to time. Human time is repetitive: all men and women arc from life to death, in a cyclical process that can only ever repeat. “Man, declining always, disappears / In the weak circles of declining years” (3–4). However interesting a biography is, it always has the same ending. Monarchy is a political system consciously oriented around this repetition, which, from the perspective of more linear historical modes, resembles a kind of stasis: “heavy monarchs make a wide return, / Longer, and more malignant than Saturn: / And though they all Platonic years should reign, / In the same posture would be found again” (15–18). The rhyme between “reign” and “again” underscores the point: monarchy is fundamentally repetitive.

Cromwell, by contrast, is able to imbue the endless cycles of days and years with novelty: “Cromwell alone with greater vigour runs / (Sun-like) the stages of succeeding suns: / And still the day which he doth next restore, / Is the just wonder of the day before” (7–10). Under Cromwell, each day is genuinely different from the last, in contrast to the repetitive “succeeding suns,” a pun on the “succeeding sons” of dynastic kingship. Is there, in these lines, an echo of the concluding couplet of “To His Coy Mistress”: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run” (45–6)? If so, the resemblance is not merely an accident of rhyme. Marvell’s witty carpe diem poem raises precisely the same problem of the mismatch between the limited, repetitive life cycle and the vast span of world history. Cromwell, however, appears to achieve the revolutionary dynamism that love cannot, overcoming the limits of a merely human temporality. “’Tis he the force of scattered time contracts, / And in one year the work of ages acts,” Marvell writes (13–14).

Cromwell, in other words, initiates the transformation of cyclical patterns into the relentless, unidirectional flow of history. He is the force through which circular time, confined to persons and to narrow bounds of England as an island nation, becomes linear and imperial. In depicting Cromwell as the figure who initiates a new temporal regime, Marvell’s verse brings multiple temporal models into play, including the longstanding Christian millennarian visions that were used by the friends and enemies of the Protectorate. But in its enthusiasm for Cromwell as a political and imperial actor, conceived in distinction to the static and passive lineage of European monarchs, Marvell’s verse also implies the possibility of a more open-ended and humanly directed historical process.

In this respect, Marvell’s poem was aligned with the new vision of historical time that began to emerge in the second half of the seventeenth century, taking decisive shape in the 1690s, with The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. One consequence was a new emphasis on the linearity rather than circularity of historical time. As Raymond Williams sketched in Keywords, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the circles of time seemed to uncoil: periods were no longer repeating cycles but unique segments of history; generations ceased to refer to the ongoing life cycle and became a segment of humanity in historical time whose experiences, by their very nature, could never be repeated; above all, revolutions ceased to be circular and became instead novel and irreversible episodes.37 England’s first event to be praised as a revolution was the Glorious Revolution, a term applied by Whigs in its aftermath.38 Its interpretation was made possible by the experiences of the middle of the seventeenth century; in turn, it shaped their memory: one of the earliest published books to use the term “Glorious Revolution” was a polemic against commemorating the anniversary of Charles I’s death, the 30th of January.39

Marvell understood that new historical vistas had become possible with the regicide. In his poem, the future, no longer a repetition of the past, becomes radically open and dynamic; as Ryan Netzley writes, “Even in adducing eschatology as a justification for Cromwell’s rule, ‘The First Anniversary’ in this moment refuses to make the obvious appeal to necessity, finality, or any other variant of a future already written.”40 Marvell’s Cromwell, then, not only initiates a new era, but a new approach to temporality. He draws England into a novel epoch, associated with the largest scale of time: the rise of empires and the Biblical progression of history toward its climax. James Loxley, in an essay on the temporal patterns of “The First Anniversary,” observes, “This is not, in other words, a matter of seizing the occasion presented to you by time, as might be said about the Cromwell of ‘An Horatian Ode’, but instead about political and constitutional poesis – making time.”41 Loxley is surely exactly right to emphasize the political, constitutional, and indeed imperial dimensions of the new Cromwellian chronology that Marvell depicts.

It is worth noting that the chronology was new in a concrete as well as an abstract sense. Shifts in historical perspective often have calendrical or horological implications. In the most famous example, the French Revolutionaries dated modernity from the Revolution, renamed the months, created a ten-day week, and even tried (unsuccessfully) to decimalize the clock; one of its leading historians suggests that “a new relationship to time was the most significant change, and perhaps the defining development, of the French Revolution.”42 By comparison, English calendrical revisions were modest, but they were real. Under the Stuart kings and their predecessors, laws were dated by regnal years.43 The Commonwealth introduced a different form of dating. When Parliament issued a new Great Seal, they replaced the image of the monarch throned with one of the Parliamentary body, adding the words “In the First Year of Freedom by Gods Blessing Restored 1648.”44 It was, as Sean Kelsey notes, “a forthright revision of the old system of regnal dating” with one important exception: while regnal dating presumed that the time sequence would begin again from the year one, the new state’s system of dating would ideally continue until the end of time, in an unbroken series of numbers.45 In practice, however, it was rarely used. Instead, under both the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, laws and legal documents used A.D. dates, bringing them into the common history of Christendom. In short, real practices of dating were aligned with the distinction between the limited life cycle of the monarch and the inauguration of a more open-ended history that Marvell depicts in “The First Anniversary.”

Had Marvell written a panegyric to the Commonwealth (“In the First Year of Freedom,” say), the distinction between two modes of politics and their forms of temporality might have been simpler: the personal and cyclical on the one hand, versus the imperial and linear on the other. But the Cromwellian Protectorate was not the Commonwealth, and Marvell’s poem did not and could not draw so neat a contrast. Cromwell was not a king, but he was a ruler; there were parallels, as well as contrasts, between the Stuart and Cromwellian temporal modes. Thus even as Marvell’s poem lauded Cromwell as the force extricating England from the stasis of monarchical rule, it also praised him as a distinctive individual, with a human genesis, and by implication his own path arcing toward death. When, near the poem’s conclusion, the rival monarchs proclaim, “O could I once him with our title see, / So should I hope yet he might die as we” (391–2), the poem’s readers surely grasp that with or without the title of king, Cromwell will eventually die. Apart from anything else, the poem has said so, in a couplet that edges toward heresy: “Thee proof beyond all other force or skill, / Our sins endanger and shall one day kill” (173–4). Even as Marvell plays with the idea of Cromwell as a figure of Christ, he simultaneously acknowledges his mortality. Cromwell both initiates the movement away from a chronology based on persons and reinstates it by the exemplary power of his own personality.

The tension between older modes of chronology and a post-Reformation historical perspective, as I suggested above, was already present in the anniversary genre by the seventeenth century. From the start of its English career, the form was superbly attuned to the possibility of multiple, conflicting models for measuring time. Marvell used this potential and sharpened it in a poem that insists on both the relevance and obsolescence of the human life for the interpretation of historical time.46 By calling attention to this aspect of Marvell’s poetics, I am not suggesting that he deliberately undermined Cromwell or his government. Like Matthew Augustine, I am skeptical of accounts that suggest “the poem has a shadow agenda which runs against its overt support for the Protector’s ‘quasi-republican’, ‘quasi-imperial’ stance—either urging him to accept the crown or subtly warning against the erosion of liberty under the Instrument.”47 What I do think is that Marvell, in writing an anniversary, deliberately made some of the deepest contradictions of the Cromwellian Protectorate into a vital element of his verse. Like his Cromwell, he troubled the waters in order to “yearly mak’st them heal” (402).

If the contradictions Marvell’s poem explored take their impetus from the predicament of the Cromwellian Protectorate, they also point to a much longer and more enduring literary problem. The rise of new historical paradigms with the modern administrative state and capitalist society did not simply eliminate other ways of reckoning time, including the human lifespan. If anything, the emergence of an impersonal master chronology for history sharpened the contrast with individuals’ own experience. As A.R.P Fryxell points out, the “preoccupation with the divergence between subjective temporal experience and the objective time of mathematical, social, or political systems” has been central to modernity.48 The exploration of the alignment and misalignment of individual and social or political time schemes became a major preoccupation of literature. While medieval literature sought to coordinate human time and the longer arc of sacred time, modern literature, from the Renaissance to roughly the new millennium, sought to coordinate human time with secular history. Marvell was precociously attuned to the tensions and competition between each mode. But from at least the eighteenth century, and certainly from the nineteenth century on, core strands of literature sought to place the individual life within history, even as writers remained conscious that the two time scales were fatally mismatched. The representation of generational change and conflict, the overwhelming preoccupation of the nineteenth-century novel, and of the subjectivity of memory, a major theme in the twentieth century, were both focused on this mismatch. But if this was literature’s distinctive problem, by the same token it was, until recently, one of its greatest sources of power. Culture in general, but literary culture in particular, was able to give the trajectory of history meaning by linking its movements to changes in human lives. We now seem to be past the moment when literature is capable of crystalizing experience for more than a handful of people; since the turn of the new millennium, technology has been almost unchallenged as our measure of change. All the more reason to consider how the anniversary, a now nearly forgotten genre brilliantly exploited by Marvell, reveals this task of literature at its very inception.

Notes

  1. Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, rev. ed., ed. Nigel Smith (London: Pearson, 2007), ll. 387–8. [^]
  2. Joad Raymond, “Framing Liberty: Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ and the Instrument of Government,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62, nos. 3/4 (1999): 313–350, 314, https://doi.org/10.2307/4621646. [^]
  3. Joad Raymond, “A Cromwellian Centre?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 145. [^]
  4. John M. Wallace, “Andrew Marvell and Cromwell’s Kingship: The First Anniversary,” ELH 30, no. 3 (1963): 214, https://doi.org/10.2307/2872036. [^]
  5. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1838–1940, ed. Howard Eliand and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395. Benjamin’s insight was extended in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983). Perhaps the most influential account of the temporal transition in modernity remains the work of Reinhardt Koselleck, especially Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). [^]
  6. Denis Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 149. [^]
  7. There is no single history of the development of the anniversary mass, but research into the foundation of chantries inevitably tracks the spread of the practice, since chantries were founded to provide commemorative masses, including anniversaries, for patrons’ souls. John McNeill traces anniversary masses to late antiquity in “A Prehistory of the Chantry,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 164, no. 1 (2011): 138, https://doi.org/10.1179/174767011X13184281107884. For early medieval British practice, see David Crouch, “The Origin of Chantries: Some Further Anglo-Norman Evidence,” Journal of Medieval History 27, no. 2 (2001): 159–180, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4181(01)00007-0. [^]
  8. Alfonso Pérez de Lara, De Anniversariis et Capellaniis (1610). [^]
  9. William Allen, A Defense and Declaration of the Catholic Churches Doctrine of Purgatory (Antwerp, 1565), 255. [^]
  10. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (London, 1579), 367. [^]
  11. James Richard Redmond McConnel, “The 1688 Landing of William of Orange at Torbay: Numerical Dates and Temporal Understanding in Early Modern England,” The Journal of Modern History 84, no. 3 (2012): 541, https://doi.org/10.1086/666048. [^]
  12. Qtd. in Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar, 12. [^]
  13. The fact that the death of monarchs did not coincide with the solar year necessitated complex adjustments, as Alden A. Mosshammer notes in The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). [^]
  14. Anthony Grafton, “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History and Theory 14, no. 2 (1975): 156–185, https://doi.org/10.2307/2504611. [^]
  15. As Alison Chapman writes, “to inhabitants of sixteenth-century England, the calendar would have seemed far less ‘natural’ than modern critics apparently assume. In fact, the early modern calendar was the site of fierce debate as different ideological and political interests vied for control over its timetable.” See “The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser’s English Calendar,” SEL 42, no. 1 (2002): 2–3, https://doi.org/10.1353/sel.2002.0002. [^]
  16. Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); James Doelman, The Daring Muse of the Early Stuart Funeral Elegy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021). [^]
  17. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (Lyon, 1561), 168. Scaliger writes, “In Anniversario haec eadem omnia praeter luctum. Nemo enim iam annum bienniumve defuntum deflet.” [^]
  18. Jasper Mayne, in John Donne, Poems (London, 1633). [^]
  19. For a discussion of the relationship between Donne’s “Anatomy” and medical anatomies, see Matthew Landers, “Semeiologia, Semiotic Bridges, and the ‘New Science’ in Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave and An Anatomy of the World,” English Studies 100, no. 2 (2019): 149–169, https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2018.1555978. [^]
  20. John Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins (London: Pearson, 2008). [^]
  21. Ben Jonson, Informations to William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. Ian Donaldson, in Works, vol. 5, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 361. [^]
  22. John Donne, qtd. in Anne Lake Prescott, “Refusing Translation: The Gregorian Calendar and Early Modern English Writers,” The Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 7, https://doi.org/10.1353/yes.2006.0054. [^]
  23. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). For recent comments on Donne’s reception, see Katherine Calloway, “John Donne and English Puritanism, 1650–1700,” The Seventeenth Century 39, no. 1 (2024): 81–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2023.2266480. [^]
  24. John Dryden, Eleonora: A Panegyrical Poem (London, 1692), n.p. [^]
  25. See Poems, 200. In the Horatian Ode the phrase “first years’ rents” (86) is used to describe Cromwell’s imperial victory, closely recalling Donne’s description of his Anniversaries as his “first year’s rent” (447) and “second year’s true rent” (520). To my knowledge, this parallel has not been raised in the scholarship, and it must remain speculative. But the possibility is intriguing: the phrase is exceptionally rare in poetry, and Marvell was clearly intrigued by Donne’s metaphors of temporal reckoning. [^]
  26. David Cressy, “The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 29, no. 1 (1990): 31–52, https://doi.org/10.1086/385948. [^]
  27. William Poole, “The Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Elder (1565–1635) and Younger (1596/7–1642?),” Milton Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2017): 163–191, https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12223. For the politics of Gill’s commemoration, see Sean McKeown, “The Reception of Gustavus Adolphus in English Literary Culture: The Case of George Tooke,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 2 (2009): 200–220, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2009.00560.x. [^]
  28. The XXXth of January. Or, an Anniversary (Paris, 1652). [^]
  29. As Nigel Smith observes in an acute contextualization of the poem, “he was apologizing for Cromwell’s continuing singular power, which was frustrating to many, republican and royalist alike.” See Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 126. [^]
  30. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Needham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 142. [^]
  31. Stephen N. Zwicker, “‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’: Andrew Marvell and the Problem of Panegyric,” in Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400, ed. Matthew Augustine, Giulio Pertile, and Steven Zwicker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 59. [^]
  32. Victoria Moul, “Andrew Marvell and Payne Fisher,” The Review of English Studies 68, no. 285 (2017): 524–548, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw144. [^]
  33. Payne Fisher, Piscatoris Poemata (London, 1656), C1v: ille dabit pacem, qualem sub rege sabino roma, vel augusto tulerat sub caesare mundus. [^]
  34. Victoria Moul, “England’s Stilicho: Claudian’s Political Poetry in Early Modern England,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 28, no. 1 (2021): 23–50, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00529-z. [^]
  35. Victoria Moul, A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 387. [^]
  36. Moul notes that Fisher refers to the accident in another poem: the accident was clearly much discussed. But Fisher does not allude to it in his Anniversarium, much less make it his central panel. For another discussion of this accident, see Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110–14. [^]
  37. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1983). See the entries for “revolution” and “generation.” [^]
  38. James R. Hertzler, “Who Dubbed It ‘The Glorious Revolution?’” Albion 19, no. 4 (1987): 579–585, https://doi.org/10.2307/4049475. [^]
  39. Anonymous, King Charles I, No Such Saint, Martyr or Good Protestant as Commonly Reputed, but a Favourer of Papists and a Cruel and Oppressive Tyrant (London, 1698). [^]
  40. Ryan Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 62. Netzley’s argument for the capacity of lyric, written in the present tense, in contrast to narrative, written in the past tense, to retain this radical openness is especially acute as a reading of Marvell’s use of literary form to consider questions of temporality. [^]
  41. James Loxley, “Hollowing after Cromwell in ‘The First Anniversary,’” in Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400, ed. Matthew Augustine, Giulio Pertile, and Steven Zwicker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 46. [^]
  42. Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 68. [^]
  43. I thank Christopher D’Addario for suggesting this line of investigation. [^]
  44. John Cooper and James Jago, “Picturing Parliament: The Great Seal of the Commonwealth and the House of Commons,” The Antiquaries Journal 101 (2021): 377, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581521000020. [^]
  45. Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 96. [^]
  46. Koselleck argues that under absolutist states “the assumed life span of a governing ruler was a permanent feature of the political calculus of probability… the dimensions of historical time were measured by natural, human qualities.” See Futures Past, 21. That is, kingship bound politics to the life cycle to varying degrees in varying polities throughout the eighteenth century, and in some cases, much longer. [^]
  47. Matthew Augustine, Andrew Marvell: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 149. At the same time, Nigel Smith is surely right to note that that does not mean that Marvell may not have had private reservations that do not make it into the poem: “it may be that, like Nedham and Milton, M. voiced outward support for the Protectorate, while remaining privately worried by its threat to liberty.” Poems, 283. [^]
  48. A.R.P. Fryxell, “Time and the Modern: Current Trends in the History of Modern Temporalities,” Past & Present 243, no. 1 (2019): 295. [^]

Acknowledgments

I thank Ryan Netzley for inviting this submission and his editorial work and the two anonymous reviewers who provided acute and useful advice.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.

References

Allen, William. A Defense and Declaration of the Catholic Churches Doctrine of Purgatory. Antwerp, 1565.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.

Augustine, Matthew. Andrew Marvell: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Brady, Andrea. English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Calloway, Katherine. “John Donne and English Puritanism, 1650–1700.” The Seventeenth Century 39, no. 1 (2024): 81–95.  http://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2023.2266480.

Cooper, John, and James Jago. “Picturing Parliament: The Great Seal of the Commonwealth and the House of Commons.” The Antiquaries Journal 101 (2021): 377–400.  http://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581521000020.

Cressy, David. “The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England.” Journal of British Studies 29, no. 1 (1990): 31–52.  http://doi.org/10.1086/385948.

Crouch, David. “The Origin of Chantries: Some Further Anglo-Norman Evidence.” Journal of Medieval History 27, no. 2 (2001): 159–180.  http://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4181(01)00007-0.

Doelman, James. The Daring Muse of the Early Stuart Funeral Elegy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.

Donne, John. The Complete Poems of John Donne. Edited by Robin Robbins. London: Pearson, 2008.

Dryden, John. Eleonora: A Panegyrical Poem. London, 1692.

Feeney, Denis. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.

Fisher, Payne. Piscatoris Poemata. London, 1656.

Fryxell, A.R.P. “Time and the Modern: Current Trends in the History of Modern Temporalities.” Past & Present 243, no. 1 (2019): 285–298.

Grafton, Anthony. “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline.” History and Theory 14, no. 2 (1975): 156–185.  http://doi.org/10.2307/2504611.

Hertzler, James R. “Who Dubbed It ‘The Glorious Revolution?’” Albion 19, no. 4 (1987): 579–585.  http://doi.org/10.2307/4049475.

Holberton, Edward. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Hunt, Lynn. Measuring Time, Making History. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008.

Kelsey, Sean. Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

King Charles I, No Such Saint, Martyr or Good Protestant as Commonly Reputed, but a Favourer of Papists and a Cruel and Oppressive Tyrant. London, 1698.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Landers, Matthew. “Semeiologia, Semiotic Bridges, and the ‘New Science’ in Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave and An Anatomy of the World.” English Studies 100, no. 2 (2019): 149–169.  http://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2018.1555978.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Loxley, James. “Hollowing after Cromwell in ‘The First Anniversary.’” In Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400, edited by Matthew Augustine, Giulio Pertile, and Steven N. Zwicker, 41–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Revised edition. Edited by Nigel Smith. London: Pearson, 2007.

Mayne, Jasper. “Epistle Dedicatory.” In Poems, by John Donne. London, 1633.

McConnel, James Richard Redmond. “The 1688 Landing of William of Orange at Torbay: Numerical Dates and Temporal Understanding in Early Modern England.” The Journal of Modern History 84, no. 3 (2012): 541–574.  http://doi.org/10.1086/666048.

McKeown, Sean. “The Reception of Gustavus Adolphus in English Literary Culture: The Case of George Tooke.” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 2 (2009): 200–220.  http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2009.00560.x.

McNeill, John. “A Prehistory of the Chantry.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 164, no. 1 (2011): 138–156.  http://doi.org/10.1179/174767011X13184281107884.

Mosshammer, Alden A. The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Moul, Victoria. A Literary History of Latin & English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Moul, Victoria. “Andrew Marvell and Payne Fisher.” The Review of English Studies 68, no. 285 (2017): 524–548.  http://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgw144.

Moul, Victoria. “England’s Stilicho: Claudian’s Political Poetry in Early Modern England.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 28, no. 1 (2021): 23–50.  http://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00529-z.

Netzley, Ryan. Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

Pérez de Lara, Alfonso. De Anniversariis et Capellaniis. 1610.

Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes. Translated by Thomas North. London, 1579.

Poole, William. “The Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Elder (1565–1635) and Younger (1596/7–1642?).” Milton Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2017): 163–191.  http://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12223.

Prescott, Anne Lake. “Refusing Translation: The Gregorian Calendar and Early Modern English Writers.” The Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 1 (2006): 1–11.  http://doi.org/10.1353/yes.2006.0054.

Raymond, Joad. “A Cromwellian Centre?” In The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, edited by Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, 145–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Raymond, Joad. “Framing Liberty: Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ and the Instrument of Government.” Huntington Library Quarterly 62, nos. 3–4 (1999): 313–350.  http://doi.org/10.2307/4621646.

Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Poetices Libri Septem. Lyon, 1561.

Smith, Nigel. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

The XXXth of January. Or, an Anniversary. Paris, 1652.

Wallace, John M. “Andrew Marvell and Cromwell’s Kingship: The First Anniversary.” ELH 30, no. 3 (1963): 214–233.  http://doi.org/10.2307/2872036.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; rev. ed., 1983.

Worden, Blair. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Needham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Zwicker, Stephen N. “‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’: Andrew Marvell and the Problem of Panegyric.” In Imagining Andrew Marvell at 400, edited by Matthew Augustine, Giulio Pertile, and Steven N. Zwicker, 57–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.