These Pendants of the Eyes: The Bourgeois Protestantism of ‘Eyes and Tears’

A year or so after the Restoration, Abraham Cowley describes how many became aware that Cromwell’s ‘unmanly tears’ were nothing more than political theater, ‘as if a Player, by putting on a Gown, should think he represented excellently a Woman, though his Beard at the same time were seen by all the Spectators’.¹³ Cowley’s comparison of a tearful Cromwell to an actor adorning a gown exemplifies how hypocrisy and femininity were often interchangeable accusations levied at ‘pious’ weepers. As we will see, Marvell recuperates tears as feminine display by displacing them from the stage to the household. In ‘Eyes and Tears’, weeping is bourgeois insofar as tears are luxurious ornaments, but it is also Protestant, insofar as the speaker demonstrates vigilance in scrutinizing tears as material, spiritual, and poetic signifiers.

Once considered a resolutely Catholic form of sacramental penitence, weeping is now understood to have been a prominent, but contested, form of private prayer in early modern Protestantism.¹⁴ Because tears were simultaneously understood as divine gifts and human creations, weeping helped Protestants distinguish true from false repentance, even if it did not cause such repentance. The rise of pious weeping in Reformation England surely owes much to Protestantism’s de-emphasis of sacraments, but unlike medieval affective piety, Protestant weeping was a largely private prerogative; public weeping raised the specter of hypocrisy. It is important to note that Catholic preachers of the high Middle Ages were similarly preoccupied with hypocrisy and exaggeration as it pertained to penitent weeping, even as they encouraged their parishioners to shed tears. In this respect, Catholic and Protestant notions of weeping are not so different. But the public weeping of medieval devotion became less common in Reformation Europe and England, and the problem of hypocrisy shifted away from excessive and towards public weeping.¹⁵ Though sermons and funerals were acceptable occasions for weeping, elite and popular Calvinism argued that tears emerging from physical pain or earthly loss possessed no inherent spiritual value. Thus, it was better for Protestants to shed tears in private, lest they be accused of hypocrisy.

Protestant weeping was heavily gendered. Because women and children tended to weep more than adult men, worldly tears were often consigned to the former, and the latter faced charges that their ‘pious’ tears were womanish, childish, or both.¹⁶ Elaborating the gendered nature of Protestant weeping helps scholars recognize how readings of ‘Eyes and Tears’ that describe the poem as secular in its depiction of female weeping often miss its engagement with the fluid intersection between Catholic and Protestant worship. Catholic poets indebted to Southwell usually reached the same devotional conclusions as their progenitor, but they often shifted their focus to questions of feminine subjectivity and the dichotomy between public, ‘external’ emotion and private, ‘internal’ emotion. Such shifts led Protestants to moralize and satirizize the poetry of tears tradition, but they nevertheless found appealing its emphasis on divine agency.¹⁷ Gary Kuchar argues that secular lyrics depicting female weepers mediate ‘Eyes and Tears’ partly because Marvell is interested in celebrating ‘the sensual and aesthetic side of … transformative grief … while nevertheless maintaining a degree of lyrical constraint’.¹⁸ But because Marvell’s constrained lyricism attempts to render constructive the feminine stigma of weeping, we can also conclude that Marvell is equally interested in providing a properly Protestant depiction of weeping by wedding feminine subjectivity to private piety.

With its poetic speaker ‘insulated from the world around [him] and the world of values from which [he came]’, ‘Eyes and Tears’ (~1648) reflects the private bent of Protestant weeping. Nigel Smith calls ‘Eyes and Tears’ a highly original commentary on ‘English religious verse since the late sixteenth century and the confessional battleground of which it was a part’. This is not to say, however, that the poem directly participates in the poetry of tears tradition inaugurated by Southwell; Marvell’s aesthetic use of religious imagery is not particularly concerned with distinctions between Catholic and Protestant forms of worship.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the poem’s center of gravity resides in the figure of a weeping Mary Magdalene. Most early modern Protestant depictions of the Magdalene focus on her conversion from ‘a life of sensual delight to one of chaste and contrite faith’. The contrast between ‘subversive eroticism’ and ‘puritanical orthodoxy’, however, breaks down when we consider how Mary Magdalene’s ‘sacred eroticism’ suggests that female sexuality ‘inhabits a traditional construct of religious subjectivity, one that passes from the cloistral devotions of the Middle Ages into early modern representations of a privatized, autonomous inwardness’.²⁰ Indeed, Marvell depicts the conflation of eroticism and piety through the manner in which the Magdalene’s ‘tears more wise/Dissolved those captivating eyes’, so as to ‘fetter her Redeemer’s feet’ with ‘liquid chains’ (ll. 29–32). These liquid chains might strike the reader as recalling a rosary,²¹ perhaps suggesting that Marvell is replacing a materialistic with an affective repentance. But it is Christ who is fettered by these chains, thus indicating that Marvell is not critiquing so much as reappropriating this ‘Catholic’ image so as to depict how the Magdalene’s tears, embodying her sins, materially script Christ into his role as humanity’s redeemer. Christ’s absolution of the Magdalene’s sins plays out in the episode at the house of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7: 36–50, in which she bathes Jesus’s feet with her tears. Simon questions Jesus’s prophetic abilities, but Jesus responds that the sins of this woman have been forgiven, partly because of her faith and partly because of her demonstration of hospitality. The scriptural subtext of the Magdalene stanza thus evinces the poem’s interest in godly conduct within the household. There is value in publicizing private tears, just as scripture makes the Magdalene’s tears known to a Christian audience.²²

As the poem adopts a more public voice in its concluding stanzas, the speaker brings himself to the brink of opening the ‘double sluice’ of his eyes, allowing them to ‘practise’ their ‘noblest use’ (ll. 45–46):

Now like two clouds dissolving, drop,
And at each tear in distance stop:
Now like two fountains trickle down:
Now like two floods o’erturn and drown. (ll. 49–52)

Unlike Magdalenian tears, flowing upward like ‘incense’ to ‘heaven dear’ (l. 41), the poet’s similes, which become increasingly terrestrial (‘two fountains trickl[ing] down’) and hyperbolic (‘two floods o’erturn[ing] and drown[ing]’), figure tears as flowing downward. The Magdalene helps the speaker of ‘Eyes and Tears’ understand and appreciate the pious potential of weeping, but in the poem’s final stanza, he ceases addressing his own eyes and speaks in the second person: ‘let your streams o’erflow your springs,’ he says (ll. 53–54, my emphasis). The deictics of the final line ambiguously ally weeping with both the speaker and his audience (‘these weeping eyes’) while placing the tears themselves at a remove (‘those seeing tears’ [l. 56, my emphasis]). In positing the ‘rigorous reflexivity’ of Marvell’s poem, Kuchar suggest that Marvell moves towards something inexpressible without quite reaching it.²³ In keeping with its reflexivity, ‘Eyes and Tears’ ends on a Protestant compromise between pious weeping and poetic language as a substitute for pious weeping.²⁴ It is significant that this compromise plays out at precisely the moment in which the speaker directly addresses an audience: the moment in which he shifts from a private to a public voice.

If the speaker struggles to weep, perhaps it is because, earlier in the poem, he reveals himself to be too much a creature of the world, prone to conceptualizing the relationship between affect and tears in economic, rather than religious, terms:

Two tears, which Sorrow long did weigh
Within the scales of either eye,
And then paid out in equal poise,
Are the true price of all my joys. (ll. 9–12)

The speaker sees himself purchasing joys from sorrow with his tears. Nigel Smith suggests that this mercantilist exchange is indeed pious, signifying ‘a penitent sense of redemption through sacrifice’.²⁵ The following stanza, however, complicates this exchange as one and done, for tears return to the speaker:

What in the world most fair appears,
Yea, even laughter, turns to tears;
And all the jewels which we prize,
Melt in these pendants of the eyes. (ll. 13–16)

This stanza seems to chastise vain materialism; worldly objects are only ‘fair’ on the level of their appearance. But curiously, Marvell retains the same material conceit in describing the melting of the literal ‘jewels’ in the speaker’s field of vision within the figurative jewels—‘pendants’—of the speaker’s tears. These tears, worn by the speaker’s eyes as luxury items, exemplify the fluid threshold between worldly and spiritual value. As Joan Hartwig argues, they transform ‘a sense of plentitude in this world’ into ‘something of greater value, a joy that is unbounded by sorrow because the weeping eye has transformed joy and sorrow into the same feeling’. Kuchar sees the unification of joy and sorrow in these stanzas as translating the gendered representations of purification in the tradition of spiritual alchemy into experiential terms so as to advance a ‘mysteriously contained celebration of grief’.²⁶ But because such purification occurs while retaining the poetic conceit of the jewel, it seems that Marvell is equally interested in turning tears into luxurious ornaments signifying humble materialism beyond effeminate hypocrisy. The shift in the poeticization of tears occurring across these two stanzas—from currency exchanged for joys to ornaments signifying joy-sorrow hybridity—utilizes the metaphoric field of economy to detail a subtle move towards greater spiritual understanding.

The image of tears-as-pendants evinces Marvell’s bourgeois Protestantism because it reconciles the pious potential of weeping with weeping’s unavoidable association with gaudy, ‘effeminate’ display. It achieves this reconciliation by embracing tears as outward displays while paradoxically juxtaposing them to the vain objects of sight; though tears are figured as potential objects of ocular vanity, they emerge from the dissipation of such vanity. Thus, Marvell makes weeping appealing to a fashionable audience by utilizing an image of fashion to depict the subject’s transcendence over worldly vanity without rejecting worldliness outright. In its image of tears-as-silver thread in a tapestry, ‘The First Anniversary’ echoes the aspect of luxurious display central to Marvell’s bourgeois Protestantism in ‘Eyes and Tears’, but it adds an emphasis on domestic productivity to suggest that private weeping can be publically beneficial. In this way, Marvell can speak to Cromwell as a well-known practitioner of weeping while also speaking to, and as, an audience of bourgeois Protestants, for whom religious devotion and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing endeavors.

Employing Tears in Protectorate England

Blair Worden explains how Cromwell aroused ‘conflicts of emotion’ throughout the Interregnum; both his enemies and devotees mistrusted him, for they believed that England’s fate ‘would be determined by his character and decisions’.²⁷ In ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (June–July 1650), Marvell registers such unease in depicting the ‘wiser art’ (l. 48) of Cromwell’s Machiavellian political cunning. At Hampton Court Palace, where Charles I negotiated with Parliament and the New Model Army after his defeat in the Second Civil War, Cromwell ‘twin[s] subtle fears with hope’, weaving ‘a net of such a scope/That Charles himself might chase/To Caresbrook’s narrow case’ (ll. 49–52). Smith points out that the contemporary suspicion voiced in this stanza—Cromwell arranged for Charles to flee to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight so that the governor could betray him—is groundless.²⁸ Nevertheless, this moment in the ‘Horatian Ode’ reflects Cromwell’s potential for emotional manipulation. The memoirs of Edmund Ludlow detail an episode in which Charles narrates an interaction with Cromwell, wherein the general ‘wept plentifully’ on account of remembering the King’s encounter with his children. Cromwell divulged ‘the Sincerity of his Heart towards the King’, but Charles saw such emotional expression emerging from the dependence Cromwell, Independents, and the army had on him as a means of acting against Parliament.²⁹ A sympathetic reading of Cromwell’s tears would argue that they demonstrate his veneration of domestic affection. But it is striking that Charles, of all people, who would become the ‘tearful martyr-king’ of Royalists through the publication of Eikon Basilike, construes Cromwell’s tears as nothing more than political dissimulation.³⁰ Perhaps Charles learned a thing or two from Cromwell about the political power of tears.

This would not be the only time Cromwell wept to political effect. His dissolution of the Rump Parliament (20 April 1653) tipped the scales of power towards Thomas Harrison’s faction within the army and his Fifth Monarchist movement, but the manner in which Cromwell enacted the dissolution caused Parliament to question his sincerity. Newsletters of that year note the rise of a ‘zealous party in the Army’ speedily pressing for ‘a new Representative’ body for England. Preaching members of the army, a newsletter of 15 April 1653 claims, ‘have drawne the General to them, who, as it’s beleeved, was never from them, but meerly for their ends’. Earlier, Cromwell visited the House of Commons ‘with weeping eyes’, promising that ‘he would as willingly hazard his life against any whatever that should professe themselves their enemys, as he had done against those that were publique enemys to the Commonwealth’.³¹ Indeed, Cromwell wept at the thought of violence towards Parliament and vowed future army-Parliament fidelity.³² But as the newsletter claims, most in Parliament knew that Cromwell ‘hath teares at will, and can dispence with any Oath or Protestation without troubling his conscience’. Five days later, Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament. This was not ‘the finishing stroke of an elaborately worked-out plan’, as C. H. Firth explains, but rather ‘a sudden change of plan, a desertion of the policy which he had previously been pursuing, and the adoption of a completely different policy’. Cromwell’s change of course likely owed much to the ‘rising excitement in the army during the early part of 1653’.³³ But for Parliament, it was a surprising rebuke of his earlier professions of loyalty. The general’s tears were viewed not only as instruments of political deception, but as signs of his malleable conscience.³⁴

The Cromwell of Marvell’s ‘First Anniversary’ does not weep, nor does he practice emotional manipulation, but he does navigate ‘the wat’ry maze’ (l. 1) of life that becomes the ‘new’ seas of the Commonwealth era (l. 157). Marvell, however, is not so naïve as to ignore Cromwell’s role in creating England’s tempests; the poem concludes by comparing him to the angel of Bethesda (John 5:4), paradoxically ‘[t]roubling the waters’ so that he can ‘yearly mak’st them heal’ (l. 402). The poem deploys a seafaring metaphor to explain Cromwell’s rationale for dissolving the Rump Parliament and encouraging the resignation of the Nominated Parliament; reading providence with his ‘more careful eye’, he takes the helm from ‘the artless steersman’ and ‘doubles back’ the ship of state ‘unto the safer main’ (ll. 273–76). But we might imagine moderate MPs reading Marvell’s praise of Cromwell’s ‘sober spirit’ (l. 230) as deeply ironic, especially if they witnessed his enthusiastic tears for the Rump right before dissolving it. If said MPs were harboring royalist sympathies, the conclusion of Marvell’s stanza may have registered as an unintentional reference to Cromwell’s manipulative tears before Charles: ‘down at last thou poured’st the fertile storm;/Which to the thirsty land did plenty bring,/But though forewarned, o’ertook and wet the king’ (ll. 236–38). Cromwell, however, habitually weeping in his speech to the Nominated Parliament (4 July 1653), explains how allowing the Rump to stay in session, given their inability to produce a constitution, would have been tantamount to ‘throw[ing] away the liberties of the nation into the hands of those who had never fought for it’.³⁵ Indeed, Marvell takes seriously Cromwell’s role in planting the vine of ‘sober liberty’ in post-Civil War England by comparing him to Noah (ll. 289, 283). Having successfully navigated the ark of state through ‘the wars’ flood’ (l. 284), Cromwell has become the country’s post-diluvian ‘husbandman’, and ‘the large vale lay subject to [his] will’ (ll. 286–87). If he wished to water the vine of liberty with his tears, such was his prerogative.

Even in ‘A Poem Upon the Death’, which claims that the Lord Protector was ultimately killed by grief over the passing of his daughter Elizabeth (6 Aug 1658, one month before his own passing), Marvell would only indirectly depict a weeping Cromwell. Marvell compares the deceased Elizabeth to ‘some dear branch … pruned by an untimely knife’ from her ‘parent-tree’, which ‘through the wound its vital humour bleeds’ (ll. 93–96). ‘Trickling in wat’ry drops’, this sap’s ‘flowing shape/Weeps that it falls ere fixed into a grape’ (ll. 97–98). As a depiction of weeping, Marvell’s image of Cromwell dropping sap as a function of branch pruning speaks to the enormous grief of a father outliving his child. Still, Marvell avoids directly presenting a weeping Cromwell, even though the premature death of his daughter would surely be an appropriate occasion. Nevertheless, Marvell’s image of Cromwell trickling sap illustrates Hirst and Zwicker’s claim that the elegy harmonizes ‘domestic affection’ and ‘the hidden sympathies of suffering’ in presenting the Cromwells as an ‘affective family’.³⁶ Perhaps Marvell is simply ignoring the well-known portrait of Cromwell dispensing tears at will, but it is also possible that the elegy affords him a means of redefining his political value as the value of publicizing domestic affection.

In ‘The First Anniversary’, it is the poet and the Protectorate faithful that weep, and Marvell’s comparison of weeping to embroidery confers upon the former a sense of domestic productivity:

Like skilful looms which through the costly thread
Of purling ore, a shining wave do shed:
So shall the tears we on past grief employ,
Still as they trickle, glitter in our joy. (ll. 183–86)

Just as ‘skilful looms’ stitch a silver thread through an otherwise golden tapestry, the faithful ‘employ’ tears in the otherwise joyful milieu of Protectorate England’s first year in response to Cromwell’s coaching accident. The embroidery terms Marvell employs recall the image of Cromwell weaving Charles’s net in the ‘Horatian Ode’, thus intimating Cromwellian dissimulation. But these terms also appeal to an audience of domestic workers, both male professionals and female amateurs, simultaneously concerned with the political value of Cromwell’s accident and the economic value of their tapestry. While the threads of ‘purling ore’ (the manifold glories of the Protectorate’s first year) are much more ‘costly’ than the tapestry’s ‘shining wave’ (weeping over Cromwell’s accident), this wave does not devalue it as a whole; they make the tapestry shine, much as the weeping faithful ‘glitter in [their] joy’, given Cromwell’s survival of the accident. Unlike Cromwell, accused of effeminacy in actively deploying tears, the weeping of the Protectorate faithful can only be considered effeminate insofar as femininity is associated with diligent weaving that edifies the English Protectorate through the production of a celebratory tapestry earnestly grappling with the vulnerability of its Lord Protector. The bourgeois Protestants weeping over Cromwell’s accident are rendering such weeping productive, as they would by embroidering less costly silver threads into a golden tapestry.

To better understand the bourgeois Protestantism of ‘The First Anniversary’’s joyful weeping, it will be instructive to compare it to similar tears in James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), which shares with Marvell a political interest in unifying moderates. In Oceana, Harrington combines a republican critique of Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump with an attempt to counsel the Lord Protector into achieving settlement through a ‘balance of dominion’ predicated on the protection of property.³⁷ One way Harrington appeals to Cromwell is by indirectly praising his rejection of the crown, through Lord Archon’s divestment of power after finding ‘the rapture of motion’ (rotating elections) in Oceana and the ensuing rapture of ‘joy and harmony, into which his spheres … were cast’. Because this rapturous harmony occurred ‘naturally’, Lord Archon sees no need to force the Senate or people to take an oath of allegiance. But as a Christian, he wants to destroy ‘all unreasonable desires’ in the commonwealth, so he enters the senate to abdicate his magistracy. The ‘astonished’ senate stood silent until Lord Archon exited, leaving them ‘with the tears in their eyes’.³⁸ The senate then decides to place the virtues and merits of the office of Archon in its ‘true meridian’—Olphaus Megaletor, Oceana’s Cromwell figure. Argus, a skilled orator expressing the ‘true-heartedness’ and ‘goodwill’ of the people, argues that Lord Archon could have done the people of Oceana great mischief but decided not to. Reflecting on Lord Archon’s noble deeds, Argus cannot control his affective response: ‘I dare say there was never a one of them could forbear to do as I do—and, it please your fatherhoods, they be tears of joy’.³⁹ To be clear, Lord Archon is not a Cromwell stand-in; the office of ‘Archon’, as created by Lord Archon’s abdication of magistracy, stands in for the office of Lord Protector. In this scenario, Cromwell imperfectly holds the office of Archon; he did not receive the office of Lord Protector from some higher source. Still, the division of power is so great a moment for the senate that Argus, a man accustomed to rhetoric’s potential for emotional deception, cannot help but weep for joy. Because Argus and Oceana’s senate weep as a natural expression of gratitude for the separation of power, we can thus view these tears as illustrative of Harrington’s material philosophy of political interest.⁴⁰ Oceana’s aristocratic few and well-affected many involuntarily weep for joy, we might speculate, because the installation of a new head of state secures their property and riches: the foundation of true liberty.

The poetic tapestry of ‘The First Anniversary’ also praises Cromwell’s humility in declining the English crown. But unlike the senate of Oceana, who weep joyful tears as a result of Lord Archon’s divestment of power, the poet and Protectorate faithful actively employ grievous tears in order to enhance the joy of Protectorate England. The sectarians could be found ‘[r]ejoicing when [Cromwell’s] foot had slipped aside’ because they erroneously expected their ‘new king’ (Christ, but also Harrison) might ‘the fifth scepter shake,/And make the world, by his example, quake’ (ll. 296–98).⁴¹ The poet and company, however, render the coaching accident productive:

So with more modesty we may be true,
And speak as of the dead the praises due:
While impious men deceived with pleasure short,
On their own hopes shall find the fall retort. (ll. 187–90)

Unlike ‘impious’ sectarians, the Protectorate faithful are modest in their (radical) promise to speak of the Lord Protector as if he were to have died in the accident. Such poetic speech concludes when ‘the great captain … returning yet alive/Does with himself all that is good revive’ (ll. 321–24). In the intervening 100-plus lines, Marvell weaves a tapestry of Cromwellian and biblical events in quite a different manner than the sectarians, who deface ‘the scriptures and the laws … With the same liberty as points and lace” (ll. 315–16). ‘The First Anniversary’’s imagined elegy for Cromwell is certainly a prophecy of what could have happened, had Cromwell passed. But as Ryan Netzley argues, it is also an ‘alternative past’ urging readers to be wary of the transcendent, imminent apocalypticism advanced by sectarians.⁴² The elegy crescendos into a comparison of the fallen Protector ascending to heaven like Elijah, a figure anti-Cromwellians like Fifth Monarchist Christopher Feake deployed to criticize the pseudo-monarch. But whereas Feake associates himself with the prophet,⁴³ Marvell turns Cromwell into Elijah, whisked up into the Miltonic ‘kingdom blest of peace and love’ (l. 218). The Protectorate faithful become his disciple Elisha,⁴⁴ left on earth with a legacy they are not yet ready to handle: ‘We only mourned ourselves, in thine ascent,/Whom thou hadst left beneath with mantle rent’ (ll. 219–20). In this way, they take a cue from Cromwell himself, who gave up his ‘privacy so dear’ to become ‘the headstrong people’s charioteer’ while modestly refusing the crown (ll. 223–28). As Laura Knoppers argues, this episode ‘foregrounds and problematizes the process itself of constructing a Cromwellian image’, though it insists that the right interpretation is ‘Cromwell is not a king’. But it also represents, as Norbrook suggests, ‘the kind of poetry that it would have been necessary to produce had Cromwell perished in his coaching accident’.⁴⁵ It is thus crucial that the heart of ‘The First Anniversary’ is the opaque vision of a company of weepers weaving a unique scriptural tapestry imagining Cromwell’s death, searching for alternative pasts so as to prepare for an uncertain future. The bourgeois productivity of weaving and the private piety of weeping have become intertwined metaphors for the poem’s submerged pastiche of scripture.

Marvell stitches the poem’s second depiction of weeping to its first through images of sectarians rejoicing over Cromwell’s accident, thus suggesting that he is linking the domestic productivity of the first image to the solitary fortitude of the second. Against the hypocritical Adamism of the sectarians (ll. 319–20), Marvell tells the story of the ‘first man’ during the first ‘morning new’, pleased with the sun’s ‘shining race’ until sorrowing when it ‘plunged below the streams’ (ll. 326–30). Such a scene recalls the final two stanzas of ‘The Garden’ (1653–55),⁴⁶ in which the speaker compares his quiet innocence to ‘that happy garden-state,/While man there walked without a mate’ (ll. 57–58). Tellingly, Marvell champions this state of masculine isolation (‘After a place so pure, and sweet,/What other help could yet be meet?’ [ll. 59–60]) while admitting that such a state of solitary wandering ‘’twas beyond a mortal’s share’ (ll. 61–62). In ‘The First Anniversary’, however, the first man is despondent his first night in paradise; his ‘weeping eyes’ keep ‘doleful vigils’ for the fallen sun, recalling the Protectorate faithful weeping in response to Cromwell’s accident. Indeed, he is environed by the ‘screeching noise’ of owls and ravens that, like the ranting sectarians, ‘[d]id make the fun’rals sadder by their joys’ (ll. 333–34). Finally, ‘with such accents, as despairing’, the first man mourns in words: ‘“Why did mine eyes once see so bright a ray;/Or why day last no longer than a day?”’ (ll. 338–40). Without knowledge of the cycle of days, the first man feels the intensity of existential despair. But Marvell’s tautological repetition of day pokes fun at the sectarians; waiting for ‘the day’ of Christ’s return, they will experience nothing but the ordinary cycle of days. Weeping, often considered by Protestant hardliners to be the effeminate antithesis to masculine fortitude,⁴⁷ serves in ‘The First Anniversary’ as solitary man’s first instinctual response to the foreboding threat of nightfall. By linking this individual bout of masculine weeping to the feminized weeping of the Protectorate faithful through the metaphorically dense image of weaving, Marvell suggests that the faithful are ethically revived through weeping because it produces fortitude.

The figurative tears of mourning in ‘The First Anniversary’, as Joad Raymond argues, are ‘a dress rehearsal for the actual event’ in ‘A Poem Upon the Death’. Indeed, both poems attempt to champion the Protectorate faithful above the sectarians. As Edward Holberton argues, the elegy distinguishes the ‘sober affections’ of Cromwell and his loyalists from the ‘cruder passions’ of the people.⁴⁸ This dynamic plays out in the stanza claiming that the Lord Protector’s death date—3 September, the same day as his decisive military victories at Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651)—immortalizes him. Recalling ‘The First Anniversary’s’ attempt to distinguish the pious weeping of the faithful from the shameful rejoicing of sectarians upon Cromwell’s accident, the elegy differentiates those mourning Cromwell’s death from those celebrating it:

That so who ere would at his death have joyed,
In their own griefs might find themselves employed;
But those that sadly his departure grieved,
Yet joyed rememb’ring what he once achieved. (ll. 149–52)

Unlike the weeping faithful in the poem, who employ grief-like tears to prudently forecast the uncertainties of a Cromwell-less Protectorate, the sectarians of the elegy can only employ themselves with their own grief because Cromwell’s death date reminds them, for all eternity, of his momentous achievements. Upon his death, the Protectorate faithful are left with the task of remembering Cromwell’s place in English history. Part of Cromwell’s spiritual attraction, Holberton explains, was his private simplicity. Marvell’s poem, in fact, resembles a later pamphlet that claimed to be the ‘expositor’ of a private Cromwell who had special insight into the ‘“Mysteries of Godliness”’ and the ‘“great secret of Gods election”’.⁴⁹ Thus, the Protectorate faithful confidently assert the piety of their tears (‘Where heaven leads, ’tis piety to weep’ [l. 166]), but these tears are anything but private, restrained, and apolitical:

Stand back ye seas, and shrunk beneath the veil
Of your abyss, with covered head bewail
Your monarch: we demand not your supplies
To compass in our isle; our tears suffice. (ll. 167–70)

Marvell’s image of Cromwell’s mourners encircling England with their tears cuts in both isolationist and expansionist directions. On the one hand, the verb’s preposition—‘[t]o compass in our isle’—suggests that the mourners are protecting a newly-vulnerable England with their tears, whereas the surrounding seas endanger the island through the specter of naval invasion. But as the stanza develops, Marvell celebrates Cromwell’s international and transatlantic achievements; he has ‘joined us to the continent’ by ‘plant[ing] England on the Flandric shore’, and he has ‘stretched our frontier to the Indian ore’ (ll. 172–74). The first example, alluding to Anglo-French forces capturing Dunkirk from the Spanish (1658), possibly speaks to a bourgeois Protestant audience in celebrating an expansion of English land through defeat of a powerful Catholic nemesis. The second example also speaks to such an audience, likely interested in the gold to be procured from Jamaica, taken by England in 1655.⁵⁰ Keeping chaos at bay while forging connections to the outside world, the tears of Cromwell’s mourners, shed by a vigilant bourgeois citizenry, ultimately serve as England’s best fortification as it transitions from Lord Oliver to Lord Richard Cromwell, from ‘storms’ and ‘deluge[s]’ to ‘a shower’ and ‘[r]ainbows’ (ll. 322–24).⁵¹

Throughout the Cromwell encomia, Marvell reimagines tears as employment. ‘The First Anniversary’’s simile comparing weeping to weaving reworks the femininity of weeping into a positive association with domestic productivity not only to speak as and to an audience of bourgeois Protestants, but moreover, to conflate weeping and scripturalism as demonstrations of private piety that can be publicized to beneficial ends. In connecting this simile to the poem’s depiction of individual masculine weeping, Marvell suggests that weeping can be masculine because it produces fortitude. Indeed, tears become England’s material fortification in ‘A Poem Upon the Death’, protecting the newly vulnerable country without isolating it from the outside world. Despite being ‘lost in tears’ as they ‘[w]ander like ghosts about [Cromwell’s] loved tomb’ (ll. 300–1), Marvell and the faithful are prepared for the uncertainties of Protectorate England’s future. Even though Richard Cromwell continues to tread the ‘rugged track’ (ll. 305–6) of his father, they place more faith in their own tears to ‘guide us upward through this region blind’: ‘Since thou art gone, who best that way couldst teach,/Only our sighs, perhaps, may thither reach’ (ll. 302–4).

Glitter In Our Joy: Marvellian Weeping as Affective Politics

As I have argued throughout this essay, Marvell’s transformation of the femininity of weeping into an indicator of private piety and domestic productivity responds to weeping’s strong association with Cromwell throughout revolutionary England. In concluding, I would like to follow Matthew Augustine’s lead in moving ‘beyond politics’ and exploring how a ‘critical sensibility’ regarding the ‘events’ staged by Marvell’s poetry can help scholars avoid reducing the politics of Marvell’s verse to its immediate and textually demonstrable contexts, in the interest of constructing a broader concept of the political.⁵² To this end, one might notice that the two poetic ‘events’ primarily dealt with in this essay—tears-as-jewels melting into pendants (‘Eyes and Tears’) and tears-as-silver threaded into a golden tapestry (‘The First Anniversary’)—both meditate on the relationship between sorrow, weeping, and joy through images of luxurious display. Perhaps, then, Marvellian weeping indicates an affective concept of the political, one in which the externalization of internal emotion attempts to forge community.

To consider weeping an expression of joy in Marvell’s poetics is to invoke a much more distant historical context: the early Christian tradition of gratia lacrimarum (‘grace’ or ‘gift of tears’). Eugenie Brinkema points out the influence of Augustine’s distinction between public and private weeping on gratia lacrimarum, but her categorization of pre-Enlightenment weeping as ‘antisocial’ skips over the vexed contours of privacy and publicity in early modern Protestant devotion.⁵³ Marvell’s iteration of gratia lacrimarum, particularly with the pendants of ‘Eyes and Tears’, taps into the etymological origin of the English word ‘joy’ as it derives from the Latin ‘gaudere’, which provides the origin of the English ‘gaudy’, a word usually describing ornate jewelry. For Brinkema, the link between ‘gaudy’ and ‘gaudies’—the beads on a rosary—indexes a conception of affect in which ‘joy’s merriment hovers in the pleasure or gladness in the glittering surface of things’.⁵⁴ As ornaments emanating and reflecting light, Marvell’s pendants are a complex overlay of exteriority and interiority: they are adorned on the outside of the body, and their own interiority is opaquely visible yet ultimately opaque. To say that joy hovers on the glittering surface of tears is not to say that weeping transforms sorrow into joy, but that weeping produces a tearful surface wherein joy can be discovered.⁵⁵ In this way, Marvell’s poetic deployment of gratia lacrimarum does not use the image of the pendant to illustrate how tears publicize a profound interior piety; the pendant contains the private-public dichotomy, thus suggesting that tears produce joy by publicizing interplays between privacy and publicity while ultimately leaving private the interior piety of the adorner.

Brinkema’s treatment of tears not as an expression of interiority but as ‘a self-folding exteriority that manifests in, as, and with textual form’⁵⁶ dovetails with Marvell’s interest in the relationship between weeping and poetry, especially as it plays out in ‘The First Anniversary’’s iteration of gratia lacrimarum, in which tears glitter like the submerged thread of silver in a golden tapestry. Tears certainly manifest in the poem: as a response to Cromwell’s accident affording the poet an opportunity to imagine an alternative past allowing him to refashion the prevailing scripturalism of the present. In this sense, Marvell is attempting to convince readers that there is a real contingent of Protectorate faithful weeping with the skillful looms in the poem itself. But by claiming that he ‘employ[s]’ grievous tears to ‘interweave’ the ‘one sorrow’ of Protectorate England’s first year amidst his ‘yearly song’, Marvell is also suggesting that tears manifest as the poem itself; as they ‘glitter in [their] joy’, the weeping faithful shine like the thread of Cromwell’s accident within the poem itself. Thus, ‘The First Anniversary’ renders nearly synonymous the weeping of the faithful and their poeticization of Cromwell’s vulnerability as self-folding exteriors: as inherently public phenomena containing private folds.⁵⁷

The affective politics of Marvellian weeping, then, consists in publicizing private piety without forfeiting the sanctity of private life altogether. Marvell values the privacy of weeping in Protestant thought and worship, but he reconciles this valuation with his equally strong insistence that weeping is the ‘noblest use’ of human eyes (‘Eyes and Tears’, l. 46). The employment of tears seems to contradict the entire premise of gratia lacrimarum, in which tears are gifts conferred by God and the Holy Spirit. Indeed, Marvell employs gratia lacrimarum as poetic gifts to his readers, gifts that validate tears as human adornments and creations while confronting inevitable accusations of dissimulation. In an article on early modern crocodile tears, Joseph Campana explores the tension between affect and ethics created by the question of animal weeping: ‘The rush to distribute affect, emotion, cognition, and speech to nonhuman creatures seems to imply a countervailing desire to strip capabilities from the human, as if to turn away from reason and sentience is to turn towards happiness’.⁵⁸ Marvell would certainly agree; weeping is the noblest use of the eyes because ‘only human eyes can weep’ (‘Eyes and Tears’, l. 48). But weeping does constitute a turn towards happiness, joy, and peace when early modern affect and ethics are situated in religious contexts. For Marvell, the joy of weeping resides in publicizing privacy to the appropriate degree. Like skillful looms in the privacy of their homes weaving a tapestry meant for public display, Protestants can publicize their private weeping in a manner that enriches—even beautifies—the public.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.