ABSTRACT
One of Andrew Marvell’s most distinctive practices as a poet is that of speaking through the voice of someone who is evidently not himself. These voices can be more abstract than human, as in ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ where the speakers articulate the views of the two halves of a divided self. At other times the speakers, although human, are still pastoral types, such as the Mower who only acquires a name (the entirely conventional ‘Damon’) in one of the four mower poems. Frequently, however, Marvell appropriates the voices of actual persons, especially writers. In Tom May’s Death, he conjures up the ghost of the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson – one of the royalists’ favourite authors – to deliver a denunciation of the recently deceased republican historian and translator of Lucan, Thomas May. And in The Loyal Scot we hear the ghost of another royalist, the satirist John Cleveland, retracting the anti-Scottish views formerly expressed in his poem The Rebel Scot.
