ABSTRACT
Steven Zwicker examines the characteristic 'economy, neatness, and efficiency' of Andrew Marvell's longest satire, The Last Instructions to a Painter. He notices how the familiar metaphor of the body politic takes on explicit sexual perspectives in the 1660s. Zwicker's wonderfully attentive reading of The Last Instructions shows Marvell developing an increasingly coherent political vision and emerging as one of the finest satiric poets of the Restoration. The dating of Marvell's lyrics is vexed, but a background for the whores and virgins of The Last Instructions out of the pastoral materials that marked the poet's sojourn at Lord Fairfax's estate can be arranged. The Last Instructions gives an occasion to chart the metaphor in the most important satiric text of the first decade of the Restoration and to map the political argument of innocence and appetite into the larger rhetorical field of the 1660s.
