ABSTRACT
Marvell's 'beloved' is distributed across the text in discrete pieces. For Marvell's poem has not yet laid the spectacular Jacobean imagos to rest, although it is also evidence of the historical impetus towards allotting the body to final obscurity. If Marvell's dismemberment owes something to the measured precisionism of the judicial torturer, as does Tulp's, nor have the incisions yet become wholly clinical. For against the idyll and its affect, the poem is uncompromising in its sexual objectives, not to say its 'sexual polities': this is poetry with operative purposes, designed to seduce. This is, as Christopher Hill argued some time ago, an anti-epicurean ethic, and one which could be well described as militant and 'puritan', in its combativeness and its commitment to labour, if not actually in its emphasis on urgent sex. The poem is after all call for consummation of the pleasures of the body: sex is its publicly avowed objective even if violence is its formal desire.
