ABSTRACT
My alternate title for this chapter alludes, in a blunt expression of intertextual debt, to a seminal article in the history of reading on how Gabriel Harvey read one of his books. 1 It is so titled, no doubt (to doubt myself), to borrow glory, but also to place my reading of Marvell's “Damon the Mower” in a field—the history of reading—in which it has rarely, explicitly or extensively, been located. 2 Damon's rant and self-scything have not especially concerned historians of reading because, I suspect, the poem's generation from its author's reading, beyond the standard classical pastoral and other poetic fare, has not much been noted. Why that qualification, though: why “not much”? The qualification appears because, after I happened to notice what seemed the poem's unexpected origin in a late sixteenth-century herbal, I discovered that A.B. Grosart, nineteenth-century editor of collected editions of, among other authors, Marvell, had rather beaten me to it, as had many subsequent editors, whether on their own steam or borrowing his, with or (more usually) without acknowledgment. 3 There might have ended my reading of “Damon,” and of Marvell's reading of Gerard's herbal, almost before it had begun. The work was done.
