The Garden Analysis

Marvell loves the classics, and his choice of form and meter for "The Garden" is no exception. He uses a meter called iambic tetrameter, which means he's got four iambs per line. What's an iamb? It...

If we break the stanzas up into groups, say stanzas I-IV and V-IX, you might notice that the speaker in the first four stanzas has decidedly different things to say than the speaker in V-IX. In the...

Gardens are important in "The Garden" for lots of reasons, but in this section we're going to use our super-Shmoop vision goggles and focus in on the kind of garden Marvell is trying to create in h...

Going Up: "The Garden" starts off steady—lots of branches mean that the climb is fairly regular, just like the meter and rhyme of the poem. Marvell isn't heavy on things like alliteration or...

One of the more popular interpretations of this poem is that "The Garden" is about—gasp—gardens in seventeenth-century England, hence the title of the poem. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of s...

In official literary lingo, Marvell is what we like to call a Metaphysical Poet. This puts him in the company of some pretty impressive folks like John Donne, Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and H...

"The Garden" is no walk in the park, folks. There are allusions galore, complicated thoughts and syntax, fancy words, and so many layers of meaning not even your English teachers will unanimously a...

Marvell was sent to college at the ripe old age of twelve years old. And to Cambridge no less! (Source) Marvell was BFFs and work buddies with none other than John Milton. (Source)Marvell's poems w...

"The Garden" is proof that you don't need sex to have a sexual poem. This poem is crawling with sensual images and sexual innuendo, which makes us giggle a little bit because the poem is basically...

Lines 13-14: Hermes Trismegistus—the idea that everything on earth has a similar but more superior counterpart in the heavens comes from a line of philosophical thinking called Hermeticism.Lines...