The two books of nature and scripture was one of the ubiquitous formulas of the early modern period, informing natural theology, the investigation of the natural world and the interpretation of the Bible. In this study I take up Andrew Marvell’s use of the commonplace in his pastoral poems. The theological underpinnings of nature’s book, or the two books inform his poems in ways that are both direct and indirect. Rather than praise the Creator, Marvell asks what it means to misread nature’s alphabet and fail to recognise the divine signs of Creation.
Thus whereas the theology of the two books supposes a complementary relationship between nature and scripture, Marvell often implies the incongruity of the two. Instead of taking the natural world as a site of revelation, Marvell is characteristically interested in the disjunction between the pagan, or classical contexts of his poems and the Christian metaphors that have been derived from them. The Protestant disjunction between the orders of nature and grace inform these poems on several levels, including the juxtaposition of non-Christian and Christian depictions of paradisal nature.
Further, I argue that Marvell’s poems provide us with a reading of some of his sources. Quotations from the Bible appear to be ‘read’ in his pastoral verse, as biblical figures are extracted from the context of the sacred and adapted to the setting of his pastoral worlds. The enigmatic qualities of Marvellian pastoral owe much to this quality of re-reading which also applies to his use of other conventions, such as emblem books, Neoplatonic philosophy or sectarian nature-mysticism. Marvell’s poems ‘read’ these models or conventions, responding to their authority claims as descriptions of the natural world.
