The Story Archive

The Garden

Andrew Marvell · 1681 CE · Poem · English · Renaissance

Men wear themselves out to win the palm, the oak or the bays, when any single tree gives more shade than all those garlands woven together. In the green shade the fruit drops on the speaker's head of its own accord, the mind withdraws into its own happiness and annihilates all that's made to a green thought, and the soul sits in the boughs whetting its silver wings. Marvell's fullest statement of the retirement ideal, and the poem that made a green thought in a green shade proverbial.

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