マーヴェルの「庭」と17世紀の庭（後編）

Marvell’s Gardens in the Seventeenth Century (Part III)

Yoshinaka Takashi

広島大学大学院文学研究科論集

The Hiroshima University studies, Graduate School of Letters

We all know that literary tradition has often associated the imagery of fruits in general with sexuality, but scholars and annotators so far have not noted that Marvell’s reference to melons in ‘The Garden’ might be deeply bound up with the properties of cucurbitaceae.

One of the typical properties, especially the medicinal ones, of cucurbitaceae is to bring down a fever. And it seems to have been believed that this kind of cooling effect was gained not only physically but also mentally. Under the section of ‘The Physicke commodities of the Pompons and Mellons’ in The Gardener’s Labyrinth, Thomas Hill explains this medicinal virtue: ‘The greater number of Physitians writes, that those eaten, doth mitigate the venereall act, and do abate the genitall seed’. It is highly probable that this kind of knowledge was available through Gerard’s immensely popular herbal to the readers of Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, or that his ‘habit of incorporating influences in his poems from recently published printed volumes’ urged him to allude to Hill’s explanation of melons in the 1651 edition of The Gardener’s Labyrinth. In ‘The Garden’, this healing property of melons fits in very nicely with the speaker’s claim that ‘When we have run our passions’ heat, / Love hither makes his best retreat’ (lines 25-26). Marvell’s intended meaning might be ─ or at least the reader who knew this particular property of melons could detect ─ the irony embedded in the description of the speaker ‘stumbling on melons’. He has just ridiculed ‘Fond lovers, cruel as their flame’ (line 19), but he himself, unaware of his own different kind of infatuation, falls in love with ‘this lovely green’ (line 18). By showing that this dendrophile has lost his footing and got carried away by the passion’s heat, which melons were supposed to cool down, and perhaps by partly laughing at himself, Marvell cannot but suggest the ridiculous aspect of the garden-mania which another of his poems, ‘The Mower against Gardens’, thematises. 　　

The last section of this paper, by drawing attention to the fact that the speaker in ‘The Garden’ does not perform gardening labours, argues that Marvell’s gardens, after all, are created in the mind and reaffirms the limits on the part of literary scholars of positivism in analyzing a work of art.

アンドリュー・マーヴェル

「庭」

17世紀

果実

メロン栽培

English and American literature [ 930 ]

jpn

広島大学大学院文学研究科

[ISSN] 1347-7013

[NCID] AA11643449