As “The Garden” begins, the poem’s speaker sits back to cast a cynical, amused eye on the folly of humankind, as if he were watching a crowd from afar.
How silly it is, he reflects, that people run around trying to “win the palm, the oak, or bays”—that is, to earn the leafy crowns that symbolize military, civic, and poetic triumph, respectively. Such victories, in his view, can only satisfy for so long.
He makes that point through a surprising, witty leap from symbolic palms, oaks, and bays to literal ones. A quest for the glory of “the palm, the oak, or bays,” he says, means committing yourself to “some single herb or tree”: that is, to one little plant, whose “short and narrow verged shade” can offer only the most limited shelter. Public triumph, in other words, can't offer lasting satisfaction. Soon enough, people’s victories fade away, and they have to scurry after yet another triumph to keep themselves going.
The trees that provide crowns of leaves, the speaker goes on, are wiser by far than the people who pursue those crowns. Punnily, even as a crown of palm, oak, or bay leaves braids around a victor’s temples, the tree’s inadequate shade upbraids (or rebukes) the person who pursues it.
The speaker has his own strong sense of what’s worth pursuing, and it isn’t any one symbolic shrub. Rather, it’s the metaphorical “garlands of repose,” wreaths that one can only weave from “all flowers and all trees.” In other words, it’s the rest and calm one finds in a garden. Only the real, live natural world offers the great and lasting reward of peace.
In this poem, the speaker will turn his back on all the sweating and striving that makes civilization look so petty and tiresome to him, retreating into an ideal garden in quest for those “garlands of repose.” But this isn’t a simple poem about the glory of nature, though that’s part of it. Rather, this artful speaker will weave literal and metaphorical ideas about gardens together. His ideal garden, readers will discover, is at once a real place and a rich conceit, an extended metaphor for his dream of a perfect inner life.
Fittingly enough, Andrew Marvell here uses a form that feels manicured as a flowerbed:
- The poem is written in octets (or eight-line stanzas) of iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm (as in “To win | the palm, | the oak, | or bays”).
- Those even, steady iambic lines are further divided into rhymed couplets, so that each new rhyme swiftly finds a match.
- The stanzas thus take on a square four-by-four pattern: four beats per line, four couplets per stanza.
Taken all together, this neat shape evokes a kind of deep, calm order—a sense that, in the speaker’s garden, all is perfectly in balance.