His elegant handwriting, in diplomatic manuscripts, flowed from labor, critique, erasure, revision, and care-not without circumspection and shrewdness. Marvell was a virtuosic rhetor, philologist, and aesthete. What malign eye watches as we wade into them? Chlora’s tears are drowning pools, and so are the judgments he keeps. Readers of Marvell know this perch: having displayed poetic authority and interpretive agency, he watches us fumble for either in meadows of signs and ironies. He watches but “keep” his “silent judgement,” like a god scouring a world. 2 Interpretable but unknowable, they seem to mean something to our poet, who like the tears refuses disclosure. Enslaved pearl divers-who in untold numbers died-finding her tears, would find deeper depths and finding no bottom drown. How wide dream those who hope to sound Chlora’s tears. That dive for pearl through seas profound,
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