The Picture of little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers

Abstract

Critics, for the most part, are silent on what they take ‘The Picture’ in the tide to be, but three ladies have spoken out. At Cambridge M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas in Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1940) took it to be a painting in a frame. They noted on p.52 that the poem ‘On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins was ‘based on a similar theme; it too was inspired by a picture’. At Oxford, however, Helen Gardner did not agree. In her introduction to The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin, 1957), p.22, she wrote: ‘This lovely poem would seem to have arisen from thoughts suggested by the name and family history of a friend’s child. Whether Marvell actually caught sight of her in a garden we have no means of knowing.’