Daphnis and Chloe

Abstract

Marvell took his title from the Greek prose romance ‘Daphnis and Chloe’, written by the otherwise unknown Longus in the third century A.D. He took his stanza form from Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, the first verse of which goes:

Let the bird of loudest lay

On the sole Arabian tree

Herald sad and trumpet be

To whose sound chaste wings obey.

It is true that Thomas Carew chose. this same metre for ‘The Separation of Lovers’ (1640), but he indented his two middle lines, whereas Shakespeare and Marvell did not. Nevertheless the first twenty-five of Marvell’s trochaic quatrains deal with ‘the separation’ of Daphnis from Chloe. The last two quatrains bring about an extraordinary end, an intellectual peripeteia which springs a surprise, but destroys all our sympathy for Daphnis. Like so much Cavalier poetry, ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ expresses a male hedonist point of view. Its moral is immoral. Therein lies its wit.