“Companions of My Thoughts More Green”: Damon’s Baconian Sexing of Nature Abstract

Anthony J. Funari

This article examines the relevance that Francis Bacon’s call for humanity to engage in a (re)productive relationship with Nature has for Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower’s Song.” Rather than viewing Damon’s realization of his isolation from the meadows as solely due to his emerging sexual feeling for Juliana, this article complicates the Mower’s plight by arguing that Damon experiences a tropological shift in how he characterizes Nature. While in “Damon, the Mower” sexuality appears alien to the natural world, Damon comes to recognize Nature as a sexual entity through his depiction of the grass’s growth as “luxuriant” and the meadows as a participant in a May-game festivity. The transition that Damon experience parallels that which Bacon demands for the sciences. For Bacon, the restoration of humanity’s Edenic mastery begins with treating Nature as any woman subject to masculine domination. However, in perceiving Nature through terms similar to those that Bacon advocates, Marvell’s protagonist does not discover a path to back Paradise but reenacts the Fall. On this basis, Marvell offers a counter narrative to the one Bacon posits in which the new science returns humanity to its prelapsarian mastery over Nature.