If anything unifies the distressingly miscellaneous poems of Andrew Marvell it is a restless obsession with the anxieties, uses, and meanings of time. In “the various Light”1 of his verse with its plumage of incandescent verbs, Marvell worries and wrestles with time as he explores the ways of reckoning, keeping, hastening, devouring, dissolving, congealing, contracting, and foreshortening temporal experience, all the while venturing to ante-date some position of finality and repose beyond the contingency of time. Ranging from the pressures of psychic time to the possibilities of historical time, Marvell’s poetry offers a rich thematic field that canvasses human existence in the saeculum. For the poet as for the greater part of his contemporaries, time is linear and purposive, a dimension of trial, conflict, and decision, suspended between the memory of a paradise long since lost and the longing for a paradise yet to be regained. The structure of time for Marvell is apparently Christian and Protestant in its premises, his poetry abounds in biblical references and religious resonance, and as several readers have noted he seems to share with his age a lively sense of apocalyptic expectation.2 Yet his theological orientation remains elusive, his religious sensibility perplexing, and conspicuously lacking in his verse is a vision or intuition of redeemed timelessness and of the salvific action of grace in mediating between the temporal and the eternal. Nowhere in Marvell do we find Milton’s calm assurance that “long eternity shall greet our bliss” or a sense that the race of “envious Time” acquires meaning and issues in the prospect of personal beatitude.3