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'How happy might I still have mowed,
Had not Love here his thistles sowed!...'(9)
Before, that is, he was changed by love, before love made him less than himself, Damon was, he believes, simply "happy." Marvell seems to me deeply engaged in the Empsonian problem of including everything in the "humble thing," of
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade. ("The Garden")
Losing that second skin requires giving away exchange itself, which is precisely what Damon's gift giving performs, for together the three gifts represent the process of exchange. The sacrifice of exchange paradoxically enables Damon to exchange his earlier diminished identity for a more comprehensive one. By giving away the transformation from impotence to pantheistic power, Damon opens up th possibility of enacting that transformation. Only after stanza 5's gift giving does Damon "find" his hitherto lost, diminished identity.
'I am the Mower Damon, known
Through all the meadows I ahve mown.'
On me the morn her dew distills
'Before her darling daffodils.
And, if at noon my toil me heat,
The sun himself licks off my sweat.'
While, going home, the evening sweet
In cowslip-water bathes my feet (6).
This Damon remembers a perfect identity with nature, and a powerful presence emphasized by Marvell's use of the present tense: "I am known...the morn her dew distills." Inscribed within this powerful identification with Nature, however,is a trace of the exchanged "presents" which enable the union. The "mown" meadows by which Damon is known are cut, diminished things, dismembered, "disarmed," like the "harmless snake." Damon's sacrifice of exchange, itself requiring an exchange of complex mutability for simple singularity of identity, enables a single identity but one that implies an opposite, complex identity.
Stanza 7 similarly re-presents Damon's lost "presents" while building a full, rich identity from a mutable, diminished one.
'What, though the piping shepherd stock
The plains with an unnumbered flock,
This scythe of mine discovers wide
MOre ground than all his sheep do hide.
With this golden fleece I shear
Of all these closes every year.
And though in wool more poor than they,
Yet am I richer far in hay.
Though the shepherd flocks are "unnumbered," the circular sweeps of Damon's scythe appropriate even "more ground than all the sheep do hide," and their wool is added to his harvest--his hay become "golden fleece." Damon "discovers" the plain identity of a simple union with Naturewhich, inevitabley, implies a complex identity. The phallic scythe's discovery of the "plain," hidden ground reproduces the snake's changing of skin. Like the "snake that kept within" and "now glitters in its second skin," the "plain"/ground was hidden and now yields a "golden fleece." Damon (and his scythe), god-like at the center of the universe, inscribes himself upon "all the meadows," discovering himself both as a plain simplicity that was hidden, and as the double-skinned, complicated, snake.
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