Resumen de Alexander Pope's garden at Twickenham: an architectural design proposed
The above lines are part of the discussion of retirement and public life which forms one of the themes of Marvell's poem. At the same time we notice that the specified symbolism, the bastions as suggestive of the senses, tells us something of the way the gardener (and the poet) see the nature of man in an unsettled part of the seventeenth-century: on guard in a potentially hostile world. Thus Marvell's overt theme is given resonance. However, the metaphorical nature of the planting the poet describes is not what we usually think of as architectural in gardening: it is too literal a representation of a piece of architecture for that.
