page 133

The association with Marvell's poem is a cogent one, I think. Marvell writes of a garden; Hawken writes (in her third sestet and passim) of a natural world the real life of which is independent of human encoding. Marvell soon writes: 'Such was that happy Garden-state / While man there walked without a mate'; but Hawken's fifth sestet addresses the meeting of the sexes squarely: