Marvell's 'A Dialogue between the Soul and Body': Probable Sources and Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ALTHOUGH Marvell's compact tour de force, ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’ (DSB), has resonances with a number of works,1 virtually all of the images in the poem can be accounted for in terms of appropriations from three main probable proximate sources.2 Two of these sources, the Jesuit poet Hermann Hugo's Latin emblem book Pia Desideria (Amsterdam, 1624) and James Howell's The Vision (1651), have been previously noted, by Kitty Scoular Datta and by L. N. Wall, respectively.3 A third source, Josuah Sylvester's Du Bartas his Divine Weekes and Workes, does not appear to have been remarked.4 The purpose of this note is to extend the findings of Datta and Wall with regard to the works of Hugo and Howell; to provide evidence suggesting that Marvell made significant appropriations from Du Bartas, particularly in the final two stanzas of DSB; and to outline briefly the implications of his use of these sources for some scholarly and critical questions regarding the poem.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".