Andrew Marvel and The Definition of Love

I just read a review of a new biography of Andrew Marvell, about whom I never knew anything except that he wrote "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Definition of Love." Turns out he was a political figure, Secretary to the commander of the New Model Army, assistant to Milton in the civil service of Cromwell's Protectorate, and from 1659 to 1678 he was MP from his native Hull. (Thus "I by the tide of Humber would complain"; incidentally, his father drowned in the Humber.) He traveled to Moscow in the train of an ambassador, touring Scandinavia on the way back. In later years he was a crusader for freedom of religion and thought against any sort of "Popery and Arbitrary Government", to quote one of his pamphlets. He never married and seems to have been much of a loner, which adds further intensity to this wonderful poem:

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its Tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.