Critics have commented that the poem's pastoralism works against the tradition in several ways, particularly through its strong association of the garden with a retreat from women and erotic love.
[8] Preferring the beauty of trees to that of women, Marvell's speaker rejects the conventional lovers' colors–"white" and "red"–in favor of the "lovely green" of the garden.
It includes allusions to the myths of Apollo and Daphne and Pan and Syrinx from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, stories that both describe a nymph’s escape from threatened rape through transforming into a plant.
[12] Marvell may have drawn inspiration from an ode by Casimire Sarbiewski, retelling The Song of Solomon, and from the pastoral topos of the Golden Age, in which nature provides of itself spontaneously.
"[14] It has been argued that this stanza also references Book VIII of Pliny's Natural Historie, in which the Goddess Pomona describes how her fruits offer themselves to men[11] The imagery here is notably lush, fecund, and sensuous, but the stanza once again shows discomfort with sensuality by also associating pastoral abundance with the Christian Fall of Man: “Stumbling on melons, as I pass,/Insnared with flow’rs, I fall on grass.”[14] In the sixth and seventh stanzas, the speaker retreats from bodily experience into his own mind, “Annihilating all that’s made/ To a green thought in a green shade.”[15] This line also demonstrates Marvell's concern with the destructive power of the mind over the natural world.
[16] The poem's ambivalent attitude towards sexuality and erotic attachment culminates in the 8th stanza, in which the speaker invokes the Biblical Garden of Eden, “that happy garden-state,” but here conjured before the creation of Eve.
[25] In contrast, satirist Samuel Butler incorporated allusions from “The Garden” in his defense of the ecclesiastical politics that Marvell had critiqued in his play, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672).
Critic Alan Pritchard claims that “The Garden” may have been written after the Stuart Restoration rather than during the earlier 1650-1653 'Fairfax period' when Marvell was most closely associated with Lord General Thomas Fairfax.
John Aubrey, Milton’s biographer, claims that Paradise Lost, published in 1667, was begun in 1658 and finished in 1663, though he asserts that some parts were certainly written even earlier.
[19] Critics also claim that other Marvell poems also portray adult women as a threat to solitude, praising non-erotic love and the “innocence that precedes sexual knowledge.
In the 17th century, poetic and dramatic exploration of Christianity was common, with works like Milton's Paradise Lost rising to popularity, and critics agree that these influences infiltrate Marvell’s poetry.
[31] Critic Barry Weller notes that both “The Garden” and Marvell's poem, “The Mower to the Glowworm,” reference Paradise Lost by including versions of "falls."
Yet, as J.B. Leishman argues in The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, “The Garden” is more argumentative and nuanced, adopting a paradoxical attitude towards a contemplative life and the solitude it appears to advocate.