First was the world as one great cymbal made,
Where jarring winds to infant Nature played.
All music was a solitary sound,
To hollow rocks and murm'ring fountains bound.
In poetry, symbolism is everything. Here, Marvell puns on the  homophony  between symbol and the percussive instrument known as the cymbal. One is the idea that an image can stand for another idea. The other is a very loud sound. This is his conception of the creation of everything, a sort of “big bang”: 

Musics Empire