Lines in a poem by Thomas Fairfax with a clear verbal echo of Marvell’s have created further confusion. Fairfax’s ‘Upon the New-built House at Apleton’ (undated) contains the passage: ‘Thinke not o Man that dwells herein/This House’s a stay but as an Inne’ which calls to mind Marvell’s ‘The House was built upon the Place/Only as for a Mark of Grace;/And for an Inn to entertain/Its Lord a while, but not remain.’ Although Marvell is making the notion of the house as a temporary earthly resting place or inn into a modest metaphor it might also refer to the fact that Fairfax had already announced plans to rebuild it. Fairfax’s lines, if written later, could be an allusion to Marvell’s rather than a contemporary endorsement of his conceit, as they have sometimes been regarded. Fairfax could even have been influenced in his designs for the second house by the principles enunciated by Marvell in his poem. In spite of much debate by Marvell scholars and architectural historians there still remains a not wholly discountable degree of doubt about just which house Marvell was referring to, which further researches in local architectural history may one day finally resolve.2
Whichever arrangement of stones was behind the poem, its own imaginative construction rests on the surest of foundations. Its vivid scenes recall and make further connections with Marvell’s other poems of gardens and conventional pastoral. It is the last in a line of distinguished country house poems of the seventeenth century, which begins with Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘Sir Robert Wroth’, runs through Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ and ‘To my Friend G.N. from Wrest’, Robert Herrick’s ‘A Country-life’ and ‘A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton’ and ends with ‘Upon Appleton House’, which is both a part of and a departure from that tradition.3 Behind these English models were the Latin poets Horace and Martial, who praised places of residence but without the wider resonances of the English tradition. It was a way of seeing the country house and praising it, not as a rich man’s prize, but as the hub of a traditional, ordered, ethical way of life. It stressed the social function of the house in its community and the relationship of this domestic economy to nature. The poet who celebrated this organic community was thus a part of it.
Marvell’s emphasis on the indigenous flavour of Nun Appleton’s architecture and physical proportions reflects the fact that the professional architect was more or less unknown in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The completion in 1622 of the Banqueting House at Whitehall by Inigo Jones, an architect with a self-conscious awareness of classical styles and Italian methods, marked a turning point, combining with other social changes – which in turn had an impact on architecture – to alter the organic conception described above. The gradual replacement of the great hall, where the landowner dealt directly with his tenants and practised what the sixteenth century called ‘housekeeping’, by newer architectural features emphasising the separation of the private domestic life from the public role was accompanied by a tendency for the country house to become a place of relaxation, alternating as a home with a fashionable town house. The poems of Jonson and Marvell stress the older role of the house: modest, functional, in harmony with its animate and inanimate surroundings. The concept is idealised, of course, masking quasi-feudal social relationships and deep inequalities of wealth and land ownership, but as a genre it held sway, producing many fine poems.
Marvell’s poem begins inside this tradition but develops into something else. It is a poem about the country house, about solitude (that new concept for the seventeenth century, when the great house started to swing away from its communal life towards greater privacy) and about nature. Marvell was influenced in writing it by ‘La Solitude’, a poem by the French poet Saint-Amant, whose work he may have encountered during his period in France in the previous decade. The poem was translated by Fairfax himself; another Saint-Amant poem, ‘La Jouyssance’, was translated by Thomas Stanley, tutor to William Fairfax, son of Lord Fairfax’s great-uncle Edward Fairfax, who in turn had translated Tasso.4
The opening stanzas of ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’ immediately set the tone of the poem: wittily hyperbolic, yet at the same time celebrating the modesty and proportion of the early house, which belonged to ‘that more sober Age and Mind’ when vulgar ostentation, sanctioned by the grandiose ‘Forrain Architect’, was still in the future:
Within this sober Frame expect
Work of no Forrain Architect;
That unto caves the Quarries drew,
And Forrests did to Pastures hew;
Who of his great Design in pain
Did for a Model vault his Brain,
Whose Columnes should so high be rais’d
To arch the Brows that on them gaz’d.
Not only is the house modest in its dimensions, but it is also conscious of function, avoiding wasteful decoration, a very Puritan architectural aesthetic: ‘Where ev’ry Thing does answer Use’. The poem alludes to Fairfax’s other, more spacious, properties in Yorkshire: Bishop’s Hill (the York town house where Mary was born), Denton (where Fairfax was born) and Bilborough. It makes the point that Nature at Nun Appleton has provided spontaneously something that, with all their art, they lack: ‘fragrant Gardens, shaddy Woods,/Deep Meadows, and transparent Floods’.
Having set the scene, Marvell then proceeds to recount the family history of the Fairfaxes. In the sixteenth century the heiress and ‘blooming Virgin’ Isabel Thwaites was shut up in the Nun Appleton priory by her guardian, the Prioress, Lady Anna Langton, to prevent her being courted by William Fairfax. He secured Isabel’s release and married her in 1518, the same Prioress being forced at the dissolution of the nunnery to hand the property over to the sons of William and Isabel. The poem dramatises the seductive overtures to Isabel of the ‘Suttle Nunns’, who stress the attractions of the celibate life and try to reel in their precious catch. Marvell’s Puritan reading of the crafty Catholic nuns, anxious to capture the innocent virgin for Rome, fits perfectly with his notion of Catholicism’s project of trying to recruit the best by stealth, as the Jesuits had tried to do with him, briefly, as an undergraduate. Never again would he allow himself to fall victim to the dangerous wiles of that religion and its ‘Hypocrite Witches’. The first of many pictures of sexual innocence – an abiding leitmotif in the poem and one connected with the figure of Mary Fairfax whom some critics have seen as its unifying principle5 – is painted in this section where the nuns invite Isabel to turn her back on men and sleep each night with a selected virgin: ‘Where you may lie as chast in Bed,/As Pearls together billeted.’ In the description of William Fairfax’s hesitation about taking Isabel by force there may be an allusion to the present Lord Fairfax’s misgivings about the conduct of the recent war and regicide: ‘Sometimes resolv’d his Sword he draws,/But reverenceth then the Laws’. In the end William decides on force, brushing aside the ‘Wooden Saints’ and ‘Relicks false’ brandished by the nuns. Thus Marvell has established the foundation myth of Nun Appleton: Protestant valour has defeated superstition, restoring the house to its proper function as a Puritan seat: ‘’Twas no Religious House till now.’
Marvell then begins to praise Fairfax’s retirement in ambiguous terms that could be taken as a criticism in spite of the virtuous tone of the portrait of one ‘who, when retired here to Peace,/His warlike Studies could not cease;/But laid these Gardens out in sport/In the just Figure of a Fort’. Developing the notion of the flowers as ranked military forces (‘See how the Flow’rs, as at Parade,/Under their Colours stand displaid’) he compares the garden-retreat of Nun Appleton to a lost Edenic scene that, after the rupture of war, can never be retrieved:
Unhappy! shall we never more
That sweet Militia restore,
When Gardens only had their Towrs,
And all the Garrisons were Flowrs,
When Roses only Arms might bear,
And Men did rosie Garlands wear?
Tulips, in several Colours barr’d
Were then the Switzers of our Guard.
Th
e remaining stanzas of the poem describe the grounds and surrounding landscape of Nun Appleton. Even in Marvell’s description of the mowers at work, images of war infiltrate, as well as religious images of redemption – the path of a mower through the grass is compared to the parting of the Red Sea for the Israelites. The recent conflict cannot be put out of mind even in what is ostensibly a gentle landscape portrait. There seem pointers, reminders, here – to Fairfax or the prematurely retired twenty-nine-year-old poet – of the world they have retreated from. Like the birds who nest in the meadow, hoping to shield themselves from sight, they are vulnerable to the mower’s scythe. Modest retirement may be no more than an evasion: ‘Unhappy Birds! what does it boot/To build below the Grasses Root;/When Lowness is unsafe as Hight’. Even a detail such as the release of the ‘Cataracts’ at Denton thirty miles up the River Wharfe – sluices opened to clear ponds, resulting in flooding of the meadows at Nun Appleton6 – carries an ambiguous charge, as if it is obscurely reminding Fairfax of his abandonment of Denton and, by implication, of wider responsibilities. It also gives Marvell the opportunity for some wonderful conceits (‘And Fishes do the Stables scale’), playing with the inversions of the flood. After this, Marvell’s retreat into the wood contains more closely observed images of nature which Victorian taste was to light gratefully on:
Then as I carless on the bed
Of gelid Straw-berryes do tread,
And through the Hazles thick espy
The hatching Thrastles shining Eye
The Heron from the Ashes top,
The eldest of its young lets drop,
As if it Stork-like did pretend
That Tribute to its Lord to send.
Sharp and vivid as the poet’s natural observations are, the political allusions never quite disappear. The ‘hewel’ or woodpecker is seen as slowly undermining the solid oak tree, which has been fatally weakened by a ‘Traitor-worm’ just as the state may have been weakened by the betrayals of the Royalists. ‘Who could have thought the tallest Oak/Should fall by such a feeble Strok’!’ After the Civil War the most solid institutions, including kingship, must be considered now impermanent.
Marvell’s reference to himself as an ‘easie Philosopher’ of the wood sets up an echo with his poem ‘The Garden’ where Neoplatonist thoughts are triggered by nature. Marvell is almost Wordsworthian in his reading of a lesson from the vernal wood: ‘Thrice happy he who, not mistook,/Hath read in Nature’s mystick Book.’ The poet who would, before the decade’s end, be immured in lodgings off the Strand and moving in the crowded world of Restoration politics, was plainly – however much he mediated it through sophisticated and allusive imagery – a lover of the natural world. Yet he could not leave that sophistication alone, and his choice of image to convey his languid passage through the leaf-canopied wood was one that expressed a Puritan twinge of guilt at over-indulged ease or forgetfulness of decent plainness: ‘Under this antick Cope I move/Like some great Prelate of the Grove.’ Even his sensual pleasure in this bucolic recreation must be rendered with a dash of self-lacerating ardour:
Bind me ye Woodbines in your ’twines,
Curle me about ye gadding Vines,
And Oh so close your Circles lace,
That I may never leave this Place:
But, lest your Fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your Silken Bondage break,
Do you, O Brambles, chain me too,
And courteous Briars nail me through.
The poem ends with the arrival of ‘young Maria’, who ‘like a sprig of Misleto,/On the Fairfacian Oak does grow’. She is the only child of the Fairfaxes and Marvell refers to their hopes in her. Disappointed at the absence of a male heir they have made ‘their Destiny their Choice’ and placed all their hopes for the future in Mary Fairfax. She would die, childless, as the Duchess of Buckingham in 1704, but for now she is seen as the centre of an imagined, prelapsarian world of beauty and innocence: ‘Heaven’s Center, Nature’s Lap/And Paradice’s only Map.’ The sky is now growing dark and they must move in. In a final extravagant image – for which Marvell’s knuckles were rapped by T.S. Eliot, but which is one of the most delightful and witty in the poem – the darkening sky is compared to the dark leather coracle that the salmon-fishers hoist: ‘And, like Antipodes in Shoes,/Have shod their Heads in their Canoos’.
Marvell’s other topographical poem to Fairfax, ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow’, concerns another house owned by Fairfax at Bilborough, a few miles from Nun Appleton. The hill referred to is, in that flat country, a rather risible eminence of 145 feet which Marvell claims in the poem can be used by seamen on the Humber as a landmark. It is ‘a perfect Hemisphere’ with ‘a soft access and wide’ which may be why, as a local farmer told the present author in 1997: ‘Folk ski off it in winter.’ Again, Marvell alludes to the military past of Fairfax:
Much other Groves, say they, then these
And other Hills him once did please.
Through Groves of Pikes he thunder’d then,
And Mountains rais’d of dying Men.
The poem concludes that Fairfax does not want those hills without the corresponding groves: ‘Nor Height but with Retirement loves’. The suggestion seems to be that he needs both the active and the contemplative life and Marvell, in his poems to his patron, seems to be holding him to that balance, reminding him of the world left behind and his duty to it, as well as praising the pleasures of retirement.
‘The Garden’ grants more allowance to the need for withdrawal. ‘How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the Oke, or Bayes’, it begins, continuing in a mode of profound contemplation that does not seek to counterbalance every description of natural beauty with some allusion to politics or society or a call to the active life. It is thus different in temper from the Fairfax poems and may belong to a later date, when the need for calm reflection and quiet may have been more pressing. As a busy politician, Marvell often seemed in his correspondence to be rushed and harried. His letters of that period sometimes contain expressions of determination to go into the country to find the space to think and write. Although living in central London, during his years as an MP he spent some time in a cottage at Highgate, demolished in 1869 and now part of Waterlow Park. A memorial tablet in the wall of Lauderdale House, halfway up Highgate Hill, marks the putative spot of ‘Andrew Marvell’s Cottage’ today. Only one letter is actually dated from Highgate (24 June 1673), but there are several other references to going there in his correspondence. On 24 July 1675, for example, he wrote to his favourite nephew, William Popple, about being ‘resolved now to sequester my self one whole Day at Highgate’7 and in another letter he apologised for a late reply to a letter, saying, ‘I am much out of Towne’8 – probably a reference to a further spell in Highgate. His reputation for secrecy may have had as much to do with this need to find time to read and to compose as with darker intrigues.
The exclamation in ‘The Garden’ – ‘Fair quiet, have I found thee here,/And Innocence thy Sister dear!/Mistaken long, I sought you then/In busie Companies of Men’ – differs from the playful mock-languor of the Fairfax poems. There is an unqualified relish for seclusion – ‘Society is all but rude,/To this delicious Solitude’ – and a frank sensual enjoyment of the fruits of the garden – ‘The Luscious Clusters of the Vine/Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine’. The governing antithesis of this poem, however, is not the simple Puritan pleasure versus ascetic purity of the pastoral-religious lyrics. From the sensual celebration of the fruits of the earth, Marvell passes not to renunciation or censoriousness. The movement is a transcendent one, to a mystical, disembodied rapture of pure contemplation that has left behind the poor world of mere sense:
Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Sea
s;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.
The seductive smoothness and rhythm of these lines draws the reader into a contemplation of Marvell’s garden-ecstasy, where all conscious intellectual activity and the world of actual sense melt into a Platonic idea of garden greenness, a sort of distilled essence of natural beauty, a ‘green Thought in a green Shade’. In his posthumous volume of Miscellaneous Poems Marvell uses the word ‘green’ an extraordinary number of times, the colour operating as a potent symbol of the contemplative mood. The exalted state Marvell reaches in the poem, where his ‘Soul into the boughs does glide’ like a bird, is compared with the Edenic state of unsexual bliss where pleasure was solitary: ‘Two Paradises ’twere in one/To live in Paradise alone’. Marvell never married and wrote many poems celebrating love without sex and the innocence that precedes sexual knowledge.
Marvell did not stay longer than two years at Nun Appleton, assuming he arrived there some time after November 1650 when he wrote the poem on the death of Tom May, perhaps as late as the beginning of 1651. Early in 1653 he was seeking an official government post, although the post he actually attained during the summer was another tutorial one. Two poems during 1651 can be accurately dated, the first being ‘To his worthy Friend Doctor Witty upon his Translation of the Popular Errors’. Witty was a Hull physician who translated a Latin treatise published in 1638 by another Hull doctor, James Primrose. Marvell’s poem, together with a Latin one on the same theme, appeared among some commendatory verses to the translation, which seem to have been published very early in 1651, so he was thus still in contact with Hull during his Fairfacian retreat. The poem is of interest chiefly for its insight into Marvell’s view of translation. He believed strongly that the translator should be servant of the text and not try to be clever at its expense. Too many translators ‘are Authors grown’ and, by adding matter unnecessarily, ‘make the Book their own’, a charge that could still be levelled at some poetic translators today. Translators who muddy the waters of good prose by their prolix additions are worse than those who miss out things from the original: ‘He is Translations thief that addeth more,’ writes the poet.
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