World Enough and Time (9 page)

A refugee from literary London where he was well connected, the automatic choice for inclusion in any set of commendatory verses or in a celebration of any of the leading poets of the day, Marvell might have been reflecting on his prospects at this time. Surrounded by dedicated public men engaged, or fresh from engagement, with important political issues, he might have thought himself a litte frivolous. He was without a settled career and his only public skill was in the forging of pretty verses. The Puritan in him rather than the aesthete might have felt uncomfortable at this, but before he left Yorkshire there would be further celebrations of landscape and living, the painting of a
paysage moralisé
that would go some way to assuaging these doubts if they existed.

6

Green Thoughts

Society is all but rude

To this delicious Solitude

Nun Appleton House was so called because a Cistercian nunnery once occupied the spot. The house that Marvell celebrated – though it is not the one that stands on the site today, which is owned by a well-known brewing family from Tadcaster – was built from stone taken from the ruined priory. Traditionally it was assumed that Lord Fairfax, whose family had owned the twelfth-century priory since its dissolution in 1542, came to live in a new house started in 1637 or 1638. This is referred to by the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby in his diary for 16 October 1712, where he reports visiting Nun Appleton with an aged local man, Robert Taite. The latter recalled having seen ‘the old house pulled down, and a stately new one erected by Thomas Lord Fairfax, the General, and now the most of that pulled down, and a much more convenient (though not quite so large an one) erected by Mr Milner'.
1

Of these three houses, the first, cobbled together from the stones of the nunnery, is likely to be the one praised by Marvell in ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax'. The second sounds too ostentatious for the modest building in the poem (though it is a poem filled with hyperbole that could make the great small as well as the small great). This second house was engraved by Daniel King somewhere between 1655 and 1660 and shows a cupola that has persuaded some readers of the poem to identify the lines: ‘the swelling Hall/Stirs, and the
Square
grows
Spherical
' with this rather new-fangled architectural feature, which would have been unusual in a pre-1650 house. The third, present-day, house was the product of the work done in 1712 and described by Ralph Thoresby.

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 principle
5
– 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.

The 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 Appleton
6
– 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: