Marvell's Watery Maze: Digression and Discovery at Nun Appleton

The narrative structure of Upon Appleton House has long invited and as long resisted explanation. The poem opens with promise of sobriety, its tetrameter couplets display the epigrammatic concision we associate with Marvell, and its sculpted stanzas seem balanced and self-contained. Yet the bounds and walls and close-fitting spaces of the house at Nun Appleton fail to hold the narrator as he wanders beyond their confines, over meadow and wood, through fantasy and apostrophe, into ventriloquized moods and prophetic strains. The lyric miniaturist promises control, yet his poem slips from the containment of an English country house into a dark landscape which seems at once portraiture of the estate, of the spirit, and of the deepest recesses of the self.

Rosalie Colie's masterly reading began by admitting what appeared to her the unresolvable problem of form, the frank and willful irregularity of Upon Appleton House.Later scholarship struggled unevenly with the poem's pressure toward dispersal and multiplicity,its seeming disregard for, even subversion of, the usual signs of formal coherence,while recent critical work has reflected increased theoretical sophistication and ease with narrative disjunction and fragmentation. ¹ John Rogers, Barbara Estrin, and Lynn Enterline have reopened the poem and reimagined its structure with fresh readings of historical and psychoanalytic complexity. ² One scholar has uncovered a late sixteenth-century map of Nun Appleton crossed by the river's serpentine line and finds that Marvell's poem provides "an entirely plausible account of a sinuous yet circular walk through the Fairfax estate." ³

Upon Appleton House is indeed exact and detailed in its allusions to Fairfacian property and history; yet the celebration of the house is darkened, not only by the civil turmoil from which the General has withdrawn, but by the absence of exactly those compliments to patrons traditional in country house poems--the display of abundant blessings, gifts, and tributes. At Nun Appleton no cheerful brows glow in firelight, no groaning board suggests feasting, no stewards or tenants populate the scene. Instead bloody Thestylis serves up a baby rail, and abundance figures in the number and density of the estate's orphaned creatures and sinister domains of garden, meadow, and flood.

The narrator's progress through the poem not only swerves from the anticipated path of country-house discourse; it strays in ways synonymous with transgression and moral deviation. A generic deviant, the poem raises the specter of disorder and deviance at many levels: personal, familial, national, sexual, spiritual. As a subordinate yet intrusive presence among his employers, the tutor pulls at various threads of their story but appears to have no history himself. He is of neither a Fairfax nor a military line, neither child nor parent, not a tree or a bird, despite his wishful woodland masque--perhaps neither male nor female but an amphibian of doubtful nature. And through his peculiar "survey" and his movements "betwixt", we encounter a series of silent, sacrificial victims. ⁴ The grounds surveyed become depths to be plumbed; and a mariner's line (381-82) sounds an underworld of digression, drowning, and the translation of youth.

Beginning with the digression into the nunnery, Upon Appleton House celebrates yet oddly highlights the skirmish of parents, suitors, and rivals around the youthful Isabel and Maria. We are not allowed to forget, by contrast, Maria's "studious hours," her languages, and her wisdom cultivated in the halcyon days before her translation into a bride; nor can we forget how Isabel was tempted generations earlier into spiritual retreat. And behind the impulse to retreat from or postpone the demands of heterosexual reproduction hovers the child's tutor, the narrator whose intellectual fertility Lord Fairfax employs to extend the family fame in lines of verse. Some of the poem's alarm which collects around children may be anger and sadness that belongs to the tutor, a progenitor whose personal lines do not go forward but inward and back to the past. He...