Prompted by a small mention in Saturday's Guardian Review, I've just been re-reading, slowly and carefully (and with great joy), Andrew Marvell's long poem Upon Appleton House. And remembering again just how calming, complex and exotic it is. To understand how a poem, even a long one, can be all of those things, you have to read it, I'm afraid. It is self-reflective, witty, conscious and aware, setting out how to live correctly (if you are very rich), and within 'measure'.
In Robert Markley's words "...Nun Appleton can be identified with an ideal realm that, in a postlapsarian world, can take shape only as the imaginary projection from - and onto- a fallen nature." (From an essay called "Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone’: Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the contradictions of ‘nature’" in The Country and the City Revisted). But that really focuses too much perhaps on the last, longer section in the woods of the estate.
The chief conceit of the poem is not original with Marvell - that the house and estate of a person indicate the quality of his mind and morality. Lord Fairfax the parliamentarian general famously retired in 1650 - resigning in opposition to the Council of State's decision to invade Scotland. The poem is a pangyric to Fairfax, and uses the description of the house and gardens to praise him, his ancestors and his daughter (Marvell was her tutor at the time).
Go and read it now. Please.
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