ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
up another characterizes more generally the vision of “Upon Appleton House,”
as a number of critics have observed. But there is a politics in this kind of
mobility as well, one especially suitable to the mobility of the political moment
and very different, say, from the kind of robust but blunt patriotism of a Drayton.
“Upon Appleton House” quietly dramatizes tactfulness of the most extraordinary
kind in its praise of Fairfax, as if Marvell, like the modern poet he is often seen
to resemble—Yeats—was drawn to his task by the fascination of what is difficult.
Milton’s celebration of the warrior Fairfax in The Second Defense, though
sympathetic, seems almost crude by comparison. Nothing is said in “Upon
Appleton House” of Fairfax’s ill health as a justification for retreat, just as
Marvell takes the popular image of Fairfax as the warrior hero and deflects it
away from the center of the poem and on to Fairfax’s ancestral past. Nothing is
said about the great Parliamentary victory at Naseby led by Fairfax; nothing
about Fairfax’s response to the execution of Charles; nothing about his wife’s
problematic role in her husband’s decision to retire. She is known in this poem
simply—and beautifully—as “Starry Vere.” With the exception of the Miltonic
celebration of conscience, all the big issues that might appeal to contemporary
curiosity are left out, thwarted. By the standards then and now, Marvell would
make a poor journalist in this poem.
So discreet and diplomatic is the poet in handling the Fairfax “situation” that
we might almost begin to suspect that Marvell’s modesty is the true subject of
the poem. “Humility alone designs/[These] short but admirable Lines.” In one of
the most intriguingly “allegorical” moments in the poem, in fact, Marvell invites
us to share his surprise over the toppling of the “Tallest Oak” in the forest by a
hewel, or woodpecker, as if we were witnessing pastoral function as partisan
political criticism:
The good he numbers up, and hacks;
As if he mark’d them with the Ax.
But where he, tinkling with his Beak,
Does find the hollow Oak to speak,
That for his building he designs,
And through the tainted Side he mines.
Who could have thought the tallest Oak
Should fall by such a feeble Strok’!
277
(stanza 69)
The scene is eerily reminiscent of the king’s execution in “An Horatian Ode,”
as is often noted. The closing exclamation even encourages us to think in terms
of political parallels; but Marvell invites this response only to explain away in
the next stanza the temptation to allegorize by producing a kind of semiotic
overload. With a quick glance back and four couplets forward, Marvell arrives
at a no-fault solution to partisan readings: