ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
Nor would it, had the Tree not fed
A Traitor-worm, but within it bred.
(As first our Flesh corrupt within
Tempts impotent and bashful Sin.)
And yet that Worm triumphs not long,
But serves to feed the Hewels young.
While the Oake seems to fall content,
Viewing the Treason’s Punishment.
278
(stanza 70)
A Fairfax who brooded over his failure to avert the execution might find comfort
in these lines. And yet it is also the case that the easiness in Marvell’s philosophy
here doesn’t prevent him from participating elsewhere in a “game” of
Cromwellian iconoclasm, as the nunnery episode indicates, or, for that matter,
in a game of Miltonic disenchantment, although played for smaller stakes: “The
wasting Cloister with the rest/Was in one instant dispossest” (stanza 34).
“Things greater are in less contained.” That sentiment might easily serve as a
motto for this poem—indeed for Marvell’s lyric vision more generally; for as
private and idiosyncratic as are the individual perspectives in “Upon Appleton
House,” Marvell’s practice of identifying the lesser world of the estate is
accomplished only by his continually looking over the shoulder at the larger
world beyond. “He call’d us Israelites” cries “bloody Thestylis” (stanza 51), one of
the supposedly imaginary mowers in the poem, the “he” being, of all people,
Marvell the poet. In this novel, theatricalized rupture of the fictional frame, we
witness the aggressive habits of the levelling mowers as they react against the
casually expressed typologizing authority of the poet, but the scene also draws
our attention, once again, to the analogical habits of Marvell’s mind that have
been operating throughout the poem. In this regard, it is perhaps not
unreasonable that critics have sometimes regarded the young, chaste Maria as a
belated figure for Elizabeth. Nor is it altogether surprising that the poem, in its
dynastic glances backward and private celebrations of Maria’s magical
innocence, seems also to herald the end of courtliness as a potent literary mode
altogether. Saying much in little, the poem seems always on the verge of saying
more.
* * *
But humility alone also hardly guaranteed a place for Marvell beyond the
grounds of Appleton House; or if it helped at all, it helped him merely to
exchange “one tutorship for another,” Cromwell’s ward for Fairfax’s daughter, as
John Wallace has ruefully noted. 32 In any event, after Appleton House, it is
Cromwell and Milton, rather than Fairfax, who occupy the lion’s share of
Marvell’s literary thinking. 33 The redetermination in emphasis is no doubt due