Hunting the Hunter: Fowling and Interpretive Entrapment in Upon Appleton House

Abstract

Focusing on Upon Appleton House, this article seeks to illumine Marvell’s communication to audiences (or to the idea of audience) and thereby to find an embodied authenticity.  Examining the relationship between narrative and surface-level appeals, the article excavates stanzas that represent common hunting practices and thereby figure the interpreter's entrapment.  It focuses on the following intertexts: Gervase Markham’s Hungers Prevention (1621), a fowling text where Marvell found his “inverted tree”; Culex, a brief mock epic attributed to Virgil that locates Marvell’s comedic gestures in grand poetic ambition; and Augustine’s Confessions, which in its metaphorical treatment of birdlime helps us to understand Marvell’s investment in poetry to be a suspension in the self-conscious pleasure of a recursive embodied process.