Remembering Civil War in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’

Abstract

After the English Civil War (1642–50), poets on both sides of the conflict, royalist and parliamentarian, debated the proper representation of emotion. Recognizing this illuminates one of the most puzzling poems of the period: ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’, the country-house poem Andrew Marvell wrote for his patron, the parliamentary war hero, Sir Thomas Fairfax.1 Although this poem does not describe the battlefields of the Civil War, war pervades its difficult language and relentless philosophical wrestling. It is a profound response to the aftermath of a protracted war founded in political and religious differences that fractured families and communities and caused much bloodshed. Marvell’s primary aim in writing ‘Upon Appleton House’ was not to document the pain caused by war in sympathetic terms, but to intervene in its management through a new species of poetry suited to the post-war Parliamentary age. About this, Marvell is clear. From the outset he praises Fairfax’s house as a ‘sober frame’ (line 1) and not a ‘great design, in pain’ (line 5). Through such terms, ‘Upon Appleton House’ advocates forms of art that stoically govern the dangerous emotions of pity, fear, sorrow, and vainglory unleashed by war and thereby guides viewers, or readers, towards reasoned moral behaviour. Stoic virtue is gendered in Marvell’s poem. Predictably Fairfax and his forebear William Fairfax, both military men, possess a stoic constancy that makes them impervious to postwar chaos, but hope for the future is vested in a woman: Fairfax’s daughter, Maria Fairfax.KeywordsSeventeenth CenturyLiterary CriticismGreat DesignEnglish PoetryHeroic PoetryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.