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“Paradice's Only Map”: The Topos of the Locus Amoenus and the Structure of Marvell's Upon Appleton House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

David Evett
David Evett*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin Madison
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Abstract

Upon Appleton House is a poem in which superficial sprightliness and subterranean portentousness, a variety of rhetorical stances, and a loose, episodic structure apparently conspire to create disunity. But a unifying principle is supplied by the formulaic topos of the locus amoenus. As this convention developed from Homer through the Elizabethans, it took on potentially ambiguous connotations of refection, generation, and eroticism. Marvell systematically exploits these connotations, making of the Fairfax estate a double microcosm which reflects a disorderly world and his own uncertain relation to it. The confusion is further mirrored in Marvell's deployment of the topos. As rhetorical device, its impact should normally be synchronous, so that its elements strike the reader as a unit, not as a sequence of terms successively qualifying one another. But Marvell breaks the unit down, anatomizes it, taking its topographical elements (garden, grass, shade, water) serially and discontinuously. Gradually, however, the locus reasserts its mythic totality. As it does, Marvell also traces a historical movement back through the development of civilization to the first locus amoenus, Eden, and a rhetorical movement from critical objectivity to devotional subjectivity. These movements come to a focus in the figure of Maria Fairfax, whom Marvell, as poet-priest, adores as summarizing the virtues of Appleton House, now become the emblem of a reordered cosmos, a refuge from the corrupting processes of time and change. The vision cannot last, as Marvell implies by sustaining the mocking extravagance of his language right through to the last, ambiguous lines. The unity is only poetic, conceptual, rhetorical. But a unity it is, sung out of confusions, with the locus amoenus as its major chord.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , May 1970 , pp. 504 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 504 M. C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, Eng., 1940), emphasize stylistic excel lences. Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford, 1965, condensing and updating his biography in French of 1928), is disinclined to see Appleton House as more than discursive and impressionistic. John Press, Andrew Marvell (London, 1958), is more hospitable to a quasi-al-legorical or symbolic reading, but his treatment is very brief.

Note 2 in page 504 Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, Wis., 1950), pp. 294–318, implicitly accepts a view of the poem as lacking in unity by seeking religious and philosophical depth in the nunnery and forest sections, and urging us to read the other parts “quite simply as they appear on the surface.” D. C. Allen, Image and Meaning (Baltimore, Md., 1960), pp. 115–153, places the poem in its genre and discerns a richly developed political and personal allegory working through the poem's principal symbols. Marie-Sofie Rjfetvig, “ ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the Universal History of Man,” ES, XLII (1961), 337–351, works typologically, concentrating on a handful of especially bizarre passages and disengaging an account of the soul's struggles to free itself from earth. Her argument largely inspires the treatment in Lawrence Hyman, Andrew Marvell (New York, 1964). Harold E. Toliver, Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1965), esp. pp. 113–129, reads the poem as a Christian-Platonic mirror of the world; his discussion and mine are, I think, generally complementary. John Wallace, Destiny and Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, Eng., 1968), discusses the poem as Marvell's epic (relating it to Vergil and Davenant), and as his valediction to Fairfax, comprising both a compliment to Fairfax's heroic retirement, and an explanation of Marvell's own need to seek an active part in the political life of the day.

Note 3 in page 504 Introd. to The Selected Poetry of Andrew Marvell (New York and Toronto, 1967), pp. xxii-xxiv.

Note 4 in page 504 Allen, pp. 119–124, traces the genre from Homer through Statius and Martial to Jonson and Marvell. See also Robert Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-th Century England (New York, 1936), and G. R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg & Courtaidd Institutes, xix (1956), 159–174.

Note 5 in page 504 Ro'stvig, p. 351, takes the hidden meanings of the poem as its highest kind of flattery. It might be observed in this connection that unlike Penshursl, this poem is not addressed to the house itself, but to an unspecified human auditor.

Note 6 in page 504 Hibbard, “The Country House Poem,” contrasts Marvell's defensiveness with Jonson's quiet assurance that Penshurst represents the central tradition in English rural life.

Note 7 in page 504 See Legouis, p. 63: “The order in which the themessucceed one another cannot be called inevitable, even if not faulty. . . . He does not husband his inspiration; he exhausts it, and only then does he end”; Bradbrook, p. 38: “Upon Appleton House is uneven, muddled”; Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1945), p. 160: “relatively formal and uneven and overlong.”

Note 8 in page 505 Allen, p. 117.

Note 9 in page 505 Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962), pp. 66–67.

Note 10 in page 505 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953); for Curtius' special notion of topoi in general, see pp. 79 ff., for the locus amoenus in particular, pp. 183 ff.

Note 11 in page 505 I owe this insight to my colleague, Prof. Eric Rothstein.

Note 12 in page 505 Cf. Thomas Wilson, The Rule of Reason (1551), sig. J5v-J6r: “A Place is the resting corner of an argument, or els a marke which giveth warnyng to our memorie what we maie speake probablie, either in one parte, or the other, upon all causes that fall in question.”

Note 13 in page 505 Sr. Joan Marie discusses these topoi generally under the term “speech within a speech”; it seems clear from her analysis that such set pieces constitute pauses in the line of argument during which the rhetorical dimension almost wholly dominates the logical; see pp. 72–73.

Note 14 in page 505 A. E. Friedmann, “The Description of Landscape in Spenser's Faerie Queene,” unpubl. diss. (Columbia Univ., 1965), following Curtius, traces these developments in some historical detail, from the forensic use of the topos by the Romans, through decadence into mere decoration, to an allegorical or symbolic revitalization in the Middle Ages and a fresh complexity in the Renaissance. The outline is no doubt generally correct. But at any time good poets will tend to use the convention with energy and point, and inferior ones to bludgeon it into banality.

Note 15 in page 506 LI. 134–142. From Theocritus, ed. and trans. A. F. S. Gow, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1950), i, 65–67.

Note 16 in page 506 The near-universality of the symbol is suggested by the variety of contexts in which it appears; see among many others Psalm xxiii; Ovid, Met. iv.306–312, describing the pool in which Salmacis and Hermaphrodite are united into a single universally sexual creature; Dante's use of Lethe in Paradise xxix-xxxi; Sannazaro, Arcadia, Prosa Quinta, a description of the roaring fountain Erymanthus immediately preceding an episode in which a waterless locus amoenus is the setting for a complaint of sterility; and Faerie Queene i.xi.29, where Red Cross is revitalized by the Well of Life.

Note 17 in page 506 Cf. Curtius, p. 112, who says that the function of the personification of Nature “must be understood as an attempt to find a place in the divine order for the forces and drives of life.” Less evasively, Christian writers gave the motif its most explicit Christian statement in certain devotional poems based on the imagery of the Song of Songs: the tree of the locus becomes identified with the Cross, and the locus as a whole the refuge of the weary sinner. See Toliver, p. 118; also Stanley Stewart, The Unclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Madison, Milwaukee, and London, 1966), esp. pp. 75 ff.

Note 18 in page 506 See, e.g., Giraldus Cambrensis' striking “De Subito amore” (Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. F. J. E. Raby, Oxford, 1959, pp. 374–375). The poet seeks refuge from the summer heat in a locus amoenus; he comes upon a maiden bathing, whose beauty, he says, dominates the day as the day quenches the stars. He calls the vision “mea damna”; the term appears in classical erotic verse meaning simply “bane,” but must surely assume a Christian coloration in a Christian poet.

Note 19 in page 506 Suggestively, Mantuan places the locus near Coito (modern Goito), an actual place on the Mincio, which he describes as a tall tower built in a marsh (The Eclogues of Baptisla Manluanus, ed. Wilfred P. Mustard, Baltimore, 1911, ii.40). See also Faerie Queene i.vii.2–7, where Red Cross dallies with Duessa in a locus amoenus setting, and Sidney's Arcadia, the episodes of Pamela's bath and Musidorus' capture.

Note 20 in page 506 See A. Bartlett Giametti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, N. J., 1966).

Note 21 in page 507 There exists a familiar kind of antitopos; examples are the opening of Shepheardes Calender: January, and Southwell's “A Vale of Tears,” in which the convention is completely stood on its head. For a discussion see S. K. Heninger, “Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral,” JHI, xxii (1961), 254–261.

Note 22 in page 507 The passage from Theocritus quoted above apparently described an actual place; see Gow, Theocritus, ii, 163.

Note 23 in page 507 viii, 103; ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven, 1958). An interesting case is Calidore's in Faerie Queene vi.x.6–8, who sees the Graces, something he can neither understand nor share in, dancing in a locus amoenus; he is outside.

Note 24 in page 507 The metaphor “impark” first introduces the nature theme, ironically. Marvell is quoted throughout from Poems and Letters of A ndrew Marvell, 2nd ed., ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952).

Note 25 in page 508 See esp. Sts. xxiu-xxiv, xxvi-xxvii; also Wallace, pp.244–245. The most strikingly recurrent terms in the episode are “Art” and “Sanctity.”

Note 26 in page 508 P. 129. Wallace argues (p. 248) that “the main function of the meadow is to contrast a disordered, brutal, and military activity with the true military discipline of Fairfax's estate.”

Note 27 in page 508 This imagery of warfare and violence is recurrent; cf. Stanzas xiv, xxix-xxxii, iii, LXII, LXXV, XC. But it is concentrated in the earlier portions of the poem. Toliver begins his analysis with it, pp. 115–116.

Note 28 in page 509 See Curtius, p. 186, and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), pp. 340–341; the sense of threat is noted by Toliver, pp. 116–117.

Note 29 in page 509 Kermode, pp. xv-xx, xiv, discusses the complexities of Marvell's tone here.

Note 30 in page 509 In the allegory, a representation of the Civil Wars (Allen, pp. 129 ff.), expressing Marvell's own uncertain attitudes.

Note 31 in page 509 The concept of the antediluvian world as smooth and flat was a commonplace; see Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (New York, 1959), pp. 81 ff.

Note 32 in page 509 Allen relates this stanza to various political mock prophecies, and the episode as a whole to the Leveller Uprising of 1649 (pp. 138–139).

Note 33 in page 509 “I” is used only once in the first 60 stanzas (XLVII); “we” appears in Stanzas xi, XLI, XLIII, XLVIII, LV. “I,” “me,” or “my” occur in 11 of the 18 stanzas of the section on the wood. Both Wallerstein (pp. 300 ff.) and Allen (pp. 143 ff.) discuss the passage as autobiographical.

Note 34 in page 510 The lines anticipate St. LXXI: “I was but an inverted tree”; on this commonplace see Alexander B. Chambers, SRen, vii (1961), 291–299. Allen, pp. 143 ff., calls the wood a representation of MarvelFs own mind, a silva mentis.

Note 35 in page 510 Miss Rjistvig has discerned these historical periods, but under the rubric of a typological approach that conceives them as essentially contemporaneous; the sequence seems to me very significant, however.

Note 36 in page 510 The passage is more abundantly conceited than any other in the poem.

Note 37 in page 510 The imagery here connects Marvell with Christ, as that in St. LXXIII to Moses (cf. Allen, p. 146), together with Adam making up the three chief Biblical archetypes of Man.

Note 38 in page 510 This fact seems to me the gravest objection to be brought against any univalent reading of the poem as a hermetic or other allegory of the rescue of the soul; it is noteworthy that such readings tend to skimp on analysis of the final section.

Note 39 in page 511 Allen links her, through Athena, with the concept of heavenly wisdom, Sophia.

Note 40 in page 511 Her ancestor, Elizabeth Thwaites, is compared to the Virgin:

But much it to our work would add

If here your hand, your Face we had:

By it we would our Lady touch;

Yet thus She you resembles much.

(St. xvii)

Note 41 in page 511 Paul Alpers, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, N. J., 1967), Ch. xi, calls attention to Sidney's use of Arcadia as an emblem of withdrawal from the active world, and to Spenser's similar procedure in FQ vi.ix-xii.

Note 42 in page 512 Toliver's conclusion (p. 129), that “the ‘dark Hemisphere‘ is not threatening,” seems to me unsatisfactory, if only because the image is so grotesque.