"Upon Appleton House" is what's known as a "country house poem," a poem praising a noble family's stately home. Such poems were often written in honor of a poet's patron: pay a poet, and they just might be so grateful that they'd write you a poem about how fabulous your house was (and, by extension, how fabulous you were).
This flavor of poem came into its own in early 17th-century England through the work of writers like Emelia Lanier and Ben Jonson. Andrew Marvell wrote "Upon Appleton House" in the early 1650s, though, some years later—and by then, England and its nobility had been through some trying times.
Marvell moved to Appleton to work as a tutor for the young Maria Fairfax. Maria was the only child of Lord Thomas Fairfax and his wife Anne de Vere, a family that played a major part in the English Civil War (of which you can find a brief overview in the Context section of this guide):
- Both Fairfax and de Vere came from famous military families and had brave and warlike temperaments themselves. Thomas Fairfax was a famous Parliamentarian general; Anne, a noted heckler.
- Though Fairfax fought alongside Oliver Cromwell, he was appalled by Cromwell's determination to execute King Charles I and largely withdrew from public life in the wake of that earthshaking beheading.
- With the war over and Cromwell installed as Lord Protector of the country, the Fairfaxes thus retired to Appleton, their country home in Yorkshire, to live as quiet a life as possible.
The poem that Andrew Marvell would write about Appleton would thus end up being about much more than the house's charms and the Fairfaxes' benevolence. Over the course of this long poem, Marvell transforms Appleton into a cultural, political, and even spiritual ideal: a place where "Right" triumphs over hidebound and false "Religion" and humanity humbly learns from nature. In short, the Appleton of this poem becomes a bastion of goodness and order, a retreat from a damaged and fallen world that is, as the speaker says at the end of the poem, "not what it once was."
This guide will examine the poem’s eight opening stanzas, in which the poem's speaker begins a kind of guided tour of Appleton, praising what he feels might be the house’s greatest virtue: its humility.
In these first lines, the speaker introduces Appleton by describing what it isn't: alien and artificial. "No foreign Architect" could have designed this place, the speaker declares. If he had, he would certainly not have given the house its "sober frame," its modest and unassuming shape.
A suspicious foreign architect would also have made his mark on the grounds. Rather than leaving the stone "quarries" from which the house's walls were mined as they are, he'd have sculpted them into picturesque "caves"; rather than preserving the "forests" that surround the estate, he'd have chopped them down to make artificial "pastures."
One of Appleton's first virtues, then, is that it doesn't lie. Rather than imposing some kind of fanciful (and suspiciously Continental) ideal on the landscape, trying to make Yorkshire look like a dream of ancient Greece, Appleton sits quietly and naturally in its surroundings.
Such modesty, the first lines suggest, is praiseworthily British. Let some decadent Frenchman build a pretentious, artificial house, the speaker seems to say; the steady English Fairfax family knows better than to impose its own petty daydreams on nature. For nature, this poem will suggest, is the wisest designer—or nature's designer is.