Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House

Here are the notes I took on it in the basement of Alderman:

MAR-vuhl

• prospective poem (like "Cooper's Hill"; also bring in Cindy on description?)
• rural shit—"Georgics," "The Task," but there are HUMANS in "Appleton House"
• buildings and their ruins and STRUCTURE—of building described, AND of poem—Pamela as a story about the interiors of buildings/characterological interiority. And trying to get inside buildings as an allegory for rape—Pamela, Shamela, Evelina.

"Height with a certaing race doees bend,

But low things clownishly ascend." (59-60)

—something about satire, maybe even Burney's mockery of middle-class pretensions in Evelina

later men become grasshoppers in "the abyss.../Of that unfathomable grass"—poetry about the English Civil War, class-warfare, the Levellers/Diggers had a rebellion that Lord Fairfax (Appleton's owner) was involved in squashing. Will Hume's history of the Civil War explain enough of this to me???

Puritan woodpeckers chopped down the royalist oak with their beaks 'cause it was rotten inside.

• Building as chastity belt:

XII

And oft she spent the summer suns

Discoursing with the subtle nuns.

Whence in these words one to her weaved,

(As 'twere by chance) thoughts long conceived.

XIII

'Within this holy leisure we

Live innocently as you see.

These walls restrain the world without,

But hedge our liberty about.

These bars inclose the wider den

Of those wild creatures, callèd men.

The cloister outward shuts its gates,

And, from us, locks on them the grates.'

(93-104)

Allegories of temptation—the evil prioress wants Isabella Thwaites to become a lesbian slut nun

• and "Paradise Lost"
• and Pilgrim's Progress
• allegory of the Protestant Reformation in England—but how does work with contemporary Puritan/Anglican stuff?

This is the same year Leviathan comes out—what can I say about THAT???

Does a Herrick and has a sexy dream about ivy:

And ivy, with familiar trails,

Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales.

Under this antic rope I move

Like some great prelate of the grove.

Then languishing with ease, I toss

On pallets swoll'n of velvet moss. (591-6)

What??? Why is the speaker an embodied person here? Is this an appropriate move for young Maria Fairfax's tutor to make in a poem? What is Marvell doing? (naughty tutors and sex in gardens: see Julie)

Why I'm Loving Independent People

From Chapter 21, 'Bearers'

The Fell King took the old man by the arm so that he should not fall, and whispered: "Gudny here wants to know whether it wouldn't be better to say the Lord's Prayer."

So the old man wept the Lord's Prayer, without ceasing to tremble, without lifting his head, without taking the handkerchief from his eyes. More than half the words were drowned in the heaving of his sobs; it was not so easy to make out what he said: "Our Father, which art in Heaven, yes, so infinitely far away that no one knows where You are, almost nowhere, give us this day just a few crumbs to eat in the name of Thy Glory, and forgive us if we can't pay the dealer and our creditors and let us not, above all, be tempted to be happy, for Thine is the Kingdom"—perhaps it was difficult to imagine a place equally well chosen for this engaging prayer; it was as if the Redeemer had written it for the occasion. They stood with bowed heads, all except Bjartur, who would never dream of bowing his head for an unrhymed prayer. Then they lifted the coffin out. They lifted it on to the horse and tied it across the saddle, then laid a hand on each end to steady it.

"Has the horse been spoken to?" asked the old man; and as it had not yet been done, he took an ear in each hand and whispered to it, according to ancient custom, for horses understand these things:

"You carry a coffin today. You carry a coffin today."

Then the funeral procession moved off.

The Fell King walked in the van, keeping as far as possible to the patches that were bare of snow, so that there would be less danger of mishap. Einar of Undirhlith led the horse, Olafur and Bjartur walked at each end of the coffin, and the old man limped along in the rear with his stick and the huge mittens with the flapping thumbs.

The women stood at the door with tear-swollen faces, watching the procession disappear in the whirling snow.