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replace Christ’s crown of thorns, finds that the serpent coils of ‘Fame and Interest’ smother and destroy his pious work of art, rendering its ‘curious [skilful] frame’ a futile tribute. There is a Puritan iconoclasm here, a doubt about the efficacy or the moral worth of the kind of highly wrought poetry (‘set with Skill and chosen out with Care’) that Marvell is devoting himself to, a ‘curious’ art that cannot redeem the world.
    A refugee from literary London where he was well connected, the automatic choice for inclusion in any set of commendatory verses or in a celebration of any of the leading poets of the day, Marvell might have been reflecting on his prospects at this time. Surrounded by dedicated public men engaged, or fresh from engagement, with important political issues, he might have thought himself a litte frivolous. He was without a settled career and his only public skill was in the forging of pretty verses. The Puritan in him rather than the aesthete might have felt uncomfortable at this, but before he left Yorkshire there would be further celebrations of landscape and living, the painting of a paysage moralisé that would go some way to assuaging these doubts if they existed.

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    Green Thoughts
    Society is all but rude
    To this delicious Solitude
    Nun Appleton House was so called because a Cistercian nunnery once occupied the spot. The house that Marvell celebrated – though it is not the one that stands on the site today, which is owned by a well-known brewing family from Tadcaster – was built from stone taken from the ruined priory. Traditionally it was assumed that Lord Fairfax, whose family had owned the twelfth-century priory since its dissolution in 1542, came to live in a new house started in 1637 or 1638. This is referred to by the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby in his diary for 16 October 1712, where he reports visiting Nun Appleton with an aged local man, Robert Taite. The latter recalled having seen ‘the old house pulled down, and a stately new one erected by Thomas Lord Fairfax, the General, and now the most of that pulled down, and a much more convenient (though not quite so large an one) erected by Mr Milner’. 1
    Of these three houses, the first, cobbled together from the stones of the nunnery, is likely to be the one praised by Marvell in ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’. The second sounds too ostentatious for the modest building in the poem (though it is a poem filled with hyperbole that could make the great small as well as the small great). This second house was engraved by Daniel King somewhere between 1655 and 1660 and shows a cupola that has persuaded some readers of the poem to identify the lines: ‘the swelling Hall/Stirs, and the Square grows Spherical ’ with this rather new-fangled architectural feature, which would have been unusual in a pre-1650 house. The third, present-day, house was the product of the work done in 1712 and described by Ralph Thoresby.
    Lines in a poem by Thomas Fairfax with a clear verbal echo of Marvell’s have created further confusion. Fairfax’s ‘Upon the New-built House at Apleton’ (undated) contains the passage: ‘Thinke not o Man that dwells herein/This House’s a stay but as an Inne’ which calls to mind Marvell’s ‘The House was built upon the Place/Only as for a Mark of Grace; /And for an Inn to entertain/Its Lord a while, but not remain.’ Although Marvell is making the notion of the house as a temporary earthly resting place or inn into a modest metaphor it might also refer to the fact that Fairfax had already announced plans to rebuild it. Fairfax’s lines, if written later, could be an allusion to Marvell’s rather than a contemporary endorsement of his conceit, as they have sometimes been regarded. Fairfax could even have been influenced in his designs for the second house by the principles enunciated by Marvell