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in his poem. In spite of much debate by Marvell scholars and architectural historians there still remains a not wholly discountable degree of doubt about just which house Marvell was referring to, which further researches in local architectural history may one day finally resolve. 2
    Whichever arrangement of stones was behind the poem, its own imaginative construction rests on the surest of foundations. Its vivid scenes recall and make further connections with Marvell’s other poems of gardens and conventional pastoral. It is the last in a line of distinguished country house poems of the seventeenth century, which begins with Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘Sir Robert Wroth’, runs through Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ and ‘To my Friend G.N. from Wrest’, Robert Herrick’s ‘A Country-life’ and ‘A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton’ and ends with ‘Upon Appleton House’, which is both a part of and a departure from that tradition. 3 Behind these English models were the Latin poets Horace and Martial, who praised places of residence but without the wider resonances of the English tradition. It was a way of seeing the country house and praising it, not as a rich man’s prize, but as the hub of a traditional, ordered, ethical way of life. It stressed the social function of the house in its community and the relationship of this domestic economy to nature. The poet who celebrated this organic community was thus a part of it.
    Marvell’s emphasis on the indigenous flavour of Nun Appleton’s architecture and physical proportions reflects the fact that the professional architect was more or less unknown in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The completion in 1622 of the Banqueting House at Whitehall by Inigo Jones, an architect with a self-conscious awareness of classical styles and Italian methods, marked a turning point, combining with other social changes – which in turn had an impact on architecture – to alter the organic conception described above. The gradual replacement of the great hall, where the landowner dealt directly with his tenants and practised what the sixteenth century called ‘housekeeping’, by newer architectural features emphasising the separation of the private domestic life from the public role was accompanied by a tendency for the country house to become a place of relaxation, alternating as a home with a fashionable town house. The poems of Jonson and Marvell stress the older role of the house: modest, functional, in harmony with its animate and inanimate surroundings. The concept is idealised, of course, masking quasi-feudal social relationships and deep inequalities of wealth and land ownership, but as a genre it held sway, producing many fine poems.
    Marvell’s poem begins inside this tradition but develops into something else. It is a poem about the country house, about solitude (that new concept for the seventeenth century, when the great house started to swing away from its communal life towards greater privacy) and about nature. Marvell was influenced in writing it by ‘La Solitude’, a poem by the French poet Saint-Amant, whose work he may have encountered during his period in France in the previous decade. The poem was translated by Fairfax himself; another Saint-Amant poem, ‘La Jouyssance’, was translated by Thomas Stanley, tutor to William Fairfax, son of Lord Fairfax’s great-uncle Edward Fairfax, who in turn had translated Tasso. 4
    The opening stanzas of ‘Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax’ immediately set the tone of the poem: wittily hyperbolic, yet at the same time celebrating the modesty and proportion of the early house, which belonged to ‘that more sober Age and Mind’ when vulgar ostentation, sanctioned by the grandiose ‘Forrain Architect ’, was still in the future:
    Within this sober Frame expect
    Work of no