ABSTRACT
Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House is a good starting place because it is, for a start, about a place; because it carries ecological and political concerns we still share; because it gathers and transforms traditional topics or “places” of poetic invention-metaphorical, allegorical, emblematic, and typological, the latter largely from the Book of Genesis; because it weaves these together with observation of the actual place and its inhabitants; and because Marvell’s playful language is serious, lightsome, resonant, witty, unsettling, and ever fresh. In this chapter, I offer a close reading of a poem that unsettles and richly reseeds language to enable new perceptions, and through the multiplicity of its connections invites the reader’s mind to engage in ways of thinking and perceiving that are less linear than radial and resemble habitats and watersheds more than roads and rooms.
