ABSTRACT
In 1970, Rosalie Colie published a book subtitled 'Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism'. Another is the tendency of Marvell's poems to keep on rigorously staging the formal impasses of Renaissance pastoral. In attempting to deallegorize this narrative and simultaneously purge it of violence, Marvell makes a pure love of trees into the original pastoral motive. This is the poem Jonathan Goldberg has plausibly identified as the canonical Marvell garden poem, in which the entire rhetorical repertoire of Renaissance pastoral is rehearsed. Before turning to Upon Appleton House, in which these contradictory lyric scenarios are elaborated, let us briefly consider some further attempts by Marvell to envisage a good economy of the garden state. The 'Marvel of Peru', an exotic New World import otherwise known as Jalapa mirabilis, finds its way into the poem's flower catalogue; it represents the new version of himself by which the domestic English Marvell is at once seduced and threatened.
