ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Anglo-Dutch bond flowing through the seventeenth century through Vondel’s metaphor of two rivers flowing together. It shows the transnational nature of intellectual and artistic culture, and the degree to which these countries inhabited a shared literary space. The chapter focuses on their imaginative rather than material exchange, and tracess the roots and nature of specific parallels between the works of Milton, Marvell, and Dutch writers. Marvell had the opportunity to experience the Dutch literary environment first-hand when he travelled to the Netherlands in the 1640s and 1660s. The composition of Marvell’s poem commenced in the autumn of 1651. Nun Appleton is located in Yorkshire. In the summer of 1651, Charles II planned to invade northern England with his army in Scotland.
