World Enough and Time by Nicholas Murray Read Free Book Online

Forrain Architect;
    That unto caves the Quarries drew,
    And Forrests did to Pastures hew;
    Who of his great Design in pain
    Did for a Model vault his Brain,
    Whose Columnes should so high be rais’d
    To arch the Brows that on them gaz’d.
    Not only is the house modest in its dimensions, but it is also conscious of function, avoiding wasteful decoration, a very Puritan architectural aesthetic: ‘Where ev’ry Thing does answer Use’. The poem alludes to Fairfax’s other, more spacious, properties in Yorkshire: Bishop’s Hill (the York town house where Mary was born), Denton (where Fairfax was born) and Bilborough. It makes the point that Nature at Nun Appleton has provided spontaneously something that, with all their art, they lack: ‘fragrant Gardens, shaddy Woods,/Deep Meadows, and transparent Floods’.
    Having set the scene, Marvell then proceeds to recount the family history of the Fairfaxes. In the sixteenth century the heiress and ‘blooming Virgin’ Isabel Thwaites was shut up in the Nun Appleton priory by her guardian, the Prioress, Lady Anna Langton, to prevent her being courted by William Fairfax. He secured Isabel’s release and married her in 1518, the same Prioress being forced at the dissolution of the nunnery to hand the property over to the sons of William and Isabel. The poem dramatises the seductive overtures to Isabel of the ‘Suttle Nunns’, who stress the attractions of the celibate life and try to reel in their precious catch. Marvell’s Puritan reading of the crafty Catholic nuns, anxious to capture the innocent virgin for Rome, fits perfectly with his notion of Catholicism’s project of trying to recruit the best by stealth, as the Jesuits had tried to do with him, briefly, as an undergraduate. Never again would he allow himself to fall victim to the dangerous wiles of that religion and its ‘Hypocrite Witches’. The first of many pictures of sexual innocence – an abiding leitmotif in the poem and one connected with the figure of Mary Fairfax whom some critics have seen as its unifying principle 5 – is painted in this section where the nuns invite Isabel to turn her back on men and sleep each night with a selected virgin: ‘Where you may lie as chast in Bed,/As Pearls together billeted.’ In the description of William Fairfax’s hesitation about taking Isabel by force there may be an allusion to the present Lord Fairfax’s misgivings about the conduct of the recent war and regicide: ‘Sometimes resolv’d his Sword he draws,/But reverenceth then the Laws’. In the end William decides on force, brushing aside the ‘Wooden Saints’ and ‘Relicks false’ brandished by the nuns. Thus Marvell has established the foundation myth of Nun Appleton: Protestant valour has defeated superstition, restoring the house to its proper function as a Puritan seat: ‘’Twas no Religious House till now.’
    Marvell then begins to praise Fairfax’s retirement in ambiguous terms that could be taken as a criticism in spite of the virtuous tone of the portrait of one ‘who, when retired here to Peace,/His warlike Studies could not cease;/But laid these Gardens out in sport/In the just Figure of a Fort’. Developing the notion of the flowers as ranked military forces (‘See how the Flow’rs, as at Parade, /Under their Colours stand displaid’) he compares the garden-retreat of Nun Appleton to a lost Edenic scene that, after the rupture of war, can never be retrieved:
    Unhappy! shall we never more
    That sweet Militia restore,
    When Gardens only had their Towrs,
    And all the Garrisons were Flowrs,
    When Roses only Arms might bear,
    And Men did rosie Garlands wear?
    Tulips, in several Colours barr’d
    Were then the Switzers of our Guard.
    The remaining stanzas of the poem describe the grounds and surrounding landscape of Nun Appleton. Even in Marvell’s description of