Department
Foreign Languages
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2019
Embargo Period
1-27-2020
Abstract
THE TORTOISE IN ANDREW MARVELL’s “Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax” (1652) is a highly perplexing metaphor that appears twice, framing the poem’s ninety-seven octosyllabic stanzas.1 The initial suggestion that “Beasts [. . .] Birds [. . .] [and] Tortoises” (11–13) inhabit spaces best suited to their anatomies creates a lacuna in the poem, which some scholars have interpreted as a critique of Appleton House.2 Is the Fairfacian dwelling, standing in Brobdingnagian scale against the backdrop of the tortoise shell, unbefitting of its owner, Marvell’s patron, Lord General Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671)? Or does the poet revere the scale and proportion of Appleton House and praise it axiomatically, through a theory of architecture articulated in the maxim: “Their Bodies measure out their Place” (16)? I argue the latter case and propose that the shared geometries of architecture and anatomy converge in the source of the tortoise metaphor: Vitruvius’s De architectura (ca. 15 BCE).
Journal Title
South Central Review
Journal ISSN
0743-6831
Volume
36
Issue
3
First Page
68
Last Page
84
Comments
This is the post-print. The full publisher's PDF is available at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/741498.