‘To wound an oak’: the Poetics of Tree-felling at Nun Appleton
But I, retiring from the flood,Take sanctuary in the wood;And, while it lasts, my self embarkIn this yet green, yet growing ark1Andrew Marvell's poem, 'Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax', which searchingly explores the civilised retirement from public life of the Commander-in-Chief of Parliamentarian forces from 1645 to 1650, Sir Thomas, 'Lord General' Fairfax (1612-71), has, like Marvell (1621-78) himself, received a considerable measure of critical attention in recent years. Unsurprisingly, considering the poem features no fewer than eighteen stanzas on Nun Appleton's wood, a good deal of this attention, by scholars such as Chris Fitter, Diane McColley, Nigel Smith and James Turner, has focused on its environmental concerns,2 which include the felling of oak trees on Fairfax's idyllic Yorkshire estate, memorably effected by woodpeckers figuring the New Model Army: 'Who could have thought the tallest oak / Should fall by such a feeble stroke!'. Marvell, though, was not the only man to pen verses on Nun Appleton in the seventeenth century. As well as a modest offering from Lord Fairfax himself, 'Upon the New-built House att Apleton',3 there is another poem from this period concerned not only with this identical Yorkshire retreat but also, intriguingly, with the same theme of oak-felling. This poem is 'The Vocal Oak', subtitled 'Upon Cutting Down the Woods at Nun-Appleton',4 by Brian Fairfax (1633-1711), Thomas's cousin. Published in 1849,5 the poem has not been entirely ignored by literary critics. Turner quotes eight lines from it, arguing that Fairfax conveys the countryside as 'an object of capital investment and conspicuous consumption', and both Fitter and Smith make brief reference to it, if solely in relation to Marvell.6 Nonetheless, 'The Vocal Oak' has hitherto failed to receive the sustained critical examination which its literary, ecological and political moment merits. Written in 1679, the year following Marvell's death, Fairfax's poem provides a vivid illustration of seventeenth-century poetically framed attitudes to the exploitation of the countryside in general, and to deforestation in particular.7 In addition to its treatment of tree-felling as an intrinsically significant and wholly deleterious environmental event, the poem also demonstrates the richly symbolic uses to which responses to such activity could be put, in a Restoration era when the posthumous reputation of Lord Fairfax, for whom Brian had acted as private secretary from 1661, was being placed under growing strain. Though in many ways a strikingly individual piece, rooted in both the personal and political preoccupations of its day, 'The Vocal Oak' also betrays revealing parallels with Marvell's earlier poem, shedding new light on the manuscript circulation and contemporary popularity of a work which, like most of Marvell's poetry, was published posthumously in 1681.8 The poem does not rival Marvell's in ecological, any more than in literary, importance; rather, it operates as a satellite, orbiting around and in some ways dependent on it, yet at the same time exhibiting its own singular characteristics. This article, then, provides the first detailed analysis of 'The Vocal Oak', a close reading in which contemporary configurations of politics, environment and intertextuality are triangulated.Given the plethora of modern studies on seventeenth-century protoenvironmentalism, the wider context of a poem concerned, at least on one level, with deforestation needs little explanation. More than most other ecological anxieties, deforestation had been, and was still, a hotly-debated issue at the time of the poem's composition. Michael Williams gives the early modern British timber crisis an instructively European and Far Eastern context, suggesting that only Rome at its peak and northern China in the twelfth century match the scale of the problem experienced in Britain from the late sixteenth century onwards. Ken Hiltner has shown that early modern England experienced a host of environmental crises, including air pollution, acid rain, endangered species, wetland loss and, not least, deforestation. …
Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell
Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell by Diane Kelsey McColley. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 252. $89.95. Halfway through his essay "Walking," H. D. Thoreau asks "Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?" The question is rhetorical. He has already announced his own intent to speak for Nature, and turned to survey the territory behind, where he finds little in the way of precedent or guidance: English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare included, breathes no quite flesh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood--her wild man a Robinhood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. The literature that speaks for Nature is yet to come, or so it would seem. Thoreau's gesture is at once a ground-clearing and an investiture; it heralds the American tradition of nature writing, which has at heart the belief that before the nineteenth century "Nature herself" is mostly absent from Western literature. This is also a central tenet of ecocriticism, which generally does not regard early modern literature as ecological in its concerns or sensibilities. Although Thoreau's name does not appear in Diane McColley's Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell, it is largely his judgment on English literature and its formidable critical legacy that the author has in her sights when she announces her intent to challenge the notion "that pre-Romantic and pre-Darwinian poetry, especially if it is monotheistically religious, is intrinsically unecological, or that 'ecocriticism' of it is intrinsically anachronistic" (1). The book's central argument is that many English poets of the seventeenth century, including Milton and Marvell, but also George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Margaret Cavendish, among others, demonstrate sensibilities properly deemed "ecological" when they criticize contemporary practices of deforestation, pollution, and large-scale mining; show regard for plants and animals as "fellow creatures whose lives belong to themselves"; and promote a sense of kinship with and empathy for all living things by means of "language responsive, in sound and form as well as image and thought, to the lives of plants, animals, elements and places" (1, 7). McColley chooses the modern term "ecology" over the classical and early modern term "economy" because, she says, "economy," with its roots in the Greek words oikos (household) and nomos (law), designates the management of an estate for human benefit, while "ecology," with its root logos (word, knowledge), "suggests that our use of knowledge needs to be good for the whole household of living things" (1). Ecology, then, concerns the knowledge of nature in itself, as opposed to knowledge of its use-value for humans; it also involves the intimate personal engagement of the human subject with the natural world. "Ecological" poetry of the seventeenth century, whose language McColley describes as fluid and responsive to the lives of animals and plants, promoted just such respectful attention to nature and empathetic connections with it. By contrast, she says, "the Baconian program of empirical science required a rational, explicit, unambiguous language," which promoted the domination of nature, its reduction to a body of ascertainable facts, and its exploitation for human benefit (4). McColley's readings of the "living language" of poetry are sensitive, beautifully realized, and powerful; they make an important contribution to critical understanding of how seventeenth-century poetry reworks traditionally allegorical and emblematic readings of nature and reflects an emerging awareness of the natural world. Readings of the language of science are less nuanced by comparison, but the primary sources brought together in this book, including several texts of early modern science, will be useful to other scholars and critics looking to interrogate critical commonplaces about nature in early modern literature. …
The British Republic, 1649-1660
Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Introduction The Commonwealth The Protectorate From Protectorate to Monarchy Conclusion Notes Bibliography Bibliography for the Preface to the Second Edition Index