앤드류 마블의 역사성:『애플턴 저택』에 나타나는 시간과 공간

Abstract

Andrew Marvell's longest poem, The Appleton House, has been considered difficult to understand due to its inconsistent thematic distractions and elusiveness throughout the poem. As the title suggests, Marvell's work, belonging to a genre of topographical poetry that describes or praises a landscape or estate, seems to give us a guided tour of Lord Fairfax's estate's beautiful scenery. But it goes beyond its suggested traditional literary framework with its multi-layered references to contemporary historical events amidst the English Civil War, in which Marvell's patron has been deeply involved as Lord General of the Parliamentary forces. It is in this historical context that we are led to a better understanding of the poem. But this study finds that the historical approach, though hardly exhaustive in itself, cannot be well-documented enough to shape the meaning of the poem, let alone the intention of the poet in this context. For these historical moments referred to in Marvell's work do not simply remain whole to direct our attention to what they are supposed to suggest. It seems that these historical particulars in the seventeenth-century England transcend time and space to something universal, something beyond history to an Aristotelian higher truth. Just as a drop of dew does “express / The greater Heaven in an Heaven less,” Marvell's poem seems to refuse to remain in the local country house; it tries to fly to immortality of literature.