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possibility that he composed these delicate lyrics during these two years of rural seclusion – conditions of leafy tranquillity that are reflected in many of the poems themselves – but this can only be guesswork. There would be a few more years of tutoring before he became increasingly drawn into public and political affairs, when the conditions for such compositions would not be so auspicious. But poets do not always compose in a methodical way. Their poems are often far from being contemporaneous reports on experience. They are picked up and put down. They are redrafted. Earlier fragments are recycled in later compositions. Emotion, in Wordsworth’s phrase, is recollected in tranquillity. Writing the poems on Appleton House and Bilborough could even have been a means of bringing back and reliving the experience later. Nor does the fact that Marvell wrote lively political satires mean that he had abandoned more delicate lyric verse. Poets can handle more than one genre at a time. He may have continued circulating in manuscript poems of a kind that would not interest the political public, as the existence of manuscript versions (though not in his own hand) suggests. Nevertheless, with all these caveats, the Nun Appleton period seems the most persuasive date of composition for these pastoral and religious lyrics.
    Since Marvell left no other record of this period, except in verse, the precise nature of his relationship with Mary Fairfax can only be guessed at. In ‘Upon Appleton House’ a passage of fifteen stanzas is explicitly addressed to ‘The young Maria ’ which celebrates her youth, her innocence, and her purity:
    Â Â Â Â  LXXXVII
    â€™Tis She that to these Gardens gave
    That wondrous Beauty which they have;
    She streightness on the Woods bestows;
    To Her the Meadow sweetness owes;
    Nothing could make the River be
    So Chrystal-pure but only She;
    She yet more Pure, Sweet, Streight, and Fair,
    Then Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers are.
    Lines such as these – probably handed over immediately to the perusal of Marvell’s poet-patron – were conventional praise, but the poet manages, too, a more pointed judgement that suggests that Mary’s intellectual accomplishments might be more marked than her personal beauty:
    For She, to higher Beauties rais’d,
    Disdains to be for lesser prais’d.
    She counts her Beauty to converse
    In all the Languages as hers;
    Mary was twelve or thirteen when her young tutor arrived at Nun Appleton. He was twenty-nine, old enough for a proper distance to exist between the two but young enough, perhaps, for a little playful teasing to enter into the relationship between the young daughter of Anne Vere, the strong and fiercely independent-minded mother who had defied the Cromwellian court, and a witty, clever poet, recently arrived from London where he had mixed with the leading poets of the day. Recurring in the lyrics tentatively assigned to this period of his life is the theme of childhood innocence and beauty, celebrated for the most part conventionally but occasionally – as in the poem ‘Young Love’ – with a faintly unsettling explicitness that can recall for the modern reader the charged ambiguities of Lolita. There is a preoccupation with prepubescent innocence in ‘A Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure’ – a very Puritan debate or verbal tournament between sensuality and purity in which ‘a single Soul does fence/The batteries of alluring Sense’, progressing through the sequence of human temptations to the ultimate triumph of the ‘victorious Soul’. Similar concerns are found in ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun’, with its innocent childlike speaker, brushed by the real world with its ‘wanton Troopers’, a term that entered the language only with the arrival of the covenanting army in 1640. But there is also a parallel