‘Contained’ and ‘Unconstrained’: Andrew Marvell and the Signs of Sound

This chapter focuses on the production of sound in Marvell’s poetry, particularly ‘Upon Appleton House’, and considers how Marvell endows his verse with a voice that sounds distinctly from those of his speakers – including the dominant speaker with whom we have sometimes tended to associate Marvell himself. In this the chapter offers a new approach to an important subject in Marvell scholarship – the poet’s characteristic elusiveness – by drawing on recent work in sound studies as well as early modern poetics. It argues that the poem’s voice has a substantial presence articulated in form and specifically in the device of couplet containment. In that device, the poem exercises a kind of agency that is separate from that of its speakers and that sometimes acts at their expense. Marvell positions the form of his poem as an independent entity whose power is the more remarkable because it can go unnoticed even by those who speak it into being.