A Green Marvell: Seventeenth Century Draining of the Fens and “Salmon-Fishers Moist” in <em>Upon Appleton House</em>

It has been noted that riots were ongoing in the nearby Fens at the time Upon Appleton House was composed. In the summer of 1651, fen men were rioting against the drainage project in Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme. The area was among the first of the vast tracts of land to be drained into arable land in England. A prime example of agrarian modernization, the drainage projects increased grain production but destroyed the traditional pastoral economies of fen men, along with the fen ecosystem, becoming “England’s greatest ecological disaster.” While this historical context of the poem has been noted before, there has been little discussion of the poem’s engagement with it. My article foregrounds Marvell’s engagement with this issue in his country house poem. Building on and revising the existing discussions of the meadow as a space of conflict between capitalist logic of improvement and the voice of the laboring poor, I suggest, these logics are deliberately framed by ecologically minded questions, subtly raised through, among others, the recurrent presence of non-human creatures and the sighting of “salmon-fishers moist” (769) in the final lines, and the poet’s self-representation as an angler, a charged figure in the “fundamental struggles of the time over rights of land-use.”