Stanza 72 of Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House.'

Various attempts have been made to discover numerological patterns in the ninety-seven stanzas of 'Upon Appleton House'. Maren-Sofie Rostvig, for example, has suggested that its structural pattern is 10 + 75 + 12 where the 75 central stanzas are comprised of three groups of 25 stanzas.(1) Expanding on her suggestions, Douglas Brooks-Davies has drawn attention to the numerological significance of the whole poem's midmost stanza, the 49th, where the mowers begin scything the grass to create a lane that recalls the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites.(2) This middle stanza, as Brooks-Davies rightly points out, marks the divide between the first half dealing with the Fairfaxes, the house and gardens and the largely contemplative second half. This natural division, however, is subsequently modified by him to form two unequal halves of 46 and 51 stanzas, where 46 is numerologically related to the forty-six years it took Herod to rebuild the Temple and 51 more tentatively to the fifty years of the Jubilee and the following one year of 'true rest'. Brooks-Davies's numerological pattern of stanzas is in fact different from that proposed by Maren-Sofie Rostvig, and therefore each structural pattern yields different numerological interpretations. One would also expect the total number of stanzas, 97, to possess a numerological significance, which, as far as I know, it does not. On the other hand the number of lines, 776 (8 x 97) is one short of 777 or, if the title is included, is 777. This number could well be significant. Rostvig and Brooks-Davies differ in another respect. Rostvig concentrates mainly on structural patterns, while Brooks-Davies is in some cases also interested in relating the number of a stanza to its contents. This approach, it seems to me, has the advantage of avoiding a certain arbitrariness in structural numerology by anchoring the number of a specific stanza in the matter taken up in that stanza.

I would like to illustrate this by examining stanza 72 of 'Upon Appleton House' to see whether its contents correspond to its …