Today, during a discussion of surreal or hyper-real or just plain heightened imagery in one of the poems shared (thanks, Shoshana, for your wonderful poem!), I mentioned this famous poem by Andrew Marvell. I confused its title and subject with a poem in the same sub-genre (the country-house poem) by Ben Jonson, "To Penshurst."
Marvell's poem, "Upon Appleton House," is a marvelous piece of work. He wrote it in 1651, a couple of generations after the Jonson poem, but in the same vein or sub-genre of complimenting a person, perhaps a benefactor or potential benefactor, i.e., somebody in position to do a writer some good at court or among the publishers, i.e., somebody with money, connections and, of course, an estate, complimenting a person through a glowing description of his or her digs in the country.
You can read the Wikipedia entry on Marvell's poem, but I recommend that you go and read the poem. It'll go slow in the beginning, due to the 500-year old English, but it's worth the time and effort.
What made me think of this poem were the lines in Shoshana's poem about the fish tattoo and the fish imagery in general. (If you don't have the time or the patience to read the whole poem, go to stanza 60, where the fish imagery comes in. But you should know that the passage is best read in context of the developing argument of the poem.) The imagery is so striking, "arresting" was the word that I used this afternoon, as to be, as I say above, hyper-real. Realer than real. Air-brush real. Too-bright-for-the-light-of-day real. In other words, surreal. For in Marvell's poem, you'll find a wonderfully hyper-real description of fish swimming in air, seemingly. The estate had endured a serious flood just before Marvell visited, or perhaps as he visited, as I recall from the poem. So, a fish swimming across a field seemingly through the air would of course had been a fish in a flooded field.
I remember first reading that image and thinking how perfectly Apollinaire of Marvell!
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