SOURCE: "Power and Conscience: Marvell and the English Revolution," in The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in The Work of Andrew Marvell, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 15-62.

In the excerpt below, Chernaik contrasts the political and world views presented in Marvell's "Horatian Ode" and "Upon Appleton House."

… Marvell's most famous comment on the English revolution, made twenty-odd years after the fact, combines a recognition of the inevitability of historical processes with a sigh of regret that history took the path it did. If only the aggrieved subjects had been content with 'Patience and Petitions', if only the King had carried out the necessary reforms himself. 'An Horatian Ode' and 'Upon Appleton House' view the events of the Civil War from two entirely different perspectives, appropriate to their central figures, Cromwell and Fairfax, but they share with The Rehearsal Transpros'd the ironic recognition that what must be—'such an...