Andrew Marvell's country-house epic, Upon Appleton House, has long been understood as a meditation on conventional philosophical themes. An exact dating allows us to see the topical and polemical force of those themes. Moreover, situating the poem within particular chronological and geographical confines, the summer of 1651 and the household of the recently retired Lord General as well as the political geography of the vale of York, reveals the continuities and the patronage-afflicted contours of the poet's engagement with the crisis of the English revolution, a crisis he had so searchingly explored in An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland.