Marvell's poems to and about Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell belong together, since both men became famous for their leadership of the parliamentary army against the king's forces, though Fairfax withdrew from the limelight and Cromwell went on to become a world-famous state leader. In the 1681 Miscellaneous Poems the poems were to have appeared together in two related clusters, with three relating to Fairfax's estate at Nunappleton immediately preceding a much larger group concerning Cromwell, beginning with the ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwel's Return from Ireland’, and ending with ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’ This arrangement represents both the facts of Marvell's life – his service to Fairfax preceded his service to Cromwell – and those of his subjects – Cromwell succeeded Fairfax as commander-in-chief after Fairfax declined to make war on the Scots. These signs of logic and intention have been only partially preserved in the best of the modern editions (Margoliouth's); and they were sabotaged by modern literary criticism, which early decided that, with the exception of the ‘Ode’, the ‘Cromwell’ and the ‘Fairfax’ poems belonged in separate camps.

By the standards of the school of Eliot and its successor, New Criticism, the ‘Horatian Ode’ was valued for qualities (formal poise and ironic distance) that actually separated it from its great historical subject; while the concept of a ‘pastoral’ Marvell created a strong temptation to turn the ‘Fairfax’ poems into statements of a world-excluding ethos, which then became magnets for other more obviously pastoral poems in the collection. But it might be more useful today to see the ‘Cromwell’ and ‘Fairfax’ poems as a series of studies, spread out over eight years, in a single problematic: is it possible to write with integrity about events that will later be seen, with the dubious wisdom of hindsight, as revolutionary, but which, from the perspective of an onlooker–participant at the time, are inevitably infected with bias? From the moment of Charles I's execution, Marvell was evidently alert to the historiographical imperative to accuracy and objectivity, and oppressed by the difficulty of its achievement. While he partly conceived this as a rhetorical problem (how to manage appropriate shades of praise and blame), he also posed it as an ontological issue of validity in historical interpretation.