There’s some slippage here between the apothecary – “balms” – and the kitchen (“baits for curious tastes”), in keeping with how most seventeenth-century recipe books included instructions for making medicines and foods alike

The nuns use ambergris – a preservative derived from a secretion of sperm whales, usually found in lumps on beaches – to perfume the cloths adorning the altars

This is a complicated analogy: the nuns combine pious labors with pleasure in the same way they combine fruit with sugar, to make some kind of holy jam

This fruit, though, is “mortal fruit” – recalling the fatal apple Eve pulled (plucked/harvested) in Eden. The nuns temper this symbol of sin with the “uncorrupting Oyl” of sugar, redeeming vice with virtue

This all sounds good, but there’s something sinister about it: how could something that “perisht” be “preserved clear and full”? Are the nuns staging culinary versions of Christ’s resurrection? And is that – especially from Marvell’s Protestant perspective – just a fun way of being pious, or a blasphemous, creepy form of idolatry?

Don’t worry, the nun assures Isabel – we have fun here, too!

;)

Although Isabel would be a new recruit, seniority apparently doesn’t matter in this abbey, and the abbess has already tapped Isabel as her successor. Which would be fine with this nun, whose fantasy of being under a yoke tied by Isabel’s “fair Hands” sounds a little like a bondage fetish

If Isabel doesn’t like any of the abbey’s rules, she can just ignore them and do what she wants

The relationships between the women in this sorority house are a little confused: the other nuns would be both equal to Isabel, as her sisters, and ready to serve her as her maids

William Fairfax (the ancestor of Marvell’s patron, Thomas) seems like a nice guy and all, but the nun suggests Isabel can do better: why settle the boy next door when you can marry God?

This has clear sexual connotations: “thing” was a contemporary euphemism for female genitalia (as in, in Othello, Iago’s reference to the “common thing” of his wife, implying she’s a whore), and the “things” of the nuns are not “fit” for men

These were the fads in seventeenth-century English gardening

In a similar spirit to Marvell’s, Francis Bacon warns against over-enthusiastically decking out your estate. Fountains are fine, but “pools mar all, and make the garden unwholesome, and full of flies and frogs”