An Unintended Episode: English Country House Poems

I had not thought to do an episode on the English country house poetry of the 17th century, but was recently reminded of their place in the survey of early modern literature, so here's a look at that peculiar subgenre.

In this show, we'll look at Aemilia Lanyer's "A Description of Cooke-ham" and Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst."

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• 9:02 (Cont.) An Unintended Episode: English Country House Poems

Transcript

Happy old man, who 'mid familiar streams

And hallowed springs, will court the cooling shade!

Here, as of old, your neighbour's bordering hedge,

That feasts with willow-flower the Hybla bees,

Shall oft with gentle murmur lull to sleep,

While the leaf-dresser beneath some tall rock

Uplifts his song, nor cease their cooings hoarse

The wood-pigeons that are your heart's delight,

Nor doves their moaning in the elm-tree top.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Classic English Literature Podcast, where hardcore litterbugs can get the reason for their rhyme.  The verse that I opened with is a speech from Roman superpoet Virgil’s first eclogue.  It’s one of the first examples of the “farewell to a place” poem and I stumbled over it recently, then thought to myself: “Self, you need to do a little bonus episode.”

You see, Virgil’s eclogue is a conversation between two shepherds, one of whom, Meliboeus must leave his beautiful valley since his land has been granted to a Roman soldier.  The poem grapples with several sociopolitical issues surrounding the Roman civil wars which need not concern us here.  What does concern us is Virgil’s institution of the pastoral poem of place – a celebration of and a meditation on a particular location, a topoi, to coin a pun.

This is relevant to our mainline study of English literature because where we’re at right now – the early to mid 17th century – saw the introduction and flourishing of a vogue for poems about English country houses, and the two most famous examples of these poems were written by two poets we’ve covered already: Aemelia Lanyer and Ben Jonson.  And since I dropped no hint of their topographical innovations, when I was reminded of Virgil’s poem, I thought I needed to rectify that oversight.  So, here it is, an episode on the English country house poem.

You know what I mean by a country house, don’t you?  I’m not talking about a little cottage by the river or a cabin in the woods.  I’m talking about those huge piles set in beautifully landscaped parks – the kind of houses that get names like Audley End House or Hatfield House.  These are basically getaway palaces for the aristocracy, needing a bit of RnR when life in the town house presses in, or in fact residential mansions for the country gentry, who exercised a kind of manorial power over the county.

English Country House poetry, which emerged during the Renaissance period, particularly in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, is characterized by its idealized portrayal of these rural estates. The genre developed during a time when the English aristocracy was becoming increasingly wealthy and influential. Country estates, symbolizing power, wealth, and stability, embodied the ideal English way of life. They were self-contained worlds, where the landowners exerted control over the land and people within their domain.  We should also note the enclosure movement, which transformed the rural landscape and displaced many peasants by cutting them off from lands previously available for livestock grazing.  The poems inspired by these houses often blend descriptions of the physical beauty of the estates with themes of hospitality, social order, and the relationship between the landowners and their tenants or guests, constructing an ideal of the countryside as a place of harmony and prosperity.

Amelia Lanyer is generally regarded as the first writer of the English country house poem.  Those of you fact-checking in real time may come across books or websites supporting Ben Jonson’s claim, but those are usually based on old scholarship that did not know or did not recognize Lanyer’s work.  Anyway, her poem called “The Description of Cooke-ham” appears in her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which we talked about in episode 65, published in 1611.  Lines in the poem which refer to the wedding of Lanyer’s friend Anne Clifford in 1609 and then its entry in the Stationers Register in 1610 pretty firmly establish the date of composition.  The poem the speaker’s leaving of Cooke-ham, the estate rented by Margaret Clifford, Dowager Countess of Cumberland, where Lanyer resided for a few weeks in her teens.  Lanyer compresses her elegiac poem into the archetypal turning of the year’s seasons.  She begins with the word “Farewell,” firmly establishing her connection to Virgil’s tradition.  Then she loads the second pentameter line with three repetitions of the word that dominates the poem’s sense: the word grace.  She writes:

Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtained

Grace from that grace where perfect grace remained.

She’s got, like, a triple-pun going on here: grace as in God’s grace, yeah, then grace as in honor or goodwill, and then grace as in the honorific address: Your Grace, the Countess of Cumberland.  Lanyer opens this poem crediting her time at Cooke-ham, and the generosity of her social superiors, with creating her as a poet.  And as such, we seem to get a good deal of the obsequious kiss-uppery associated with patronage poems.  Remember, the first part of Salve Deus consists of an entire catalogue of rather angling poems of flattery.  Ten lines in, and we get a tribute to the Countess, “From whose desires did spring this work of grace,” adding a fourth use of grace, this time as aesthetic refinement: her presence creates this bucolic paradise that kindles Amelia’s poetic flame.  

Lanyer describes how the entire estate, its flora and fauna, just went into raptures at the Countess’ arrival: 

The house received all ornaments to grace it,

And would endure no foulness to deface it.

And walks put on their summer liveries,

And all things else did hold like similes.

The trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad,

Embraced each other, seeming to be glad,

Turning themselves to beauteous Canopies,

To shade the bright sun from your brighter eyes;

The crystal streams with silver spangles graced,

While by the glorious sun they were embraced;

The little birds in chirping notes did sing,

To entertain both you and that sweet spring.

This is a top-shelf example of what grumpy old literary critics would call the pathetic fallacy.  The pathetic fallacy attributes human emotions and responses to nonhuman objects.  It’s a kind of personification, but more focused on feelings than, say, actions.  Saying “the clouds ran across the sky” is an action, and clouds don’t literally run, so that’s kind of personification.  However, saying, a la Jimi Hendrix, that “the wind cries Mary,” we’ve granted the wind the capacity of emotion, of pathos, and so have committed the pathetic fallacy.

Why’s it a fallacy, some of you might ask?  Good question.  The term actually comes from 19th century art critic extraordinaire John Ruskin who, in his 1856 work Modern Painters, offers his explanation.  He begins by quoting a piece of poetry by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould

Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.

Then, Ruskin goes on to argue:

This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?

It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art, we have always found that nothing could be good, or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless untrue. And what is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being so.

So, the danger here is that overly-sentimental poetry, or art, can lead us to misperceptions of truth, and we must be aware of art’s capacity for emotional manipulation.

But his concern rests mainly on writers who lack a certain nuance and delicacy when employing this type of verse, and I’m sure even Ruskin would not charge Miss Amelia with any aesthetic crime.

The poem continues to abound in its vernal fecundity, while drawing particular attention to a singular oak tree in the center of the estate’s park under which the young women reclined in the shade and dreamt poetic dreams.  Now, you don’t have to be the Pope to get that Lanyer’s leaning into an Edenic analogy: Cooke-ham is an innocent paradise for women.  But in case you missed this subtlety, she punches the bruise by then invoking Christ, the Apostles and their “Holy Writ” placed in the tree.  Then, she refers to Moses and his bringing of the law, the will of God.  Then, King David, the poet-king of the Psalms and Joseph, the compassionate provider. She moves immediately into a little disquisition on the Clifford family’s pedigree, Bedfords and Dorsets.  But lest we think that Lanyer is running through the lip balm rather too rapidly, there’s an odd little moment of social consciousness.  The speaker laments the conventions of rank and status that separate the children of God, especially the daughters of God, who are cast

down into so low a frame

Where our great friends we cannot daily see,

So great a difference is there in degree.

Many are placed in those orbs of state,

Parters in honor, so ordained by Fate,

Nearer in show, yet farther off in love,

In which, the lowest always are above.

Even the lowly, who love God and fear death, who pursue heaven, can attain grace at the end, just as the high-born and mighty.  Here, at Cooke-ham, we understand that – true relations of grace – while the world outside pits souls against each other.   And it is to that world that Amelia must return now that her time with the Cliffords has ended.  Once again, the natural world reacts to the women’s departure with an autumnal conceit and the foreboding approach of winter: 

sweet Cooke-ham, whom these ladies leave,

I now must tell the grief you did conceive

At their departure, when they went away,

How everything retained a sad dismay.

The grass dies, the leaves wither and fall, the briars clutch.  The birds no longer sing and the sun grows weak.  Ah, Countess Cumberland, Margaret Clifford, has left the building!  But Lanyer makes one last move to save the poem from being uncomplicatedly fawning.  She makes the poem, not really about Margaret and not really about Cooke-ham, but about herself.  Claiming the mantle of poet due to her experience of this place, she concludes by saying:

This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give,

When I am dead thy name in this may live,

Wherein I have performed her noble hest

Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,

And ever shall, so long as life remains,

Tying my life to her by those rich chains.

I feel something of an ironic tension in the words “noble” and “unworthy” here, and the final sentiment of the poem concerns Lanyer’s life – “my life” – not her patroness’s or her summer home.  She is bound by “rich chains” – another rather ambiguous idea: the bondage of the poor to the wealthy? the bondage of wealth itself? the richness of communal experience?  It’s all there, and makes the poem a bit more than just an inflated thank-you card.

Ben Jonson’s big contribution to the country-house genre is, in fact, a thank you note to the Sidney family for his stay at their Penshurst Estate.  “To Penshurst,” from 1616, celebrates the home of Sir Philip Sidney, the great Elizabethan writer we looked at in episode 35, where “At his great birth where all the Muses met”  and flatters the current master of the house, Philip’s younger brother Robert, Earl of Leicester.  

I find this a rather strange poem, though.  Jonson opens by alluding to an ode by Roman poet Horace, which reads in part:

There’s no ivory, there’s no

gilded panelling, gleaming here in my house,

no beams of Hymettian

marble rest on pillars quarried in deepest

Africa, I’ve not, as heir

to Attalus, become unwitting owner

of some palace, no noble

ladies trail robes of Spartan purple for me.

Jonson’s version:

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,

Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row

Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;

Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,

Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,

And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.

Jonson, as did his Horation forebear, establishes immediately a contrast between the artificial elaborate and the natural and, relatedly, the meretricious and the moral.  He condemns the gaudy, ostentatious houses that may outshine Penshurst, but praises that house for its symbiosis with the world of nature: 

Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,

Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.

OK, so it seems we have some concern about what we might today call authenticity, realness.  But then Jonson begins his customary cramming of classical allusion: we’re told of dryads and fauns, the gods Pan and Bacchus – and this always feels a bit jarring to me.  Maybe that’s just my post-Romanticist positioning, but self-conscious classical references always seem like the kind of gilded ornamentation that stands in contradistinction to the simple, homely language of natural people.

Be that as it may, Jonson also plays quite fast and loose with the pathetic fallacy, particularly in terms of the estate’s bounty and its willingness to give of that bounty to its human inhabitants.  He tells of the pheasants and partridges that “for thy mess are willing to be killed,” and of “Fat aged carps that run into thy net.”  Frolicking woodland creatures only too happy to be eaten: paradise.

The poem’s middle section, from lines 48-88, addresses social relations, but in a rather different manner than did Lanyer in Cooke-ham.  Whereas she lamented the stratification that separated people into exclusive ranks, Jonson presents a rather utopian vision of Platonic order, a chain of being in which each plant, animal, and human knows its natural and rightful place in the cosmic order of things, where none envies other but only pursues the fulfillment of their station.  Consumption, again, is the conceit for showing this harmonious stability.  Penshurst’s

liberal board doth flow

With all that hospitality doth know;

Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat,

Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat;

Where the same beer and bread, and selfsame wine,

This is his lordship’s shall be also mine,

And I not fain to sit (as some this day

At great men’s tables), and yet dine away.

Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by,

A waiter doth my gluttony envy,

But gives me what I call, and lets me eat;

He knows below he shall find plenty of meat.

There’s an invocation of the old hospitality code: all guests are welcome at the lord’s table.  But this passage also implies a kind of egalitarianism while simultaneously subverting it.  Guests may dine on that which the lord dines, but the servants don’t mind because they know that they’ll get some good vittles “below,” as in, down in the servants’ quarters.  So this bucolic communal vision is only an accommodation of the hierarchical order, not a levelling of it.  And I wonder if this is part and parcel of Jonson’s rather peculiar dualism between nature and artifice.  In Jonson’s view, hierarchy is natural – in fact, self-evident.  Clearly the world is ordered in ranks of greatness.  It is modern views of equality that are artificial, human concepts imposed upon a contradictory nature.  

And here’s where poetry intersects with the politics of the time.  As I mentioned earlier, land enclosure by the aristocracy was radically changing agrarian England.  Movements that came to be called the Levellers and the Diggers, populist in nature, sometimes rioted against grain laws and enclosure, while demanding popular sovereignty, suffrage, and religious toleration.  For the conservative Jonson, this seems an anarchy striking at the very heart of the order of being, with his privileging of “manners, arms, and arts.”  These tensions will boil over in the decades following these poems, especially in the Civil Wars of the 1640s.

And maybe country house poems feel those first tremors of that later earthquake.  They seem to present an idealized social order, but yet there are moments of doubt, almost like they exist because a defense needs to be made against an oncoming attack.  Maybe that’s why they’re nostalgic – not just because a lovely holiday has ended, but perhaps pre-nostalgic, for an imaginary world that, despite never having really existed outside the poet’s ability to create the country house as some sylvan idyll, an imaginary world that is doomed.

If you’re interested in exploring more poems to see how things play out in the years to come, may I suggest Thomas Carew’s “To Saxham” from perhaps the 1620s and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” from the 1650s.

If you’ve enjoyed our little tour of the English countryside, please leave a 5 star review on your preferred podcatcher to raise the show’s profile.  I also accept cash, so if you’d like to make a donation to keep the lights on and the cat fed here at the Classic English Literature Podcast, click the support the show button.  Until next time, friend listener, be well!