The Treatment Of Nature In The Country-House Poems - Essay Example

The Treatment Of Nature In The Country-House Poems In seventeenth-century England, the patronage system that supported poets led to the birth of a new genre of poetry, short-lived at the time, but definitely the center of a lot of critical attention today: the country-house poetry. In the guise of praising the country house or estate, the poets usually eulogized the estate owner who were also their patrons, involving extensive descriptions of natural scenery, an invocation of pastoral traditions and the depiction of an exaggeratedly superabundant nature. Current critical opinion now credits Aemilia Lanyer with the first country-house poem printed in England, “The Description of Cooke-ham”, which preceded the almost canonical “To Penshurst”by Ben Jonson. It would be my effort to study the treatment of nature in the country-house poems by using these two particular examples, and to establish the nature of the relationship that has been depicted between the human and natural world in the each of these poem's individual universe. The comparison between the two country-house poems is intriguing not the least because when we see the body of critical literature dedicated to the two poets, writing about Lanyer is conspicuous by its absence, whereas much ink has been spilt over Jonson's “To Penshurst”. Another interesting fact is the striking similarity of some of the parts of both. “And no one empty-handed, to salute/Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit” and “They had appeard, your honour to salute,/Or to preferre some strange vnlook'd for sute:” seem to have common undercurrents of paying homage to the estate owner in residence, whether it it is nature that pays it in the case of Cooke-ham, or the tenants, who seem to form a part of the natural landscape in Penshurst. It would be crucial to understand the collections within which these poems were printed, the popular literary conventions of the time and the individual backgrounds of the poets themselves, including the circumstances in which the poems were written. To look at the place of nature in the scheme of things in these two poems, we would analyze the descriptions of nature in the two poems, and how they are presented in relationship to human existence, the references made, as well as the explicit and implicit meanings conveyed. Also useful would be a perusal of the patriarchal connotations in Jonson, and the feminist influences in Lanyer. “To Penshurst” was first published in the "Epigrammes" and "Forrest" sections of Jonson's Workes in 1616, almost five years after his contemporary Lanyer published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum which finished with “The Description of Cooke-ham”. Both collections consisted of poems dedicated to patrons. “To Penshurst” was written for Robert Sidney, Lord Lisle and his wife, Barbara Sidney, who were an established part of the nobility and were living in the house since the 1550s, and tactfully presents a dedication to them through a projection of nature into the persona of the lord and the lady of the country house. It would also be pertinent to mention here that Jonson had well-documented aspirations of belonging to and becoming one of the nobility and did whatever possible towards this end, this poem was one of such efforts to please his high-born patrons through a positive association with nature. “The Description of Cooke-ham”, on the other hand, centers around Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset and later to be Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery in the background of Cooke-ham which was their temporary refuge for a while where Aemilia accompanied them. In the poem, nature appears to celebrate Anne Clifford, and mourns her loss when she is married off. Lanyer wrote this poem when she was forty, at a time when her situation was not half as secure as Jonson's, which could have very well have shaped the subversion she shows in the Cooke-ham poem, in her depiction of the relationship between human and nature. “It is really impossible to emphasize strongly enough how marginal, how unusual her position was in Renaissance England--as a Jew, converted or not, as an Italian, as the wife of a Catholic, as a woman artist making a living as a fringe member of the court”.(Coiro, 1993) Now that we have established the background for the two poems and their authors it would perhaps be prudent to examine the poetic convention they were using. The pastoral tradition was much used in Jonson's poem, as in the subsequent creations in the country-house genre. Descriptions of idyllic countryside, a simple, even simplistic life and rustic characters in natural settings were the order of the day in pastoral poems. We find strong traces of this in “To Penshurst”, which states in the very beginning that superiority of the building lies in its natural bounty: “Thou joy'st in better marks, of soil, of air,/ Of wood, of water ; therein thou art fair”. The natural attributes are shown to be much better than the urban beauties of other country homes: “.... marble ; nor canst boast a row /Of polish'd pillars, or a roof of gold : /Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told ; /Or stair, or courts”. Like all pastoral writing, the natural descriptions of Penshurst express an urban longing for the freshness and vigor of life in the countryside, and seeks to establish a lifestyle where man is in harmony with nature. Lanyer also uses extensive descriptions of nature but her descriptions are of an Eden on earth, a flourishing garden, which seems meant for spiritual contemplation by the women who live there. No man enters this garden, and when one does cast his shadow by marrying the mistress the garden responds with mourning and decay. She uses pathetic fallacy to imbue nature with a kind of intensely personal sympathy towards the human protagonists in keeping with the pastoral convention of intense identification between man and nature. Nature in Cooke-ham seems to be spiritually attuned to the Clifford women and seems to rejoice in their joy and mourn with them in their times of loss or grief. “Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree/ Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee!” Lanyer's poem does not recall a warm, golden, verdant, countryside like Penshurst which is almost bursting with a pagan fertility, and a never changing aura of abundance and sunshine. This is nature refined, empathizing with human thought and prayer, through the device of pathetic fallacy. “In these sweet woods how often did you walke,/With Christ and his Apostles there to talke;/Placing his holy Writ in some faire tree,/ To meditate what you therein did see:/With Moyses you did mount his holy Hill,/ To know his pleasure, and performe his Will.” One must remember, however that this is not a Wordsworthian contemplation of nature, it is merely the poet's way of eulogizing the patroness, by giving her spiritual attributes, and placing her amidst the ascetic beauty of nature in the “sweet woods”. By understanding the devices and the conventions used by Jonson and Lanyer we are able to anticipate their take on the relationship between the human world and the natural one. But to thoroughly understand their depictions, a closer analysis of the nature descriptions in each of the poems is called for. Johnson's “To Penshurst” begins with idealizing the natural landscape by incorporating mythical beings of nature: “Thy mount, to which thy Dryads do resort,/ Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made, /Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade ;” . These lines serve to describe nature as a magical realm in the country estate of the Sidneys. The Sidneys are also shown to be part of the same cycle as these mythical, divinized creatures of the green woods and the forest; the same cycle of love, birth, celebration: “Thou hast thy walks for health, as well as sport :/ Thy mount, to which thy Dryads do resort,/Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made, / Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade ; /That taller tree, which of a nut was set, /At his great birth, where all the Muses met. There, in the writhed bark, are cut the names/ Of many a sylvan, taken with his flames”.By talking of the birth of Philip Sidney which was marked by the planting of an oak, and talking of the passions of the “sylvan” , Jonson presents nature and human beings in complete harmony. They are shown to be so similar in that human beings and mythical beings of nature follow the same laws, the laws of nature. Having established the one-ness of the Sidneys with nature, Jonson goes on to use words like, “yield” “crown”, and “tribute” to establish an idealistic kinship, one in which nature seems to be like a willing tenant or subject to the Sidneys, willingly offering her dues. “Each bank doth yield thee conies ; and the tops/Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sydneys copp's, /To crown thy open table, doth provide/ The purpled pheasant, with the speckled side :/ The painted partridge lies in ev'ry field, / And for thy mess is willing to be kill'd./ And if the high-swoln Medway fail thy dish, /Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish,” . It is as if the exaggerated superabundance of nature literally offering its bounties on a plate is actually the natural law and part of the natural order: Jonson idealizes reality through the formal art of his poetry. Jonson depicts nature in terms of what it has to offer man, as something that is eager to be harvested, to be consumed, as if that were its destiny: “Fat aged carps that run into thy net, /And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat, /As loth the second draught or cast to stay,/ Officiously at first themselves betray./ Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land, / Before the fisher, or into his hand,”. Jonson extends this “natural order” to human beings, who come with their own offerings as marks of their affection just to please the Sidneys: “But all come in, the farmer and the clown ; / And no one empty-handed, to salute/ Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit/..../But what can this (more than express their love)/ Add to thy free provisions, far above/ The need of such ?”. This bounty and willingness to be harvested is echoed in the discreet descriptions of fertility and virtue of the lady of the household: “Thy lady's noble, fruitful, chaste withal”. The Lady Sidney bore twelve children in her lifetime, and Jonson successfully associates Penshurst's hospitable embrace with the good housewifely skills of Lady Sidney; its natural abundance with her childbearing; and her children who "suck innocence" from both mother and place with the rustic residents of the estate. Jonson gives Penshurst the permanence and resourcefulness of nature itself, though it was established in the 1550's, and was a little over half a century old at the time of writing. The supposed "natural order" of things is in fact a historically and culturally specific ideal where nature and human beings are united under one law, harmoniously offering up all they can to the virtuous nobleman, the supreme landlord and the sole father figure. Nature in the universe of “To Penshurst” is tied together to human beings in a harmonious relationship that is idealized to the extreme, with definite connotations of a patriarchal establishment. Lanyer's Cooke-ham is not the fertile farming estate that Jonson's Penshurst is: its beauty is more ascetic and spiritual. Through an intelligent use of pathetic fallacy, she is able to make the garden identify completely with the temporary lady of the estate, and her use of similies makes nature come alive with connections to the mistress. Coiro sums it up brilliantly, elaborating the poetic device that defines the relationship between man and nature within the boundaries of Cooke-ham: Lanyer's poem uses a strategy sharply different, making the artifice of the pathetic fallacy part of the subject of her poem. The place becomes a living tribute to Lady Clifford's power, she "From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace." "The Walkes put on their summer Liveries,/ And all things else did hold like similies" (137). And so throughout the body of the poem the garden becomes a garden of similies, the central oak, a man defending her from Phoebus's advances, for example, or the vista she saw from under the tree--hills, vales and woods--are men "as if on bended knee" (139) pleading before her. (Coiro, 1993) On the face of it the poem is a sort of farewell to Cooke-ham, because the lady of the house went away to get married and carry out her responsibilities in a new life, and it is fitting that nature mourns for the loss of the mistress of the household: “The trees that were so glorious in our view, / Forsooke both flowres and fruit, when once they knew, /Of your depart, their very leaues did wither, /Changing their colours as they grewe together....This beeing vaine, they cast their leaues away, / Hoping that pitie would haue made you stay:” But one may note here that there is only a mourning for the sad loss of the mistress to be married away, there is no consolation in the anticipation of marital joys to come her way eventually. And in particular, there is no mention of children. In stark contrast to the superabundant fertility of both nature and Lady Sidney, there is no comparable notion of physical fertility in either Cooke-ham or in its mistress. But that does not mean there is no fertility whatsoever, there is the fertility of the spirit and the poet took joy in it : “Oh what delight did my weake spirits find,/ In those pure parts of her well framed mind:” This is a feminist assertion of a woman's ability to be fertile of mind and spirit, not of the physical body. The women spent time in pursuits of the mind, as evinced in this line: “Where many a learned Booke was read and skand”. The mistress also looked upon nature as the reflection of God, of His Spirit. The lady apparently held that it was this that gave the grace and beauty of nature its true meaning, something the poet clearly appreciates. The creatures of nature, man included, follow the divine law at Cooke-ham, and are the reflection of Godly power and wisdom : “What was there then but gaue you all content,/ While you the time in meditation spent, / Of their Creators powre, which there you saw,/ In all his Creatures held a perfit Law;/ And in their beauties did you plaine descrie, / His beauty, wisdome, grace, loue, maiestie”. And whereas Jonson celebrates the patriarchally established “natural order” both for man and nature which he eulogizes through his poetry, Lanyer sees no such order in nature or human beings, she; actually subverts the order in these lines, clearly resenting the “fortune” of the nobility: “Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame, / Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame: / Where our dear friends we cannot dayly see,/ So great a difference is there in degree./ Many are placed in those Orbes of state, / Parters in honour, so ordain'd by Fate;/ Neerer in show, yet farther off in love,” Nature within the boundaries of Cooke-ham is therefore a sympathetic entity that forms a spiritual haven for the women that inhabit its beautiful but isolated world. Marriage is not a happy occasion in the universe of the poem as it breaks up the spiritual sisterhood and the virtuous contemplation that used to be the norm. Nature is also an expression of God, and is understood by the women as such, it is an appropriate venue for communion with the Supreme Creator who makes the laws followed by both man and nature. The human and the natural worlds exists in sympathetic harmony, where both appreciate the other, and nature does not offer itself to man in idealized verse as in Jonson's Penshurst. The depiction of the relationship between man and nature in Penshurst and Cooke-ham tells us a lot about the ideas, attitudes and preferences of the authors of the two poems. While Jonson was a conformist, who idealized the harmony between man and nature and the patriarchal notions that support his patron as the supreme master in the estate, Lanyer subverted the medium, using the pastoral convention but turning it on its head in a scarcely concealed rebellion against the social order, refusing to present it as the “natural order” as Jonson does. Both poets have used nature as a vehicle, a device, and used it to suit their entirely different purposes. Coiro, A.B. “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson”. Criticism. Vol.35. Iss: 3. 1993. pp.357 Loxley, J. The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. New York: Routledge. 2001.pp.102-3 Friedberg, H. Ben Jonson's Poetry: Pastoral, Georgic, Epigram. English Literary Renaissance,Vol. 4. No. 1, Winter. 1974. pp. 111-36. Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, Vol. 17 Read More