The Trees of the Muses in Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611)
Résumés
Cet article analyse le symbolisme des arbres dans le poème d’Aemilia Lanyer « The Description of Cooke-ham » (1611) pour révéler sa reconstruction mémorielle et protoféministe de la nature. Contrairement à ce qui a pu être suggéré par la critique, l’évocation de la nature dans ce poème ne saurait être réduite à un exemple précoce de ce que John Ruskin nommait « pathetic fallacy ». Bien que la nature soit de fait présentée comme animée de sentiments, ceux-ci ne se limitent pas à une projection du moi poétique. L’anthropomorphisme des arbres peut être vu comme une reconnaissance de l’altérité de la nature que la poétesse s’efforce d’expliquer alors qu’elle quitte le domaine de Cooke-ham, et qui entre de fait en résonance avec l’état émotionnel de celle-ci. Les espèces et caractéristiques particulières des arbres ont une valeur symbolique qui lie intrinsèquement ce texte au long poème religieux auquel il fait suite, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. De plus, les références à Philomèle et à Écho – deux mythes qui associent femmes et nature – montrent comment Lanyer se réapproprie la vallée des Muses de la mythologie grecque en la transposant dans un contexte pastoral anglais. Plus que des points de repère qui illustrent la fonction topographique du poème, les arbres de Cooke-ham sont des facteurs essentiels dans une poétique qui mutualise l’expérience des femmes et celle de la nature.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Lanyer (Aemilia), arbres, pathetic fallacy, élégie, auctorialité, protoféminisme, poème topographiqueKeywords:
Lanyer (Aemilia), trees, pathetic fallacy, elegy, authorship, protofeminism, countryhouse poemPlan
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- 1 The poem was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 2 October 1610, before Jonson’s “To Penshurst”, (...)
- 2 See her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “Clifford [née Russell] Margaret, cou (...)
- 3 In his will, George Clifford bequeathed his estate to his brother Francis, stipulating that if the (...)
- 4 In this paper, “Cooke-ham” refers to the poem, and “Cookham” to the place it describes.
- 5 Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1 (...)
1Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham”, the first published country-house poem in the English language,1 depicts a fallen paradise. Her patron, Margaret Clifford (née Russell), Countess of Cumberland (1560-1616), lived there with her daughter Anne (1590-1676) while she was estranged from her husband at the end of his life, as well as after his death in 1605.2 Margaret indeed supported her daughter Anne’s claim to her father’s inheritance, even against the latter’s wishes.3 Cookham4 was a crown manor in Berkshire leased to Clifford’s brother, William Russell of Thornhaugh, where Margaret and Anne lived before 1605 and shortly after.5 Aemilia Lanyer joined them there for an uncertain period of time, perhaps working as Anne’s tutor. When he had to relinquish the lease for financial reasons, William Russell turned them out, and it is this moment of departure that the poem elevates into an elegy.
- 6 “The House receiv’d all ornaments to grace it, / And would indure no fouleness to deface it” (“The (...)
2Contrary to what its title suggests, the poem does not really “describe” Cookham. The house itself is hardly mentioned,6 receding behind the overpowering evocation or creation of “a female Eden”, as Barbara Lewalski puts it:
- 7 Barbara Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford and Aemili (...)
A paradise inhabited solely by women: Margaret Clifford who is the centre and sustainer of its beauty and delights, her young virgin daughter Anne, and Aemilia Lanyer, portraying the destruction of this Edenic place when its Lady departs[.]7
- 8 Todd A. Borlik, “Renaissance Literature and the Environment”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Liter (...)
- 9 I concur with Arya Sureshabau who contends that Lanyer’s poetry “prompts us to develop an understan (...)
- 10 The nine dedications are to Queen Anne of Denmark; to Princess Elizabeth; to Arabella Stuart, who h (...)
- 11 See for instance Catherine Larrère, L’Écoféminisme, Paris, La Découverte, 2023; Ynestra King, “The (...)
3The poem indeed creates a sanctuary where its three female – and only – inhabitants thrive away from the world and its troubles, under the aegis of Margaret Clifford, in what seems to be perfect harmony with nature. As Todd Borlik writes, “Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘To Cookham’ (1610) praises Margaret Clifford’s Berkshire estate as an eco-social community in which the natural world is revitalized by and commiserates with the women who find refuge there”.8 Nature itself is reduced to a handful of elements which are invested with considerable meaning, so that the reader must pay close attention to detail.9 Lanyer dwells on two species, whether vegetal or animal, which come to life with her pen and reciprocally give life to the estate: trees and birds. These two species are intrinsically linked in the poem for both practical and symbolical reasons. Together, they fashion a poetic land which legitimises and perpetuates Lanyer’s poetic creation by inscribing it in nature. Cookham is thus transformed into a new mount Helicon, or more precisely, a new Valley of the Muses, with its sacred grove by the spring Aganippe and its statues of the nine Muses. Indeed, the collection begins with dedications to nine famous women of the time, including Margaret and Anne.10 These nine women become English versions of the Muses inspiring the poet, and, although they are not individually mentioned in “The Description of Cooke-ham”, they implicitly find their place in its pastoral setting. The classical allusions in the text, most prominently to Philomela and Echo, reinforce the protofeminist dimension of the poem – one might even say its ecofeminist dimension, as Lanyer defends the idea of a special connection between women and nature to assert her authority as a poet.11
- 12 Christine Coch, “An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanyer and the Early Modern Garden”, Renaissance an (...)
4The connection between women and nature in the poem has long interested critics. In a 2004 article, Cristine Coch analysed “The Description of Cooke-ham” in the context of the history of the early modern garden to show that the poem illustrated the utopian vision of the garden as paradise while representing its limits. She suggested that this paradox made the garden – a term which in this instance may be more problematic than it seems – the ideal setting to represent female authorship.12 Building on earlier studies of the impact of Lanyer’s gender and social class (she was a commoner) on her authorship, recent analyses of “The Description of Cooke-ham” have reevaluated its representation of and relation to nature. In a chapter of the 2016 Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts collection, Louise Noble argues:
- 13 Louise Noble, “‘Bare and Desolate Now’: Cultural Ecology and ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’”, in Je (...)
[T]he landscape of the poem transforms itself from a locus amoenus, an idealized environment (the estate’s gardens and grounds in all their glory) to a locus horribilis, a depraved environment (this same landscape stripped bare) in a cultural-ecological imperative wherein the disempowerment of the female speaker and the degradation of the Cookham landscape are deeply implicated in one another.13
- 14 Ibid., p. 101: “While the poem suggests, of course, social and ecological concerns of early sevente (...)
- 15 K. Giordano, “A Cooke-ham of One’s Own”, art. cit.
- 16 Liberty S. Stavanage, “Questioning Gynocentric Utopia? Nature as an Addict in ‘A [sic] Description (...)
- 17 Anna Beskin, “The Birds of Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’”, Modern Philology, 114. (...)
5Nature’s and women’s positions are equated in the poem to denounce their common exploitation in a patriarchal society – a view that aligns with contemporary ecofeminism and highlights the radical modernity of Lanyer’s creation.14 Kaley Giordano goes one step further (perhaps one step too far) in suggesting that Lanyer’s poetic creation only sustains itself at the expense of nature, which she sees as willfully destroyed at the end of the poem.15 Liberty Stavanage similarly examines what she sees as the exploitation of nature in the poem to serve as a lower point than women in a social hierarchy dominated by men.16 And in her article on “The Birds in the Description of Cooke-ham”, Anna Beskin explores the poem’s avian imagery to comment on Lanyer’s gendered authorship and patronage, with special attention paid to the “Phoenix” referring to Margaret Clifford and Philomela whom she views as an image of Lanyer herself.17 Female authorship and patronage are thus inextricably linked in the poem.
- 18 L. Noble, “‘Bare and Desolate Now’”, art. cit., p. 106.
- 19 “The Description of Cooke-ham” was apparently written sometime between 25 February 1609 when Anne C (...)
6What still needs to be further interrogated, however, is the status of nature in the poem – a nature which is largely encompassed by trees, since, as Louise Noble writes, “[a]lthough Lanyer’s catalogue is a form of nature witnessing that embraces all elements of the Cookham landscape, trees clearly dominate”.18 Rather than a “description”, the poem is a mnemonic reconstruction of a place the three female characters in it have left behind – perhaps long left behind, if the poem was indeed written around 1609,19 and the Cliffords left the estate in 1605. The lack of detail in the poem can be viewed as a trace of its elegiac tone – the persona writes Cookham as she remembers it, i.e., not very well, all the more so as her recollection is mediated by her sadness – but it also complicates ecocritical readings as topical nature is actually absent and only exists in the persona’s mind. In this article, I argue against the assumption that Lanyer’s poem is an early example of pathetic fallacy by paying closer attention to the status of nature in the piece; then I examine the Protean qualities of the trees in Lanyer’s anthropomorphised nature; and I finally question the mythological references to explore her rewriting of the sacred grove of the Muses.
Recontextualising Lanyer’s Pathetic Fallacy
- 20 Amy Greenstadt, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Fallacy”, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8.1 (...)
- 21 In the words of A. Greenstadt, “the writer’s power to imbue inanimate objects – in this case the na (...)
7The trees of Cookham frame Lanyer’s mnemonic reconstruction, highlighting the connection between humans and nature in this anthropomorphised space. The estate reacts first positively to Margaret Clifford’s presence then negatively to her departure, as it mimicks the seasonal change from summer to autumn and winter. Critics such as Amy Greenstadt and Kaley Giordano have used the phrase “pathetic fallacy” to describe this phenomenon,20 but they work with a generic notion of pathetic fallacy, without reference to Ruskin21. In this section, I propose to take a closer look at Ruskin’s notion in order to assess whether or not it is actually relevant to Lanyer’s construction of nature in her poem.
8The urge to call on pathetic fallacy to define “The Description of Cooke-ham” comes from the fact that nature is presented as feeling:
- 22 “Cooke-ham”, respectively ll. 35-36, p. 131, and ll. 43-46, p. 132. The “Phoenix” refers to Margare (...)
The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend. […]
The swelling Bankes deliver’d all their pride,
When such a Phoenix once they had espied.
Each Arbor, Banke, each Seate, each stately Tree,
Thought themselves honor’d in supporting thee.22
- 23 Oxford English Dictionary, “pathetic fallacy”, in “pathetic” adj. 3.b.
- 24 Jane Austen, Emma, London, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994, p. 319.
9The passage blends external expressions of feeling (“right humbly” is an explicit judgement on the author’s part) with projected self-assessment attributed to nature (“thought themselves”). In this mix, the author’s perception is everywhere. As a result, it is tempting to view this phenomenon as pathetic fallacy, generally defined as “the attribution of human emotions or responses to animals or inanimate things, especially in art and literature”.23 However, contrary to classic examples of pathetic fallacy such as Jane Austen’s Emma, in which the weather mirrors the heroine’s despondency as she experiences the pangs of jealousy,24 the poet and her object are separated by both time and distance. As the beginning of the poem makes it clear, Lanyer is not gazing at Cookham in the here and now, but remembering it as lost. In that respect, nature is presented as only existing in the author’s mind – a fact often overlooked by critics which complicates the application of pathetic fallacy to the poem.
10In the passage quoted above, as throughout the poem, the constant use of the simple past reminds us that nature is reminisced about, and does not exist anywhere else than in the persona’s mind. The importance of memory in “The Description of Cooke-ham” (as well as in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a whole) has been studied by Kate Chedgzoy, who convincingly argues:
- 25 Kate Chedgzoy, “Remembering Aemilia Lanyer”, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2, 2010, par. 15 (...)
Creating in her own description of the garden at Cookham the textual trace of a material memory-place, Lanyer both reminisces about this lost paradise and rests her own claim to be remembered as a writer on her association with the Clifford women there. […] “The Description of Cooke-ham” is thus both an exhortation to recollect, and itself a site of memory.25
11The Cookham that is being described is no longer accessible to the poet: the estate has receded beyond reach. Moreover, while it may seem at first that the persona projects her own feelings onto the landscape which she displaces onto external objects, instead, she attempts to read nature by interpreting the impressions that emanated from them in her recollection. These impressions are structured by contrasts (in this case between humility and pride), suggesting an overarching rational construction that can only come from two places: nature itself, with the implication that this setting has been created by God to serve as a shrine to the Cliffords’ authority; or the persona, not so much in a burst of passion as in a deliberate recreation of nature. In the last couplet, Lanyer takes the personification of nature further by endowing it not only with feeling but with conscience – a conscience of social class, as the estate is aware of its inferiority to the Cliffords (“thought themselves hono’rd”). She presents herself as entering nature’s mind, rather than attributing feelings to it. The passage is marked by a division between the landscape itself and Margaret Clifford, but the speaker recedes behind both of them, so that her subjectivity encompasses them both.
12Yet a distinction between subjectivity and objectivity undergirds Ruskin’s definition of pathetic fallacy:
Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words [“subjective” and “objective”] at once, be it observed that the word “Blue” does not mean the “sensation” caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the “power” of producing that sensation; and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding. It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound, which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary.
- 26 John Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”, from Modern Painters, vol. 3, part 4, London, George Routle (...)
In like manner, a gentian does not produce the sensation of blueness if you don't look at it. But it has always the power of doing so; its particles being everlastingly so arranged by its Maker. And, therefore, the gentian and the sky are always verily blue, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary; and if you do not see them blue when you look at them, it is not their fault but yours.26
- 27 On the concept of the nonhuman, see for instance Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapol (...)
- 28 Louise Noble views this slightly differently: “this shift [between the human and the non-human] is (...)
13Ruskin uses examples from the natural world (the sky, a plant) to justify his distinction of the subjective and the objective, anticipating current ecocritical concerns about the irreducible existence of nature to human perception, and the distinctive life of the nonhuman.27 In the case of the “Description of Cooke-ham”, the fact that nature is mediated by memory collapses its objective existence; its “feelings” are the result of its anthropomorphisation and not the projection of the poet’s feelings.28 This distinction confirms Louise Noble’s argument that Lanyer’s use of natural tropes is essentially ironic in that the poet distances herself from the social hierarchies mirrored by nature in the poem. It also mitigates Amy Greenstadt’s queer analysis of the passage in which Margaret Clifford kisses an oak tree: if the actual tree might have indeed worked as a “barrier keeping them ‘neere in showe, yet farther off in love’”, the fact that this episode only exists in a mnemonic reconstruction collapses boundaries to make poet and patron share a memory, albeit one of a bittersweet kind.
14Lanyer does not pretend to write about an objective state of nature. The poem appropriately begins by referencing the persona rather than her patron or the estate, and is strewn with epistemic phrases that highlight its artificial construction:
- 29 “Cooke-ham”, ll. 17-18, 22-24, 33-34 p. 131; ll. 191-192 p. 138.
O how (me thought) against you thither came,
Each part did seeme some new delight to frame! […]
And all things else did hold like similies:
The Trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad,
Embrac’d each other, seeming to be glad […]
O how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee […]
Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree,
Looks bare and desolate now for want of thee[.]29
15These repetitive mentions of perception reinforce the distinction between subjective and objective, constantly reminding us that what we are reading is structured as a description, i.e. necessarily mediated by the author’s mind, and not nature itself. The poem is characterised by a precise rhetorical construction, moving back and forth between the description of Margaret and Anne Clifford’s virtues, nature’s harmonious response to them, and the plight of the persona as a poet in need of a new patron. Lanyer exemplifies this aspect of pathetic fallacy: she is perturbed by her mental state, or, as Ruskin puts it,
- 30 J. Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”, Modern Painters, op. cit., p. 170.
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the “Pathetic Fallacy”.30
16But Lanyer never passes off these feelings as “the truth” nor their impact upon her perception as an independent state of nature. Instead of playing on the confusion between subjective and objective which is rooted in pathetic fallacy, she constantly reminds us that her description is mediated – and not only by feelings, but also by a self-conscious distancing from nature itself which stands against the interpretation of the poem as an example of pathetic fallacy. By foregrounding memory, she also reminds us that nature exists outside of our minds, and that her poem can only be an attempt to recreate it through a work of art. This process is highlighted by the depiction of the trees in the poem.
The Protean Trees of Cookham
- 31 “Cooke-ham”, l. 7 p. 130; see also l. 1, “sweet Cooke-ham”.
- 32 Ibid., l. 35, l. 27, p. 131. The trees turn “themselves into beauteous canopies” (l. 25) so that th (...)
- 33 “It was indeed, a place of great delight, for through the midst of it there ran a sweet brook which (...)
- 34 Oxford English Dictionary, “arbour | arbor” n.
- 35 “The Trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad” (“Cooke-ham”, l. 23, p. 131).
17The Cookham estate first appears as a locus amoenus derived from the pastoral tradition: it is immediately presented as a “sweet place”, later as a “delightfull place”, in literal translations of the Latin phrase.31 Sheltered from all sides by “hills” and “streams”,32 containing the eye to enhance beauty in a manner similar to Philip Sidney’s initial description of Arcadia in the eponymous romance,33 it is peopled with trees. The word “tree” itself is used thirteen times in the 210-line poem, together with “woods” (ll. 40, 81), “arbour” (which can mean “grassy turf”, “an orchard”, a group of certain “trees or shrubs”, a “bower” or “a shaded or covered alley” – in the majority of cases involving trees34), and the individual components of trees (“leaves”, ll. 63 and 135, “boughs”, l. 65) or what they produce, “flowres [sic.] and fruit” (l. 134) – which are explicitly associated with trees.35
18Much of Lanyer’s depiction builds on the pastoral mode, and one can only be struck by how generic these references are. Lanyer does not attempt to visually represent the estate through minute details: instead, it is to be imagined by the sensations it produces. For instance, she repeatedly describes the trees as “stately” (ll. 45, 53 and 191) – a word evocative of size as well as social class, in congruence with the Cliffords’ aristocratic status – but does not give any specifics in terms of shape or colour beyond the reference to “green” (“faire greene leaves”, l. 63). The adjective is never specified, but rather used in an allegorical fashion:
- 36 Ibid., ll. 193, 195-196, p. 138.
Turning greene tresses into frostie gray [...]
The Sunne grew weake, his beames no comfort gave,
While all green things did make the earth their grave.36
19Lanyer’s description of seasonal change ironically evokes that of Amiens in one of the songs from As You Like It:
- 37 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.5.1-8, ed. Francis X. Connor, with an introduction by Todd A (...)
Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me.
And turn his merry note,
Unto the sweet bird's throat:
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.37
- 38 See for instance the following song in the play, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” in 2.7.174-194, or, (...)
- 39 “Do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age with the only happiness of t (...)
- 40 See the quote by Louise Noble in the introduction of this essay.
20“Green” clearly stands for the “green world” of pastoral, a fantasy it helps to conjure up for the reader, but it does not give a precise sense of the trees or the estate in question. And while Amiens’s song celebrates an Edenic wood protecting its inhabitants from the elements (even if the song is belied by some passages in the play),38 the speaker in Lanyer’s poem is quick to exploit the paronomasia between “green” and “gray” to ironically emphasise the sense of decay that the estate’s apparent haven cannot hide. The passage also contrasts with the pastoral setting of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which one of the two princes, Musidorus, is puzzled by the region’s eternal spring he witnesses in the trees.39 On the contrary, the trees of Cooke-ham immediately encompass the change from locus amoenus to locus horribilis mentioned by Louise Noble by manifesting the passing of time.40 In all three cases, however, the word “green” initially subsumes the differences between individual trees, invoking pastoral with varying degrees of irony.
- 41 See A. Beskin, “The Birds of Aemilia Lanyer”, art. cit., p. 524.
21This indeterminacy facilitates the most striking aspect of the trees of Cookham: their Protean quality, as one species merges into another, and then one season into another. The trees thus not only embody the passing of time, and the deterioration of the Cliffords’ social position at the same time. They also use the transformative might of nature as a backdrop for the creative powers of poetry through anthropomorphism:41
- 42 “Cooke-ham”, ll. 22-26, p. 131.
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[.]42
22Nature is brought to life by love and companionship, not only between the trees themselves, but out of love for Margaret Clifford, giving a perfect picture of harmony between the human and the non-human. It is as if nature became human while retaining its own identity. Further down, Lanyer focuses on one particular tree that is endowed with the ability to morph into other species:
- 43 Ibid., ll. 53-62, p. 132.
Now let me come unto that stately Tree,
Wherein such goodly Prospects you did see;
That Oake that did in height his fellows pass,
As much as lofty trees, low growing grass,
Much like a comely Cedar straight and tall,
Whose beauteous stature far exceeded all.
How often did you visit this fair tree,
Which seeming joyful in receiving thee,
Would like a Palme tree spread his arms abroad,
Desirous that you there should make abode[.]43
23In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, human beings are regularly changed into plants, flowers and trees, but here, the metamorphosis remains limited to the vegetal realm, which suggests the irreducible alterity of the natural to the human world. It is not, however, a metamorphosis in the strict sense, but one that only happens in the persona’s and the reader’s imaginations through a series of comparisons. This superimposition of images is allowed by the physical characteristics of the oak tree, its height and width, but also by the personification that implicitly likens the tree to a giant human being, and thus facilitates the metaphorical passage from one tree species to another.
- 44 There may also be a political subtext: a legend suggests that the trees of Lady Jane Grey’s Bradgat (...)
- 45 A. Greenstadt, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Fallacy”, art. cit., p. 70-71.
24This evolution from one species to another is obviously symbolical. The oak tree is particularly rich in symbolism in Western culture, where it is commonly associated with strength, endurance, fertility, power and justice. In England, the distinct species of the English oak is celebrated as a national emblem, associated with ancient druidic rites and with the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood and his associates.44 Moreover, the oak tree can stand for the equality of souls in heaven. It is, therefore, a powerful symbol, which efficiently blends the secular inspiration of “The Description of Cooke-ham” with the religious one of Salve Deus Rex Judeaorum.45
- 46 The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, eds. Robert Caroll and Stephen Prickett, O (...)
- 47 Ibid., p. 697, p. 803.
- 48 Ibid., p. 1001, p. 922.
- 49 Ibid., p. 685.
- 50 Ibid., p. 377, p. 379. The reference to cedar could thus work as an allusion to Mary Sidney Herbert (...)
- 51 See Ecclesiasticus 24:13, in which Wisdom (gendered as female) exclaims “I was exalted like a cedar (...)
25The other two species evoked, the cedar and the palm tree, are certainly less local than the oak, but they also have symbolical value. Just like the oak, the cedar and the palm tree evoke eternity (since they are evergreen trees), fertility, abundance, and in the case of the palm tree, victory and peace. The association of these three species that are so visually different may seem surprising, but it is their religious significance that brings them together. In the Bible, the cedar is presented as the first of trees (1 Kings 4: 33),46 and is said to have been planted by God (Psalm 104:16, Isaiah 41:19).47 Its height is commended (Amos 2:9, Ezekiel 17:22),48 and like the palm tree of Lanyer’s poem, its branches spread wide (Psalm 80:10-11).49 Cedar was used to build King David’s palace (2 Samuel 5:11, 7:2).50 It is also associated with the Virgin Mary, who is sometimes called “the Cedar of Lebanon”.51
- 52 The Bible, ed. cit., The New Testament, p. 305.
- 53 https://aleteia.org/2020/09/29/what-kind-of-wood-was-the-cross-of-christ-made-of/ (last accessed 6 (...)
- 54 The poem in itself (after the twelve dedications) begins with (after a stanza dedicated to Elizabet (...)
- 55 Salve Deus, ed. cit., ll. 761-816, p. 84-86. For a wider context on this issue, see Michelle M. Dow (...)
- 56 See Salve Deus, ed. cit., ll. 1009-1144, ll. p. 94-100, ll. 1465-1544, p. 114-117.
26As for the palm tree, it is associated with Christ, whose triumphant entry into Jerusalem was celebrated with the holding of palm branches, and is still commemorated on Palm Sunday. Visual representations of martyrs in the Christian tradition also often present them holding palm branches, as mentioned in Revelation 7:9.52 Cedar and palm are also often said to be two of the woods of which the Cross was made of.53 While “The Description of Cooke-ham” is explicitly a secular poem, the cedar and the palm tree – which were probably not part of the estate itself as their species would not have thrived in the English climate – add a spiritual depth to it, just like the references to “Christ and his Apostles” (l. 82), “Moyses” (l. 85) and “David” (l. 87), with whom Margaret Clifford is said to have entered in contact through her meditations and hymn-singing in “these sweet woods” (l. 81). The trees thus function as signs of Margaret Clifford’s piety, but they also tie “The Description of Cooke-ham” to the longer poem to which it was appended, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which describes Christ’s Passion, and contains several laudatory addresses to Margaret Clifford, especially at the beginning and at the end.54 Salve Deus is also much invested in the depiction of the tree of knowledge, which allows for another connection with “Cooke-ham”, as the Clifford women are being turned out from their own little Eden, through no fault of their own but because of male deficiency – just like Lanyer blames the Fall on Adam rather than “our mother Eve”.55 “The Description of Cooke-ham” is thus consistent with the rest of the volume in offering an example of female virtue and faith, with discreet reminders of Christianity inscribed in what is implicitly presented as God’s book of nature. As such, it strengthens Lanyer’s authorial position by joining the personal experience of the elegy with the universal one of the devotional poem. Bringing together the oak, the cedar and the palm tree, Lanyer assembles a typically English and two Biblical trees symbolising Christ and the Virgin Mary, who are central to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum – which describes Christ’s passion in great detail and offers particular focus on Mary as well as on pious women from the Bible.56 The trees, therefore, take on a metatextual function which is reinforced by mythological echoes through which Lanyer turns Cooke-ham into an alternative valley of the Muses.
Recovering the Valley of the Muses
- 57 On the actual Valley of the Muses and its shrine, see Yannis Kalliontzis, “The Shrine of the Valley (...)
- 58 Salve Deus, ed. cit., p. 129.
- 59 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “deserts” refer to “an uninhabited or uncultivated trac (...)
- 60 “And pardon (Madame) though I do not write / Those praiseful lines of that delightful place, / As y (...)
- 61 See my “Portraits of Female Mentors in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)”, in Beatri (...)
27Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum ends with an allusion to the Valleys of the Muses57 embedded in an address to Margaret Clifford, which perfectly ties the religious poem to the country-house poem that follows, “The Description of Cooke-ham”: “On your Deserts my Muses doe attend: / You are the Arcticke Starre that guides my hand, / All what I am, I rest at your command” (ll. 1838-1849).58 This envoy explicitly situates the Muses on land that is presented as owned by the poet’s patron (“your Deserts”)59, building up a sense of positive expectation that will be shattered immediately at the outset of the country-house poem, with its first word, “Farewell”. Connecting with the stanza at the beginning of Salve Deus in which Lanyer addressed Clifford’s commissioning of a country-house poem and her taking liberties with it,60 the end of Salve Deus also encapsulates the discreet power struggle between poet and patroness which will characterise “The Description of Cooke-ham” through the use of possessive adjectives.61 Even if the poem ends on an expected profession of humility and gratitude towards her patroness, the persona presents the Muses as “hers” – suggesting both a bold reappropriation of the mythological Muses and a displacement from those to the Clifford women, who in effect inspire Lanyer to write her poem. In this transition, Lanyer prepares the reader to enter a new Valley of the Muses, not at the foot of mount Helicon, but at Cookham.
28The Valley (or Grove) of the Muses is described by Hesiod (c. 8th century B. C.) at the beginning of his Theogony, the only surviving account of the origins of the gods in Greek mythology. The poem begins with an invocation of the Muses which locates them on mount Helicon and its slopes:
- 63 Ibid., ll. 23-24, p. 80.
- 64 In Hesiod, it takes the form of what might have been a proverb, “But why all this about oak tree an (...)
- 65 “Cooke-ham”, p. 133.
- 66 See also l. 183, ibid., p. 137.
- 67 The phrase “England’s Helicon” was well-known since it was the title of a collection of pastoral ve (...)
29This is also where they have taught the poet to sing: “And they once taught Hesiod the art of singing verse, / While he pastured his lambs on holy Helicon’s slopes”.63 The two poems are even linked by a mention of the oak tree.64 Just like with Cooke-ham, both the Muses and the poet are present in the same place, a locus amoenus characterised by hills where the Muses dance and brooks where they bathe. In “The Description of Cooke-ham”, as we have seen, “Hills” (l. 35),65 as well as “brookes and christall springs” (l. 71),66 are mentioned, and even if the Cliffords do not dance, they certainly walk through the woods. Margaret and Anne Clifford thus become the equivalents of the Greek Muses, and Lanyer that of Hesiod – one of the earliest known poets in Western culture – in an English, female Helicon.67
- 68 “Cooke-ham”, p. 130.
30The very beginning of the country-house poem confirms the move from Helicon to Cookham, indicating that it is the place “where the Muses gave their full consent” (l. 3).68 Through the Muses – both as mythological creatures and as figurations of the Clifford women – Lanyer enacts a fusion between the topical estate and her poem. Furthermore, the trees are peopled with both birds and mythological creatures which are particularly relevant to embody the experience of the three women:
- 69 Ibid., ll. 28-32, p. 131, ll. 47-48, p. 132.
The little Birds in chirping notes did sing,
To entertain both you and that sweet spring,
And Philomela with her sundry leyes,
Both you and that delightfull Place did praise.
[…]
The pretty Birds would oft come to attend thee,
Yet flie away for feare they would offend thee[.]69
- 70 Their story is recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses, book VI. See The xv. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, e (...)
- 71 “Cooke-ham”, l. 189, p. 137. In nature, only male nightingales sing, but there is no indication whe (...)
31The story of Philomela seems erased in her mention, as if she were taken only as a metonymy for a nightingale, and only one of the many birds that attend Margaret Clifford. There is neither explanation nor amplification that would specify her story: Philomela was raped by her sister Procne’s husband Tereus who cut off her tongue to prevent her from denouncing him.70 Philomela then wove a tapestry representing her assault and sent it to her sister Procne. In revenge, Procne killed her and Tereus’s son Itys, boiled and served him to her husband, presenting him with their son’s head afterwards to make him understand what he had done. Tereus chased Procne and Philomela who were changed respectively into a swallow and a nightingale by the gods. Philomela’s song was as a consequence always “mournefull”, as Lanyer herself puts it.71 None of this extreme violence features in Lanyer’s poem. Yet the reference and the setting remind us that the forest is a site of aggression for women, whose physical and moral integrity is always in danger, even in an apparent haven from the world from which men are ostensibly absent. Although Procne is not named, her involvement in her sister’s story, and her seeking for revenge at the expense of her own son, is a powerful and disturbing allusion to female sisterhood in the face of adversity, an adversity that directly results from male social dominance.
- 72 Ibid., ll. 189-190, p. 137-138.
- 73 Oxford English Dictionary, “lay” n4 1.a.
- 74 Oxford English Dictionary, “ditty” n 2.a.
32Philomela’s name is repeated a second time towards the end of the poem, in extremely similar terms: “Faire Philomela leaves her mournefull Ditty, / Drowned in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie”.72 The presence of Philomela almost frames the poem, and she is constantly associated with self-conscious references to poetry: “leyes” and “ditties”. These terms come as no surprise since they are both often associated with birdsong, the former referring to “a short lyric or narrative poem intended to be sung”,73 and the other to a short, simple song.74 They both perfectly associate art and nature – the art of nature in its most organic, seemingly spontaneous form. There is also a clear evolution from “praise” to “no pittie” which emphasises the cruelty of the Clifford women’s situation.
- 75 “Cooke-ham”, ll. 199-200, p. 138.
- 76 On Echo and early modern poetry, see for instance Anthony Archdeacon, “The Influence of Ovid’s Echo (...)
33As an embodiment of violence perpetrated on women and of the resulting creation of poetry, Philomela (whose name rhymes with “Aemilia”) is also an embodiment of the female poet, as is the mythological creature that nearly concludes the poem: “Delightfull Eccho wonted to reply / To our last words, did now for sorrow die”.75 Like Philomela, Echo is a female creature whose body was dismembered and effaced through metamorphosis, in her case not through animalisation, but disappearance.76 Only her voice remained, haunting the landscape in pursuit of her lost love. Incidentally, Echo was originally a mountain nymph who had been instructed by the Muses, where she was admired for her musical talents. Her resounding, disembodied voice, which can repeat up to seven words of what she hears, thus symbolically becomes the voice of nature itself, as well as the voice of dispossessed women as a whole. She becomes an emblem for Lanyer’s authorship, for the plight of the Clifford women, and by extension for women in general in the patriarchal society of Jacobean England.
34Through Philomela and Echo, living in woods composed of symbolical trees, on hills from which Margaret Clifford can see several counties yet are imbued with the reminiscence of the Muses, Lanyer creates an Anglicised, womanised version of mount Helicon, or more precisely of the Valley of the Muses on the left slopes of the mount. Yet this natural art is figured as an extreme experience of pain through the figures of Philomela and Echo. Rather than the triumphant presence of the nine Muses, Lanyer fills her own Helicon with anthropomorphised creatures including female birds, and with real-life women including herself, all of which embody injustice and dispossession. Despite its apparently out-of-time aspect, the Cookham estate offers a social commentary on the situation of women in Jacobean England. As a commoner who is losing her female patronage, and is standing at a crossroads both in her personal and in her poetic life, Lanyer paradoxically becomes the only voice – a female poet of the middle or lower class – able to make these woods sing.
Conclusion
35Lanyer’s locus amoenus in “The Description of Cooke-ham” is deceivingly simple: in keeping with the pastoral tradition from which it borrows, it blends the topical and the allegorical, the secular and the spiritual, tradition and modernity, in a unique creation. Nature is the site where all of these influences meet, most prominently in the trees of Cookham, so that, far from a simple “description”, the poem conceptualises nature in an almost abstract fashion, endowing it with thoughts and feelings while recognizing its alterity rather than using it as the unmitigated mirror of the persona’s emotions in an anticipation of pathetic fallacy. The trees’ metamorphic qualities synthesise the various levels of interpretation of nature and highlight the discreet complexity of Lanyer’s creation, as a tribute to her poetic abilities. They are also the site of her proto-feminist – one might say proto-ecofeminist – rewriting of nature where hers and the Cliffords’ plight comes to encapsulate women’s history as one of dispossession. Classic mythological allusions are reinvigorated by the consistency of their dual association with nature and women, that are perfectly attuned in the experiences of loss that they both undergo. Yet it is this dispossession – natural, gendered, and social – that allows Lanyer to claim her authorship and continues to make the poem so vivid and current, over four hundred years later.
Notes
1 The poem was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 2 October 1610, before Jonson’s “To Penshurst”, which was published in 1616. It was probably written in 1609-1610, and was published as an appendix to Lanyer’s only poetic collection, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, London, Valentine Simme for Richard Bonian, 1611. See Angelika Zirker, “Aemilia Lanyer, ‘The Description of Cookham’ (1611)’” in Ingo Berensmeyer (ed.), Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, Leiden, Brill, 2019, p. 480. All references are to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.
2 See her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “Clifford [née Russell] Margaret, countess of Cumberland (1560-1616)”, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5655.
3 In his will, George Clifford bequeathed his estate to his brother Francis, stipulating that if the latter died without male heirs, the estates would revert to Anne, who was to receive £15,000 upon her marriage. See Jessica Malay’s introduction to her edition of Anne Clifford’s Autobiographical Writing, 1590-1676, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018, p. 1-2. Malay writes that: “Anne’s mother, Margaret, was scornful of this settlement, complaining that it was ‘a portion that many merchant’s daughters have had’ and telling Anne that ‘your ancient inheritance from your forefathers from a long descent of ancestors is richly worth a hundred thousand pounds’ (Portland MS 23, Letter, 1615, p. 77; Letter, 1615, p. 77). Margaret Russell refused to accept the will and this ignited an inheritance dispute that would last for decades, with repercussions that crumbled on for over a century”, p. 2.
4 In this paper, “Cooke-ham” refers to the poem, and “Cookham” to the place it describes.
5 Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 212-241 (n. 11). As Anne Baynes Coiro puts it, Cookham “was a temporary refuge loaned or rented to these women by the king while they persisted in their stubborn fight to be allowed, as women, to inherit land, an outrageous claim” (“Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson”, Criticism, 35.3, Summer 1993, p. 357-376, here p. 364).
6 “The House receiv’d all ornaments to grace it, / And would indure no fouleness to deface it” (“The Description of Cooke-ham”, ll. 19-20, p. 131; later abridged to “Cooke-ham”).
7 Barbara Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford and Aemilia Lanyer”, The Yearbook of English Studies, 21, 1991, p. 87-106, here p. 104.
8 Todd A. Borlik, “Renaissance Literature and the Environment”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 20 June 2022, https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1311 (all web references last accessed 5 March 2026).
9 I concur with Arya Sureshabau who contends that Lanyer’s poetry “prompts us to develop an understanding of intimacy that hinges on close reading” (“‘Like similies’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Poetics of Intimacy”, Modern Philology, 123.2, 2025, p. 151-177, here p. 151).
10 The nine dedications are to Queen Anne of Denmark; to Princess Elizabeth; to Arabella Stuart, who had a claim to the throne; to Susan Bertie, Countess Dowager of Kent; to Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; to Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford; to Margaret Clifford, Countess Dowager of Cumberland; to Katherine Howard, Countess of Suffolk; to Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset. The collection also contains three more general, anonymous dedications: “To all virtuous Ladies in generall”, “To the Vertuous Reader”, “To the Doubtfull Reader” (which ends the collection). See The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. cit., p. 3-50 and 137. Moving from nine to twelve dedications, the paratext invites comparisons with both the Classical and Christian traditions (the nine Muses and the twelve Apostles), reconciling the poem’s classical and religious inspirations.
11 See for instance Catherine Larrère, L’Écoféminisme, Paris, La Découverte, 2023; Ynestra King, “The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology”, in Judith Plant (ed.), Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, Philadelphia, New Society Publishers, 1989, p. 18-28; Karen J. Warren, “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism”, Environmental Ethics, 12.2, Summer 1990, p. 125-146.
12 Christine Coch, “An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanyer and the Early Modern Garden”, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 28.2, Spring 2004, p. 97-118.
13 Louise Noble, “‘Bare and Desolate Now’: Cultural Ecology and ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’”, in Jennifer Munroe and Edward J. Geisweidt (eds.), Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts: A Field Guide to Reading and Teaching, London, New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 99-108, here p. 99.
14 Ibid., p. 101: “While the poem suggests, of course, social and ecological concerns of early seventeenth-century England, it is rather startling to consider that ‘The Description of Cookham’ anticipates by some 400 years some of the thinking of social ecologists today”. Noble, however, does not use the word “ecofeminism” to characterise Lanyer’s poem, but it is implicit in her demonstration, as Kaley Giordano rightfully points out: Kaley Giordano, “A Cooke-ham of One’s Own: Constructing Poetic Persona at Nature’s Expense in Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ and Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’”, Early Modern Culture, 13: Shakespeare in the Anthropocene, 2018, p. 1-17, here p. 4.
15 K. Giordano, “A Cooke-ham of One’s Own”, art. cit.
16 Liberty S. Stavanage, “Questioning Gynocentric Utopia? Nature as an Addict in ‘A [sic] Description of Cooke-ham’”, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, 54.1, 2018, p. 65-78.
17 Anna Beskin, “The Birds of Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’”, Modern Philology, 114.3, February 2017, p. 524-551.
18 L. Noble, “‘Bare and Desolate Now’”, art. cit., p. 106.
19 “The Description of Cooke-ham” was apparently written sometime between 25 February 1609 when Anne Clifford became Countess of Dorset (her marriage is acknowledged in the poem) and the poem’s publication in late 1610. See The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. cit., “Textual Introduction”, p. xxv.
20 Amy Greenstadt, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Fallacy”, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8.1, Spring / Summer 2008, p. 67-97; K. Giordano, “A Cooke-ham of One’s Own”, art. cit., p. 11. See also A. Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service”, art. cit., p. 371.
21 In the words of A. Greenstadt, “the writer’s power to imbue inanimate objects – in this case the natural and built environment of a country estate – with human feeling” (“Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Fallacy”, art. cit., p. 68).
22 “Cooke-ham”, respectively ll. 35-36, p. 131, and ll. 43-46, p. 132. The “Phoenix” refers to Margaret Clifford.
23 Oxford English Dictionary, “pathetic fallacy”, in “pathetic” adj. 3.b.
24 Jane Austen, Emma, London, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994, p. 319.
25 Kate Chedgzoy, “Remembering Aemilia Lanyer”, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 2, 2010, par. 15 and 17, https://jnr2.hcommons.org/2010/1100/.
26 John Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”, from Modern Painters, vol. 3, part 4, London, George Routledge & Sons, 1856, p. 167-168.
27 On the concept of the nonhuman, see for instance Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
28 Louise Noble views this slightly differently: “this shift [between the human and the non-human] is achieved most powerfully through the anthropomorphizing of nature, effectively sparking a connection between the two and producing a form of poetic agency that challenges the status quo” (“‘Bare and Desolate Now’”, art. cit., p. 101).
29 “Cooke-ham”, ll. 17-18, 22-24, 33-34 p. 131; ll. 191-192 p. 138.
30 J. Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy”, Modern Painters, op. cit., p. 170.
31 “Cooke-ham”, l. 7 p. 130; see also l. 1, “sweet Cooke-ham”.
32 Ibid., l. 35, l. 27, p. 131. The trees turn “themselves into beauteous canopies” (l. 25) so that the space is sheltered form above too. The word “burrough” (l. 48) also evokes the idea of a shelter. See Oxford English Dictionary, “burrow” n1 1.a.
33 “It was indeed, a place of great delight, for through the midst of it there ran a sweet brook which did both hold the eye open with her beautiful streams and close the eye with the sweet purling noise it made upon the pebble-stones it ran over; […] Round about the meadow, as if it had been to enclose a theatre, grew all such sorts of trees as either excellency of fruit, stateliness of growth, continual greenness, or poetical fancies have made at any time famous. In most part of which trees there had been framed by art such pleasant arbours that it became a gallery aloft, from one tree to the other, almost round about, which below yielded a perfect shadow, in those hot countries counted a great pleasure”. Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008 [1985], p. 41-42.
34 Oxford English Dictionary, “arbour | arbor” n.
35 “The Trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad” (“Cooke-ham”, l. 23, p. 131).
36 Ibid., ll. 193, 195-196, p. 138.
37 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.5.1-8, ed. Francis X. Connor, with an introduction by Todd Andrew Borlik, Oxford, The New Oxford Shakespeare, 2024, p. 97.
38 See for instance the following song in the play, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” in 2.7.174-194, or, in the same scene, Orlando and Adam’s hunger and physical distress, ll. 103, 128-32, 166-168. As You Like It, ed. cit., p. 103-107.
39 “Do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age with the only happiness of their seat, being clothed with a continual spring because no beauty here should ever fade?”, P. Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. cit., p. 14.
40 See the quote by Louise Noble in the introduction of this essay.
41 See A. Beskin, “The Birds of Aemilia Lanyer”, art. cit., p. 524.
42 “Cooke-ham”, ll. 22-26, p. 131.
43 Ibid., ll. 53-62, p. 132.
44 There may also be a political subtext: a legend suggests that the trees of Lady Jane Grey’s Bradgate Park estate in Leicestershire were pollarded as a sign of mourning after her execution in 1554. From the point of view of a female commoner about to lose any employment or social protection, as well as from that of a female aristocrat abandoned by her male relatives, Lady Jane Grey could appear as a precedent of a wronged noble woman, unfairly punished. See for instance James Howards Wilkins, Trees of the British Isles in History and Legend, London, Muller Publishing, 1972, p. 147; Alison Plowden, Lady Jane Grey: Nine Days Queen, Cheltenham, History Press, 2011, p. 165.
45 A. Greenstadt, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Fallacy”, art. cit., p. 70-71.
46 The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, eds. Robert Caroll and Stephen Prickett, Oxford, Oxford World’s Classics, 1997, The Old Testament, p. 413.
47 Ibid., p. 697, p. 803.
48 Ibid., p. 1001, p. 922.
49 Ibid., p. 685.
50 Ibid., p. 377, p. 379. The reference to cedar could thus work as an allusion to Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke, one of the dedicatees of the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: she had completed a translation of the Psalms into English with her brother Philip.
51 See Ecclesiasticus 24:13, in which Wisdom (gendered as female) exclaims “I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus”, in a chapter often associated with (and used in prayer for) the Virgin Mary.
52 The Bible, ed. cit., The New Testament, p. 305.
53 https://aleteia.org/2020/09/29/what-kind-of-wood-was-the-cross-of-christ-made-of/ (last accessed 6 April 2026).
54 The poem in itself (after the twelve dedications) begins with (after a stanza dedicated to Elizabeth I) a rather long dedication to “[t]he Ladie Margaret Countess dowager of Cumberland”: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. cit., Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ll. 9-72, p. 51-54. Towards the end of Salve Deus, two stanzas are addressed to her once again (ll. 1169-1184, p. 101-102). The poem even ends with a less explicit, but nevertheless transparent, allusion to the Countess: “Your rarest Virtues did my soule delight, / Great Ladie of my heart: I must commend / You that appeare so faire in all mens sight” (ll. 1835-1837, p. 129).
55 Salve Deus, ed. cit., ll. 761-816, p. 84-86. For a wider context on this issue, see Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa (eds.), Women Writers on the Fall, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2012.
56 See Salve Deus, ed. cit., ll. 1009-1144, ll. p. 94-100, ll. 1465-1544, p. 114-117.
57 On the actual Valley of the Muses and its shrine, see Yannis Kalliontzis, “The Shrine of the Valley of the Muses: An Archaeological, Historical and Literary Revisited”, CHS Research Bulletin, 8, 2020, https://research-bulletin.chs.harvard.edu/2020/03/30/shrine-valley-of-the-muses/ (last accessed 6 April 2026).
58 Salve Deus, ed. cit., p. 129.
59 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “deserts” refer to “an uninhabited or uncultivated tract of country; a wilderness”, and was “formerly applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land”, the latter being particularly fitting for Cookham. Oxford English Dictionary, “desert” n2.
60 “And pardon (Madame) though I do not write / Those praiseful lines of that delightful place, / As you commaunded me in that faire night, / When shining Phoebe gave so great a grace, / Presenting Paradice to your sweet sight, / Unfolding all the beauty of her face / With pleasant groves, hills, walks and stately trees, / Which pleasures with retired mind agrees” (Salve Deus, ed. cit., l. 17-24, p. 51-52).
61 See my “Portraits of Female Mentors in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)”, in Beatrijs Vanacker and Lieke van Deinsen (eds.), Portraits & Poses: Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern Europe, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2022, p. 213-230 (p. 220-224).
62 Hesiod, Theogony, ll. 1-4, in Hesiod: Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, trans. Evelyn White, H. G. Loeb Clasical Library, vol. 57, London, William Heinemann, 1914, p. 79. The Theogony was not translated into English until 1728 (in The Works of Hesiod, trans. William Cooke, London, N. Blandford for T. Greene, 1728), but it is likely that Lanyer, who spoke several languages, had knowledge of it either in Greek or Latin.
63 Ibid., ll. 23-24, p. 80.
64 In Hesiod, it takes the form of what might have been a proverb, “But why all this about oak tree and stone”, ibid., l. 35. On this puzzling line, see Edward A. Schmoll, “Hesiod’s Theogony: oak and stone again”, Scholia, 3.1, January 1994, p. 46-52.
65 “Cooke-ham”, p. 133.
66 See also l. 183, ibid., p. 137.
67 The phrase “England’s Helicon” was well-known since it was the title of a collection of pastoral verse published in 1600 – one which did not, at least explicitly (since some of the poems are anonymous) contain poems by any women writers. See England’s Helicon, London, John Roberts for John Flasket, 1600. With her own poem, Lanyer offers an alternative English Helicon that is entirely female, whether for its “Muses” and patronesses or for its author. The proximity between the two works in terms of theme and genre seems a little too strong to be a mere coincidence.
68 “Cooke-ham”, p. 130.
69 Ibid., ll. 28-32, p. 131, ll. 47-48, p. 132.
70 Their story is recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses, book VI. See The xv. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding, London, Willyam Seres, 1567, p. 92-94.
71 “Cooke-ham”, l. 189, p. 137. In nature, only male nightingales sing, but there is no indication whether or not Lanyer was aware of the fact.
72 Ibid., ll. 189-190, p. 137-138.
73 Oxford English Dictionary, “lay” n4 1.a.
74 Oxford English Dictionary, “ditty” n 2.a.
75 “Cooke-ham”, ll. 199-200, p. 138.
76 On Echo and early modern poetry, see for instance Anthony Archdeacon, “The Influence of Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus Myth on English Petrarchan Poetry”, Early Modern Literary Studies, 20.1, 2018; Véronique Gély-Ghedira, La Nostalgie du Moi. Écho dans la littérature européenne, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2000; and my “Echo, Pastoral Tradition and the Lyric Self in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania”, Sidney Journal, 39.2, 2021, p. 61-86.
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Aurélie Griffin, « The Trees of the Muses in Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611) », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 20 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/22228 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160fr
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