“In my wood to dwell”: Margaret Cavendish’s Ecocritical Thinking and her Uses of Allegory in Poetry
Résumés
Margaret Cavendish est aujourd’hui couramment considérée comme un exemple précoce d’auteur soucieux de l’environnement et étudiée sous l'angle des approches écocritiques, mais le risque d’anachronisme est grand. La dimension écocritique de sa poésie doit être réinterprétée à la lumière de sa conception de la nature dans sa philosophie. Cet article vise à contextualiser son apparente préoccupation pour le monde naturel en lien avec la tradition littéraire des prosopopées d’arbres, la politique du XVIIe siècle et sa conception philosophique de la nature, en examinant en particulier l’un de ses dialogues de 1653, un long poème de 164 vers en pentamètres rimés intitulé « A Dialogue between an Oak and a Man Cutting Him Down » (« Un dialogue entre un chêne et l’homme qui l’abat »). Ce poème, qui inclut un plaidoyer de l’arbre au bûcheron pour qu’il ne le coupe pas, a été lu dans les études critiques récentes dans une perspective écocritique. Pourtant, la convention de la prosopopée de l’arbre, qui remonte à la Bible et à Ovide, avait déjà été utilisée par Drayton, entre autres, dans son populaire Poly-Olbion (1619). Placer l’approche de Cavendish dans cette tradition nous permet de mieux comprendre l’articulation entre son intérêt réel pour le monde naturel, l’allégorie politique et sa philosophie naturelle. En se concentrant sur la technique allégorique complexe de Cavendish dans le poème, cet article étudie ses utilisations discursives du chêne en tant qu’emblème aux multiples facettes, exigeant une agilité herméneutique de la part des lecteurs – et prouvant une fois encore que sa poésie est plus sophistiquée qu’on ne l’a cru jusqu’à présent.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
analogie, allégorie, écocritique, guerres civiles anglaises, nature, prosopopée, poésie scientifique, arbres, vitalisme, Cavendish (Margaret)Keywords:
analogy, allegory, ecocriticism, English Civil Wars, nature, prosopopeia, scientific poetry, trees, vitalism, Cavendish (Margaret)Plan
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- 1 Poems, and Fancies: written By the Right Honourable, the Lady Margaret Countess of Newcastle, Londo (...)
- 2 Dorothy Osborne, The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. Moore G. C. Smith, Oxford, C (...)
- 3 Even Sylvia Bowerbank, in an article about Cavendish’s poetry, writes that “[e]ven those of us who (...)
- 4 For a sympathetic reading of Cavendish’s practice of variety, see Hero Chalmers, “‘Flattering Divis (...)
- 5 Poems and phancies written by ... the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, London, printed by William Wil (...)
1The poetry folio miscellany entitled Poems, and Fancies was Margaret Cavendish’s first published work in 1653.1 That it met with her early readers’ incomprehension is an understatement. Some of these, like Dorothy Osborne, famously expressed their shock and disbelief in their correspondence: “Sure the poore woman is a litle distracted she could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, If I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.”2 Critics themselves have for long read this volume of Cavendish’s with a certain amount of perplexity, and the poems have often been seen as early, occasionally embarrassing, attempts – the consensus among specialists being for a long time that her latest works are more mature and informed than her early works.3 This relative disfavour might be explained by two factors: the originality (long interpreted as the “oddity”) of the poems, which include such poems as “A Complaint of Water, Earth, and Air, against the Sun,” or “Similizing Birds to a Ship,” and the fairly poor quality of the poetry itself, which is often dangerously close to doggerel.4 Yet while Cavendish did not publish another volume of poetry after this one, and turned to other genres, in particular natural philosophy, she never disavowed this first work. On the contrary, she persisted and issued two revised editions of the Poems in 1664, and again in 1668 – changing the order of the poems, and introducing important variants.5
- 6 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament, ed. Brandie (...)
- 7 She was thought eligible for Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee’s anthology The Stuffed Owl: An Antholog (...)
- 8 For Cavendish’s connection with Epicurus, see among others Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, G (...)
- 9 See for instance Michael Drayton, “Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie,” in The Battaile of Agincourt Fo (...)
- 10 See for instance Habert de Cerisy’s “Métamorphose des yeux de Philis en Astres,” in Recueil de dive (...)
2For the last few years, however, especially since the publication of two ground-breaking editions of the volume, first by the late Brandie Siegfried (for “The Other Voice” series) in 2018, and then the following year, online, by Liza Blake,6 there has been a new surge of interest in this work, which proves much more complex once its oddity is accepted as originality rather than simply dismissed as awkward. It might perhaps never be possible to see Cavendish as a formalist,7 but her poetry needs to be read on different terms. The collection is a strange hybrid: the poems about natural philosophy, inspired by an Epicurean, atomistic agenda, can be connected to a long line of “scientific” poetry which goes back to Lucretius’ De Rerum natura.8 The fairy poems can be read alongside Drayton’s or Herrick’s fairy poetry, and show an interest in English folklore and small and invisible things.9 Her other poems, more baffling, and sometimes fanciful, have been less easy to place: the “similizing” poems, which compare two sometimes very heterogeneous elements can best be compared to the playful game of “Metamorphoses” played in the Paris salons, which occasionally resulted in poems published in the fashionable miscellanies of the time.10 The section of the dialogues is even more baffling, with dialogues like “A Dialogue betwixt Man, and Nature,” “A Dialogue betwixt the Body, and the Mind,” “A Dialogue betwixt Earth, and Cold,” “A Dialogue betwixt Earth, and Darknesse,” “A Dialogue of Birds,” “A Dialogue betwixt Melancholy, and Mirth,” etc. This article focuses on the “Dialogue between an Oak, and a Man cutting him downe,” a long poem in rhymed pentameters in which Cavendish articulates her ecocritical concerns, using the very rich symbolism of the tree in a creative way.
- 11 See for instance Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England(...)
- 12 See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York, (...)
- 13 Drayton, Poly-Olbion, London, 1619. Drayton pursued extensive personifications. The Forest of Arden (...)
- 14 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie Contriued into Three Bookes: The First of Poets and Po (...)
3There is no precedent, to the best of our knowledge, of a poem in which a speaking tree is made to argue for its right to live. In the poem, the tree is presented as a rational, sentient being, endowed with language and capable of disputing and feeling anxiety. That this evinces an ecocritical concern is obvious in the personification of the tree, who is thus given reason, feelings, and passions, all the more so as the tree is made to stand for itself and for nature in the poem: for the tree deplores the unnecessary cruelty of human beings towards nature and pleads for him to be spared the axe. The poem has comfortably been read in an ecocritical perspective, along with “A Dialogue betwixt Man, and Nature” (Poems, and Fancies, 58-59).11 In the wake of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Sylvia Bowerbank was among the first in 2004 to read Cavendish’s philosophy as “ecofeminist,” because it gendered nature as female.12 Since then a whole generation of scholars have followed suit and taken Cavendish’s environmental ethics for granted. But when read carefully as a whole, the poem is more ambiguous than it looks if quoted only in fragments. In order to better understand the articulation in the poem between Cavendish’s concern for the natural world, political allegory and the philosophical context, it is prerequisite to contextualise this apparent eco-friendliness in relation to the literary convention of prosopopeias of trees, and not only to Cavendish’s philosophical conception of nature. This literary convention goes back to the Bible on the one hand and Ovid on the other. The device was earlier used by Drayton, among others, in his popular pastoral Poly-Olbion (1619), where trees are allowed to speak the ones after the others.13 We need to unpack Cavendish’s allegorical technique, her discursive uses of the oak as a multifaceted emblem, to reflect on her specific status of the tree in the poem. By using the trope of prosopopeia, or personification, which Puttenham defined as “the counterfeit in personation” (a figure which animates and gives a voice to things),14 Cavendish turns her apparently straightforward dialogue between an oak and a woodcutter into a reflection on the status of nature in the Creation, but also a multilayered fable, with political, and philosophical applications.
“Nature is divine” (l. 159):15 The Tree as a Sentient and Rational Being
- 15 I am voluntarily misquoting the text, which reads: “A Nature is divine” (the 1668 version reads: “T (...)
- 16 See for instance “A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life,” in Nature’s Pictures, London, p (...)
- 17 See “Of a Funerall,” Poems, and Fancies, p. 195-196, “An Elegy on my Brothe, Lill’d [sic] in these (...)
- 18 “The rest of the Parks were totally defaced and destroyed, both Wood, Pales and Deer; amongst which (...)
4For a royalist like Margaret Cavendish, who had married Charles I’s former Captain-General William Cavendish, Marquess, later Duke, of Newcastle, and was living in exile in the Low Countries in the early 1650s, deploring the cutting of an old oak would have taken on a very personal significance. At the time when Margaret Cavendish was having her volume of poetry privately printed in London, she was trying to negotiate the restitution of some of the couple’s sequestered properties during the Civil Wars with the new authorities – to no avail – and could only deplore what she saw as vandalism perpetrated against their estates and parks. Throughout her work, in fact, she repeatedly laments the depleting of aristocratic parks and forests during the Civil Wars and Interregnum.16 This poem, deploring the felling of an oak, could be read alongside the more elegiac verse included in the volume, like the elegies on her favourite brother who had died by the hand of Parlementarian soldiers.17 In the period, many aristocratic estates, with their parks and forests, were vandalized or destroyed, as timber was needed to build ships and houses, to the horror of their previous owners. Cavendish still writes with nostalgia about losing their parks in 1667 in The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle in 1667.18
- 19 “Nous rendre comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature,” René Descartes, Discours de la méthode [16 (...)
- 20 For the debate about Merchant, see Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature (...)
5But the oak, however, does not just stand in her poetry for a sentimental attachment to her cherished parks and gardens, nor are parks only symbolic of formerly prized aristocratic estates, or more generally of social status. For Cavendish is making a statement which must be seen as echoing her thinking about nature in her natural philosophy. Her conception of nature has often been described as eco-friendly because nature in her thought is characterized as a feminine entity, just as in the poem, when nature is described, on l. 155, as “hid[ing] her selfe,” and seems almost to replace God. In her landmark book, The Death of Nature (1980), Carolyn Merchant investigated how the historic shift that led to the rise of mechanism in philosophy changed people’s conception of nature: instead of seeing it as a living organism, mechanistic philosophy began to see it as a machine. This in turn prompted philosophers like Descartes, among others, who famously argued that men should become “as masters and owners of nature,” to justify the domination and exploitation of nature.19 If Merchant’s theory has now come under scrutiny – critics have pointed out that she attributes to mechanistic philosophies shifts that were anterior –, the link she makes between the domination of nature (often allegorized as female) and woman remains an important idea to understand Cavendish’s environmental ethics.20 At the end of the poem, the woodcutter describes man’s enquiries into nature as violent and inquisitive, for man has, he argues,
A Curiosity for to inquire:
A Wit that nimble is, which runs about
In every Corner to seeke Nature out.
For She doth hide her selfe, as fear’d to shew
Man all her workes, least he too powerfull grow. (l. 152-56)
6This was a familiar way of describing scientific pursuit in the period: Francis Bacon himself had used the metaphor of hunting down to describe the quest of the early modern scientist, who ought to “hound nature,” and “penetrate” into “its holes and corners,” in De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623) – introducing into the philosophical discourse the conventional image of the rape of nature:
- 21 Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), in Francis Bacon, The Works, eds James (...)
For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. […] Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object.21
- 22 George Herbert, The Temple Sacred poems and private ejaculations, Cambridge, printed by Thom. Buck, (...)
7In a poem entitled “Vanitie,” George Herbert embraces this commonplace by describing the quests of the astronomer and the chemist in sexual terms, again using images of rape: the chemist in particular is shown seeking to “devest / And strip the creatures naked, till he finde / The callow principles within their nest.”22
8Cavendish’s philosophical notion of Nature stands in sharp opposition to this conception. In her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, nature is described as eternal, “infinitely self-moving” and “self-knowing,” and as having sense and reason in its smallest parts. Cavendish posits that everything in the universe is composed of a combination of three kinds of matter, rational, sensitive and inanimate. So actual trees might not speak, but they are certainly capable of a sentient and a rational knowledge of their own, although it is less developed in animals, as she argues in Observations on Experimental Philosophy:
- 23 Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy [1666], ed. Eilleen O’Neill, Cambridg (...)
And as the figures and parts alter by their compositions and divisions, so do both interior and exterior particular knowledges: for a tree, although it has sensitive and rational knowledge and perception, yet it has not an animal knowledge and perception; and if it should be divided into numerous parts, and these again be composed with other parts, each would have such knowledge and perception, as the nature their figure required.23
9It is therefore highly significant for Cavendish to give a voice to trees and animals in her poetry, since in her philosophical works she sees the living world as a continuum. This conception of matter allows us to read these poems in an ecofeminist perspective.
- 24 See Bruno Latour’s concept of Gaia, which is itself based on Lovejoy, as summarized in Facing Gaia. (...)
10Attributing knowledge to everything in nature also implies a move that displaces the centrality of man – in the general sense of “mankind,” but also of man as representative of the male sex – in the Creation: in Cavendish’s conception of Nature, mankind belongs to nature, of which it is a part, and cannot be seen as separate, or superior – which in turn anticipates Lovejoy and Latour’s own contemporary return to a form of vitalism as can be seen in their conception of Gaia.24 So, when the tree pleads for his life, and presents his central role in his habitat as based on collaboration and sympathy, as “he” does in the first section of the poem, it is tempting to interpret his complaint in light of another poem of Cavendish’s which is even more explicit about men’s cruelty to nature, “The Hunting of the Hare.” In this poem, Cavendish rails at mankind, and more specifically at man (as opposed to woman), for thinking he is central in the Creation and can therefore destroy nature as he wishes:
- 25 Poems, and Fancies, p. 112-3.
As if that God made Creatures for Mans meat,
To give them Life, and Sense, for Mans to eat;
Or else for Sport, or Recreations sake,
Destroy those Lifes that God saw good to make:
Making their Stomacks, Graves, which full they fill
With Murther’d Bodios [sic], that in sport they kill.
Yet Man doth think himselfe so gentle, mild,
When he of all Creatures is most cruell wild.
And is so Proud, thinks onely he shall live,
That God a God-like Nature did him give.
And that all Creatures for his sake alone,
Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.25
- 26 This poem is very close to another heterodox, French, poem, written a little later (1690), and equa (...)
11Here, not only does Cavendish seem to advocate vegetarianism – a position which she shares with the Quakers –, but she also compares the rule of man over nature to a form of tyranny.26 “A Dialogue between an Oak, and a Man” is perhaps less straightforward, but its first section, which starts with the Oak’s pleading for his life, as he reminds the woodcutter of all the benefits he brings to mankind and his environment, is illuminated by a comparison with Cavendish’s writings about natural philosophy, where she criticizes man for his arrogance in thinking that he can dominate and exploit nature as a mere resource. The woodcutter’s answer (from l. 30) obliquely introduces the political theme of the regicide, through the metaphor of the oak as the king of the wood: the forester argues for the necessary downfall of the oak, to which the oak objects. In the third section (from l. 68 to the end), the longest of the poem, the man introduces the theme of knowledge – knowledge of the world, then of God – to justify the sacrifice of the Oak. If we are to account for the complexity of the poem, and in particular of the long, convoluted discussion of the vanity of knowledge that ends the dialogue, it is necessary to take into account other contexts too, first the political one, then a moral one. As we shall see, this complexifies a neat eco-feminist reading, although the concept remains relevant. And how are we to understand the ironic final twist in which the tree is presented by the “man” with an enigmatic alternative in the form of a rhetorical question: “If you, as Man, desire like Gods to be / I’le spare your Life, and not cut downe your Tree”? It is perhaps necessary to wonder who this “man” represents at that moment of the poem (man in general? a particular man?) or what the tree then stands for. It is clear that there is much more to this poem than “only” the defence of a tree, and through it, of “Nature.”
This is not an Oak
- 27 Annabel Patterson comments on how Virgil’s model served over and over again in the early modern per (...)
- 28 See Peter L. Smith, “Lentus in Umbra: A Symbolic Pattern in Vergil’s Eclogues,” Phoenix, 19, 4, 196 (...)
- 29 Virgil, “Eclogues,” in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1-6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, London, (...)
12The tree was endowed with a very rich symbolism in the early-modern period. The poem can first be read as a political allegory. It is even possible to wonder whether this poem is really about the exploitation of nature at all, for it belongs to a long tradition of works which echo the pastorals that are also political allegories, in loose imitation, for instance, of Virgil’s Eclogues.27 The oak’s opening plea immediately conflates the topos of the pastoral locus amoenus with Virgil’s symbolic use of the tree as a shelter in an extended political allegory: “Why cut you off my Bowes, both large, and long, / That keepe you from the heat, and scortching Sun / And did refresh your Limbs from sweat?” (1-3). According to Peter L. Smith, in Virgil’s political allegory, shade and coolness “repeatedly indicate peace, leisure and stability,” while discord and political injustice are associated with the scorching sun.28 The beginning of Cavendish’s poem seems to closely echo Virgil’s first Eclogue, where the shepherd Tityrus, under the protection of a powerful ruler, leisurely reclines “under the canopy of a spreading beech,” while his friend Meliboeus, driven into exile, comments: “Here, amid familiar streams and sacred springs, you shall enjoy the cooling shade.”29
- 30 Hamrick, “Trees in Anne Finch’s Jacobite Poems,” art. cit., p. 542.
- 31 Anthony Van Dyck, “Charles I on Horseback,” c. 1635-6 (960 mm x 863 mm), National Gallery, London.
13In seventeenth-century England, especially around the Revolution, the Virgilian pastoral shade was often reinterpreted in light of the oak’s traditional association with the figure of the king, and most especially the Stuart kings. As Wes Hamrick remarked, “[n]ot every oak in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century is a Stuart symbol, but it frequently appears in both text and image as an unambiguous symbol of the monarchy.”30 Charles I in particular commonly used the tree as an emblem for his reign. In many of his great state portraits, he is shown standing next to an oak, his signature as it were, as for instance in Van Dyck’s famous “Equestrian portrait of Charles I,”31 which represents Charles riding under a large oak bearing a Latin inscription meaning: “Charles, King of Great Britain” (“CAROLVS / REX MAGNAE/ BRITANIAE,” fig. 1).
Fig. 1: A. Van Dyck, “Equestrian Portrait of Charles I,” Oil on Canvas, 367 × 292.1 cm, NG1172, The National Gallery, London.
- 32 James Howell, Dendrologia Dodona’s grove, or, the vocall forrest, London, printed by T[homas]: B[ad (...)
14In James Howell’s Dendrologia: Dodona’s Grove, or the Vocall Forest (1640), an allegorical à-clé romance based on the model of Barclays’s Argenis, which retraces the recent past of the English monarchy, the royal oak represents Charles I. As the various trees and forests of Europe speak in turn, the English forest celebrates its royal incumbent, heir to the Caledonian Oak (James I), and his Halcyon days – a phrase commonly associated in Caroline poetry with the allegedly pacific realm of Charles I, the “newly enthroniz’d OKE”:32
Under the Branches of the Stately Caledonian Oke, newly settled in his triumphant Throne, begirt with Cions of his owne royall Stemme, […] the Lillies and Roses White and Red, did bourgeon round about him, the Muses and Graces made Festivals, the Faunes, Satyres, and Nymphs, did dance their Roundelays, all the Trees of the field did clap their hands; and never was seene such Halcyonian days[.] (57-8)
- 33 Some of them copied the painting attributed to Isaac Fuller, “King Charles I and Colonel William Ca (...)
15England’s king is shown being saluted by nature: “all the Trees of the field did clap their hands.” This is a reference to the Biblical prosopopeia of Isaiah 55:12, where nature rejoices over the Israelites’ deliverance from Babylon and their return to Palestine: “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Significantly, Howell here uses Biblical typology (which looked for analogies between history and the Bible) to praise the Stuarts. In the 1641 edition, he adds an engraved portrait of himself leaning against an oak, as a sign of his loyalty, as a frontispiece. The image of the royal oak continued to prosper with Charles II, especially after the young king’s narrow escape after the Battle of Worcester on 4 September 1651: Charles, dressed up as a servant, took refuge in the thick foliage of a massive oak tree, near Boscobel House, until he could be exfiltrated; the anecdote resulted in a whole series of popular representations of the Boscobel tree after the Restoration.33
Fig. 2: “K. CHARLES II and Coll: Carless, advising under the ROYAL OAK,” in Abraham Cowley, “Book of Plants,” in Third and Last Volume of the Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, Charles Harper, 1711), p. 485. © Private collection.
- 34 “The Royall Oake of Brittayne,” anonymous print, 1649, The British Museum. It was sometimes used as (...)
- 35 See Cavendish’s elegiac poem about the death of the oak “Of an Oak in a Grove” (Poems, and Fancies, (...)
- 36 Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 1-8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, (...)
- 37 R. Herrick, “To the King, to cure the Evill”, op. cit., p. 66.
- 38 Ibid., p. 22.
- 39 Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House, To my Lord Fairfax,” Miscellaneous Poems, London, printed for (...)
16The image of the felled tree, in particular the oak, thus became something of a political emblem after the execution of the king in 1649 to represent the fall of the monarchy and the regicide itself, as in the anonymous satirical engraving, “The Royall Oake of Brittayne” (1649), which shows Cromwell overseeing the felling of the royal oak.34 This popular image aptly echoed in the Royalists’ minds the opinion, repeatedly reiterated, that Parliament was not only destroying the realm, but also its beautiful forests and parks, which in turn came to represent the Stuart order. In elegies on the King’s death, the shocking felling of the royal oak became something of a topos, and for this political emblem royalist propagandists tapped classical precedents, like Caesar’s desecration of the sacred oaks outside Massilia in Lucan 3.440-460,35 and the felling of Demeter’s sacred oak by King Erysichthon to prove that the gods did not exist in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8.725-778).36 This image of the felled tree as a symbol of the fall of the monarchy was sometimes used critically in the poetry of the 1630s and 1640s. In his deeply nostalgiac 1648 volume Hesperides, Robert Herrick uses the symbol of the royal tree to praise the King, calling him the “Tree of Life” in the poem “To the King, to cure the Evill” – an image turning him into an equivalent of Christ;37 but in “All things decay and die,” he uses the image as a warning, blaming the fall of the royal oak, in these early years of the Civil Wars, not on the intervention of a “cleaver” or woodcutter, but on decline and age, or mutability, the inevitable “down-fall of [the] aged trees”: “the Oke / Droops, dies, and falls without the cleavers stroke.”38 This poem seems to anticipate Marvell’s even more critical “Upon Appleton House,” written in the early 1650s, in which it is a mere hewel (i.e. a woodpecker) that appears to fell an oak, simply because it has been eaten away by a traitor worm it had itself nurtured.39
17In contrast, Cavendish’s poem clearly expresses sympathy with the old oak’s fate by emphasizing man’s ungratefulness and cruelty (as he accuses men of “invent[ing] all ways to torture [him] with pain,” l. 22). The man holding the axe is presented as devoid of any sympathy for the oak’s fate. But the tree, like the man, are primarily characters in a political fable. Cavendish does not really claim that trees are speaking and sentient beings on a par with man; and it might be significant that in the 1664 edition she revised the title and emended “him” into “it,” which creates some friction with the poem’s extended personification: “A Dialogue between an Oak and a Man Cutting It Down.” It is difficult, therefore, not to see the political dimension of the personified oak: when Cavendish sympathizes with the tree’s suffering as he falls under the axe of the woodcutter (“And will you thus requite my Love, good Will? / To take away my Life and kill?” l. 18-19, p. 66), its analogical resemblance with the figure of Charles I immediately comes to mind. The maiming of the tree’s “body” at the hands of the feller is thus implicitly compared to a form of martyrdom (flaying, lopping off limbs and head…), which cannot but evoke early-modern public executions – and more specifically of course, the beheading of the king at the hands of the executioner in 1649:
First you do peele my Barke and flay my Skinne,
Hew downe my Boughes, so chops off every Limb.
With Wedges you do peirce my Sides to wound,
And with your Hatchet knock me to the ground. (l. 24-27, p. 67)
18The oak’s “pierced sides” also suggest the image of Christ, to whom the “martyred” Charles I was frequently compared by loyalists.
19It comes therefore as no surprise that the man of the dialogue should describe the oak as “King of all the Wood” (l. 31) and discuss the causes of his felling in an extended political allegory. Cavendish uses topoi of seventeenth-century moral and political theory to describe discord in terms she could have found in Bacon, or Shakespeare’s King Lear. Here, the feller presents himself not as the direct cause of the Oak’s downfall, but as its mere executioner: “Your Acornes young, when they grow big and tall / Long for your Crowne, and wish to see your fall” (l. 34-35, p. 67). Rebellion is caused by the envy and ambition of the young generation; it is primarily the consequence of the people’s “humours” of ambition, discontent and ungratefulness, which have distorted the natural bonds between generations and between friends, and is due to the fickleness of subjects. It is a general, anthropological rule that is here stated: “all Subjects they do in Change delight […] Although in ease, and peace, and wealth do live, / Yet all those happy times for Change will give” (l. 40, 42-3, p. 67). The world of politics is determined by human passions, and if it is characterized by mutability, it is because men are “mad,” in the sense of giddy, or changeable. The “man” of the dialogue takes up the conventional royalist denunciation of “discontent,” which was often attributed to the universal destructive passion of rebellion, based on a blind desire for change or innovation. To this, the Oak opposes his steadfast virtue and his resistance to change, which means he does not try to please: “Good Kings governe justly, as they ought, / Not to examine Thoughts how they do like” (55-56, p. 67).
“Misery of man” (l. 147, p. 70)
20As the poem, in its second half (from l. 68, p. 68), veers off to discuss the question of “knowledge,” it leaves political questions aside to broach more moral and metaphysical issues, in particular the notion of man’s misery. It can then also be interpreted as a spiritual allegory. The man first argues that the oak deserves to be cut down because it is ignorant of the world and of itself: “But here, Poore Oake, thou liv’st in Ignorance, / And never seek’st thy Knowledge to advance” (68-69, p. 68). This passage reflects a similar sentiment to one expressed by the French moralist Pascal in his Pensées, written roughly at the same time, and which also invokes the tree to offset mankind’s misery:
- 40 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Charles-Marie des Granges, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 1964, p. 171, Bru (...)
La grandeur de l’homme est grande en ce qu’il se connaît misérable. Un arbre ne se connaît pas misérable.
C’est donc être misérable que de [se] connaître misérable, mais c’est être grand que de connaître qu’on est misérable.40
- 41 The Workes of Beniamin Jonson. The second volume, London, printed [by John Beale, James Dawson, Ber (...)
- 42 Ben Jonson, “XCIII. To Sir Thomas Roe,” “Epigrammes,” The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, London, printe (...)
21What makes men paradoxically greater than trees is that they know themselves to be miserable – they are conscious of their predicament as fallen men (which, according to Pascal, is the prerequisite for welcoming God’s Grace). The man of Cavendish’s poem seems to derive a sense of superiority from this knowledge of misery, which goes together with a patronizing pity for the oak, reiterated in the final stanza: “Alas, poore Oake, thou understandst, nor can / Imagine halfe the misery of Man” (l. 147-148, p. 70). But the knowledge the oak misses he could acquire, the man suggests, or at least glimpse at, by consenting to be felled in order to be put to use and serve mankind, first to build a ship (l. 70-81, p. 68), and then a stately home (l. 105-114, p. 69). The “knowledge” that is mentioned here is purely worldly, however: it is the experience of travelling and the participation to maritime exploration, for instance, and to the colonial and commercial exploration and exploitation of new lands. The oak could thus be turned into a tall ship “to traffick on the Maine”; it could ride the proud waves to “round the World, new Land to find” (l. 72, 80, p. 68). It is the experience of the “world,” as it serves as wood for timber and paneling, “to build a Stately House […] / Wherein shall Princes live of great renowne” (l. 105-106, p. 69). The alleged knowledge offered by the man of the poem to the oak in exchange for his life is morally suspicious: the ship will conquer and “trample downe” (l. 73, p. 68) the waves, themselves described as “sweld with pride.” The timber (which, the oak argues, will turn him into a “Slave,” l. 150, p. 69) will be used to build a stately house for the “delight” and “pastime” of “best Companie” (l. 107, 108, p. 69), and the only advantage to be gained by the oak is that he might hear their music and their plays, and watch their balls. The paneled room will be hung with their pictures. Each time, the Oak turns the offer down and defends his fixedness and steadfast stoic virtue, refusing to become a slave to serve vain pursuits such as commerce, colonization, pomp and entertainments: “O, said the Oake, I am contented well / Without that Knowledge, in my Wood to dwell” (l. 83-84, p. 68) – with a pun on wood as the forest, which would suggest a community of trees, and wood as his own matter, or flesh to continue the personification. This passage echoes a famous line of Jonson’s “An Epistle answering to one that asked to be sealed of the Tribe of Ben,” in which the poet proposes to “dwell as in my Center, as I can.”41 Jonson is known for his often-reiterated ideal of the centered self as a stoic consciousness. In “To Sir Thomas Roe,” he thus advises his friend: “Be alwayes to thy gather’d selfe the same: / And studie conscience, more then thou would’st fame.”42 In “To Penshurst,” Jonson famously praises the “dwelling” landlord, at the centre of his well-ordered community, which he sees as the basis of virtue. In Cavendish’s “Dialogue,” the tree, “dwelling” within his wood, seems to echo this ideal of the centered self, which is also the wise stoic self.
- 43 l. 137-8, p. 69. Version of 1668: “I am happier far, said th’ Oak, than you Mankind; / For I Conten (...)
22The woodcutter finally asks the tree why he is so opposed to death, since he lives in “misery,” i.e. in spiritual ignorance, and a prey to the elements – as if the tree should envy man’s predicament, because human misery is evidence of his superiority over other creatures. The oak reiterates his assertion of moral steadfastness and freedom, offering instead a critical view of the misery of man: “Yet I am happier, said the Oake, then Man; / With my condition I contented am.”43 The passage includes some well-known topoi of the moral discourse about the vanity of human life, and the poem reads in fact, in this section, very much like a literary “vanity with a tree,” which is suggestive of man’s pride. In a second poem entitled “Vanitie,” George Herbert neatly summed up the folly of mankind, mistakingly looking for pleasure on earth, instead of setting their thoughts on God and salvation:
- 44 Herbert, op. cit., p. 104.
Poore silly soul, whose hope and head lies low;
Whose flat delights on earth do creep and grow;
To whom the starres shine not so fair, as eyes;
Nor solid work, as false embroyderies;
Heark and beware, lest what now do measure
And write for sweet, prove a most sowre displeasure.44
23The oak of Cavendish’s poem similarly denounces the vanity of these toys and false honours – vanity of vanities, all is vanity. “He” then reasserts his own moral superiority over man:
- 45 Version of 1668: “[…] I Content, in my Condition find: / Man nothing loves, but what he cannot get; (...)
With my condition I contented am.
He nothing loves, but what he cannot get,
And soon doth surfet of one dish of meat:
Dislikes all Company, displease’d alone,
Makes Griefe himself, if Fortune gives him none.
And as his Mind is restlesse, never pleas’d;
So his Body sick, and oft diseas’d. (l. 138-144, p. 70)45
- 46 John Donne, Meditation I, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa, Oxford, Oxford Univ (...)
- 47 Pascal, Brunchvicg 139, op. cit., p. 109.
24Misery of man, who can never be satisfied with his condition. It is tempting to hear an echo, here, of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasion: “O perplex’d discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of Man!”46 But we might also remember that Pascal’s Thoughts include a whole section about the misery of man, i.e. man without God, as being caused by his perpetual restlessness, which he saw as a consequence of his metaphysical disquiet: “tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne pas savoir demeurer en repos dans une chambre.”47
25The oak’s wisdom, conversely, is founded in his content with his condition, and beyond the image of the wise Stoic self, we might recognize here the idea of the good life that can be found in pastoral retreat, another convention of many royalist poems of the period, as in Katherine Philips’s “A Country-life,” which was written roughly at the same time as Cavendish’s poem:
- 48 Katherine Philips, Poems by the most deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, London, printed by (...)
How Sacred and how Innocent
A Country-life appears,
How free from Tumult, Discontent,
From Flattery or Fears!
This was the first and happiest Life,
When man enjoy’d himself;
Till pride exchanged Peace for Strife,
And Happiness for Pelf.
[…]
But I, resolved from within,
Confirmed from without,
In Privacy intend to spin
My future Minutes out.
And from this Hermitage of mine,
I banish all wild toyes,
And nothing that is not Divine
Shall dare to tempt my Joyes.
[…]
In this retir’d and humble seat
Free from both War and Strife,
I am not forc’d to make retreat,
But chuse to spend my Life.48
26In similar fashion, Cavendish’s tree asserts his freedom and the “honour” of living in his own wood according to nature, rejecting art and artifice: “More Honour ‘tis, my own green Leaves to beare. / More Honour tis, to be in Natures dresse” (l. 126-127, p. 69).
- 49 Version of 1668, p. 102.
- 50 “A Dialogue between Nature and Man,” p. 59.
27The poem then ends with an ambivalent section that seems to oscillate between an assertion by the human speaker of his pride in man’s “divine” part (his mind), which distinguishes him from the rest of nature and makes him rise towards the divine (“But Man hath something more, which is divine. / He hath a Mind, doth to the Heavens aspire,” l. 151-152, p. 70), and a deploration of that same pride and of man’s misery, since this “divine” nature “never can be satisfied, until / He, like a God, doth in Perfection dwell” (l. 161-162, p. 70) – or, as rephrased in the 1668 version of the poem: “[t]ill he, therein, the gods doth equalize.”49 The hesitation between the singular and the plural, and the enormity of the claim – man strives to be the equal of God – signal an anti-humanist, anti-Christian perspective on man, accused of sinful pride. In Cavendish’s poem entitled “A Dialogue between Nature and Man,” man – here a representative of all mankind – argues that men pass all other created things, because “[t]heir Soules like Gods shall be.”50 In the poem, however, the word “soul” is missing, as if Cavendish was avoiding it in a conscious strategy of evasiveness, and the human speaker argues about man that: “He hath a Mind, doth to the Heavens aspire” (l. 151, p. 70) – an ambivalent phrasing which is not without suggesting pride, and is corrected in the 1664 version to suggest a greater separation between reason and divine aspiration: “He hath a mind, and doth to Heav’n aspire.” The singular “Heaven” is also slightly less ambiguously spiritual. The first 1653 version suggests instead that with his reason, man strives to vie with God, a contentious statement which suggests pride, and turns man into a kind of libertine.
28This claim sheds a sarcastic light onto the last lines of the text, however, and their ironic suggestion that the tree might be saved from the axe: “If you, as Man, desire like Gods to bee, / I’le spare your Life, and not cut downe your Tree” (l. 162-163, p. 70). Here we see a shift in addressees, since the man is now addressing Nature herself, through the tree. The devious proposal, given that the oak has just said “[w]ith my condition I contented am” (l. 138, p. 69), is purely rhetorical. It is a false, sophistic alternative, but it introduces a malicious irony into the text, since in the end, after the tree has eloquently pleaded for his life for 160 lines, it still lies at the mercy of the woodcutter, whom it has failed to convince to spare its life. The malice of the alternative also concerns the nature of the proposal of the man here, which is to make the tree as sinful as “man.” The irony retroactively contaminates man’s alleged “divine” part, his mind, which makes him state a proposal that points to a perverse use of reason.
- 51 In 1668: “For Curiosities he doth inquire” (p. 101).
But Man hath something more, which is divine
He hath a Mind, doth to the Heavens aspire,
A Curiosity for to inquire:51
A Wit that nimble is, which runs about
In every Corner to seek Nature out.
For She doth hide her selfe, as fear’d to shew
Man all her workes, least he too powerfull grow. (l. 151-156, p. 70)
- 52 Herbert, op. cit., p. 77, 78.
29Not only is this form of inquiry a tyranny against nature, but it is also described as vain curiosity, which the 1668 amplifies by the use of the plural “curiosities” instead of the singular, which is even more pejorative. Herbert had similarly condemned man’s vanity, his vainglorious and ill-placed curiosity, which included scientific pursuits and could only lead him to forget about Christ. In “Vanitie [I],” already quoted, the astronomer and the chemist thus become emblems of vanity, committing acts of violence on nature to “learn” about the principles of nature in a spirit of acquisitiveness; the astronomer “can bore, / And thred the spheres with his quick-piercing minde / […] / Surveys, as if he had design’d / To make a purchase there”; the chemist attempts to rape nature, as he “can devest / And strip the creatures naked, till he find / The callow principles within their nest.” Yet in the end, both remain blind to the divine truth of grace: “Poor’ man, thou searchest round / To finde out death, but missest life at hand.” 52But the woodcutter of Cavendish’s poem fails to mention grace or salvation: he describes knowledge as vain curiosity and there is no apologetic perspective to save him from error here. The similarity with Pascal’s or Herbert’s dialectics is therefore only superficial: the man of Cavendish’s poem stands in fact as the very picture of man without God. And instead of looking, like Pascal in the maxims mentioned above, at the tree and nature from the perspective of man, Cavendish does exactly the opposite: she looks at man from the vantage point of the tree in a poem which now offers a moralized “Vanity with an oak,” and depicts man in terms similar to the ones used by Pascal to describe “man without God”:
- 53 Pascal, Brunscvicg 389, op. cit., p. 170.
L’Ecclésiaste montre que l’homme sans Dieu est dans l’ignorance de tout et dans un malheur inevitable. Car c’est être malheureux que de vouloir et de ne pouvoir. Or il veut être heureux et assure de quelque verité, et cependant il ne veut ni savoir ni desirer point de savoir. Il ne peut même douter.53
30But who does the woodcutter of the poem represent – man (in general) or a particular man? This seemingly ironic figure who sounds much like Milton’s serpent exercising his sophistic logic upon Eve, as if he was trying to tempt the tree into giving his consent to being changed into timber (in order to serve vain pursuits), and thus to swapping his sentient and knowing life for a material and spiritual death. Here the poem’s elusive allegory seems to reconfigure itself once more, and the tree itself can be interpreted as morphing into an allegory of man whose virtuous fixedness is threatened by the malicious woodcutter. I’d like to suggest that this murky figure might have something to do with the “malicious fowler” who sets out his snares in Katherine Philips’s “La Solitude de St. Amant”:
- 54 Philips, op. cit., p. 173, 172.
Here Water-fowl repose enjoy,
Without the interrupting care,
Lest Fortune should their bliss destroy
By the malicious Fowlers Snare.
Là cent mille oyseaux aquatiques,
Vivent, sans craindre, en leur repos,
Le Giboyeur fin & dispos,
Avec ses mortelles pratiques.54
31Where the French poet Saint-Amant had more simply written about the capable “fowler,” who is excluded from his bird sanctuary, Philips, adding the adjective “malicious,” introduces an echo of Psalms 91.3: “the Lord is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust. / Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.” In this psalm, as in Philips’s poem, and perhaps in Cavendish’s “Dialogue” studied here, the association of the (male) fowler or feller with the serpent, as a figure of Satan, suggests the presence of evil in the natural world, and the sinful desecration perpetrated against nature.
32In this perspective, it is perhaps possible to read Cavendish’s ambiguous poem as presenting the oak, and through him a feminized nature, as the victims of the malicious male “feller” in an ecocritical perspective. As we have seen, however, the allegorical uses of the tree in the poem turn the poem into a multilayered fable. Interpreting this poem demands agility and versatility on the part of the readers, as the poem’s elusiveness and its lack of a unifying perspective constantly requires adjusting. The tree functions here as an anamorphic and metamorphic emblem: it stands for itself, but also for nature as a synecdoche, in particular the natural world abused by mankind, and more specifically by men. But in the course of the poem, because the oak is “more noble in reason” than the woodcutter (who stands alternatively for one man and for mankind), it is also used to hold a mirror up to man’s misguided (and sinful) inquisitive pursuits, although the poem remains elusive on matters of faith. The tree thus seems to stand for steadfast, stoic resolve, making a case for withdrawal and a form of learned ignorance. Finally, the man’s final, ironic suggestion in the poem that he might spare the oak must be interpreted as an act of cruel tyranny, which must have evoked, to a Royalist like Cavendish, the parliamentarians’ abuses and acts of desecration committed against the garden of England. The philosophical and political aspects of the poem are thus intrinsically intertwined, as the analogical and the literal levels of reading eventually merge.
Notes
1 Poems, and Fancies: written By the Right Honourable, the Lady Margaret Countess of Newcastle, London, printed by T. R. for J. Martin, and J. Allestrye, 1653.
2 Dorothy Osborne, The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. Moore G. C. Smith, Oxford, Clarendon-Oxford University Press, 1947, p. 37. I fear that this article is guilty of what Lara Dodds describes as a conventional approach that opens “an essay on Cavendish’s writing with these or similar comments as a prelude to arguments that redefine the so-called defects of Cavendish’s writing in more positive terms,” but then she herself lists a number of negative early assessments of Cavendish’s works (Early Modern Studies Journal, 6, 2014, p. 29-65 (here p. 29), https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2.-Dodds1.pdf (all web references last accessed 05/01/2026).
3 Even Sylvia Bowerbank, in an article about Cavendish’s poetry, writes that “[e]ven those of us who are attracted to her personality and ideas cannot help but wish she had been a more disciplined writer” (“The Spider’s Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the ‘Female’ Imagination,” English Literary Renaissance 14, 1984, p. 392-408, here p. 407). For the latest evidence about Cavendish’s intellectual development in the late 1650s, see Deborah Boyle, The Well-Ordered Universe: The Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, and Anita Gilman Sherman, “The Impact of Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy on Margaret Cavendish”, Studies in Philology, 120, 2, 2023, p. 315-339.
4 For a sympathetic reading of Cavendish’s practice of variety, see Hero Chalmers, “‘Flattering Division’: Margaret Cavendish’s Poetics of Variety,” in Line Cottegnies and Nancy Weitz, eds., Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish, London, Associated University Presses, 2003, p. 123-144.
5 Poems and phancies written by ... the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, London, printed by William Wilson, 1664; Poems, or, Several fancies in verse with the Animal parliament in prose / written by the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent princess, the Duchess of Newcastle, London, printed by A. Maxwell, 1668.
6 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament, ed. Brandie R. Siegfried, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series, Toronto, Iter Press; Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018; Margaret Cavendish. Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition, ed. Liza Blake, published May 2019, http://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/. Brandie Siegfried’s edition is based on the 1668 revised edition (with modernised spelling and punctuation); Liza Blake’s online edition is a conflated edition aiming at an ideal “best text,” based on the 1653 edition, but making extensive use of the revised 1664 edition. Because of the complicated publishing history of the 1653 edition in particular and the existence of multiple variants (see Blake’s notice, http://library2.utm.utoronto.ca/poemsandfancies/textual-and-editorial-introduction/), I have used the EEBO copy of the 1653 edition (as representative of first intentions), held at the Huntington Library, for this article, but checked against the later editions, and added line numbers. For the editorial history of the volume, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, “Margaret Cavendish as Editor and Revisor,” in Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry and Culture 1640-1680, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 63-67.
7 She was thought eligible for Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee’s anthology The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, New York, Capricorn Books, 1930 (repr. New York, New York Review of Books, 2003).
8 For Cavendish’s connection with Epicurus, see among others Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 1-7; Line Cottegnies, “Generic Bricolage and Epicureanism in Margaret Cavendish’s Imaginative Works,” in Lisa Hopkins and Tom Rutter, eds., A Companion to the Cavendishes, ARC Humanities Press, 2020, p. 325-348, here p. 327-30, and Jessie Hock, “Fanciful Poetics and Skeptical Epistemology in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies,” Studies in Philology, 115, 4, 2018, p. 766-802.
9 See for instance Michael Drayton, “Nimphidia, The Court of Fayrie,” in The Battaile of Agincourt Fought by Henry the fift of the that name, King of England …, London, printed [by Augustine Mathewes] for William Lee, 1627, p. 117-134; Herrick’s fairy poems were published in Hesperides, or, The works both humane & divine of Robert Herrick, London, printed for John Williams and Francis Eglesfield ..., 1648. See Marjorie Swann, “The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 53, 2, 2000, p. 449-473.
10 See for instance Habert de Cerisy’s “Métamorphose des yeux de Philis en Astres,” in Recueil de diverses poësies, Paris, Louis Chamhoudry, 1654, p. 59-78.
11 See for instance Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies (1653),” in Ingo Berensmeyer, ed., Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019, p. 594-614; Bill Phillips, “The Rape of Mother Earth in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: An Ecofeminist Interpretation,” Atlantis, 26, 1, 2004, p. 49-60, here p. 54-56.
12 See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York, Harper and Row, 1980, and Bowerbank, op. cit., passim.
13 Drayton, Poly-Olbion, London, 1619. Drayton pursued extensive personifications. The Forest of Arden speaks out in Song XIII. In Song VII, he laments the felling of oaks as a symbol of deforestation wreaking havoc throughout England (VII. 271-90). For a study of Drayton’s own sentiment on trees, see Sara Trevisan, “‘The murmuring woods euen shuddred as with feare’: Deforestation in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion,” The Seventeenth Century, 26, 2, 2011, p. 140-163.
14 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie Contriued into Three Bookes: The First of Poets and Poesie, the Second of Proportion, the Third of Ornament, London, 1589, p. 200. On the figure of the prosopopeia, see Evan Cheney, “‘Thou hast a free passeporte’: Poetic Personation and Literary Patronage in Spenser’s Prosopopoia, Or Mother Hubberds Tale and The Sheheardes Calender,” Studies in Philology, 118, 3, 2021, p. 538-564.
15 I am voluntarily misquoting the text, which reads: “A Nature is divine” (the 1668 version reads: “That Nature is Divine, which seeks the best,” p. 101).
16 See for instance “A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life,” in Nature’s Pictures, London, printed for J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1656, p. 368-391 (where she laments the desecration of her mother’s estates: “she made her house her Cloyster, inclosing her self, as it were therein, for she seldom went abroad, unless to Church, but these unhappy Warrs forc’t her out, by reason she and her children were loyall to the King; for which they plundered her, and my Brothers of all their Goods, Plate, Jewells, Money, Corn, Cattle, and the like, cut down their Woods, pull’d down their Houses, and sequestred them from their Lands and Livings” (Nature’s Pictures, p. 377).
17 See “Of a Funerall,” Poems, and Fancies, p. 195-196, “An Elegy on my Brothe, Lill’d [sic] in these unhappy Warres” (p. 196).
18 “The rest of the Parks were totally defaced and destroyed, both Wood, Pales and Deer; amongst which was also Clipston-Park of seven miles compass, wherein my Lord had taken much delight formerly, it being rich of Wood, and containing the greatest and tallest Timber-trees of all the Woods he had[.]” The Life of the thrice noble, high, and puissant prince William Cavendish, Duke, Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle, London, printed by A. Maxwell, 1667, p. 92. See also p. 170: “That the cutting down of Timber in the time of Rebellion, has been an inestimable loss to this Kingdom, by reason of Shipping; for though Timber might be had out of Foreign Countries that would serve for the building of Ships, yet there is none of such a temper as our English Oak; it being not onely strong and large, but not apt to splint, which renders the Ships of other Nations much inferior to ours; and that therefore it would be very beneficial for the Kingdom, to set out some Lands for the bearing of such Oaks, by sowing of Acorns, and then transplanting them; which would be like a Store-house for shipping, and bring an incomparable benefit to the Kingdom, since in Shipping consists our greatest strength, they being the onely Walls that defend an Island.”
19 “Nous rendre comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature,” René Descartes, Discours de la méthode [1637], VI, in Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2010, vol. I, p. 102.
20 For the debate about Merchant, see Katharine Park, “Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science,” Isis, 97, 3, 2006, p. 487-495, and Sandrine Parageau, Les Ruses de l’ignorance, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010, p. 253-256, for instance.
21 Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), in Francis Bacon, The Works, eds James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Devon Heath, London, 1870, vol. 4, p. 296. Quoted by Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature, op. cit., p. 168. Cavendish seems to confirm this interpretation of Bacon’s: “But most men make such cross, narrow, and intricate ways in Nature, with their over-nice distinctions, that Nature appears like a Labyrinth, whenas really she is as plain as an unplowed, ditched, or hedged champion; […] some with their penetrations, pressings, squeezings, and the like, make such holes in her, as they do almost wound, press and squeeze her to death” (Philosophical Letters, London, 1664, p. 489).
22 George Herbert, The Temple Sacred poems and private ejaculations, Cambridge, printed by Thom. Buck, and Roger Daniel, printers to the Universitie, 1633, p. 78.
23 Margaret Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy [1666], ed. Eilleen O’Neill, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 170-171.
24 See Bruno Latour’s concept of Gaia, which is itself based on Lovejoy, as summarized in Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter, Polity Press, 2017. This is not the place for a thorough development, but in many ways Margaret Cavendish’s own form of “materialist vitalism” – although the concept of “vitalism” as it is understood today, is largely anachronistic for the seventeenth century – appears relevant for these new-old ways of conceptualizing human beings’ relationships to their environment.
25 Poems, and Fancies, p. 112-3.
26 This poem is very close to another heterodox, French, poem, written a little later (1690), and equally neglected, Antoinette Deshoulière’s “La Solitude,” which idealizes nature only to denounce the injustice and barbarity of man (Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde, Madame Deshoulières, Poésies, Paris, chez Jean Villette, 1693, p. 6).
27 Annabel Patterson comments on how Virgil’s model served over and over again in the early modern period (Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, p. 1-17). For more examples of the uses of trees as a political allegory in the period, see Wes Hamrick, “Trees in Anne Finch’s Jacobite Poems of Retreat,” Studies in English Literature, 53, 3, 2013, p. 541-563.
28 See Peter L. Smith, “Lentus in Umbra: A Symbolic Pattern in Vergil’s Eclogues,” Phoenix, 19, 4, 1965, p. 298-304, 298 and 300.
29 Virgil, “Eclogues,” in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1-6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, London, William Heinemann, 1926, Loeb edition. First Eclogue, l. 46. Note that the tree is an oak in Theocritus.
30 Hamrick, “Trees in Anne Finch’s Jacobite Poems,” art. cit., p. 542.
31 Anthony Van Dyck, “Charles I on Horseback,” c. 1635-6 (960 mm x 863 mm), National Gallery, London.
32 James Howell, Dendrologia Dodona’s grove, or, the vocall forrest, London, printed by T[homas]: B[adger]: for H: Moseley, 1640, p. 58.
33 Some of them copied the painting attributed to Isaac Fuller, “King Charles I and Colonel William Carlos (Careless) in the Royal Oak,” Oil on Canvas, (2127 mm x 3156 mm), National Portrait Gallery, London, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01073/King-Charles-II-and-Colonel-William-Carlos-Careless-in-the-Royal-Oak.
34 “The Royall Oake of Brittayne,” anonymous print, 1649, The British Museum. It was sometimes used as the frontispiece of Clement Walker’s Anarchia Anglicana, or, The History of Independency, the Second Part, s. l., 1649.
35 See Cavendish’s elegiac poem about the death of the oak “Of an Oak in a Grove” (Poems, and Fancies, p. 160).
36 Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 1-8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1960, Loeb edition.
37 R. Herrick, “To the King, to cure the Evill”, op. cit., p. 66.
38 Ibid., p. 22.
39 Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House, To my Lord Fairfax,” Miscellaneous Poems, London, printed for Robert Boulter, 1681, p. 76-103.
40 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Charles-Marie des Granges, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 1964, p. 171, Brunschvicg 397 (“The greatness of man is great in that he knows he is miserable. / A tree does not know itself to be miserable. To know oneself to be miserable means to be miserable, but it is to be great to know that one is miserable,” my translation).
41 The Workes of Beniamin Jonson. The second volume, London, printed [by John Beale, James Dawson, Bernard Alsop and Thomas Fawcet] for Richard Meighen [and Thomas Walkley], 1640, p. 218. On Jonson’s centered self, see Thomas M. Greene, “Ben Jonson and the Centered Self,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 10, 2, 1970, p. 325-348.
42 Ben Jonson, “XCIII. To Sir Thomas Roe,” “Epigrammes,” The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, London, printed for W. Stansby, 1616, p. 798.
43 l. 137-8, p. 69. Version of 1668: “I am happier far, said th’ Oak, than you Mankind; / For I Content in my Condition find” (p. 101).
44 Herbert, op. cit., p. 104.
45 Version of 1668: “[…] I Content, in my Condition find: / Man nothing loves, but what he cannot get; / And soon doth surfeit of one Dish of Meat: / Dislikes all Company, displeas’d alone; / Makes Grief himself, if Fortune gives him none. / And, as his Mind is restless, never pleas’d; / So is his Body sick and oft diseas’d.” (p. 101).
46 John Donne, Meditation I, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 7-8.
47 Pascal, Brunchvicg 139, op. cit., p. 109.
48 Katherine Philips, Poems by the most deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, London, printed by J. M. for Henry Herringman, 1667, p. 88, 90-91.
49 Version of 1668, p. 102.
50 “A Dialogue between Nature and Man,” p. 59.
51 In 1668: “For Curiosities he doth inquire” (p. 101).
52 Herbert, op. cit., p. 77, 78.
53 Pascal, Brunscvicg 389, op. cit., p. 170.
54 Philips, op. cit., p. 173, 172.
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| Titre | Fig. 1: A. Van Dyck, “Equestrian Portrait of Charles I,” Oil on Canvas, 367 × 292.1 cm, NG1172, The National Gallery, London. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/docannexe/image/22376/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 448k |
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| Titre | Fig. 2: “K. CHARLES II and Coll: Carless, advising under the ROYAL OAK,” in Abraham Cowley, “Book of Plants,” in Third and Last Volume of the Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, Charles Harper, 1711), p. 485. © Private collection. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/docannexe/image/22376/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 92k |
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Line Cottegnies, « “In my wood to dwell”: Margaret Cavendish’s Ecocritical Thinking and her Uses of Allegory in Poetry », Études Épistémè [En ligne], 48 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 mars 2026, consulté le 20 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/22376 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/160ft
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