The Importance of the Garden in Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cookham”
Thoughts on cultivation
They often wept, though, speechless, could not pray you,
Letting their tears in your fair bosoms fall,
As if they said, Why will ye leave us all?
For the average modern day reader, the idea of the natural world holding a particular power over the human experience and possessing a certain purity that channels its connection with God might seem entirely farfetched. As we live in a period of great ecological upheaval in relation to the impending climate catastrophe, the beauty of the natural world is lost in the discourse surrounding political and economic action. Despite this modern decline, the importance of the natural world for human existence and connection is found in nearly all periods of literary and historical history. Beginning with the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, imagery of the garden is central to religious writings, teachings, and practices. In the protestant religion, the natural world was created by God for man, and the influence of nature as evidence of God’s presence is found repeatedly in protestant poetry. One of the most complex female poets of the period, Aemilia Lanyer, who lived from 1569 to 1645 emphasized the importance of the garden’s presence in many of her poems. While Lanyer is now recognized and praised for her protofeminist poetry, it is the presence of the garden in her work that is unmistakably unique.
For historical context, Jim Bartos writes in his 2010 article for Garden History, “The Spirituall Orchard: God, Garden and Landscape in Seventeenth-Century England Before the Restoration'' that “the fall out of Eden and the resulting impact on man’s place in the world were all viewed as historical fact in England in the seventeenth century” (Bartos 177). For poet Aemilia Lanyer, God’s presence in the natural world was her reality. Bartos continues, writing that in Protestant reading in particular, “the habit of mind was accustomed to a dual sense in scripture was also accustomed to seeing an event, a thing or a person as a type, a representation, or a figure for something else” (Bartos 177). Unlike, say, the period of Romanticism that would later appear in the years 1785 to 1832 which placed the human experience first in the representation of nature, for protestant writers the natural world represented God—it represented something higher and more divine than the human.
Bartos goes on to thoroughly explain the importance of not only individual plants in the seventeenth century as individuals, and highlights the importance of gardens. The imagery of the garden originated in biblical history as Eden, the garden in which the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil grew. Bartos writes that while not all ecological presence was read as being Edenic in reference, that “it would appear that gardens were sometimes experienced at the same time both temporally, in the here-and-now, and in the context of sacred history” (Bartos 188). For Lanyer, the seventeenth century importance of the garden is important to many of her writings. The act of experiencing a garden in her poem “The Description of Cookham” is both a here-and-now event, but also draws forth from the speaker a particular sense of mourning for the history that the garden holds. Lanyer personifies the plants growing on the grounds of Cookham, expressing their emotions at the speaker’s departure. This is in line with Barto’s essay. The trees are not merely stoic figures witnessing their former companions depart, but emotional beings silently expressing their grief: “They often wept, though, speechless, could not pray you” (Lanyer). This contrasts with the tone Lanyer uses earlier in the poem to express the sacred history of these trees that the speaker is fond enough of to kiss, expressing that “never shall my sad eyes again behold /… the trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad, / Embraced each other, seeming to be glad” (Lanyer). This natural garden that Lanyer is painting in “Description of Cookham” is a representation of the speaker’s own struggle with the here-and-now and the sacred history that spiritually binds all human beings with the natural world.
Further, the garden in Lanyer is a place that is deeply and intimately connected to the female experience. Christine Coch writes in her 2004 article for Renaissance and Reformation “An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanter and the Early Modern Garden” that “gardens, women, and poetry had long been associated in sixteenth-century verse written by men, typically as sources of analogous pleasures” (Coch 98). She goes on to express the trouble of dismissing the act of gardening and gardens as being merely feminine social spheres for isolation, but that in the seventeenth century gardening was still within the domain of men, writing that “if a woman claimed the garden as her own, she did so in defiance of competing male claims” (Coch 100). Lanyer’s defiance of the traditionally masculine structure and purpose of the garden allows it to become a place where female intimacy can be openly expressed, both in female relationships and relationships with the natural world.
In “Description of Cookham” Lanyer’s creation of the vast garden proves Coch’s idea that “gardening enables women to create ‘miniature worlds’ manifesting their thoughts and desires more completely than the ‘real’ world ever would” (Coch 102). This is expressed in the opening lines of the poem: “Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtained / Grace from that grace where perfect grace remained” (Lanyer). Cookham provided a world in which the speaker and the women she is departing with could discover both their own selves as well as the divine qualities of the natural world. While Lanyer’s speaker is expressing what the garden of Cookham has given her, she is also illustrating what she has given the garden in return: “each arbor, bank, each seat, each stately tree, / Thought themselves honored in supporting thee” (Lanyer). Coch’s strongest argument comes when she writes “A garden’s privacy offered women a physical place for the spiritual space allowed them in Protestant traditions” (Coch 104) and that Lanyer’s writing “foregrounds her poetic labor with first-person tags that prevent garden and poet from merging entirely and allowing art to obscure the artist” (Coch 106). While the garden in Cookham is so far detached from the male gaze—the male dominated world—the speaker is able to articulate and express her deepest emotions while remaining distinctly separate from the natural world, maintaining her own presence and agency.
Kailey Giordano presents a different reading of Lanyer in her similarly titled essay “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.’” While both Bartos and Coch write on the beauty and harmony of the garden in Protestant poetry, Giordano suggests that in Lanyer’s “Cooke-Ham” there is an ecological destruction happening at the hands of the speaker. While Bartos argues that the power of the garden allows the observer and the natural world to become one, both in the here-and-now and in the deep sense of historical time, Giordano writes that Lanyer’s similes and personification of nature “remind us of the separation between the picture produced by the poet’s mind and the actual unfolding of events in the natural world” (Giordano, 9). The question of garden representing Eden as mentioned in Bartos, Giordano compares ‘Cooke-ham” to Ben Jonson’s similar poem “To Penshurst,” writing that “Both Penshurst and Cooke-ham are true pictures of Even, but the loss of the latter must be lamented from outside by an Eve cast out of her Eden” (Giordano 10). Giordano focuses on the destruction and deterioration of this picture Lanyer has painted of the garden, and in a way, reducing its divine power to merely existing a product of the artist, not as creation of God.
Giordano’s article argues against the harmony presented by both Coch and Bartos. While she writes that Layner’s “access to nature is always mediated by her thoughts” (Giordano 10) this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the unifying theme of all Protestant poetry is that the mind allows one to connect with God. After all, George Herbert writes quite literally in “Denial” that it is his thoughts that he relies upon to worship God: “My breast was full of fears / And disorder: / My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, / Did fly asunder” (Herbert). As Herbert is describing, he struggles to feel connected to God as it is his thoughts that are incapacitated. Lanyer similarly uses her thoughts on the garden to express its divine presence in both the here-and-now and the in the sacred history Bartos writes of. The garden that she illustrates in “Cooke-ham” provides not only a place for her to work through her own emotions and her own grief and mourning at the loss of part of herself, but it provides a landscape in which women can interact with God and one another—providing them with a space of their own. It is the divine presence of the natural world that is most important in Lanyer’s poetry, both in its beauty and within its continued presence and influence in our world today.
Works Cited:
Bartos, Jim. “The Spirituall Orchard: God, Garden and Landscape In Seventeenth-Century England Before the Restoration.” Garden History, vol. 38, no. 2, 2010, pp. 177–93, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41411753. Accessed 11 May 2022.
Coch, Christine. “An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanyer and the Early Modern Garden.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, vol. 28, no. 2, 2004, pp. 97–118, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43445755. Accessed 11 May 2022.
Giordano, Kailey. “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. Vol 13. Shakespeare in the Anthropocene. 2018.
Herbert, George. “Denial.”
Lanyer, Aemilia. “Description of Cookham.”