ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
vernacular literature in England, although Lanyer’s combative “defense” looks
forward to the local querelle des femmes that was soon to erupt in the pamphlet
literature by the likes of Joseph Swetnam and Rachel Speght and anticipates
further down the line the radical egalitarianism of Mary Astell. 22
As this stanza intimates, Lanyer is frequently on the verge of breaking
boundaries, historical and rhetorical, which is one way to describe the
present appeal of Salve Deus. And yet, as outward and forward-looking as
Lanyer can sound, she is still very much bound up in the hierarchical
culture she wishes, in some respects, to alter. Her “Description of Cookeham,”
appended to Salve Deus (but in some ways an easier introduction to
her work), highlights the discrepancy between her visionary politics and the
social realities of Jacobean culture. Sometimes regarded as another “first” for
Lanyer, this time in the genre of the “country house poem,” the 210-line
“Cooke-ham” returns the reader to the private estate of the Countess of
Cumberland, mother to the (now) better known Anne Clifford, with Lanyer
using the occasion to trace out her own tenuous affiliations with this noble
family. Like all of Lanyer’s poetry, it has a distinctly sympathetic female
slant, one made more poignant, even sentimental in places, by the note of
exile sounded at the outset:
Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtained
Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain’d;
And where the Muses gave their full consent,
I should have powre the virtuous to content:
Where princely Palace will’d me to indite,
The sacred Storie of the Soules delight.
Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest,
And all delights did harbour in her breast:
Never shall my sad eies againe behold
Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold.
As a memorial to an idyllic time in the recent past spent on the country estate,
“Cooke-ham” redirects the explicitly religious concerns of Salve Deus toward a
personal celebration of the landscape, now made special, if not sacred, by the
hallowing presence of the mistress. In doing so, Lanyer anticipates a number of
themes and attitudes soon to become central to the tradition of the “countryhouse”
poem—the estate represented as a place that combines aesthetics and
power fit for royalty:
All interlac’d with brookes and christall springs,
A Prospect fit to please the eyes of Kings:
And thirteene shires appear’d all in your sight,
Europe could not affoard much more delight;
224
(ll. 71–4)