ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
but also, as develops later in the century, a place for private devotional
meditation:
What was there then but gave you all content,
While you the time in meditation spent,
Of their Creators powre, which there you saw,
In all his Creatures held a perfit Law.
225
(ll. 75–8)
Given its assumed date of composition, sometime around 1609–10, 23 “Cookeham’s”
originary relationship to poems in the “estate” or “country house”
tradition is also a matter of critical interest. But if there is a strong probability
that Lanyer’s poem predates Jonson’s “To Penshurst” by a few years, it is equally
the case that these two poems diverge significantly on crucial issues; for Jonson’s
describes his arrival on the scene, Lanyer’s her departure from it. “To Penshurst,”
moreover, collapses the distinction between private and public spheres when the
king is represented as coming on the scene, while “Cookeham” reinforces the
distinction between the two: the “prospect” is fit to please a king’s eye but is not
itself visited by royalty. And most important, Lanyer does not—cannot?—
represent herself as a poet seated at the table of the great, as Jonson so
emphatically does. Whatever class differences there were between a Jonson and
a Sidney, these could be temporarily surmounted in “To Penshurst” because
Jacobean culture, thanks in part to Sidney, approved a vision of the classicized
male poet with a recognized pedigree of his own. There was, however, no similar
cultural niche for Lanyer in 1611. “A Womans writing of divinest things” is a
title of distinction conferred only in retrospect by later cultures seeking to
discover their own gendered, literary origins. 24 It did not provide entry into the
great houses of the day—in this case the building is not even glimpsed by
Lanyer—let alone a seat within at the table. In a very precise sense, Lanyer’s
poem is a farewell to a place to which she never belonged: “So great a difference
is there in degree” (l. 106). As “The Description of Cookeham” makes clear,
imagining a female community is not the same as being an inhabitant of that
community. (The problem of social communion with the great is perhaps most
evident in the strange tree-kissing episode recounted near the end of the poem.)
In short, if we follow out a recent provocative suggestion that future criticism of
“To Penshurst” needs to account for Jonson’s act of locating his poem in “a field
already occupied by a voice that speaks as a woman,” 25 then we also need to
acknowledge the possibility that what Jonson saw was a house still waiting to be
visited by a poet.