Summary
“The Description of Cooke-ham” is a valediction to a royal estate in which the poet, her patron (Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland), and her patron’s daughter (Lady Anne Clifford) temporarily resided.
The opening lines situate the poem in the following contexts: Lanyer’s departure from the Cooke-ham estate, the countess’s commissioning of the poem, and the poet's reminiscence of her days at the estate. At Cooke-ham, the speaker had experienced grace (both that of her patron and that of God), high virtue, and spiritual pleasure. (Lines 1–16)
In a flashback to the countess’s first arrival at Cooke-ham, the speaker—engaging in pathetic fallacy—describes how the flora and fauna at the estate seemed to welcome their visitor with enthusiasm and reverence: the house and walkways outfitted themselves in their best clothes; trees blocked the sun from the mistress’s eyes; a choir of birds (including a nightingale, referred to as Philomela in the poem) sang in joy; hills lowered themselves in respect; winds muttered sounds pleasing to the ear; streams delivered fish for the countess to eat; little animals looked upon her in awe, then fled from her bow. The speaker highlights a specific oak tree that was especially tall, handsome, and favored by the countess. The sights of Cooke-ham, finer than the entire continent of Europe, could impress many a monarch. (Lines 17–74)
Moving on to descriptions of the countess’s piety, the speaker compares the mistress to various male Biblical figures: keenly aware of the artistry of her Creator, the countess could have joined Jesus Christ and his disciples in religious discourse; like Moses, she obeys divine law; like David, she sings hymns; like Joseph, she provides for her people. (Lines 75–92)
The poem then shifts to praise of the countess’s similarly virtuous and clever daughter, Anne, who would later leave Cooke-ham to marry the Earl of Dorset. The speaker laments the circumstances separating her from the Clifford women, and accuses Fortune (personified) of casting her back into her lowly origins. She hopes that her faith in heaven will make her worthy of God’s love, which does not discriminate in terms of class and other worldly distinctions. (Lines 93–126)
The speaker then narrates the countess’s last day at Cooke-ham. Her leaving coincided with, and is compared to, the arrival of winter. Upon learning of her departure, the trees in Cooke-ham wither like ageing, dying people. Narrating the countess’s final kiss on her favorite oak tree, the speaker is frustrated that an undeserving inanimate object has won the affection of her mistress. The plants and animals of Cooke-ham seemed to join the speaker in mourning their separation from the Cliffords: the brooks and streams dried up; birds sang sad songs, and the nightingale’s ditty won no pity; the sun ceased to offer warmth; pleasant echoes no longer sounded through the estate; the house put on dust and cobwebs to express its grief. (Lines 127–204)
The poem closes by returning to the poet’s own departure from Cooke-ham. In the final lines, the speaker expresses her hope to both preserve the name of her patron in her poetry, and remain connected to the virtues of her dear friend the countess. (Lines 205–210)
Analysis
“The Description of Cooke-ham” not only captures an individual’s nostalgia for a country house and its inhabitants, but also raises important questions about class, gender, art, and power.
Lanyer begins the poem by exploring the issues of authorship, authorial perspective, and patronage. The valediction in Line 1 (“Farewell, sweet Cooke-ham”) begins the poem’s frame narrative, in which the speaker begins with a farewell to Cooke-ham, looks back on her days with the countess, then concludes by circling back to her present withdrawal from the estate. The speaker then implies both that her authorship of the poem requires permission from a higher authority (“the muses gave their full consent,” Line 3), and that her work has been commissioned by, and thus caters to the demands of, her patron Margaret Clifford (“princely palace willed me to indite,” Line 5). Consider how these contexts—the speaker’s temporal remove from the experience, the need for divine “consent,” and the demands of aristocratic patronage—may have influenced the content of the poem. Is Lanyer looking back on her days in Cooke-ham through rose-tinted glasses? What are the stakes of this poem, which was written in a period when women were rarely read or published? Note also how the first few lines establish the rhyme (heroic couplets), meter (iambic pentameter), and phonetic devices (e.g., the alliteration in “sacred story of the soul’s delight,” Line 6) that Lanyer will frequently utilize throughout this piece. Do these features render the poem somewhat predictable? Stable, perhaps, like the institution of patronage itself?
The descriptions of Cooke-ham continue to explore these issues of power and politics. In the first of the two major flashbacks in this poem, the speaker uses the language of hierarchy to describe the estate’s greetings to Clifford upon her arrival. Through her use of pathetic fallacy, the speaker not only projects her personal admiration for the countess, and but also evokes elements of monarchy and empire in doing so. Cooke-ham performs the rites of servanthood (e.g., “walks put on their summer liveries,” Line 21), courtly entertainment (e.g., “The little birds in chirping notes did sing, / To entertain both you and that sweet spring,” Lines 29–30), genuflection (e.g., “Hills, vales, and woods, as if on bended knee,” Line 68), and courtly petitioning (e.g., “to prefer some strange unlooked-for suit,” Line 70). The speaker goes on to describe the views of the estate as a “prospect fit to please the eyes of kings” (Line 72) and a “delight” that even “Europe could not afford” (Line 74). Lanyer thus portrays the countess as a powerful monarch, while personifying the estate as her obedient subject. Where might Lanyer see herself in this dynamic?
The poem then compares the countess to various male Biblical figures, thus demonstrating not only the matriarch’s capital, but also her religious integrity and her legitimacy as a spiritual leader. The countess is placed among Jesus and his disciples, Moses, David, and Joseph, each of whom represents a Christian virtue she possesses (wisdom, obedience to divine law, worship, and altruism). The segment not only captures Lanyer’s appreciation for the spiritual fellowship she enjoyed at Cooke-ham, but also continues the feminist theme of her collection Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (the larger collection of poems to which this poem belongs), where the poet reimagines Biblical narratives (e.g., the crucifixion of Christ) from a woman’s perspective.
The praise of Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of Margaret Clifford, then allows the poem to explore femininity in relation to marriage. The speaker points out that Anne is “[o]f noble Bedford’s blood” (Line 94), emphasizing once again the lineage and legitimacy of an aristocratic female figure. It “grieves” (Line 99) the speaker to narrate her separation from Anne and her mother, who left Cooke-ham for marriage (“To honorable Dorset now espoused,” Line 95) and for widow duties respectively. The poem critiques not only the institutions of marriage and family (as well as perhaps their heteronormativity), but also the class distinctions, that cause these departures. “Fortune” is personified into a cruel person who represents both these institutions as well as the insuperability of “Fate” itself, which places the worse-off speaker in “so low a frame” and her “great friends” among “those orbs of state” (Lines 103–107). Yet, as Stephen Greenblatt notes in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Lanyer may be exaggerating her friendship with Anne in these lines. Is Lanyer compromising the integrity of her poem as she once again caters to the expectations of her “great friends”?
The poem presents a final flashback to the countess’s last day at Cooke-ham, in which Lanyer continues to merge pathetic fallacy and monarchic language, as she did in the initial flashback. The trees at Cooke-ham choose to wither when they realize their impressive show of colors in the fall “had no power to stay [the countess]” (Line 137). The speaker, meanwhile, envies the “chaste, yet loving kiss” (Line 165) that an oak tree receives from the departing countess, suggesting that she desires not only a “chaste” spiritual union with her countess, but also “loving” expressions of intimacy. While the speaker is left to seethe in jealousy, Cooke-ham continues to fall apart in the flashback. “Philomela” from Line 31 (a rape victim turned into a nightingale in Greek mythology) comes back in Line 189 as a refrain, mourning the disintegration of a feminine haven, and reminding readers of misogynistic violence in the world outside Cooke-ham. Furthermore, descriptions of deterioration in Lines 179–204 exactly invert the descriptions of splendor in Lines 17–52. Might this precise mirroring suggest the speaker’s fatalism? (“[N]othing’s free from Fortune’s scorne,” she observes in Line 176.)
Leaving behind these tightly structured (yet messily mournful) verses on power, fate, seasonal decline, and homoerotic desire, Lanyer closes the poem by circling back to the introductory lines, and reiterating her thoughts on patronage. The speaker desires to remain, “so long as life remains” (Line 209), under the auspices of Margaret Clifford, and desires to “[tie her] life to her [Clifford] by those rich chains” (Line 210). The verb “tie” perhaps implies the speaker’s lingering desire for physical and emotional intimacy; the double entendre in the adjective “rich” suggests both the countess’s abundant virtues and her material wealth that has both separated and united the poet and her patron.
