Nostalgia
The speaker of “The Description of Cooke-ham” looks back on, and grieves the loss of, a community she was a part of in the past. The Cooke-ham estate was once inhabited by the poet (Aemilia Lanyer), her patron (Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland), and the patron’s daughter (Lady Anne Clifford). In idyllic paradise, the three shared a community closely knit by shared Christian values and friendship; circumstances, however, forced the women to leave both the estate and one another’s company. Lanyer highlights the speaker’s sense of nostalgia by repeating certain words and phrases, and constantly returning to earlier parts of the poem. For instance, the word “farewell” appears in Lines 1, 7, and 205, and the phrase “pleasures past” (or “pleasures passed”) appears in Lines 13, 118, and 168.
The speaker not only recalls the days of camaraderie at Cooke-ham, but also asks her patron to join her in reminiscence: “Vouchsafe to think upon those pleasures past,” she demands in Line 14. Thus the poem is not only a meditation on private nostalgia and grief, but also an attempt to rebuild community through the sharing of memory.
Religion
Cooke-ham is described as an embodiment of Christian virtue. The elaborate descriptions of nature surrounding the estate evoke the Garden of Eden. It was also at this estate that the speaker finds the countess putting Christian values to practice: meditating on the Creator’s power, engaging in religious study and discourse, observing Christian law, singing hymns, and practicing Christian hospitality. To illustrate each of these aspects of spirituality, the poem compares the countess to various Biblical figures, including Jesus and his disciples, Moses, David, and Joseph. Once the countess—the incarnation of all these values—leaves Cooke-ham, the Edenic estate begins its decline.
The poem also grapples with the distinction between the religious and the secular, the celestial and earthly, the high and the low. The speaker describes her memories of Cooke-ham as “dim shadows of celestial pleasures, / Which are desired above all earthly treasures” (Lines 15–16), suggesting that her community at Cooke-ham pursued “celestial” values inaccessible to the “earthly” world outside it. This dichotomy between virtuous Cooke-ham and the secular world intensifies the speaker’s grief upon leaving the estate.
Gender
Cooke-ham is a female utopia. Its three inhabitants identified in the poem (Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford) are women who thrive in one another’s company, in a space secure from misogynistic social structures or male violence. The countess who resides in and provides for the estate is a matriarch whose socioeconomic status can, even in male-dominated early modern society, compete with that of men. Her residence is “fit to please the eyes of kings” (Line 72), and her acts of piety can be mentioned alongside those of male figures from the Bible.
Yet this utopian dynamic is also challenged by the literal and figurative male presences in the poem. The death of the countess’s husband causes her to relocate away from Cooke-ham, and Anne soon follows suit to get married. The speaker, on the day of the countess’s departure, feels jealous towards an oak tree—gendered male—graced with the countess’s kiss she herself could never receive. Finally, nightingales sing in Cooke-ham, evoking the myth of Philomela (who was raped and mutilated by her brother-in-law and later turned into a nightingale). Thus, the poem is a valediction to a haven of female solidarity destroyed by masculinist and heteronormative social systems.
Class
Among the causes of separation between Lanyer and the Cliffords is their class difference. Bidding her Cooke-ham companions farewell, the speaker laments the “difference [...] in degree” (Line 106) which split her from her “great friends” (Line 105). The poet’s lack of socioeconomic capital starkly contrasts with the noble status of the Clifford ladies that summons them to various aristocratic familial occasions such as marriages and relocations. The system of patronage and residence in Cooke-ham was an opportunity for the poet and the noblewomen, otherwise belonging in separate social spheres, to come together physically and spiritually.
Another important class element to note is that the poem was commissioned by the countess, as indicated in Lines 11–12: “great Lady, mistress of that place, / From whose desires did spring this work of grace.” The dynamics of commissioning and patronage may have caused Lanyer to write in favor of her audience. (Lanyer exaggerates, for instance, her familiarity with Anne Clifford in Lines 117–125.) Although autobiographical details allow readers to identify the speaker of this poem as Aemilia Lanyer, it is important to recognize the possible gap between the poet herself and the persona she employs to write a commissioned piece with financial implications.
