“Bare and desolate now”

Aemilia Lanyer’s country house poem, “The Description of Cookham,” offers a unique challenge for ecocritical analysis and raises the question: What method of reading best offers an ecological pathway through the poem’s pastoral panegyric? ¹ In this chapter I argue that, while nature enters the poem as an empathetic topography of human loss and nostalgia, this figuring is a clever rhetorical strategy that is deeply ironic. By anthropomorphizing nature, Lanyer engages imagery already freighted with environmental and cultural significance to draw an analogy between the female speaker and the literal landscape of Cookham that the imagery suggests. Further, if we consider literature as having a cultural-ecological function, Lanyer’s poem is ecological not only in its physical existence, as something that responds to and actively inserts itself into a cultural and ecological tension, but also in its formal staging of the interrelationship between culture and nature in a world where that connection was already severely frayed. Thus the landscape of the poem transforms itself from a locus amoenus, an idealized environment (the estate’s gardens and grounds in all their glory) to a locus horribilis, a depraved environment (this same landscape stripped bare) in a cultural-ecological imperative wherein the disempowerment of the female speaker and the degradation of the Cookham landscape are deeply implicated in one another. This alignment of the human and nonhuman produces a poetics of ecological awareness deeply critical of existing hierarchical systems that exploit both people and the environment.