SOURCE: Cook, Patrick. “Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Description of Cooke-ham’ as Devotional Lyric.” In Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric, edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, pp. 104-18. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Cook argues that “The Description of Cooke-ham” belongs to the poetic genre of the devotional lyric rather than that of the country-house poem.]

Recent studies of “The Description of Cooke-ham,” the concluding poem of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, have reclaimed Amelia Lanyer's priority in the generic tradition of the English country-house poem. Published in 1611, five years before the poem long taken to initiate the genre in England, Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst,” “Cooke-ham” demonstrates its author's awareness of a poetic “kind” established by Martial, Horace and other Roman writers. But “Cooke-ham” locates itself within this generic heritage more by the conventions it excludes and revises than by those it imitates in a straightforward way.¹ Most notably absent is praise of the country estate's inevitably male owner, who is replaced by Lady Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, the center of an intimate female community that includes her daughter, Anne, and the poet herself, who at the time of the poem's represented actions were staying at a crown estate leased by the brother of Margaret's estranged husband (Lewalski, “The Lady of the Country-house poem,” 265). Significant revisions include those worked upon the genre's emphasis on the generous hospitality provided by the lord from his manor's open hall and the closely related golden world motif of sponte sua whereby every subordinate on the estate, from plant to animal to human, provides itself or its services through his or her or its “own will” to complete the harmonious reciprocation that supports the hierarchical structure of the aristocratic world portrayed.² These changes constitute essential parts of the poem's revision of the genre's ideology away from the equation of virtue with ownership and lineage toward a more egalitarian “housing” of virtue in the inherent and practiced goodness of the Lady herself—“all delights did harbour in her breast” (8)—and of her daughter, “in whose faire breast true virtue then was hous'd” (96).³

While modern scholarship has made considerable progress in recovering the poem's place in its generic tradition, the by-now automatic classification of “Cooke-ham” as a country-house poem, and the consequent neglect of features not associated with the genre, have contributed to a failure to recognize this remarkable text's polyphonic richness, with the paradoxical result that finding a place in the canon for a woman's text long ignored has been accompanied by a failure to apply the kind of explicatory pressures to it that contemporary works by male writers have long received. This paper examines the poem's revision of country-house poem conventions in the light of another tradition flourishing at the time of its composition, the devotional lyric. Instead of celebrating the landowner's maintenance of a self-sustaining and harmonious estate, Lanyer offers us a portrait of Lady Clifford's piety through a meditative engagement with her own salvational history, using the idea of conversion through freely bestowed grace pervasive in Protestant religious lyric: she hails Cooke-ham as the place “where I first obtained / Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain'd” (1-2).⁴ The poem also dramatizes, in the associational manner of lyric, the affective oscillations of its speaker's spiritual condition and grafts onto its country-house framework a number of concerns and techniques of the great devotional lyrics of Donne, Herbert and Vaughan.

Lanyer's memorial clearing of a space in which a community of women can fashion themselves spiritually follows the contemplative itinerary of purgation, illumination, and union, a progression, traceable to early Christian writers, that Arthur Clements convincingly finds to organize many seventeenth century devotional lyrics.⁵ Her radically feminist stance is nowhere more evident than in the fact that purgation, which detaches the self from worldly interests, is here principally a matter of removing inhibiting male presences. She replaces the men who, in country-house poems, limit women to the roles of chastely sustaining dynastic lineage and serving as part of nature's freely bestowed bounty, with both women and male biblical exemplars who can facilitate the subsequent stages of illumination and union. Freed from dynastic concerns, during their stay the women of Lady Clifford's retinue spend their time in meditation. This takes two forms. One is what W. T. Stace calls an “extrovertive” redirection of the mind, in which one uses one's senses to perceive “the multiplicity of external material objects … mystically transfigured so that the One, or the Unity shines through them” (Mysticism and Philosophy, 62). Landscape for the women is not, as in “To Penshurst” or “Upon Appleton House,” a spatial embodiment of the owner's power and authority, but a contemplative opportunity, and one that in the discursive “now” of the poem, some time after their departure and separation, is no longer available. As Lanyer laments, “Never shall my sad eies againe behold / Those pleasures which my thoughts then did unfold” (9-10). This mental “unfolding” of perceptions takes place primarily from a panoramic prospect where, Lanyer recalls, addressing Lady Clifford, “thirteene shires appeared in all your sight” (73):

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.
And in their beauties did you plaine descrie,
His beauty, wisdome, grace, love, majestie.

(75-80)⁶

The unfolding of unity in the Book of Nature from the observation of its features is accompanied, in the preferred Protestant manner, by meditation on Scripture that involves a fully sensual recreation of biblical scenes:

In these sweet woods how often did you walke,
With Christ and his Apostles there to talke;
Placing his holy Writ in some faire tree,
To meditate what you therein did see.
With Moyses you did mount his holy Hill,
To know his pleasure, and performe his Will.
With lovely David you did often sing,
His holy Hymnes to Heavens Eternall King.
And in sweet musicke did your soule delight,
To sound his pryses, morning, noone, and night.
With blessed Joseph you did often feed
Your pined brethren, when they stood in need.

(81-92)

These typologically connected references perform several functions. The “often” repeated meditations evoke a timelessness that renders meditative removal from everyday temporality analogous to typology's identification of figures across the divides of biblical history. David, the psalmist, reminds us of Lady Clifford's recourse to biblical texts that were particular favorites of women, including Mary Sidney, to whom is addressed the longest dedicatory poem of Lanyer's collection.⁷ Since the Book of Psalms “was widely recognized as the compendium par excellence of lyric poetry” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 39), Lanyer here points to her own imitation of Lady Clifford's singing of psalms, setting herself forth as a figura of the biblical lyricist in her own devotional lyric, further emptying out the temporal distinctions that separate the speaker's now, the Lady's, and that of the biblical figures.⁸

The other biblical references possess a specific thematic implication that develops as we proceed through them, much as the typological meanings of Old Testament figures developed through their New Testament antitypes, though the chronology of the process is reversed. Joseph's story is picked up at the time of his greatest exaltation, when after being thrown in a pit he has risen to the position of Pharoah's governor and can feed the brothers who sold him into slavery. As Milton notes, the episode “illustrates how God brings good from evil” (On Christian Doctrine, 15.81).⁹ The event represents the climax of a narrative, extending across Genesis 37-49, that begins with a dream in which Joseph views his brothers' sheaves bowing in obeisance to his own sheaves. The great Christian paradox of exaltation through humility adumbrated in the story through repeated acts of supplication and rising explains the relevance of Moses, who by submitting his will to his Lord's “mounts” to divine presence and reminds us that Christ's presence among his disciples represents the ultimate, kenotic example of the paradox.¹⁰ At the same time, Joseph's story introduces the country-house theme of hospitality in the great hall, providing a biblical precedent for Lanyer's revision of the genre's convention of sponte sua:

The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend.
And as you set your feete, they still did rise,
Glad that they could receive so rich a prise.

(35-38)

Rather than operating according to an economy of nature's free bounty set in reciprocal relation to the landowner's open board, an economy that in country-house poems throughout the seventeenth century naturalizes an ideology of hierarchy and exploitation, the poem offers a feminist utopics of rising through descent. This revision is consistent with the word-play that occurs when the poem most closely approaches the conventional sponte sua: “The swelling Bankes deliver'd all their pride” (43). The line invites us to see the stream yielding forth its abundance of fish sponte sua—a scene reminiscent of Jonson's “To Penshurst,” where the eels, probably freshwater lamprey commonly known as “pride,” “leap on land / Before the fisher, or into his hand” (37-38)—and, at the same time, to note that they are exalted through eliminating their superbia, just as the hills rise through their humble descent.¹¹

The theme of exaltation through humility is a familiar one is seventeenth century poetry, but what makes “Cooke-ham” a devotional lyric rather than simply a narrative celebrating the Clifford retinue's pious activities is the incorporation of this theme into the speaker's mental processes. The poet substitutes for the extrovertive and biblical meditation of the past an “introvertive” contemplation, whereby the meditator seeks “to plunge into the depths of his own [self]” (Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, 62). To understand this aspect of the poem we must consider its complex narrative structure, which is organized around a series of carefully placed temporal markers. After the introductory addresses to Cooke-ham (1-10) and Lady Clifford (11-16), we encounter a narrative, recovered through memory, of the Lady's arrival. This past-tense sequence of nature's enlivening response to her presence traces the estate's topography by beginning at the house (19) and ending at “that stately Tree, / Wherein such goodly Prospects you did see” (54), reversing (what will become) the usual movement of the country-house poem from exterior to interior. As the lyric voice proceeds along this itinerary, observing pieces and inhabitants of the landscape arranged in no mappable order, it proceeds as well from a specific remembered event into the timeless unity that is the meditator's goal. From what we might call the “historical” event of fixing up the estate—“The House receiv'd all ornaments to grace it” (19)—, we move into a landscape where temporal progression is undermined by the paradisal absence of seasons (“The Trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad” 23)—and by the slippage from simple past tenses to, beginning at line 47, “would” constructions indicating repeated actions: “the pretty birds would oft come” (47), little creatures “would come abroad” (50) and “would runne away” (52). This growing timelessness accompanies the narrator's increasing immersion into the landscape. “Now let me come unto that stately Tree” (53), she says to herself, where the “now” is the past recovered meditatively in its full sensual presence and the speaker is no less approaching the stately tree than Lady Clifford was walking with Christ and his apostles. In modern narratological terms, the poetic voice slides from the position of an heterodiegetic narrator outside the situation being recounted to that of a homodiegetic narrator within it.¹²

The Christian via contemplativa is supported in the poem by a more historically specific practice. The meditator applying the techniques popularized by Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits but, as Louis Martz has shown, still popular in Protestant England, “imagines a scene vividly, as if it were taking place in his presence, analyzes the subject, and stirs up emotions appropriate to the scene or event or personal spiritual situation” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 149). With the speaker's arrival in memory at the tree, this section of the poem sheds its last vestige of temporal progression. It has developed into a full-fledged “composition of place” and now proceeds to analysis as it lingers around the tree: the speaker who near the beginning of the section noted that “all things else did hold like similies” (21) now does her own holding by means of similes. Drawing on the kind of traditional emblematics favored in Protestant meditation, the speaker finds the tree, which has replaced the now marginal hall of the country house as the site of action, first an “Oake that did in height his fellowes passe” (55), with the emphasis on height asserting its cosmic nature and forecasting the reward of exaltation available to the humble.¹³ The oak is then compared to a “comely cedar straight and tall, / Whose beauteous stature far exceeded all” (57-58), as the analyzing mind discerns the quality of beauty. Finally we learn that the tree

Would like a Palme tree spread his armes abroad:
Desirous that you should there make abode:
Whose faire greene leaves much like a comely vaile,
Defended Phebus when he would assaile.

(61-64)

“The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree,” writes the psalmist, providing a biblical gloss on a tree that traditionally stands as an emblem of female chastity.¹⁴ Even as it retains its masculine modifier, the horizontally embracing and vertically shading tree grows increasingly feminized, until with the idea of “abiding” it has been transformed into an appropriately feminist replacement for the domain of male virtus: the great hall of the country house, which remains unvisited, relegated to the poem's margins.

As the tree similes progressively add affect to analysis, the speaker fully achieves the final, affective stage by recalling how often the Lady (and presumably the speaker with her) would come to where she is “now,” producing a kind of contemplative union with her cherished patron. The union of poet and Lady is furthered as the meditating-into-presence speaker, in a mise-en-abyme effect, proceeds to picture the Lady herself engaged in the repeated biblical meditations-into-presence. Her own meditation both contains the Lady's and is in a sense merged with it, as both have entered the same timeless space and are performing equivalent actions. But now the presence of male biblical exemplars appears to produce an unfortunate association. A hostile male presence has hovered about the edges of the poem. It appeared most openly when the Lady assumed the figure of Diana:

The little creatures in the Burrough by
Would come abroad to sport them in your eye;
Yet fearefull of the Bowe in your fair hand,
Would runne away when you did make a stand.

(49-52)

This is the very image of successful purgation, with Diana not defensively imitating the intrusive violence of Actaeon, but maintaining her difference from his representatives in the poem by merely standing—in the personal allegory Margaret Clifford asserting her legal “standing” in litigation with her hostile husband. The leaves of the central oak create pastoral shade, but the fact that they “defended Phebus when he would assaile” reminds us that the benevolent sun that embraced the crystal streams (27-28) can shift valence, transforming the scene from one of pastoral otium to one of Ovidian rape, a context that might have been passed over as we encountered “Philomela and her sundry leyes” (31), which were, of course, the result of a sexual assault. Christ, Moses, and David facilitate the speaker's continuing meditative immersion, but for some reason, perhaps the inclusion of the wicked brothers that the allusion requires, or perhaps the too-near approach to the country-house poem's hospitality theme and the ideology that theme supports, the story of Joseph precipitates the speaker's return to the less joyous present. An association that invites but ultimately frustrates our analysis turns her attention toward Anne Clifford, whose engagement to be married may have occasioned the departure from this paradise of women:

And that sweet Lady sprung from Clifford's race,
Of noble Bedfords blood, faire steame of Grace;
To honourable Dorset now espows'd,
In whose faire breast true virtue then was hous'd.
Oh what delight did my weake spirits find
In those pure parts of her well framed mind:
And yet it grieves me that I cannot be
Neere unto her. …

(93-99)¹⁵

As the subject of dynastic lineage intrudes and the females are assigned identity only through the names of the father and husband, a “now” intrudes that is very distinct from the “then” of Anne's virtue. The vision collapses and the poem modulates into lament.

Contemplative vision, though it leads in Christian tradition to union in the timeless realm, is always transient, since the self that must be purged to gain this vision inevitably, like anything repressed, returns. The tension between a true self realizable only briefly and an illusional self that must live in the world is pervasive in seventeenth century devotional verse. As Arthur Clements writes:

This central paradox of gain through loss, of life through death, embodies a traditional distinction important to understanding so much in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan: the distinction between the outward and inward man, Greek psyche and pneuma, Hebrew nephesh and ruach, the man “himself” and the divine supra-individual Being.

(Poetry and Contemplation, 11)

The distinction, I am arguing, is also important to understanding “Cooke-ham,” which focuses upon an exemplary “Phoenix” (44), a familiar symbol of life through death. Lanyer now introduces another conventional figure easily linked to the paradox. Blaming “Unconstant Fortune,” “Who casts us downe into so low a frame” (103-04), for the separation of herself from the Clifford women, she offers a polysemic pronouncement on “love, / In which, the lowest alwayes are above” (109-10). Lanyer's editor Susanne Woods paraphrases the lines as “the lower born are more devoted to the high than the reverse” (134). That is certainly a meaning relevant to the self as psyche, the social creature who has regained dominance within the speaker at this point, but for the self as pneuma the Christian paradox prevails, and Fortune's lowering represents the male-assigned lower status of the female that enabled the original experience at Cooke-ham and its recovery in the poem. What for the psyche is a negative subjection of gender and class can become for the pneuma an opportunity for spiritual growth.

It is significant that the point where higher and lower selves can find divergent meanings in the high/low paradox is also the point in the poem where the speaker displays the greatest self-division:

But whither am I carried in conceit?
My wit too weake to conster of the great.
Why not? although we are but borne of earth,
We may behold the Heavens, despising death;
And loving heaven that is so farre above,
May in the end vouchsafe us entire love.

(111-16)

A confusion of agency registered in the passive voice and dialogue within the self issues in the renewed realization that lowness and death have their rewards. This insight initiates the poem's second move into meditation, as focus on Anne Clifford, whose married future shattered the previous vision, now provides a context for recovery. The description of Anne's activities as “former sports, / So farre from being touched by ill reports” (119-20) marks another purgation of male influence. The speaker now works herself into a narrative of Lady Clifford's departure that closely mirrors the earlier narrative of arrival, to the point where line 191 repeats line 45 precisely. The section is filled with sorrow as nature dies into wintry sterility, but it also reenergizes the poet's contemplative faculties. Returning imaginatively to the fair tree, the speaker achieves another union with the Lady: “To this faire tree, taking me by the hand, / You did repeat the pleasures which had past” (162-63). The Lady joins the speaker repeating the past by becoming a similar speaker repeating the past, and both are repeating the pleasures which were “past” in another sense, since the union of the departure section repeats that of the arrival section. The Lady's final gesture is to kiss the stately tree, an act that the speaker transforms into the richly traditional union of souls through a kiss by repeating another pleasure which had passed: she kisses the tree herself, “bereaving” it of the Lady's kiss.¹⁶ Her admission that “Yet this great wrong I never could repent” (174) colors the scene as a Fall and expulsion from the garden, but the enhancement it affords to the speaker's immersion in the scene suggests that this is a Fortunate Fall consistent with the poem's pervasive thematics of gain through loss.

As the narrative moves from the tree to the house (201), temporal markers again manifest a shift into the timelessness of meditation. Nature's sorrowful decline begins in the past tense, but, with the appearance of another “now” (186) and a string of present tense verbs, the speaker seems momentarily to reenter this past until past-tense description resumes in line 195, though “did now” of line 200 briefly reintroduces the effect even as it follows a convention of past-tense narration. The second meditative section ends without the abrupt intrusion of a negative association, suggesting that through repetition the poet is acquiring mastery over the process. And not merely mastery, but exclusive mastery, as Lanyer concludes her radically feminist book somewhat problematically with an imitation of the way male poets had long asserted primacy in their Oedipal struggle with influential literary forefathers. As Nature mourns, the birds “warble forth sorrow, and their own dismay” (188). Philomela, the image of the woman poet enabled by male oppression at first imitates them, turning her song of praise into a “mournefull Ditty” (189). But she exceeds them by drowning “in dead sleepe” (190). Similarly silenced is a cognate Ovidian figure, Echo, who “wonted to reply / To our last words, did now for sorrow die” (199-200). Having eliminated her competitors in the realm of female song, Lanyer announces her mastery in the concluding valediction with three emphatic first person pronouns:

This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give,
When I am dead thy name in this may live,
Wherein I have perform'd her noble hest,
Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,
And ever shall, so long as life remaines,
Tying my heart to her by those rich chaines.

(205-10)

The Lady's virtue has passed from the estate, where it was located at the beginning—“Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest” (7)—to the poet's breast, as the meditation completes the transfer of action from the external world to the internal, from the country-house poem, we might say, to the devotional lyric. The image of rich chains continues the word-play that has repeatedly explored the paradoxes of meditative presence and absence. The hearts are united across distance, linked by a filament of continuing presence. But accompanying the notions of linkage across distance and secure internalization is a notion of imprisonment, and therefore of separation, implicit in “chaines.” The poet is reminding us that it is only through the psyche's containment and absence that the pneuma can abide in the supra-individual realm where contemplative union occurs. And the Lady's virtue will remain within her throughout absence, always available for the meditative recovery that absence enables.

If Lanyer's silencing of rival voices marks a limit to her inclusionary, feminist poetics, and perhaps expresses the “profound ambivalence” that Lisa Schnell finds in her “notion of female community” (“So Great a Difference” 29), another gesture made in “Cooke-ham” runs counter to this exclusionary practice, as Lanyer's dual role as “poet-priest” (McGrath, “Let us Have Our Libertie” 342) undergoes revision. Throughout Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum the poems themselves are presented as Eucharistic offerings, with the implication that the poet is herself a priest administering the communion to the readers whom she invites to her textual feast. The idea is most fully developed in the opening poem “To the Queen's most Excellent Majestie”:

For here I have prepared my Paschal Lambe,
The figure of that living Sacrifice;
Who dying, all th'infernall powres orecame,
That we with him t'Eternite might rise:
This pretious Passeover feed upon, O queene,
Let your faire Virtues in my Glasse be seene.

(85-90)¹⁷

Already syncretic in its equation of the Jewish Passover and Christian communion, the passage draws as well upon the contemporary Protestant debate that sought a satisfactory replacement for the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. Rejecting both Luther's belief in consubstantiation, which denied the co-presence of bread and wine with body and blood, and Zwingli's denial of Christ's presence, Anglicans developed the doctrine of “virtualism” whereby the “communicant receives together with the elements the virtue or power of the body and blood of Christ” (Davies, Worship and Theology in England, 1.83).¹⁸ The metaphor of the mirror complicates the Eucharistic message, allowing the virtue to be something returned to the reader as she feasts on the poet's paschal lamb, to be both internally renewed and externally bestowed. Elsewhere Lanyer both praises her reader's virtue and portrays her poems as the promoter of and context for it, most notably in “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” where Virtue's book “where she inroules / Those high deserts that Majestie commends” (4-5) figures the book of poems similarly enrolling its readers. As this line of imagery is brought to a close in “Cooke-ham,” Lady Clifford is numbered among the “virtuous” (4) visiting Cooke-ham, the “(sweet place) where Virtue then did rest” (7). When her “virtues” come to lodge in the poet's unworthy breast, the carefully maintained ambiguity of virtue's location in relation to the poet and her reader is finally resolved. As Lanyer asserts her primacy in women's poetry, she also assigns to Lady Clifford the priestly role she claimed throughout the collection. In becoming a humble communicant, she rises to her poetic vocation.

Notes

1. For historical accounts of the country-house poem, see Hibbard, “The Country-house poem of the Seventeenth Century”; Molesworth, “Property and Virtue: The Genre of the Country-House Poem in the Seventeenth Century”; Fowler, “Country-House Poems: The Politics of a Genre”; McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Literature; and Dubrow, “The Country-House Poem: A Study in Generic Development.” At its most basic generic level, Lanyer is yoking the celebration of the country house to the “farewell to a place” poem, the classical syntaktikon (on which, see Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry, 1972, 38-51). Studies that touch upon Lanyer's feminist version of the country-house poem include Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemelia Lanyer and Ben Jonson”; Lewalski, “The Lady of the Country-house poem” and “Rewriting Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer”; Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemelia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’”; Schnell, “‘So Great a Difference is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism”; and Woods, “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender.” The best argument for Lanyer's radical feminism is McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Aemilia Lanyer's 17th Century Feminist Voice.”

2. Most discussions of country-house poems note the pervasiveness of the sponte sua convention. The fullest survey of the subject is in McClung, The Country-house poem in English Renaissance Literature, 12-13, 16-17, and 118-22.

3. All quotations of Lanyer's poems are taken from The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods, Oxford UP, 1995.

4. On the Protestant return to the Augustinian preoccupation with conversion through grace, as opposed to the Catholic emphasis on salvation through works, see Halewood, The Poetry of Grace: Reformation Themes and Structures in English Seventeenth Century Poetry.

5. Arthur Clements's analysis of “the poetry of contemplation” relies heavily on the traditional mystic itinerary of purgation, illumination, and union. For traditional definitions of the terms, see his chapter 1, “Contemplative Tradition,” Poetry and Contemplation, 1990.

6. The sight of 13 shires has not been explained. My analysis suggests to me that seeing what is physically impossible represents a meditative vision, and the number 13 may reflect the presence of Christ and his 12 apostles, but I cannot offer an adequate explanation. For an argument that the Song of Roland uses the number 13 to associate Charlemagne and his 12 peers with Christ and his apostles, see Bulatkin, Structural Arithmetic in the Oxford “Roland.” Hieatt, “Numerical Structures in Verse: Second Generation Studies Needed (Exemplified in Sir Gawain and the Chanson de Roland),” evaluates Bulatkin's argument.

7. Margaret Hannay, “Mary Sidney and the Admonitory Dedication,” considers Queen Elizabeth's identification with David and her interest in the Psalms. Beth Fisken, “Mary Sidney's Psalmes: Education and Wisdom,” discusses Mary Sidney's psalm translations, noting especially the attractiveness of mother-child imagery to a woman writer.

8. For the importance of David as the dominant model for the seventeenth century devotional lyricist and of the Psalms in the period's conception of lyric poetry, see Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979), 39-53 and 300-04.

9. All quotations from On Christian Doctrine are taken from The Works of John Milton, 1931-38, vol. 15. Numbers refer to book and line.

10. For an extended account of the paradox of exaltation through humility in both classical and Christian epic poetry, see my Milton, Spenser and the Epic Tradition.

11. The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson (1963), cited by line number.

12. Gerard Genette develops this distinction in his chapter entitled “Voice,” Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), 212-62.

13. The oak introduces associations of the sacred drawn from both classical and biblical traditions. The temple of Jupiter at Dodona was surrounded by a grove of oaks. Abraham planted a grove of oaks in honor of the Lord at Beer-Sheba (Genesis 21.33) and built a shrine to God surrounded by oaks at Mamre (Genesis 13.18). For a lucid discussion of Protestant reliance on emblems in meditation, see Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, chapter 6.

14. In his footnote to Paradise Lost 4.139 Milton's editor Fowler cites this passage from Psalm 92 and DuBartas's Divine Weeks, line 189, where the poet asks that the adulteress “Blush (at the least) at Palm-Trees loyalty, / Which never bears, unless her Male be by.”

15. I follow Woods's retention of the spelling “steame” in line 94, though editors commonly, and sensibly, amend this to “streame.” I am hesitant to perceive here a commentary on the hot blood of Anne's betrothed, the Count of Dorset, though he was a notorious philanderer.

16. On the union of souls through a kiss, see Perella's comprehensive treatment in The Kiss Sacred and Profane. In addition to outlining the concept's history through the Church Fathers, fin amors, and Renaissance Neoplatonism, Perella briefly discusses seventeenth century examples by Donne, Cartwright, Cowley, Herrick, and others.

17. Catherine Keohane observes that “‘paschal’ refers to both the Passover and Easter” since Lanyer has chosen to narrate “a moment in which Judaism and Christianity overlap,” “That Blindes Weakenesse Be Not Over-Bold: Aemelia Lanyer's Radical Unfolding of the Passion” (1997), 364. I would add that in such passages Lanyer locates her poem's discursive moment in that same time, collapsing the centuries in between. While such collapse does not constitute a shift in diegetic positions in the manner of “Cooke-ham,” the merging of temporalities suggests how profoundly meditative techniques shape the narratological program of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a whole.

18. As Eleanor McNees observes in an excellent account of Donne's treatment of the Eucharist, “[T]he virtualists sought to defer Real presence, relegating it to a renewal of virtue within the communicant after he or she had partaken of the eucharistic elements”; “John Donne and the Anglican Doctrine of the Eucharist” (1987), 96. This ambiguity of a virtue both bestowed and renewed closely resembles Lanyer's studied ambiguity.

Works Cited

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Cairns, Francis. Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1972.

Clements, Arthur L. Poetry and Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period. Albany: State Univ. Press of New York, 1990.

Coiro, Ann Baynes. “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson.” Criticism 35 (1993): 357-76.

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Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England. Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970.

DuBartas, Guillaume de Saluste. The Divine Weeks and Works. Trans. Joshua Sylvester. Ed. Susan Snyder. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979.

Dubrow, Heather. “The Country-House Poem: A Study in Generic Development.” Genre 12 (1979): 153-79.

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