[In the following excerpt, O Hehir examines the combination of landscape and political material in Coopers Hill as it relates to the poem's genre and relationship to the emblem tradition.]

Cooper's Hill is the work that confers upon [Denham] the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.

To trace a new scheme of poetry has in itself a very high claim to praise, and its praise is yet more when it is apparently copied by Garth and Pope, after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarcely a corner of the island not dignified either by rhyme or blank verse.

So wrote Samuel Johnson in his life of Sir John Denham.¹

As is true of most of what Dr. Johnson ever has had to say, there is in these remarks a great deal of truthful perception, a certain amount of judgment couched in terms that must be interpreted if they are not to mislead, and a small share of inaccuracy. For instance, it is not quite true that no poem like Coopers Hill had ever before been written in English, though exactly which poems are selected as its antecedents depends upon the definition of the kind it itself exemplifies. Moreover, to be an accurate evaluation of what actually takes place in Coopers Hill, each of Johnson's phrases in definition of its genre requires careful qualification. The poem's “fundamental subject” is the “particular landscape” of the Thames Valley as seen from Cooper's Hill only if the phrase “fundamental subject” is understood to have a meaning such as “substructure of the discourse.” That is, Coopers Hill is not about the landscape: the landscape underlies and contains what it is about. The real “subject” of the poem is what Johnson calls the “embellishments … supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation,” and here “incidental” must not be understood to mean merely fortuitous, but instead dependent upon or naturally arising out of some feature of the scene. Johnson's most unfortunate inexactitude is his statement that these embellishments are an “addition” to the poetical description of the landscape: on the contrary, they derive from the landscape. Historical retrospection and incidental meditation upon the landscape in fact yield and embody the real substance and “subject” of the poem. Johnson's description, in other words, takes account of the realities of the situation, but formulates them with a false placing of emphasis.

Alexander Pope's analysis of Coopers Hill and its kind superficially resembles what Johnson says. In Denham's poem “the descriptions of places and images raised by the poet are still tending to some hint, or leading into some reflection upon moral life or political institution, much in the same manner as the real sight of such scenes and prospects is apt to give the mind a composed turn, and incline it to thoughts and contemplations that have a relation to the object.”² Pope's statement has led to as much mistaken thinking about the genre of Coopers Hill as has Johnson's, though perhaps with less reason. In the century and more of literary nature worshiping which followed the ages of Pope and Johnson, the chief virtue of any poem that resembled Coopers Hill would be taken to be the verisimilitude of the described landscape, its resemblance to “the real sight of such scenes and prospects.” But Pope's statement, it will be noticed, does not stress the description of the landscape as the essence of the poem: his focus is upon the “tending to some hint, or leading into some reflection upon moral life or political institution.” To Pope, in other words, it is the historical retrospection and incidental meditation that appeal, and the landscape of the poem, like the landscapes of nature, is of importance for the thoughts and contemplations to which it inclines the mind rather than for its passive values as an object of sight or as a pleasure to the senses. In this view of the nature of Coopers Hill Pope is at unison with Denham who in all four drafts of the poem tries to make clear that the apprehension of the scenery by the mind takes preeminence over mere sense perception: “More boundlesse in my Fancy then myne Eye.” At the same time Denham through all drafts also tries to emphasize the active rather than the passive role of the landscape itself in initiating cognition: “Windsore … above the Valley Swells, into myne Eye … her gentle Bosome doth present” in the earliest draft of the poem becomes in the final draft “Windsor … above the Valley swells / Into my eye, and doth it self present.”

Pope's own practice shows how thoroughly in reality he understood the true nature of Coopers Hill, for not merely does Windsor Forest stand self-confessed as a poem inspired by Coopers Hill, but a careful analysis shows it to conform to the precedents of Denham's piece in every significant detail.³ Accordingly, one part of Johnson's remarks on Windsor Forest can usefully be brought to bear on his definition of the poetic kind of Coopers Hill: “The design of Windsor Forest is evidently derived from Cooper's Hill, with some attention to Waller's poem on The Park.”⁴ This remark reveals that Johnson's instincts are brilliantly superior to his verbal formulations. On the one hand he has categorized Coopers Hill as the initial English specimen of “local poetry”; on the other hand he has associated it specifically with Windsor Forest and Waller's On St. James's Park, as lately improv'd by his Majesty. And certainly it is true that Windsor Forest borrows some details from Waller's poem, so that Pope also acknowledges, tacitly, both Coopers Hill and St. James's Park as progenitors of Windsor Forest, and so, implicitly, precursors in the same genre. To elaborate, then, Pope and Johnson between them have established Coopers Hill as an early specimen of a genre that includes also St. James's Park and Windsor Forest; while Johnson also has denominated the kind “local poetry” and indicated a proliferation of the kind through the work of “smaller poets” who, as a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine complained in 1788, since Coopers Hill might be found “reclining on almost every mole-hill.”⁵ Although in his remarks specifically directed at Coopers Hill Johnson names Samuel Garth rather than Edmund Waller as a noteworthy later practitioner of the kind, it is perhaps significant that he does not name Garth in connection with Windsor Forest, and if, as seems probable, it is Garth's Claremont he had in mind, he fails to mention that poem whatsoever in his life of Garth.

Because Coopers Hill, St. James's Park, and Windsor Forest are all poems concerned with geographical places, Johnson's term, “local poetry,” may seem to cover their common kind adequately enough, and my attempt to insinuate an unconscious distinction on his part between the poems he names and the other specimens of “local poetry” he feels there would be little value in enumerating is merely far-fetched. But whether or not Johnson felt a real distinction between these three poems and the perhaps hundreds of topographical poems in a succession commencing, it may be, with Fage's St. Leonard's Hill, and including Dyer's Grongar Hill, a real distinction does exist. For, although all these poems—hill poems, estate poems, town poems, building poems, region poems, river poems, and park poems—share with the poems of Denham, Waller, and Pope a topographical focus, the latter three share many other more important attributes not characteristic of their lesser imitations.⁶

Whenever a literary work of a new kind achieves a critical or popular success, as Cooper Hill did in the seventeenth century, it is almost certain to give rise not merely to the continuation of its own proper kind, but to pseudogenres as well. Since by virtue of the very novelty of the new work its essential nature may not be understood even by its creator, prominent superficial characteristics are almost inevitably seized upon as definitive of the new kind, and spurious new genres then arise based upon imitation of the accidents rather than the essence. Cooper Hill has at least three obvious characteristics that, either singly or in combination, enter into all its successors so far mentioned: (1) it is named after a hill, which in some sense it is “about”; (2) it describes a specific landscape—the Thames Valley as viewed from Cooper's Hill; and (3) apart from landscape description, it narrates a stag hunt that seems to be in some sense “allegorical.” From the first characteristic derive the forty-six “hill” poems up to 1821 which Raymond D. Havens counted.⁷ From the second characteristic, more important, derive not only the “hill” poems but the general body of “local poetry.” Under this heading it is of course also possible to include both St. James's Park and Windsor Forest. The third characteristic is also frequently repeated. Windsor Forest contains an almanac of hunting scenes, and in St. James's Park a mutation of the stag hunt may be recognized in the angling practiced on the lake as well as in the king's sport of paille-maille. St. Leonard's Hill (1666) contains a stag hunt, and the hunt in Coopers Hill may probably claim a separate offspring in Sir Robert Howard's The Dewell of the Staggs. That poem conforms to the description by the 1655 editor of Coopers Hill of the hunt in Denham's poem as an “Allegory of the Royall Stag.” The setting for Howard's poem is Windsor Forest, and the contending stags are described as rivals for a monarchy; the poem is obscurely about the falls and the succession of princes, and overt allusion to the recent civil wars strengthens the impression that in some way it is topical or allegorical. Yet any attempt to apply the details of the poem to the details of the succession from Charles I to Cromwell, for instance, or from Cromwell to Charles II, runs at once into irresolvable difficulties. Nonetheless, The Dewell of the Staggs may properly be regarded as a sterile offshoot of Coopers Hill, an instructive instance of a pseudogenre.

But poems that share with Coopers Hill no more than some combination of its three obvious characteristics are all merely representatives of pseudogenres. Which is to say that Johnson's denomination of Coopers Hill as local poetry is a merely superficial denomination, a placing of the poem in one of the pseudogenres it generated. All the same, both St. James's Park and Windsor Forest really do belong to the same essential genre as Coopers Hill. Among these three poems even further superficial common traits may be instanced which distinguish them from the mass of topographical poems, even from Garth's Claremont. All three, for instance, deal with the Thames, and with its importance to British commerce and for Britain's power and prestige in the world. Windsor Forest deals not only with the forest, which was part of the view from Cooper's Hill, but reciprocally with Cooper's Hill, and with essentially the same landscape as that of Denham's poem: the Thames Valley from Windsor to London. Waller's poem, though narrower in scope and on the whole more trivial than the other two, is set in part of the same scene: the royal city of Westminster. It views St. James's Park as a microcosm of all England, and indeed of the world, and there is no difficulty recognizing in it a minuscule model of the landscape of Coopers Hill. Whereas Denham had set the King's Windsor at one end of his panorama, the turbulent people's London at the other, with St. Paul's Cathedral as a token of the royal presence among the Londoners, Waller is able to see from the King's St. James's Park both the Parliament building and, “Hard by that House where all our ills were shap'd,” the one church edifice in England most closely associated with royalty, Westminster Abbey. The special structurings of the landscapes described in all three poems, distinctive as they are of these poems from most other examples of local poetry, do not in themselves constitute the specific differentiation of the kind to which these poems really belong. The shared landscape is technically accidental, but it does point to where the real differentia lies. It is not the landscape that counts, so much as the use made of it. Each poem meditates upon a landscape that it specifically associates with a monarch. Each poem is concerned primarily with the question of monarchy—the nature of princes, the place of the monarch in a commonwealth, reciprocal duties of subjects and rulers, and, above all, the harmony and balance of a well-constituted state.⁸ The poems are primarily political in subject and intent, and are therefore poles apart from their scores of superficial imitations dealing with the grandeur of Welsh hills and Irish parks, and the amenities of private gentlemen's estates.

Another road to true understanding of the intent of these poems is opened through the direct classical connections established clearly by Pope, less obviously by Denham. It has long been recognized that Pope, playing what may be viewed as a childish if harmless game, labeled Windsor Forest a “georgic” poem, in association with his Pastorals, by imitating the association that Vergil made between his Bucolics and his Georgics. That is, Vergil repeated, in the last line of his last Georgic, the first line of his first Eclogue, and Pope repeated, in the last line of Windsor Forest, the first line of “Spring,” his first Pastoral.⁹ Consequently, it appears, Pope found no incongruity in an “imitation” of Coopers Hill being at the same time an “imitation” of Vergil's Georgics; therefore he presumably thought of Coopers Hill and the Georgics as being separate representatives of the same poetic kind. Of ultimately greater significance is the fact that Sir John Denham seems also to have been under the same impression. Denham had written no obvious pastoral poetry by means of which he could work the Vergilean labeling trick worked by Pope, but another method of Vergilean labeling came to his hand. At Aeneid II.306, Vergil repeats a phrase from Georgic I.325-326; when Denham in 1656 published The Destruction of Troy, a translation of part of Aeneid II, he used for his equivalent of line 306 a phrase borrowed from Coopers Hill, a phrase that conveyed the same general sense as the Latin but did not literally translate it. That Denham's intention of thereby labeling Coopers Hill as his georgic did not fail of notice is evidenced by Moses Pengry's 1676 translation of Coopers Hill into Latin, which renders the Coopers Hill phrase by the equivalent phrase in Georgic I (and Aeneid II), even though the respective English and Latin phrases are not true translations of each other.¹⁰ Whether or not Denham, Pope, and Pengry are correct in identifying Coopers Hill (and Windsor Forest) with the genre of Vergil's Georgics, it seems fairly clear that they did make the identification. If Coopers Hill, Windsor Forest, and the Georgics are all viewed synoptically with a late-Renaissance eye, it is also relatively easy to see certain large resemblances among them which might account for that identification. To state the matter as simply as possible, all are poems ostensibly de re rustica which really deal with imperial themes.

No species of classical poetry has been so ill understood by later times as has the georgic. The Renaissance tendency to divide the world of men into only three spheres, rustic, urban, and courtly, tended to confound the georgic with the pastoral; in most of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century systems of classifying the various “kinds” of poems it is impossible to find any category that will satisfactorily separate the two. The fact is highly ironic, for the Renaissance in general also accepted the Vergilean career as the model for any poet who aspired ultimately to write a great epic, doctrinal to a nation: he must apprentice himself first to the writing of epic meters in the conventional, simple form of the pastoral, for which relatively little learning was required. With growing maturity he would proceed to the georgic and thence, having wandered long enough in fancy's maze, go on at last to soar into the epic air above Helicon. Milton's pastoral beginnings, for instance, are as readily discernible as his epic climax, but whether or not he passed through an intermediary georgic stage is a question at best only moot. Pope, on the other hand, has clearly denoted the first two stages of the Imitatio Vergilii in his own career (although the disintegration of the third stage in fact constitutes the profoundest and most fascinating part of his poetic life), and Windsor Forest is his georgic work. For still later critical tastes the world of men was further narrowed to two spheres, city and country, and the attention of poetry largely directed only to the latter. In such a critical ambience both pastoral and georgic were represented as poems concerned with the description of nature, or poems that ought to be so concerned, and because of the manifest artificiality of most specimens of both classes, both in time fell out of favor. The same critical fate overtook Coopers Hill and Windsor Forest. Pope's poem, for instance, in postromantic academic appreciation was accepted as a saving poetic token from that classic of our prose, because of its touches of “nature.” But Windsor Forest, or Coopers Hill, or Vergil's Georgics, for that matter, if passed for poems of “natural description,” are passed under false pretenses.

Certain dogmatic assertions regarding Vergil's three chief bodies of poetic work must be made. Most fundamental of these is that Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid alike are substantially concerned with politics in the larger sense: they are all de re publica, concerned with the common weal. The Eclogues depict chiefly rural scenes and rural persons, and the persons are chiefly herdsmen of one kind or another, keepers of flocks though not necessarily shepherds. Withal, the poems are filled with allusions to political topicalities: the expropriatory land grants to Octavian's veterans in the neighborhood of Mantua, the assassination and deification of Julius Caesar, the generosity of Gaius Asinius Pollio. On the whole, the relationship of the pastoral persons to the political events is a passive one; the poems express various moods—hopeful, elegiac, prophetic—in reaction to the deeds of political men, but they make no attempt to intervene in or direct events. The Aeneid, on the other hand, is set in courts and on battle-fields, and is designedly doctrinal and exemplary. In Aeneas is presented at once the model of Roman virtue, to be emulated by all citizens, and the model of a great and virtuous ruler who is, the reader is left in little doubt, both type and forerunner as well as ancestor of Augustus. Between the two extremes of pastoral and epic fall the Georgics.

Like the Eclogues, the Georgics deal with rural matters, but with farming rather than herding. The difference between the two kinds of poems is parallel to the difference between the passive and the active forms of husbandry. In the pastoral convention the keeping of herds is a leisurely occupation which allows the herdsman abundance of time in which to compose his songs and airs, to play the syrinx, to fall in love, to cultivate a personality which remains nonetheless somewhat vapid. In the georgic the landscape is not peopled with distinct actors, and narration is conducted through an unidentified poetic voice much resembling the voice of an epic narrator. Such personality as may be attributed to the georgic narrator is a grave and austere one, deeply concerned with affairs both agricultural and political, and full of practical knowledge in the first sphere which he proceeds to transfer to the second. The narrator inhabits a somber and real world—the world of work—rather than any pastoral Arcadia. Vergil's Georgics, after all, are concerned with γεωργικός, the working ([UNK]ργον) of the earth (γ[UNK]); their chief classical antecedent was the grim and practical Works and Days of Hesiod. Hesiod's poem is concerned equally with practical advice on farming, with the related matter of due times and seasons in agriculture and the prognostication of weather, and with the unhappy age of iron in which it was Hesiod's lot to live. Mutatis mutandis each of these elements reappears not only in Vergil's Georgics but also in Coopers Hill and Windsor Forest. Vergil's Georgics alter the balance among these elements, for Vergil was not really a farmer in the sense that Hesiod probably was. In Vergil's Georgics the rural scene and the practical lore of agriculture are converted into symbols and paradigms of political affairs. Some of the topicalities of the Eclogues reappear in the Georgics; Caesar's assassination, for instance, is touched on at the climax of Georgic I, and Georgic IV in optimistic mood concerns itself in part with the felicitous rule of Augustus. But in contrast with the Eclogues, the Georgics respond actively to political events; they presume to instruct, to warn, to give advice in politics as in farming, and in truth the farming lore, howsoever effectively deployed, is only incidental to the real politically hortatory purpose of the poems.

The relevance of this analysis of the Georgics to Coopers Hill and Windsor Forest should be obvious. Though to be sure neither English poem pretends to offer much in the way of agricultural advice, both offer some. Coopers Hill, for instance, comments on the fertilizing benefits conferred on soil flooded by a river, and on practical and impractical methods of preserving crops from inundation. Both poems retain vestigial traces of weather prognostication, of concern with the calendar of due times and seasons. Even the stag hunt of Coopers Hill and the hunts of Windsor Forest (as certainly Howard's Dewell of the Staggs) owe something to the suggestive duel of the bulls in Georgic III. Most important, however, both Coopers Hill and Windsor Forest treat a rural scene as the paradigm for a hortatory political discourse.

If the definition of Coopers Hill as a georgic poem is correct, that is, as a political-didactic poem employing rural nature as the vehicle of its discourse, then Johnson's classification of its kind as local poetry is misleading and largely irrelevant. Coopers Hill in reality, like Windsor Forest, belongs to a special subspecies of political-didactic poetry. The larger kind to which it thereby belongs is one that flourished in the seventeenth century. Its most impressive innovator was Ben Jonson, particularly in his eulogistic poems on King James. As Jonson himself is by far and away Denham's most influential poetical master, so Jonson's Epigrammes IV and V—“On King James” and “On the Union”—may be regarded as at least the tiny English seeds from which Coopers Hill grew. Jonson's royal masques and eulogies preceded the luxuriant flourishing in all the arts of adulation centered on the person of the king which typified the court of Charles I. Coopers Hill is but a late and sober manifestation of the same artistic phenomenon. Its immediate precursor was Waller's Upon His Majesties repairing of Pauls, which an obtuse critic might consider an early example of a “building poem,” a poem that showed Denham how the mere existence of a grand external object could be construed as an exemplary act on its part, and one from which a pertinent lesson in political morality might be drawn. In one light, therefore, Coopers Hill and Upon His Majesties repairing of Pauls might be seen as both exemplifying the same poetical kind, although Waller's poem can hardly be considered a georgic. A similar difficulty of distinction attends all consideration of the relationship of Coopers Hill to other poems of its period with which it is properly comparable.

Royal eulogy is not the distinctive note of the class of political poems to which Coopers Hill essentially belongs, for the wider class must be one that subsumes the gravity and seriousness of the georgic. Yet all the poems of the class are concerned with the equipoise of the commonwealth and the person and qualifications of the prince. A list of poems that also exemplify the dignified kind to which Coopers Hill belongs would include, besides those mentioned, preeminently such poems as Marvell's Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland, his First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector, and his Poem upon the Death of his late Highness the Lord Protector. Waller is always more trivial in his effects, but his efforts in the same kind would probably include his Cromwellian eulogy, Of a War with Spain, and Fight at Sea. Dryden carries the genre into the Restoration, with Astraea Redux and Annus Mirabilis, and even with To my Honor'd Friend Sir Robert Howard.¹¹ Dryden also approaches the specifically georgic aspect of Coopers Hill with To my Honor'd Friend, Dr. Charlton, On … Stonehenge, by him Restor'd to the True Founders.¹² That poem interprets a feature of the landscape, Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, as a symbolic statement about the place of restored kingship in the English commonweal, although to be sure that feature is drawn out of Charlton's contentious book rather than directly from the landscape. What distinguishes these poems from the usual run of princely panegyric is not so much their judicious and generalizing air as that each one interprets emblematically one or more particular places, scenes, or events. Each one is a “local poem” insofar as it is grounded firmly either in topography or history, in place or event, in space or time, or in both, rather than in fiction, myth, or mere poetically created symbol. But the direct princely and political application of all these poems separates them even from such profound topographical poems as those written by Marvell on Nun Appleton House and its gardens.

NATURE'S EMBLEMS

If Dr. Johnson's assignment of Coopers Hill to the category of local poetry needs to be rejected as inadequate, and his apparent definition of the kind as “description of a landscape, embellished by retrospection or meditation,” needs to be reversed in emphasis, T. H. Banks is equally incorrect in the opposite conclusion, “that the nature description is relatively unimportant … serving merely as a peg on which to hang ethical and philosophical reflections.”¹³ Even more than Johnson's or Pope's formulations, this statement obscures the vital connection that exists in Denham's poem between the landscape he describes and the political formulations he derives from it. If Johnson and Pope misstate the relationship they may do so because they lack an adequate terminology in which to state it accurately. Banks's statement reveals a total failure to apprehend the relationship, a failure that is a product of the wide gap between the sensibility of the seventeenth century and the type of sensibility brought into being by the nineteenth century. Although Pope's statement of the nature of the process taking place in Coopers Hill may lack precision, his own performance in Windsor Forest shows him to have had a sound intuitive knowledge of the procedures of the earlier poem. But Coopers Hill was first written between 1640 and 1642, seventy years before Windsor Forest, in an earlier world of the mind which could still discourse intelligibly about the sort of mental act performed by Denham in viewing the Thames Valley from the summit of Cooper's Hill.

The nature of that act may be seen in simplified form by an examination of Jonson's Epigramme V, “On the Union.” Jonson's poem deals with the union of the crowns of England and Scotland in the person of James I and VI:

When was there contract better driven by Fate?
          Or celebrated with more truth of state?
The world the temple was, the priest a king,
          The spoused paire two realmes, the sea the ring.

This comparison of the uniting of the two kingdoms with a marriage contract may seem to the modern mind a mere example of conceited wit, yet Jonson insists on the truth of what might be taken for a metaphor. The two kingdoms in sober fact were joined together in 1603 in a union that promised, however mistakenly, to put an end to the perpetual border warfare between England and Scotland, and it was literally true that a single king was the officiant or instrumental agent of the union. Similarly, since the two kingdoms do share between them a single island, the waters surrounding each were now joined in an unbroken circle round the realms of a single monarch—the wedding ring of the two kingdoms. In other words Jonson is not, in intention at least, exercising his wit by yoking together heterogeneous ideas: the sea and a ring, England and Scotland and a bridal couple, King James and a priest. On the contrary, he is discovering meanings actually implicit in king, kingdoms, and sea; he is reading hieroglyphs presented to him by nature and history. To borrow from the “B” text of Coopers Hill, the union as Jonson sees it “is to him who rightly things esteems, / No other in effect than what it seems” (lines 29-30).

Among the various versions of Coopers Hill, from first to last, occur several references to emblems, and it is in emblem literature and the modes of thought associated with it that an explanation of Denham's use of the landscape in Coopers Hill must be sought. Although the vogue for emblem literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is usually said to have begun with Alciati's collection of 1531, at the very roots of the concept of the emblem is a confusion fostered by the pseudoclassical work, The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo.¹⁴ That book, purporting to explain and interpret the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians, asserted that hieroglyphs were in fact condensed symbolic pictures, “in little comprehending much.”¹⁵ Pictorial emblems were then attempts to create anew something like Egyptian hieroglyphs, enigmatic pictures that would convey profound truths to the eyes of the initiate and the learned, and conceal them from the profane view of the lay. The terms emblem and hieroglyphic came in time to be largely interchangeable, and gave rise to still another species of confusion. Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici—first published in 1642, the same year as the first publication of Coopers Hill—by an unassailable process of logic arrived at an explanation for some of the obscurity he encountered in the reading of Genesis: “truely for the first chapters of Genesis, I must confesse a great deale of obscurity, though Divines have to the power of humane reason endeavoured to make all goe in a literall meaning, yet those allegoricall interpretations are also probable, and perhaps the mysticall method of Moses bred up in the Hieroglyphicall Schooles of the Egyptians” (Part One, sect. 34). In other words Moses, the author of Genesis, having received his schooling in Egypt, obviously learned to write in hieroglyphs. Since hieroglyphs are allegorical or symbolic pictures, Genesis must have originally been written in symbolic pictures, whence the obscurities in its present text. Therefore a special skill at interpreting allegory, like the skill required to decipher hieroglyph or emblem, is required to decipher the obscure parts of Genesis.

But if, through the instrumentality of Moses, God had written Scripture, he had also written the other book of his Creation. Beside “the Booke of Gods word” stood “the Booke of Gods workes,” in Bacon's phrase (Advancement of Learning [1605]) expressing a commonplace of the age. And the fact that God had chosen to write his Scripture in hieroglyphics indicated his probable predilection for that form of writing also in his Book of Works. Sir Thomas Browne had likewise revealed that assumption in a prior section of Religio Medici:

Thus there are two bookes from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other: This was the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens; the naturall motion of the Sun made them more admire him, than its supernaturall station did the Children of Israel; the ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them, than in the other all his miracles; surely the Heathens knew better how to joyne and reade these mysticall letters, than wee Christians, who cast a more carelesse eye on those common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature.

(Part One, sec. 16)

Emblems and hieroglyphics were in the air in which Coopers Hill was written. Only a few years before Denham's poem Francis Quarles had published his immensely successful Emblems (1635) and Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1638), and Quarles is at one with Browne in considering that God's Book of Works is written in hieroglyphics: “Before the knowledge of letters, God was knowne by Hierogliphicks; And, indeed, what are the Heavens, the Earth, nay every Creature, but Hierogliphicks and Emblemes of His Glory?”

If, then, the heavens, the earth, and every creature in God's Book of Works is a hieroglyph, it must be possible to read the hieroglyphs “expans'd unto the eyes of all.” And a patriotic Englishman might well feel that few pages of the Book of Works were more crammed with significant hieroglyphs than the Thames Valley between Windsor and London. In brief, what Denham attempts from the summit of Cooper's Hill is to read the landscape “expans'd” before him. His “historical retrospections and incidental meditations” are neither hung upon the peg of the landscape, nor superadded as embellishment to the description of the landscape. They are rather the meaning of the landscape, the message written in the landscape in God's hieroglyphics. Everything within that landscape, whether made by God or man—and the distinction is not always either clear or relevant—is a hieroglyph, impresa, or short emblem. The pall of cloud covering London is an accurate hieroglyph of the self-defeating busyness of the Londoners, engendered as it directly is by that very busyness. St. Paul's in the City had already been recognized by Waller as the emblem “of a heart / Large both in magnanimity and art.” Windsor Hill and Windsor Castle were their “Masters Embleme.” The castle's founder had not selected its site, but had accepted what had been thrust on him by Nature (or God), had shown in effect his own skill at reading hieroglyphs. The Order of the Garter, seated at Windsor, had in its own emblems and devices either echoed or preadumbrated Nature's emblems: the blue garter around the English arms foreshadowed the united ring of sea around Great Britain celebrated by Ben Jonson, the selection of the Soldier-Saint George of Cappadocia as patron of the order had prefigured the Soldier-Saint Charles I. St. Anne's Hill, denuded of its crowning chapel, served as a lively hieroglyph for the despoliation of the church; the Thames, flowing past Windsor, Cooper's Hill, St. Anne's Hill, and London, vividly represented all that connected those points: the flow of history, the all-encompassing constitution of the commonweal, God's design and providence, the flow of the poet's own verse. The meadow of Runnymede, a low place embraced between stream and rugged hill, was a natural hieroglyph for the great event that took place there: the meeting between King and subjects.

When Denham undertook to read the hieroglyphics on the great public manuscript expansed before him from Cooper's Hill he was not undertaking the decipherment of a language totally alien. Like Champollion, he was equipped with a key to his text. The hieroglyphic or emblematic frame of mind had already produced a common language of interpretation, a large part of the vocabulary of which was both older than and independent of either Alciati or Horapollo. When Denham beheld the battlemented towers of Windsor delicately poised above a peaceful and beautiful countryside, he was already predisposed to recognize the conjunction of Mars and Venus. That Windsor Castle was also a dwelling place of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria merely reinforced the validity of the hieroglyph, for a common feature of Renaissance portrait iconography was the depiction of king and queen, or duke and duchess, as Mars and Venus.¹⁶ The adulterous liaison between that pair of deities was only one fable concerning their relationship; an independent tale, stemming from Hesiod's Theogony, viewed them as legitimately married, parents of a daughter, Harmonia. Mars and Venus together therefore denote at one and the same time harmony and royalty. Consequently Denham can also recognize that the battlements of Windsor constitute a crown—emblem of royalty—and specifically a turreted crown like that worn by Cybele, the Great Idaean Mother of the Gods. In Coopers Hill Denham can be seen to have expanded upon each of the ideas compressed into the hieroglyph of Windsor Castle: strength and beauty, warlikeness and peacefulness, Mars and Venus, king and queen, harmony, kingship, maternity, fertility.

The emblematic habit of mind, in a word, encouraged the persistence of topoi, most of ancient, some of more recent, provenance. Even in the earliest draft of Coopers Hill, for instance, Denham had touched on one of the most enduring and widespread classical-Renaissance topoi, that of the musical structure of the world with its moral-religious-political implications. Thus he describes (or reads) Windsor Forest:

Here nature whether more intent to please
Us, or her selfe with strange varieties
(For things of wonder move no lesse delight
To the wise makers, then beholders sight)
Though these delights from severall Causes move
(For so our Children thus our frends we love)
Wisely shee knew the harmony of things
(Aswell as that of soundes) from discord springs:
Such was the discord which did first disperse
Forme, order, beauty, through the universe,
While moisture, dryness, Coldnes, heate, resists
All that we have, & that we are subsists.

Here Denham only glances at the music topos, but his aside is not a decorative simile; it is the substance of his statement, the validation of the hieroglyph of cosmic and political harmony he finds in Nature's composition of Windsor Forest.¹⁷ For the music topos was perhaps the most strongly felt of all those he had available to him. Waller's poem on His Majesties repairing of Pauls, the immediate poetic antecedent of Coopers Hill, is conducted very largely within the topos of music:

… in [Charles's] art of regiment is found
A pow'r, like that of harmony in sound.
Those antique minstrels sure were Charles-like Kings,
Cities their lutes, and subjects hearts their strings.(18)

In his essay “Of Empire” Bacon had made exactly the same political application of the music topos as Waller, placed in the same context of counterstriving contraries as Denham's lines on Windsor Forest: “To speake now of the true Temper of Empire: It is a thing rare, and hard to keep: For both Temper and Distemper consist of Contraries. But it is one thing to mingle Contraries, another to enterchange them. The Answer of Apollonius to Vespasian, is full of Excellent Instruction; Vespasian asked him; What was Neroes overthrow? He answered; Nero could touch and tune the Harpe well; But in Government, sometimes he used to winde the pins too high, sometimes to let them downe too low.” All this may seem like the theorizing of poets and bookish men, even when delivered from the pen of Lord Verulam, so that to a modern ear similar words from the lips of the practical and resourceful Earl of Strafford may sound eerily inappropriate. Yet on April 13, 1641, in a two-hour speech before the High Court of Parliament in defense of his own life, Strafford spoke some sentences that must have influenced the composition of the last part of Coopers Hill, whose author was present to hear them, though perhaps they provided no specific verbal formulations for the poem:

The prerogative of the Crown and the propriety of the subject have such mutual relations that this took protection from that, that foundation and nourishment from this; and as on the lute if anything be too high or too low wound up, you have lost the harmony, so here the excess of a prerogative is oppression, of a pretended liberty in the subject disorder and anarchy. The prerogative must be used as God doth his omnipotency, at extraordinary occasions; the laws … must have place at all other times, and yet there must be a prerogative if there must be extraordinary occasions.¹⁹

But prolonged consideration of the ways Denham in Coopers Hill treats the Thames landscape as an expansed hieroglyphic or emblematic manuscript to be read or interpreted can only lead, profitlessly at the moment, into an attempt to read or interpret the poem itself. And every judicious attempt to read the poem must take proper cognizance of the problems presented by the variant texts, and settle on one of the four drafts as the basis for any attempted explication. In like manner, consideration of matters influencing the first composition and subsequent revisions of the poem should be deferred to separate discourse on its composition and publication.

Notes

1. The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. London, 1781. 4 vols., “Denham.”

2. Pope, The Iliad of Homer (London, 1763), III, 169n.

3. For an elaborate analysis of Windsor Forest in the light of Coopers Hill see Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 89-168. The two poems had been earlier compared in some detail, though with a demented bias against Pope's work, by John Dennis (The Critical Works, ed. E. N. Hooker [Baltimore, 1943], II, 116-137).

4. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, “Pope.”

5. Quoted by R. D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (1922), p. 248, cited by Banks, Poetical Works, pp. 56-57.

6. R. A. Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1936), provides an extensive bibliography of “Hill-Poems, Sea-Poems, Mine- (and Cave-) Poems, Estate-Poems, Town-Poems, Building-Poems, Region-Poems, River-Poems, Journey-Poems.”

7. The Influence of Milton, App. C.

8. Wasserman discusses Coopers Hill and Windsor Forest in this light in The Subtler Language, pp. 35-168. His otherwise perceptive study of Coopers Hill is sadly marred, however, by his attempt to evade the problem presented by the several discrepant texts of the poem (p. 48 n. 2).

9. See, e.g., E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, eds., Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, I (London, 1961), 194.

10. See App. A, below, Coopers Hill Latine Redditum, note to line 174; B. O Hehir, “Vergil's First Georgic and Denham's Coopers Hill,” PQ, XLII (1963), 542-547.

11. Ruth Nevo (The Dial of Virtue [Princeton, 1963], pp. 30-42) recognizes the general affinity of Coopers Hill with other mid-seventeenth-century panegyrics of “high seriousness,” including some of those here suggested. But her view, if I do not misrepresent it, of Coopers Hill as treating contemporary political events with “a due generality” is only a special product of the texts problem. Generalization is far more typical of the “B” text of Coopers Hill, that produced in 1653-54 and first published in 1655, than it is of any of the three versions of the “A” text produced between 1640 and 1642. Despite Edmund Gosse's extremely muddled and misinformed attempt to find in the early versions “the very doctrine of the Neuters” (From Shakespeare to Pope [Cambridge, 1885], pp. 104-109), the “A” text is both more particular in details and more firmly Royalist and propagandistic in purport than its successor text. In 1642, after all, Denham had a king to support; in 1654 he did not.

12. This poem is also analyzed by Wasserman, The Subtler Language, pp. 13-33.

13. Banks, Poetical Works, p. 48.

14. See The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, trans. George Boas, Bollingen Series XXIII (New York, 1950).

15. The phrase is taken from the Overburian “What a Character Is” (1622): “Character is also taken for an Ægiptian Hierogliphicke, for an imprese, or shorte Embleme; in little comprehending much.”

16. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; 1962), pp. 160-164 and illustrations. Few seventeenth-century monarchs can have been as devoted to iconological allegory as was Charles I; witness not merely the masques of his reign but the paintings he commissioned from Rubens.

17. Both the all-pervasive acceptance of the music topos among Denham's contemporaries and the possibilities for misunderstanding which thereby arose are illustrated by the Henry E. Huntington Library “Draft I” manuscript of Coopers Hill (Ellesmere 8899), in which the word “soundes” is mistranscribed as “Soules,” reflecting the belief deriving ultimately from Pythagoreanism, that the soul is the “harmony” of the body. The same manuscript carries a shoulder note at this point, reading “Body of Man.”

18. Ruth Nevo (The Dial of Virtue) is so impressed by the pervasiveness of the music topos among Denham's poetical contemporaries that she has used Waller's phrase, “Cities their lutes, and subjects hearts their strings,” as the title for the first chapter of her study.

19. Quoted by C. V. Wedgwood, The Great Rebellion: The King's Peace 1637-1641 (New York, 1956), pp. 414-415, and Thomas Wentworth (London, 1961; 1964), p. 360. Perhaps Gosse would characterize Strafford's language as “the very doctrine of the Neuters.” As my life of Denham, Harmony from Discords (p. 28), reveals, Denham was present at Strafford's trial as a witness for the defense.