SOURCE: Radcliffe, David Hill. “These Delights from Several Causes Move: Heterogeneity and Genre in ‘Coopers Hill’.” Papers on Language and Literature 22, No. 4 (Fall 1986): 352-71.

[In the following essay, Radcliffe contends that throughout Coopers Hill Denham “champions heterogeneous rather than totalizing ways of thinking” and “combines differing points of view, a variety of ideological positions, and a mixture of literary conventions.”]

Eighteenth-century poets and critics agreed that John Denham was a seminal writer in the history of English literature.¹Coopers Hill played an important role in the reorganization of the hierarchy of poetic genres which took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; within a few decades after the publication of Coopers Hill, the georgic and related didactic forms challenged the epic and tragedy as the major poetic genres in England.² With the passing of the eighteenth-century, however, Denham's reputation waned to the point where, today, his famous poem is no longer even anthologized. The reasons for this decline are not far to seek: readers for whom poetry is the essential fusion of imaginative vision and formal unity have not found these qualities in Denham's poem. Nevertheless, for readers not committed to romantic aesthetics, Coopers Hill and poems like it have other things to offer: in particular, a conception of discourse that challenges received notions of the relation of literary to non-literary works and the relation of literature to life. Where modern readers often regard the literary work as a self-referential order which expresses and inculcates the value of unity, earlier readers regarded poetry as a heterogeneous imitation of the social and natural order which taught the values of discrimination and judgement in a world characterized by variety and differentiation—in other words, literary works mirrored the perceived heterogeneity of the social and natural orders.

In order to adequately interpret a work such as Coopers Hill, one must be cognizant of the value it places on variety, and the means by which it achieves variety through combining heterogeneous forms of discourse. Coopers Hill was an innovative poem in that it incorporated kinds of discourse not previously combined. Furthermore, it achieved this new combination of discourses by innovative principles of combination. Its historical importance lies in the fact that so many later readers found in the poem a satisfying model of the social and natural order as then understood. Its significance for modern readers lies in the opportunity it offers us to rethink the organizing principles that go into a literary work.

Standing in the way of such an understanding is the tendency of critics to misread literary works as unified expressions of totalizing structures, structures which correspond to overly reductive approaches to the work. Critics of Coopers Hill have taken several such approaches to the poem—seeking a unifying perspective in the description of the landscape, seeking doctrinal unity in concordia discors, and seeking in the discourse of the poem the unity of a single set of generic conventions. Such approaches obscure the ways in which Denham combines differing points of view, a variety of ideological positions, and a mixture of literary conventions. Throughout the poem Denham champions heterogeneous rather than totalizing ways of thinking, a lesson from which modern criticism stands to benefit. Only by taking account of the heterogeneity of Coopers Hill as expressed in the combinatory use of generic conventions can one adequately interpret the poem and account for the history of its reception.³

Critics have sometimes argued that unity in Coopers Hill is grounded in the landscape described by the poet, or that Denham assumed that it was. Thus Earl Wasserman claims, “total poetic success must lie in the transformation of all the other topographical features in the poem into metaphoric relevance.” This summation of objects in the landscape is mirrored by a unified structure of “expression and concept … so contained in each other as to imply a single all-controlling mode of thought. …”⁴ James Turner concurs with Wasserman in regarding the poem as a mimetic reflection of the landscape and argues that such a totalizing procedure is ideologically motivated: “Denham's task is to establish a single viewpoint equally free from flattery and idiosyncrasy; his opinions will then appear as natural and irrefutable as sight itself.” “Every perspective device has a ‘subtile Philosophy’ of this kind, an exclusive viewpoint which claims to reveal the true form of appearances. Landscape is the subtlest form of prospective, for its trickery is unobtrusive and the resulting image overwhelmingly clear.” The poet's “visual realism” permits him to deceive, presenting things not as they are, but as they seem to be when seen in a monocular political perspective.⁵

By exploring the conceptual basis behind Denham's conceits, these critics offer useful insights into the poem. However, their assumption that these conceits amount to a unified or totalizing point of view is incorrect. Indeed, they are aware that their assumption of mimetic unity leads to contradictions. Wasserman regards the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between objects and “symbols” as aesthetic failure: “Unfortunately for the artistry of the poem, at this point there is an abrupt and apparently unmotivated redefinition of the images. … But now, with another unmotivated substitution of image values. …”⁶ In this critic's view, the conceptual order of the poem becomes garbled and inconsistent. What Wasserman attributes to aesthetic failure, Turner attributes to ideological distortion. Denham's comparison of Windsor to Chertsey Abbey “is rather a dishonest one; since St. Anne's hill is visually less prominent than Windsor and lies in the opposite direction, the eye is obviously led by a political argument and not vice versa.” Turner describes Denham's departure from the spatial perspective unifying the visual field as “trickery” and “sleight of hand,” concluding that “Denham's idee fixe … betrays his visual realism.”⁷

Denham never claims to be offering a single perspective or an “overwhelmingly clear” point of view, and even goes to some pains to avoid such a practice. A variety of different kinds of vision are exhibited or discussed in the poem: that of memory, “Here have I seene …” (263); that of anticipation, “But if … No longer then within his bankes he dwels” (337-39), that of “emptie, ayrie contemplations” (170), and that of “a quicke Poeticke sight” (254).⁸ Vision may be obscured, as the Narcissus episode is intended to remind us, or when the mountains, swathed in cloud and storm, “Frown on the gentle stream” (1655 ed., 220). Denham can also imagine things as they would appear from a God's-eye perspective: “Exalted to this height, I first looke downe / On Pauls, as men from thence upon the towne” (13-14). Denham is quite aware that what one sees is a function of the point of view one adopts; he includes a variety of perspectives in his poem to make just this point. Coopers Hill instructs the reader to avoid exactly the reductive schemas that critics have tried to find in it.

The doctrine of condordia discors is also cited as justification for totalizing readings of Coopers Hill. For instance, Brendan O Hehir finds in the “classical and Renaissance cosmological principle of ‘balanced opposition’ or concors discordia … the outlines of a particular world view—both a means of interpreting and an assumption about the nature of the apprehensible universe—which controlled Denham's writing.” One should question whether it is concordia discors which controls Denham's writing or whether it is the notion of “world-view” which controls the critic's interpretation. Once again, contradictions are acknowledged: “the doctrine is emotional rather than intellectual … [and] not susceptible of rigorous analysis or capable of strict logical exposition.”⁹ Both O Hehir's analysis and that of Wasserman belie this modest assessment. The virtue of their interpretations is to show how rigorous a logical tool concordia discors could be. But they go too far when they extend the concept to organization of the visual field, to the passions, to historical processes, to syntax, metaphor, and imagery. If the concept begins to blur, it may be because it is being extended beyond its proper limits. If other principles, even competing principals, are found in the poem, the reader may be confronted, not with aesthetic or intellectual fuzziness, but with a willingness to incorporate alternative points of view.

Besides the principle of balanced opposites, one encounters, for example, the principle of hierarchical order. Both principles imply a separation by category, but they differ in the logical relation they entail: subordination is not balance. Sometimes Denham will apply both relations to the same object, as when the poet finds in Windsor Hill “A friend-like sweetnesse, and a King-like aw” (62), implying a balance of opposites, and then promptly redescribes the hill as the subordinate member of a second pair: “So Windsor, humble in it selfe, seemes proud / To be the Base of that Majesticke load” (65-66). The hill is now an emblem of balanced opposites, now an emblem of just subordination. Were Denham really proposing a “single all-controlling mode of thought,” as Wasserman suggests, there would indeed be an “unmotivated substitution of image values.” However, this is far from the poet's intention.

There are places in the poem where Denham deliberately avoids invoking the principle of balanced opposites. One is in the opening lines:

Sure we have Poets, that did never dreame
Upon Pernassus, nor did taste the streame
Of Helicon, and therefore I suppose
Those made not Poets, but the Poets those.
And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court;
So where the Muses, and their Troopes resort,
Pernassus stands; if I can be to thee
A Poet, thou Pernassus art to mee.

[1-8]

Wordsworth has taught us to expect in a landscape poem a balanced synthesis of perception and imagination, or, as Wasserman puts it, “coherently organized symbols generated by the friendly struggle between eye and mind.”¹⁰ Denham, however, does not claim that he will balance (much less synthesize) perception and imagination, but that he will subordinate perception to imagination. The poet is conceived of as “maker” (the root sense of the word), the landscape the matter he forms. As courts do not make kings, “[landscapes] make not Poets, but the Poets those.” Denham demythologizes Parnassus to make the point that landscapes are so much matter until the poet embues them with significance. Accordingly, he asserts the priority of imagination over perception: “Through untrac't waies, and airie paths I file, / More boundless in my fancie, then my eie” (11-12). The “fancie” is the higher faculty; it modifies and recombines perceptions derived from the lower senses, even supplying objects for thought where such objects are lacking. Denham employs the principles of faculty psychology to combine a variety of heterogeneous viewpoints. Nowhere does he propose the balanced synthesis of perception and imagination one expects from romantic aesthetics—indeed, his aesthetic principles of inclusiveness and heterogeneity are no more those of imaginative “unity” than his cognitive principles are those of Kantian philosophy. The relation between poet and subject is perceived here as equivalent to the relation between king and subject—as subordination, not balance.

Denham's view of politics is no more restricted to the unity of balanced opposites than his view of poetry. He thus avoids invoking the principle of concordia discors in the allegorical description of Strafford's death, which he codes, not as an example of balanced opposites, but as an example of just subordination: hounds to stag, stag to Charles:

As some brave Hero, whom his baser foes
In troops surround, now these assaile, now those,
Though prodigall of life, disdaines to die
By vulgar hands, but if he can descry
Some Nobler foe's approach, to him he cals
And begs his fate, and then contented fals

[289-94]

Denham is delicately suggesting that Parliament, Strafford, and the King have all acted properly to restore the status quo.¹¹ By invoking the principle of subordination to authority in this passage, the poet recognizes the obedience owed de jure by Strafford and Parliament to the crown, while tacitly acknowledging the de facto role that Parliament had played in restoring political stability. He resists suggesting that the crown and Parliament are “equal,” while implying that they have equally acted to restore harmony. Denham respects the heterogeneous views of sharing power (implicit in the downfall of Strafford) and of subordination to authority (explicit in the role assigned to Charles). Such a complex resolution does not reflect a simple balance of opposites, but a combination of diverse principles. Denham's political views cannot be reduced to the simplicy of concordia discors.

Attempts to find in Coopers Hill the formal unity of an essential literary kind are no more satisfactory than attempts to find the unity of concordia discors. Critics such as George Sherburn, who are concerned lest they find the poem “falls into fragments and does not make a unit,”¹² have taken umbrage at Samuel Johnson's definition of local poetry as that which takes as its subject “some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation” (Life of Denham). At issue here is the conception of genre. For Johnson, the genre is a composite of largely discrete elements—description, history, and meditation. Such a view of genre conflicts with the modern demand that poetry (and hence poetic genres) exhibit “organic wholeness.”¹³ Brendan O Hehir, for instance, attempts to separate the genre which includes Coopers Hill from various “pseudo genres” derived from it on the basis of an “essential nature” that the poem is supposed to possess: “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.”¹⁴

How does one determine which genreaic features are essential and which are accidental? O Hehir does not address this question, but merely lists three features which he regards as essential—the poem is named after a hill, it describes a specific landscape, and it narrates an allegorical stag hunt. Using these criteria, O Hehir discriminates between proper members of the genre, such as Waller's “Upon His Majesties repairing of Paul's” and Pope's “Windsor Forest” from improper imitations, such as Dyer's “Grongar Hill.” It is hard to see how such criteria are essential, since “Grongar Hill” meets two of the specifications and Waller's poem only one. If such features are “essential,” one would expect all to be in force. The discussion of genre becomes even more perplexed when O Hehir goes on to describe Coopers Hill as “a special sub-species of political-didactic poetry,” which also includes epigrams by Ben Jonson, Marvell's “Horatian Ode,” and Dryden's “Annis Mirabilis.” Where genres, sub-genres, and pseudo-genres overlap like this, it is difficult to see how any genre could be described in terms of essential and accidental characteristics.

The alternative to this difficulty is to give up monolithic conceptions of genre and the impracticable distinction between essential and accidental generic features—even if this involves giving up the notion of organic unity. Instead of thinking of a generic instance as a homogeneous totality, it can be thought of as an aggregate of non-essential generic features shared among a variety of literary kinds. Although we need not accept Dr. Johnson's precise recipe, Coopers Hill is best understood as Johnson conceived of it—as an aggregate of heterogeneous parts.¹⁵ By thinking of the poem in terms of combinatory genres the reader can avoid the critical difficulties encountered by the totalizing strategies considered above and also comprehend how Coopers Hill came to occupy such an important place in literary history.

Although the poem shares literary features with a number of genres, three in particular stand out as constitutive of Denham's discourse: the epigram, the meditation, and the georgic. The ways in which these genres combine in Coopers Hill are complex, each element modifying the others, yet each maintaining varying amounts of autonomy. Since seventeenth-century literary history may be seen largely as a transition from the short, epigrammatic forms of the metaphysical mode to the longer georgic forms of Augustan verse, the presence of both these forms in Coopers Hill, and the role the meditation plays in combining the two, are of particular interest.

Alastair Fowler has noted the influence of the epigrammatical mode on a variety of seventeenth and eighteenth century genres: “Major works of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century can sometimes seem bound together by catenas of epigrams. This might be said of works as different as Denham's Coopers Hill and Pope's Essay on Man. One obvious sign of this is the integrity of quotable distichs, which in some cases have actually been detached and printed separately.”¹⁶ It is possible to view Coopers Hill as a crazy quilt of epigrams stitched together by means of a variety of recurring themes and literary devices, the couplet form chief among them. The poem contains an opening epigram on poets and Parnassus, a sequence of emblem-epigrams on various features in the landscape, an epigram on a Rubens's portrait of Charles, an epigram on the flow of rivers and the flow of verse, and so forth. The style and often the substance of these epigrams is Jonson's. Brendan O Hehir has traced Denham's use of the garter to emblemize the joining of the two kingdoms to Johnson's “Epigram V, ‘On the Union’”: “The world the temple was, the priest a king, / The spoused paire two realmes, the sea the ring.” The epigrammatical encomiums that Denham bestows on Edward and Charles also have a model in those of Jonson:

Indeed, when had great Brittaine greater cause
Then now, to love the Soveraigne, and the Lawes?
When you that raigne, are her Example growne,
And what are bounds to her, you make your owne?

[“An Epigram. To Our Great and Good K. Charles on His Anniversary Day,” 7-14]

Furthermore, Denham's exclamation, “Oh happiness of sweete retir'd content! / To be at once secure, and innocent” (47-48), while it has sources in Horace and Virgil, can also be found in Jonson's “The Praises of a Country Life”: “Happie is he, that from all Business cleere, / As the old race of Mankind were” (1-2). The technique of paysage moralise, which Denham applies to the palace at Windsor, has a source in Jonson's “To Penshurst,” derived from an epigram of Martial. The epigram was closely related to the seventeenth-century meditation, a genre whose repertoire of themes and devices must next be considered.

Louis Martz has demonstrated the importance of Ignatian meditation for English poetry, both in thematic material and in rhetorical strategies such as composition of place and application of the affections.¹⁷ Barbara Lewalski has insisted on the importance of native, Protestant elements in meditation, particularly the typological application of scripture to personal history.¹⁸ What has sometimes been overlooked in the search for the origins of the English devotional meditation is the way in which this form of discourse quickly departed from its origins, be they Catholic or Protestant, and developed into a multiplicity of new literary kinds. Many or even most of these were initiated by Bishop Joseph Hall. In his Meditations and Vows (1605) he instituted a widely imitated new form known as the “resolve,” a short essay or aphorism leading to a moral or devotional “point,” often expressed in epigrammatical language. In 1606 Hall published the Arte of Divine Meditation in which he launched the “deliberate meditation,” a form predicated on logical method aimed at displacing Catholic forms of devotion. Later he composed his Contemplations on the Principal Passages of the Holy Story (1612), a hybrid form interlacing scriptural exegesis with hortatory meditations, and in 1633 he published Occasional Meditations, a collection of 140 short essays purporting to interpret the “book of the creatures.”

The variety of literary kinds adopted by Hall is entirely typical of the protean nature of the meditation. Meditations could be written in verse, in which case they tended to be in the epigrammatical mode—such as poems in Herbert's The Temple or Herrick's Noble Numbers—or in prose, in which case they tended to be aphoristic in style—as in collections of resolves by Tuke (1614), Feltham (1623), or Fuller (1645).¹⁹ After 1620, the meditation began to incorporate a variety of secular themes—moral topics, as in Feltham's Resolves; philosophical, as in Bacon's Novum Organon (which owes much to the resolve); folk wisdom, as in Herbert's Jaculem Prudentum; political advice, as in Quarles's Observations concerning Princes and States Upon Peace and Warre; and historical reflections, as in Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times. These works consist of large collections of small observations, variously expressed as epigrams, aphorisms, essays, or proverbs.

The topics explicated in these collections of meditations very often correspond to those in Coopers Hill. Fuller, for instance, moralises a landcape to make a political point:

In Merionethshire in Wales there be many mountains whose hanging tops come so close together that shepherds sitting on several mountains may audibly discourse one with another. And yet they must go many miles before their bodies can meet together, by the reason of the vast hollow valleys which are betwixt them. Our Sovereign and the members of this Parliament at London seem very near agreed in their general and public professions. Both are for the Protestant religion; can they draw nearer? Both are for the privileges of Parliament; can they come closer? Both are for the liberty of the subject; can they meet evener? And yet, alas! there is a great gulf and vast distance betwixt them which our sins have made, and God grant that our sorrow may seasonably make it up again.²⁰

The sentiments expressed in this meditation are those of Coopers Hill.²¹ We also find the meditational procedure adopted by Denham: an emblemmatic image followed by a sequence of observations or rhetorical questions leading to a moral point.

Hall's Occasional Meditations, like Coopers Hill, contains a meditation “Upon the ruins of an Abbey” (76). The meditation concludes with an epigrammatical “point”: “Happy is that cottage that hath an honest master and woe be to that place that is viciously inhabited.”²² Denham uses Chertsey Abbey to draw similar moral conclusions about luxury and hypocrisy, developing his topic in a series of pointed rhetorical questions analogous to those in the Fuller meditation above:

Is there no temperate Region can be knowne,
Betwixt their frigid, and our Torrid Zone?
Could we not wake from that Lethargicke dreame,
But to be restlesse in a worse extreame?
And for that Lethargy was there no cure,
But to be cast into a Calenture?

[173-78]

Denham links the hypocrisy of the monastery with the hypocritical politics of the man who destroyed it in the name of religion. One can find similar observations in Quarles's Enchyridion, published in 1641 and dedicated to the Prince of Wales: “It is an infallible signe of approaching ruine in a Republic, when Religion is neglected, and her established Ceremonies interrupted: Let therefore that Prince that would be potent, be pious; And that he may punish looseness the better, let him be religious: The joy of Jerusalem depends upon the peace of Sion” (57).²³ This meditation follows the resolve formula, the “Let therefore” signaling the move from an observation to the resolution built upon it. The 1642 Coopers Hill concludes with the same formula: “Therefore their boundlesse power let Princes draw / Within the Channell, and the shores of Law” (351-52).

The aesthetic and philosophical principle underlying these collections of epigrams and meditations was heterogeneity, the principle we have been documenting in Coopers Hill. Writers of epigrams make variety the keynote of their works, as in the “argument” of Herrick's Hesperides:

I Sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds and Bowers:
Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers.
I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,
Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of the Bridall-cakes.

[1-4]

The argument here is the absence of argument, the pleasure of variety for its own sake.

In Herbert's The Temple or Vaughan's Silex Scintillans the poets take equal pride in varying the meter, rhyme, and subject matter of their meditations. The aesthetic warrant for the heterogeneous collection of small pieces was given by Ben Jonson in the preface to his collection “Underwood”: “With the same leave the Ancients call'd that kind of body Sylva, or hyle, in which there were workers of divers nature, and matter congested; as the multitude call Timber trees, promiscuously growing, a Wood, or Forrest. …” In the section of Coopers Hill labelled “The Forrest,” Denham touches on this familiar theme:

Here Nature, whether more intent to please
Us or herselfe with strange varieties, …
Wisely she knew the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discord springs.

[223-30]

In this central statement of the concordia discors theme, Denham places his emphasis resoundingly on variety, on strangeness, and on heterogeneity. Critics who have seized upon this passage to find an underlying homogeneity in Coopers Hill have very much missed Denham's point. But neither should one make “variety” into a monolithic principle. Denham's poem is not, of course, a disjointed collection of occasional pieces. Continuity is also an organizing principle, the aesthetic influence of the georgic modifying Denham's epigrammatical verse.

Concern for order and continuity amid variety reflected political as well as aesthetic notions, as Thomas Fuller makes clear in the preface to his collection Mixt Contemplations on these Times (1660). The author still stresses the variety of material he has to present, but the experience of the revolution has tempered pleasure in variety with a concern about order:

I confess myself subject to just censure, that I have not severally sorted these contemplations, setting out such which are 1. of Scripture, 2. historical, 3. occasional, 4. personal, distinctly by themselves, which now are confusedly heaped, or rather huddled together. … However, such a confused medley may pass for the lively emblem of these times, the subject of this our book. And when these times shall reduced into better order, my book, at the next impression, may be digested into better method.²⁴

The image of Fuller's contemplations “huddled together” in the face of social disorder is a telling one. Denham, who from the opening lines of Coopers Hill identifies the seat of the muses with the seat of the king, is similarly aware of the interpenetration of aesthetic and political values: variety is always tempered by subordination or equilibration, the mixed poem equated with the mixed monarchy. The subordination of disjunct epigrams into the larger forms of Augustan poetry indicates a change in seventeenth century attitudes toward aesthetic and political principles of order.

Philosophical warrant for heterogeneity was given in the writings of Francis Bacon. For Bacon, “meditation” is the process of gathering observations and “digesting” them into collections of aphorisms, a process which he distinguishes from the “methods” of rhetoricians and logicians, writers whose forms of discourse give a false impression of coherence and closure:

He thought also, that knowledge is uttered to men, in a form as if every thing were finished; for it is reduced into arts and methods, which in their divisions do seem to include all that may be. And how weakly soever the parts are filled, yet they carry the show and reason of a total … and thereby the writings of some received authors go for the very art: whereas antiquity used to deliver that knowledge which the mind of man had gathered, in observations, aphorisms, or short and dispersed sentences, or small tractates of some parts that they had diligently meditated and laboured. …²⁵

Wisdom literature exhibits just such a concern with resisting reductive strategies. The measure of wisdom lies in the diversity and extent of experience offered, not in the coherence and closure of the discourse in which it is reflected. The process of digesting this experience into “observations, aphorisms, and short and dispersed sentences” leads to local generalizations but resists universal principles. Bacon insists on this distinction:

The understanding must not however be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to remote axioms and almost the highest generality (such as the first principles, as they are called, of arts and things. … For the lowest axioms differ but slightly from bare experience, while the highest and most general (which we now have) are notional and abstract and without solidity. But the middle are the true and solid and living axioms, on which depend the affairs and fortunes of men.²⁶

Authors of mid-century meditations, epigrams, essays, aphorisms, resolves, and observations took this advice to heart, preferring accretions of short literary forms to longer discourses organized by “method.” After observing the conventional subjects and rhetorical strategies of these forms of discourse in Coopers Hill, one might be suspicious of critical interpretations of the poem which reduce its variety of incident and expression to the uniformity of a single totalizing formula. Concordia discors is exactly the type of principle Bacon warned against. In Coopers Hill it has the status of a middle axiom only.

The variety of attitudes that Denham adopts towards economics and the social fabric illustrates this point. In the “London” section, Charles is praised for his charity in repairing St. Pauls, while the mercantile faction, viewed as threatening established religion, is condemned for its greed. These:

Toyle to prevent imaginarie wants;
Yet all in vaine, increasing with the store,
Their vast desires, but make their wants the more.

[30-32]

Such greed is opposed to limits, a notion Denham conveys through an image of indiscriminate mixture:

While Luxurie, and wealth, like Warre and Peace,
Are each the others ruine, and increase,
As Rivers lost in Seas some secret veine
Thence reconveies, there to be lost againe.

[37-40]

The principle invoked in this section is subordination of individual desire to the general good—a general good threatened by the over-reaching of the London faction. Commerce, which threatens religion, is seen as a threat to charity, which maintains it. Mercantile attitudes are implied, however, in the “Saint Annes” section when Henry is condemned for his “luxury” and the church for its “laziness.” By “subordinating” the church, the King becomes the violater of boundaries. In this instance, the principle invoked is not subordination, or balance of opposing forces, but the golden mean: “Is there no temperate Region can be known, / Betwixt their frigid and our Torrid Zone?” (173-74). The subject of commerce comes up again in the “Thames” section, where it is viewed in a most favorable light. The river is eulogized in mercantile metaphors: “Thy faire bosom is the world's Exchange” (218), and is praised precisely for its ability to overcome geographical, political, and economic boundaries: “Spices he brings, and treasures from the West / Finds wealth where ‘tis, and gives it where it wants, / Cities in Desarts, woods in Cities plants” (112-14). This passage champions commercial interests and qualifies, if not undermines, the principle of hierarchical subordination. In the “Forrest” section, commercial attitudes are used to call the landed faction into question:

And as our surly supercilious Lords,
Bigge in their frownes, and haughty in their words,
Looke down on those, whose humble fruitfull paine,
Their proud, and barren greatnesse must susteine:
So looks the Hill upon the streame. …

[245-49]

Here the general good is formulated in terms of balance and concordia discors. Extending the simile, Denham imagines the dryads of the forest dancing with the naiads of the river, an emblem of exchange and harmony between urban and rural factions.

The “wisdom” offered in these passages cannot be reduced to a single doctrine. Denham now advocates subordination, now a mean, now a mixture, now a balance of opposites. What these instances share is the recognition that England is a combination of heterogeneous interests whose common good lies in the recognition of difference, not the domination of a single faction or principle. In expressing this view, it is not surprising that Denham would turn to the meditation, in Bacon's words, “to deliver that knowledge which the mind of man had gathered, in observations, aphorisms, or short and dispersed sentences.”

The concern with the social order expressed in Coopers Hill is common in seventeenth-century epigrams and meditations, but the concern expressed for the natural order as such derives from a different tradition, that of the Latin georgic:

Ye sacred muses …
Whose Priest I am, whose holy Fillets wear;
Would you your Virgil's first petition hear,
Give me the ways of wandring Stars to know
The Depths of Heav'n above, and Earth below.
Teach me the various Labours of the Moon,
And whence proceed th'Eclipses of the Sun. …
Happy the Man, who studying Nature's Laws,
Thro' known effects can trace the secret cause,
His Mind possessing, in a quiet state,
Fearless of Fortune, and resigned to Fate.(27)

In Coopers Hill “natures laws” are no longer expressed through types and portents. Denham's vates, a Baconian philosopher, dymythologizes Virgil's mystical prognostications:

As those who rais'd in body or in thought
Above the Earth, or the Aires middle Vault,
Behold how winds and stormes, and Meteors grow,
How clouds condense to raine, congeale to snow,
And see the Thunder form'd, before it teare
The aire, secure from danger and from feare;
So rais'd … I see the City. …

[21-28]

Denham's speaker is a kind of Virgilian Happy Man looking down upon the city from a safe distance. But where Virgil only mentions nature's “secret causes,” Denham, following the mode of Lucretius's “georgic,” traces these causes to discord among heterogeneous elements: “Such was the discord, which did first disperse / Forme, order, beauty, through the universe” (231-32). Such causes leave their marks on the natural world. Denham's emblems are not, however, construed by means of secret languages, but by philosophical principles based on observing the effects of history on the landscape—“history” which, in the Baconian sense, includes both the natural and the social.

Ralph Cohen has described Denham's use of the prospect device as “innovative in dealing with man's relation to nature in the georgic poem” and argued that the poem “is based on a perceptual rather than allegorical scheme.”²⁸ This is true, but Denham's modification is better understood less as a departure from these forms than as a fusion of georgic and emblematic conventions. Perception, as the “application of the senses,” played a venerable role in seventeenth-century meditation, going back to Ignatian sources and continuing on as the notion of “contemplation” in Bacon's philosophy and “observation” in the occasional meditation.²⁹ Furthermore, Denham's innovation was to take the concept of the prospect view, common enough in contemporary paintings, emblem books, and occasional meditations, and combine it with georgic conventions. When incorporated into Denham's georgic, however, the emblematic image undergoes changes, losing its hieroglyphic qualities and taking on a literalness which is quite evident in the georgic mode. In the Fuller meditation quoted earlier, for example, the Welsh mountains have no literal connection with the English parliament. In Coopers Hill, on the other hand, the emblems are so literalized as to become synecdochial with what they represent: St. Paul's not only represents the church, it is the church, and so likewise for Windsor and the monarchy, Saint Anne's and the destruction of religion, and so forth. This tendency derives from Virgil's treatment of landscape, where the ops of the empire is represented by flourishing harvests and its warlike past by the empty helmet and half-hidden inscriptions uncovered by the peasant. Denham's innovation was to combine and transform conventions of meditation and georgic, gathering the emblems of national history into a particularized local landscape and identifying—in a philosophical rather than a prophetic context—the scientific processes of natural history with the historical processes of national affairs.

Denham alters other georgic conventions as well. Where Virgil equates the fortunes of the Roman empire with the establishment of national unity through agricultural values, Denham equates the welfare of England with the establishment of national unity through commerce, an identification that would persist in Pope's “Windsor Forest” and in many English georgics to follow. The introduction of epigram and meditation into the georgic results in the emphasis of some georgic conventions and the atrophy of others. Virgil's poem contains some fulsome praise of Augustus, but Denham devotes about a third of his poem to epigrammatical tributes to the monarchy. Under the influence of the meditation, the didactic nature of the georgic changes. Addison commented that “the Poet must take care not to encumber his Poem with too much business; but sometimes to relieve the subject with a Moral Reflection, or let it rest a while for the sake of a pleasant and pertinent digression.”³⁰ In Coopers Hill the proportion of precept to reflection is inverted: in fact the poem consists primarily of moral reflection, with precepts appearing only occasionally. As in the meditational tradition, the chief concern is with reforming the will, not imparting information. In this “georgic” meditation, however, the will concerned is not that of the individual but that of nation.

The integration of epigram, meditation, and georgic into Coopers Hill illustrates the variety of ways in which genres can combine. The epigram, for instance, is simply absorbed, one epigram merging often indistinguishably into the next. This is in accordance with Addison's description of how precepts are additively combined in the georgic poem: “as in a curious Brede of Needle-work, one Colour falls away by such just degree, and another rises so insensibly, that we see the variety without being able to distinguish the total vanishing of the one from the first appearance of the other.”³¹ Virgil similarly “conceals the bounds” when introducing his famous digressions, such as the lovemaking of the beasts or the story of Aristeus. The integration of episodes in Coopers Hill is complex. The stag-hunt digression, for instance, grows out of the “Forrest” section, the boundary concealed with a Virgilian “Here have I seen. …” Elsewhere, however, Denham clearly denotes his boundaries, particularly in the treatment of the three hills, where one might expect more continuity: “So having tasted Windsor, casting round / My wandring eye, an emulous Hill doth bound / My more contracted sight. …” (145-47). This insistence on boundaries is not the result of ineptitude on the part of the author, but is an instance of generic heterogeneity.

It was the norm for midcentury meditations to be discrete observations. Compared to the epigram, which is simply absorbed into the georgic, the meditation retains a higher degree of autonomy. It is in the opening sections that Coopers Hill is most obviously affected by the conventions of meditation. Each section is developed by means of a “composition of place,” the place being a localized landscape rather than a moment in sacred history as in Ignatian meditation, or a textual “place” as in the usual Protestant variation. The significance of the place is drawn out by the means we have observed, the “meditation” concluding with exclamations which sometimes sound very much like the traditional “application of the affections”: “O Happinesse of sweete retir'd content!,” “Here could I fix my wonder …,” “Parting thence, ‘twixt anger, shame, and feare. …” Such discrete amplifications and conclusions are not at all like Virgil's “curious Brede” of precepts.

The latter part of the poem, however, becomes increasingly less meditational and more georgic in design. The “Thames,” “Forrest,” and “Egham Meade” sections flow into one another in the subtle mixture that Addison admires in Virgil, scene dissolving into scene, description blending seamlessly into narration and reflection. Coopers Hill undergoes a remarkable, almost Ovidian transformation, modulating from the epigrammatical meditation of the pre-revolutionary period into the epigrammatical georgic of the Augustan era.

The kinds of genreaic combination we have observed in Coopers Hill reveal a great deal about its significance for its first readers. The incorporation of economiastic epigrams is indicative of Denham's nostalgia for the traditional relation of patronage between kings and poets. Denham clearly admired the courtly and aristocratic values of the Tribe of Ben. The georgic elements, which come through most strongly in the Thames episodes, reflect a different ideology, that of the merchant population with its interest in equilibration through commerce rather than subordination through rank. The meditational elements are indicative of the changing role of religion in society. Even as Denham expresses his concern for the established church, his view is a largely secular one: Coopers Hill was part of a growing literature of meditations which turned their back on “emptie arie contemplations” to take on the secular preoccupations of a troubled nation. There was thus a close connection between the genres incorporated into the poem and the social forces at work in England, the heterogeneous poem becoming a model of the heterogeneous state, the poem and the state in each instance organized by balance, subordination, and mixture.

Since the time of Dryden, Coopers Hill has been regarded as the liminal boundary between Renaissance and Augustan poetics. Denham shares with Waller and others the distinction of “perfecting the couplet,” but it was his own accomplishment to be, as Johnson observed, the author of a new species of composition. In doing this, Denham instituted a number of post-renaissance conventions by making something new out of old materials. Such events in literary history are best understood, if not only understood, by means of the combinatory notion of genre that Johnson himself held.

Notes

1. Contemporary citations are collected in John Denham, Poetical Works, ed. Theodore H. Banks (New Haven: Yale UP, 1928) 333-50.

2. Ralph Cohen, “On the Interrelation of Eighteenth-Century Literary Forms,” English Institute Annual (New York: Columbia UP, 1974) 3-48.

3. Critics have accounted for the reception of Coopers Hill and the rise of georgic poetry in various ways. For Brendan O Hehir historical explanation is not an issue; Denham's poem is simply a model for later poets to imitate (Expans'd Hieroglyphics, A Study of Sir John Denham's Coopers Hill with a Critical Edition of the Poem [Berkeley: U of California P, 1969] 7). John Chalker attributes the rise of the georgic to “the correspondence between the situations of pre-Augustan and post-Restoration England” (The English Georgic [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1969] 209), an explanation which Ralph Cohen has criticized as too general (“Innovation and Variation: A Problem in Literary History,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 4 [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1975] 297-315), since the revival of the georgic antedates the restoration, and since it fails to take into account important differences between both the poetry and the politics of Rome and England. Earl Wasserman attributed the reception of Coopers Hill to its consistent exploitation of the doctrine of concordia discors: “in dramatically engaging his cosmic doctrine in verse form, Denham gave a functional significance both to the harmoniously balanced couplet that became the neoclassic ideal and to variants of that basic form” (The Subtler Language [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1959] 82). I argue below that Denham did not use concordia discors in any such consistent manner. Even if he did, such an explanation would remain too narrow; too many other poets were writing heroic couplets. In The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), Anthony Low attributes the rise of the georgic to changing attitudes toward labor, a view which perhaps leads him to the odd conclusion that Coopers Hill lacks “a georgic spirit or georgic subject matter” (73). An adequate historical explanation should be more broadly based. Cohen sets out to provide such an explanation on the basis of the innovations that Denham introduces into the genre. Using Cohen's work as its starting point, this paper stresses that by observing genreaic change one can best make explanatory connections between formal features (such as the couplet), thematic features (such as the new interest in commerce and science), and the social functions of georgic poetry in the culture at large.

4. Wasserman 49, 58.

5. James Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979) 57, 56, 53.

6. Wasserman 70, 71.

7. Turner 51, 53.

8. Unless otherwise noted, references are to the text published in 1642, edited by Brendan O Hehir in Expans'd Hieroglyphics.

9. O Hehir 165.

10. Wasserman 51.

11. Here Earl Wasserman's identification of the stag with Strafford is accepted; however, the late Irvin Ehrenpreis has challenged the views of Wasserman and O Hehir, referring to the episode as “a decorative hunting scene” (Literary Meaning and Augustan Values [Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1974] 27). But such allegorical narratives are commonplaces in Virgilian georgics. For a detailed discussion of the allegory and its political implications, see John Wallace, “Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641,” ELH 61 (1974): 516 ff.

12. Wasserman 46.

13. Wasserman 47.

14. O Hehir 7.

15. For a discussion of generic mixture and the interpretation of seventeenth century texts, see Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind, Genre Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973). For a discussion of the implications of generic mixture in explaining literary change, see Ralph Cohen, “On the Interrelations of Eighteenth Century Literary Forms.” For a theory of genre predicated on generic mixture, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature, An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982).

16. Fowler 200.

17. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954).

18. Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979).

19. For an anthology of resolves which will convey some idea of their variety, see John L. Lievsay, The Seventeenth Century Resolve, A Historical Anthology of a Literary Form (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1980).

20. Thomas Fuller, Thoughts and Contemplations, ed. James O. Wood (London: S.P.C.K., 1964) 47.

21. For an extended explication of Denham's political views in their immediate historical context, see John L. Wallace, “Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641.”

22. In F.L. Huntley, Bishop Hall and Protestant Meditation in Seventeenth-Century England (Binghamton: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1981).

23. Francis Quarles, Works, ed. Grosart (New York: AMS, 1967).

24. Fuller 26.

25. Francis Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding (London: Longmans, 1876) 3:498.

26. Works 4:97.

27. Georgics, trans. Dryden (New York: Cheshire House, 1931).

28. Cohen, “Innovation and Variation” 16-17.

29. “So assuredly the very contemplation of things as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion, is in itself more worthy than all the fruit of inventions” (Bacon, Novum Organon 129). Svetlana Alpers has argued for the importance of the new science as an agent of change in the visual arts as well (The Art of Describing, Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983], ch. 3).

30. Dryden v-vi.

31. Dryden iii.