SOURCE: Hutchings, W. “‘The Harmony of Things’: Denham's Coopers Hill as Descriptive Poem.” Papers on Language and Literature 19, No. 4 (Fall 1983): 375-84.

[In the following essay, Hutchings maintains that, rather than merely serving as a vehicle for political commentary, the description of landscape in Coopers Hill gives the poem its structure and sense of order.]

“Coopers Hill has been honored as a poem for three centuries, but it deserves to be more famous as a historical document.”¹ So John M. Wallace sets out the approach which his essay on Denham's poem displays so comprehensively; an approach towards which modern criticism has tended since Earl Wasserman's highly influential reading in The Subtler Language.² Wallace's argument, that Coopers Hill reveals its author's “Parliamentary Royalism” in a precise, historical context, and the interpretations which Brendan O Hehir bases upon his differentiation between versions of the text depend upon and derive from Wasserman's essay.³ The crucial point made by Wasserman is that “the primary function of its [the poem's] descriptive elements is to create a realizable and meaningful structure for the political concept being poetically formulated,” an idea which leads directly to his judgment that “total poetic success must lie in the transformation of all the … topographical features in the poem into metaphorical relevance” (pp. 48-49). Wasserman's concentration upon the poem as political statement and upon the theory of concordia discors as central to its meaning derives from this premise. Later critics have adopted these as the correct issues and have produced qualifications only within the terms established by Wasserman.

This emphasis follows from separation of what Wasserman calls the “descriptive and thematic strands.” Significantly, this phrase implicitly prejudges the issue: a “thematic” strand is self-evidently going to be the real subject of a poem, while a “descriptive” strand must play the secondary role of providing a basis for its unequal partner. What the poet perceives from the top of Cooper's Hill must only be important for what it is made into. Once that point is accepted—that Coopers Hill is really political, not descriptive—Wallace's reading can justifiably turn the poem into a historical document, landscape poetry without the landscape (and, incidentally, virtually without the poetry).

The separation of the poem into two unequal elements seems to distort it in a manner which runs counter to its very tenor and essence. For example, Wasserman argues that Denham sets up a contest between eye and fancy, in which the success of the latter turns landscape into meaning, sight into mind. But, whatever else it does, Coopers Hill clearly asserts the value of harmony through the cooperation of diverse elements (socially, politically and in the landscape of the Thames valley). It is an early Augustan work not only in its verse technique, but in its concern with synthesis as opposed to dissociation. It is not surprising, then, that the eye and the fancy assist each other in the creation of the work of art. The eye makes the initial movement across the landscape to view St. Paul's Cathedral (13-14). On three further occasions Denham states that the poet's eye makes the transition from feature to feature. Windsor “swells / Into my eye” (40-41); after the Windsor passage, “my fixt thoughts my wandring eye betrays, / Viewing a neighbouring hill” (112-13); and after the St. Anne's Hill passage, “My eye descending from the Hill, surveys / Where Thames amongst the wanton vallies strays” (159-60).

Denham's method here is to alternate perception and reflection, the former taking the lead in establishing the order of the poem and cutting off the latter when it has gone far enough. Alternation is not strife. Further, the full cooperation between sight and thought emerges through the extraordinary skill with which Denham describes what the poet sees in such a way as to create the meaning. The imagination, being more “boundless” (12) than the eye, can then expand upon what has already been essentially established. Description embodies the meaning; reflection applies it to both contemporary and historical England.

The first objects perceived are St. Paul's and the city of London at its foot. The descriptions are visually contrasted:

Crown'd with that sacred pile, so vast, so high,
That whether 'tis a part of Earth, or sky,
Uncertain seems, and may be thought a proud
Aspiring mountain, or descending cloud,
          …
Under his proud survey the City lies,
And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise;
Whose state and wealth the business and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a darker cloud.

[15-28]

Indistinctness here suggests distance, but also allows Denham to create his attitude to the two features: to say that, from this distance, the cathedral appears to be either a part of the earth reaching towards the sky or a cloud descending from the sky is to eulogize in the same way as to say that the city appears to be a mist or a dark cloud is to denigrate. The cathedral is visually grand: it is vast and high, proud (suggesting pomp and nobility) and is like a mountain, an image which expresses solidity and stability as well as height. In contrast, the city is inherently unpleasant, obscure and threatening, dark where the cathedral is light.

Once this is established, Denham proceeds to expand the implications of the contrasting descriptions. In the case of St. Paul's, an allusion to Waller's “Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls” fixes the royalist stance, but also leads to the assertion that, “Now shalt thou stand though sword, or time, or fire, / Or zeal more fierce than they, thy fall conspire” (21-22). This couplet renders overt the idea implicit in the image of a mountain: the cathedral is firm, stable proof against the vicissitudes of time and accident, and against the attacks of war and religious extremists. Similarly, the lines following the description of London take up mist and darkness, the visual effects, to assert the blindness and self-destructiveness of its inhabitants. In each case, the poet first regards the feature of the scene and gives a brief description of its visual impact. The lack of elaboration, besides directing the reader's attention to the key quality of the landscape, gives the lines a bare, matter-of-fact manner which supports and confirms the words as a straightforward, exact account of what can be seen from the summit of Cooper's Hill. Denham's development (in terms of principles of moderation and adherence to a stable order) depends upon the initial image to which it is intimately related: commendation of stable order is inherent in the cathedral just as the error of the Londoners is implicit in mist and darkness. Description presents the qualities upon which the subsequent development expands. The manner of the description emphasizes the landscape as literal, not as metaphorical; so that nature is the argument, recorded and then elaborated by the poet-observer.

The hill at Windsor presents itself as an answer to the poet's appeal for “sweet retir'd content” (37) following the lines on London,

With such an easie and unforc't ascent,
That no stupendious precipice denies
Access, no horror turns away our eyes:
But such a Rise, as doth at once invite
A pleasure, and a reverence from the sight.

[42-46]

These lines are interpreted by Wasserman in terms of concordia discors (57-61). Yet the idea of a clash of discords as the prerequisite for a state of concord is alien to the poetry. Emphasis is, on the contrary, entirely on lack of conflict: the hill's slope is “easie” and “unforc't,” no horror is caused by any “stupendious precipice,” and the hill is a gentle height. To claim, as Wasserman does, that the hill is gentle because it reconciles “perpendicular directions” is to impose an idea which is simply not in the poetry. The hill does not need to reconcile since it is already pleasant and gentle, qualities which can be immediately seen and so require no complicated mental straining. Denham goes on to give his image a specific political application by expounding an ideal of kingship. Again, description both initiates and establishes the thought: moderation is seen to be attractive, and the poem argues for moderate royalism (as opposed to extremist destroyers, whether they be Henry VIII or contemporary Londoners). The essential principle lies in the landscape itself.

Denham's description is, as ever, brief and to the point. There is no unnecessary elaboration and the language is plain. Like the hill, the observation is easy and unforced. Because the manner of description is at one with its object, it comes across as truthful and direct. This is a point which is crucial to an understanding of those central lines of the poem, the famous “Thames couplets”:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.

[189-92]

Again, Wasserman analyzes these lines as an expression of concordia discors, finding the co-presence of depth and clarity to be the “harmonious resolution of opposing forces” (pp. 83-85). Now depth and clarity are simply not opposites, nor do they necessarily imply opposition. The Thames is profound but also lucid, a combination of two good qualities. Denham is always pursuing synthesis, not antithesis. He goes on to assert that the stream is gentle, strong and full, but none of these to excess. The Thames represents an ideal of moderation, an ideal which the poet openly seeks to capture in his verse. Hence the lines are balanced and harmonious, enbodying Denham's ideal as surely as the river itself does.

The pattern can be briefly traced in the rest of the poem. Windsor is succeeded by St. Anne's Hill and the ruins of Chertsey Abbey:

But my fixt thoughts my wandring eye betrays,
Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late
A Chappel crown'd, till in the Common Fate,
The adjoyning Abby fell.

[112-15]

A problem for Denham here is that the object to be perceived is not, as with St. Paul's, a noble building, but the pathetic remains of one: the quality is not grandeur, but the absence of grandeur. Denham still insists upon perception as the passage is about the effect on the observer of seeing “these dismal heaps” (149). But the initial image is implied rather than expressed: the poet states that a chapel once crowned the hill without fully realizing the resulting absence.⁴ It is significant that Pope, when he makes a similar point in Windsor-Forest, adds allusive resonance to his image of ruins.⁵ The greater poet thus solves the problem in his own way. In Coopers Hill the reflective passage takes up the idea of destruction, implicitly contrasting this with the ideal of kingship manifested in the preservation of St. Paul's by Charles (24).

The creativity of the Thames then adds to the argument. The poet's eye surveys the river which “amongst the wanton vallies strays” (160), “wanton” conveying the profusion of growth in the river valley and “strays” the gentle relaxation of the Thames' meandering course. The profusion is the point: to discover the river's wealth, one only has to “survey” (168) its shore. With the climactic “Thames couplets” Denham adds moderation to creativity—his argument is complete.

Consequently, Denham's manner changes at this point from presentation of individual features to an extended view of a section of landscape. This is introduced by a statement of the concept of concordia discors:

Wisely she [Nature] knew, the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discords springs.
Such was the discord, which did first disperse
Form, order, beauty through the Universe.

[203-6]

To apply this elemental theory to the entire poem is to ignore the careful placing of the statement before a new view of the scene (to which the theory is at once related). This new subject concerns cooperation between radically different features: “While the steep horrid roughness of the Wood / Strives with the gentle calmness of the flood” (209-10). Near-vertical roughness of forest and flat calm of the stream are opposite qualities and yet together create a harmonized scene. They are “huge extreams” (211) united by nature, as are the high mountain and low river in subsequent lines. Denham then develops the scene of high and low ground (the meadow between hill and river) as an example to conflicting sections of society. This is a central aspect of Denham's realism. Ideals are single statements, immutable like St. Paul's. Society is composed of differing elements. Proper recognition and achievement of the ideals can only be gained through reconciliation.

Both aspects are in the landscape, which presents to the eye both single images and composed wholes. And, if Denham's verse is made appropriate to the former, so it is to the latter. The “Wood/flood” couplet isolates the elements by giving them one line apiece and combines them in the unit of the couplet. The technique, of course, is common to later Augustan poetry: “Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law, / Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw.”⁶

On the plain between hill and river takes place the stag hunt which occupies the larger part of the remainder of the poem. Again the approach changes, although the underlying method does not. The chase is not an object for description, but a process for narration. Denham, however, continues to insist on its actuality: the poet says he has “seen the King” (241) attended to the chase and proceeds to describe the various actions of the stag in its flight through the countryside, referring to the “dark covert” (249), the groves (277) and the stream (301). The hunt is expressive of a different, less ideal view of society than was seen in the varied landscape. Ideas of pursuit, power and destruction become the basis for a reflection on Magna Carta and man's failure to adhere to its ideals. The hunt and the reflection are crucially connected by the landscape—each takes place on Runnymede. Topography thus still preserves its control over the poem's expression.

It is by a reversal of his established method that Denham retains his final landscape image for the closing lines. The poet first reflects on the political anarchy which results when kings and subjects force each other into extremes and only then presents an image of a river being forced to overflow its banks by man's interference with the natural order. This inverts the earlier notion of the Thames' natural creativity. The destruction by flooding occurs when man fails to recognize the essence of reality. The very fact that Denham reverses his order (reflection first, then image) itself gives the impression of an order of things being overturned. The warning of this finale is that what is at present just imagination (the complete collapse of the country into chaos) could be really enacted. Far better is it to see what the landscape shows, and then apply those qualities to social life.⁷

In his “Life of Denham,” Samuel Johnson says of local poetry that “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.”⁸ It is the plain factuality which establishes the reality of the landscape and the accuracy of the poet's observation of it. Hence the qualities are seen as real, as inherent in the landscape, not as in the mind of the poet. The poet's “fancy” plays its part when, and only when, the principles are defined. That the principles are implicit in the landscape gives them universal application and authority, while the really discordant elements all come from man when he fails to be creative and moderate. Since the essence of Denham's argument exists outside the poet's own mind, it must be objective and true. Such a method makes it appear impossible to argue with Denham: Coopers Hill applies universal truths to historical events and thus transcends those events.

There is one further point to be made and Johnson again alerts the reader to it when he comments that most descriptive poems lack plan “because as the scenes, which they must exhibit successively, are all subsisting at the same time, the order in which they are shewn must by necessity be arbitrary.”⁹ Now Coopers Hill avoids this trap because Denham has very carefully hidden his plan (a scrupulous and thoroughly didactic one) within apparently objective description, so that the landscape seems to unfold its own plan. If the poem just consisted of an exposition of ideas, description would be irrelevant, separable from the poem's meaning, and Coopers Hill and its author exposed as a historical document and a blatant politician respectively. On the other hand, if the objects in the landscape took over in such a way that Denham introduced a whole host of irrelevant descriptions (a modern Denham might manage the John F. Kennedy memorial, but could be stuck on the Citroën spare-parts depot, both of which are now to be found between Cooper's Hill and the Thames), the poem would fall apart: the descriptions would be arbitrary in order, selection and quality.

Denham's careful, characteristic avoidance of these extremes is set in relief by those minor topographical poems which claim to be based on Coopers Hill. R. A. Aubin's enormous bibliography shows the growth of this type of poem, in effect initiated by Denham.¹⁰ Later topographical poems have no reference to Coopers Hill, as the vogue eventually generated its own impetus; and such works as Windsor-Forest, and Dyer's Grongar Hill prove that the fashion created new achievements. Many early poems, however, openly acknowledge the inspiration of Denham. Francis Manning, the author of Greenwich-Hill. A Poem, states in his dedication that Denham's poem served as his model. William Goldwin admits to having borrowed the hint for his A Poetical Description of Bristol from Denham's use of a hill as a vantage point. References to Denham appear in the text of poems as undistinguished as Leighton-Stone-Air: a Poem, Moccoli. A Poem, and Greenwich-Park.¹¹ Their common factor is their utter failure to understand Denham.

Let two examples suffice. The earliest “hill poem” recorded by Aubin after Denham is Robert Fage's St. Leonard's Hill (1666), a work clearly written in imitation of Coopers Hill.¹² It contains a lot of verbal echoes of Denham, as well as copied motifs. Fage opens by allowing that the streams of Helicon are inspiring and yet asserting that they are not as clear as those of the Thames. This is an odd conflation of Denham's praise of the Thames and his opening justification of modern landscape as the starting-point for a poem. But the result is a perversion of the original: where Denham creates a kinship between classical and modern landscapes, Fage claims the superiority of the latter. Accordingly, he goes on to attribute to his hill the power of giving life to his verse (a confidence which is, alas, misplaced). What Fage does is to tilt Denham's careful balance between poet and landscape towards the latter, thus relinquishing any control over his poem. Features of his landscape appear in an arbitrary manner and order, and there is no attempt to make the technique of description in any way significant. One gets royalist statements about the rebels' destruction of some ancient oak trees, a stag hunt (for no other reason than that Denham has one), and the contented poor farmers of Clewerth Green. Fage takes ideas from his original, perverts them, and presents them along with other random ideas.

Manning's Greenwich-Hill is of special interest because of its dedication. Here Manning argues that, since Greenwich yields a prospect of greater variety than does Cooper's Hill, Denham would have written an even finer poem than he did had he chosen Greenwich for his subject. The notion that the success of a poem is commensurate with the fineness of the scene it describes derives from seeing the poem as only a literal rendering of landscape. The role of the poetic imagination in structuring the observations and applying them to areas of human experience is ignored. Manning's poem then comes as no surprise. He produces a random collection of various sights in a sequence which could, without harm (or, for that matter, benefit), be altered in any way. This is, of course, not true of visual experience of an actual prospect. A poem is not, and cannot be, the landscape. Manning rambles on about Greenwich House, where Mr. Flamsted reveals the wonders of astronomy; the Queen's House with its splendid collection of paintings by Rubens; the Thames (with, inevitably, a version of Denham's “Thames couplets”); Aurelia, one of the city's notable ladies; the Tower of London; and so forth, most engagingly, but almost interminably. The poem's inconsequence is a result of its author's abrogation of imaginative control.

On one side, then, is criticism which makes Coopers Hill all metaphorical meaning and no landscape; and on the other, Denham's would-be imitators who produce all topography and no imagination. That Denham's successors saw depiction of topography as the thing to admire about the poem should give one pause before accepting readings which take the landscape as purely metaphorical: Coopers Hill's fame was as a landscape poem. Yet the inadequacy of these imitations indicates that the authors had missed something crucial about their model. A recent reading of Coopers Hill by Eric Rothstein rightly comments that Denham's speaker “sees that the great norm for the use of power should be the order of nature itself” and that “physical nature, synthesized by the poet's eye, leads to spiritual knowledge.”¹³ But the fundamental quality of the poem is that which enables a sensitive reader to make such remarks, and which convinces a reader of their truth. It is the kind of descriptive language employed by Denham which renders the literal reality of the landscape, and hence allows the landscape itself to establish its inherent, factual truth. Political or spiritual knowledge emerges from the reader's imaginative application of those facts to the human condition. The art of the poem is to allow such implications to form what is, for Denham, a universal political argument, while delivering the descriptions in a manner which seems to preclude accusations of individual bias. This is its delicate, highly sophisticated balance.

Notes

1. “Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641,” ELH 41 (1974): 535.

2. The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neo-classic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, 1959). Further references to this edition will be cited in my text by page.

3. Brendan O Hehir, Expans'd Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's “Coopers Hill” (Berkeley, 1969). For example, O Hehir argues that the stag hunt in the final version must refer to the death of Charles, not of Strafford as in the earlier versions. Wallace further refines this issue. My quotations from Coopers Hill are from the 1668 edition, O Hehir's “B” text, and cited by line.

4. A chapel once “crown'd” St. Anne's Hill, whereas London is still “Crown'd” by St. Paul's. This illustrates how carefully Denham structures his argument within his descriptions. The parallel is a warning to Denham's contemporaries not to commit a shameful act of destruction, and the choice of word implies the royalist stance.

5. Windsor-Forest, 67-72, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, Twickenham edition (1963). All further references to Pope's works are to this edition.

6. The Rape of the Lock, 2. 105-6.

7. The 1642 version did not have this reversal of order: an instance, like the “Thames couplets,” of Denham's revision to good effect.

8. “Life of Denham” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905), 1:77. The argument I am putting forward is an extension of this formulation to take into account the method of description.

9. “Life of Pope” in Lives, 3:225. Johnson's observation puts with characteristic point and brevity one of the basic points of Lessing's Laokoon, which had been published in 1766.

10. Topographical Poetry in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1936), pp. 298-391.

11. Respectively, by Manning (London, 1697); Goldwin (London, 1712); J. H. (London, 1702); Mary Monk, in Marinda. Poems and Translations upon Several Occasions, ed. R. Molesworth (London, 1716); Greenwich-Park was published anonymously in London, 1728.

12. Substantially the final version of Coopers Hill had been published before Fage's poem. See O Hehir, Expans'd Hieroglyphicks.

13. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780 (Boston, 1981), pp. 11-12.