In celebrating a poet-overseer who turns everything on an estate, even social opposition, to account, country house poems treat form itself as a managerial technique whose expansion regulates catastrophe. Ben Jonson's, Thomas Carew's, and Robert Herrick's procataleptic presentations of what's absent from the country house—a rude steward counting one's cups—repurpose resentment into a celebration of lordly generosity. Yet this solution to the problem of resentment is paradoxical insofar as the plenty underlying the lords’ generosity does not require management. Aemilia Lanyer and Andrew Marvell use the rhyming couplet, the genre's paratactic generative principle, to depict decision-making's growth as a botanical phenomenon. Together these formal features show how problem-solving stewardship grows mindlessly, impractically, and very much like a plant. In that respect, these poems hint that problem-solving can never avert a climate catastrophe, precisely because of managerial decision-making's impulse to produce ever more of itself.
I
What does it cost to imagine climate change as a catastrophe, given that concept's fundamentally literary, especially its dramatic and narrative, valences? Does an impending climate “catastrophe” require us to do something or just change our attitude to something (as a result of reading or witnessing)? In short, how much do the often speculative and sometimes procataleptic interventions of problem-solving encourage the human activity, the manic, anticipatory busyness, that causes and accelerates climate cataclysm?1 Catastrophe in literature does not allow us to admire shipwreck from the shore, lazily, cruelly, or even empathetically. However, it valorizes difficult decisions and problem-solving in a potentially counterproductive fashion. Might the fact of an imminent (if not immanent) world-systemic collapse require a diagnosis that does not rely on shopworn, self-aggrandizing historical accounts of critical decision-making and problem-solving?2 In other words, what if solving problems is the problem to begin with?
This essay focuses on a subgenre of pastoral and georgic, the country house poem, that briefly flourished in England in the seventeenth century, just as the Anthropocene gets going.3 The originary conceit of the genre, inaugurated by Aemilia Lanyer's “The Description of Cooke-ham” (1611) and Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst” (1612), is that the entire estate, and not just the manor house, represents and even allegorizes the lord's or lady's virtue and praiseworthiness. Sometimes, the estate's fauna join in this chorus of praise by voluntarily sacrificing themselves for the lord's sustenance (this is the case in Jonson's poem, as well as Thomas Carew's “To Saxham”). Sometimes the flora participate in the encomia (as in Lanyer's more elegiac poem). Servants too often appear so as to testify to the lord's mild and right governorship.4 The manor house itself, when it is treated at all, is an emblem of not just largesse, but moderation and well-managed husbandry. The English country house poem also makes several telling modifications to its classical antecedents, Martial's Epigram 3.58 and Horace's Epode 2. Gone is Martial's explicit contest between a well-managed autarkic estate and a mishandled extractive one, dependent on the city for its resources. Absent too is the surprising turn at the end of Horace's celebration of rural delight: in its final lines, the epode's celebration of rural retreat and debtlessness is revealed to be the musings of a moneylender.5 As Raymond Williams notes, the seventeenth-century estate poem excises the “living tensions” that bedevil the classical pastoral, tensions that include but do not reduce to political economy and the distribution of property.6 That excision occurs in the interest of celebrating a careful management that makes surprising turns or conflicts, even merely ironic ones, outmoded and déclassé, evidence of a mindset that's not yet properly attuned to the practical necessities of problem-solving.7
These poems—Lanyer's and Jonson's, but also Robert Herrick's “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton,” Thomas Carew's “To Saxham,” and Andrew Marvell's “Upon Appleton House”—ostensibly praise an aristocratic lord, but they're also fantasies of seamless land management and the conflict-free production of economic value. In that respect, they are poems without strophes, let alone catastrophes. It's that fantasy, of nature and its use without dramatic or narrative conflict or crisis, that makes them an important minor genre for approaching early modern understandings of historical and environmental change. What is at stake is whether the concept of “cata-strophe,” a conclusive, critical turn downward (thus, “kata-”), captures the natural, botanical, physical, and literary phenomena at work.8 In other words, what does it mean and what does it cost to call something like climate change an imminent or immanent “turn”?
The historical coincidence of the appearance of “catastrophe” as a formal element of literary representation and one of the pivotal origin dates for the Anthropocene is just that: a coincidence.9 Yet that coincidence should prompt us to examine not only what is new about this new geological era, but also whether human and decidedly literary conceptions of critical novelty and finality hamper an understanding of ecological decline.10 The “Anthropocene” designates a geological, stratigraphically measurable turn that results from humans’ extractive growth. Like an invasive species, or a virus, humans have grown too much and too fast, eating up the carrying capacity of an ecosystem: quantitative increase turns into qualitative change. Yet the proposed solution to that qualitative change is better management of existing resources and human growth. In fact, “management” is the last word in Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer's canonical formulation of the Anthropocene in English: “An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management.”11 Whether management solves the problem or is the problem is the subject of this essay. The subgenre of country house poems is an especially fruitful site for examining this issue because they offer a concerted attempt to install management at the level not only of production, but also consumption and, in the process, seek to make form less the symbol of dominion, choice, and law, than an activity of internal, dynamic, and readerly self-regulation. Although it is certainly true that the country house poem reflects a historical shift toward modern understandings of land as property, as well as the understanding of imperial dominion that comes along with them, the genre also reveals poetry's attempt to think through the utility and economy of its own forms.12 That does not amount to the navel-gazing of sonnets about sonnets, but rather the recognition that poetic forms have their own distributive logics of efficiency, ones that do not always echo those of the “real world” things that a poem is purportedly about. The point is to manage all resources more efficiently, not to let even metaphorical or poetic growth get out of hand, to direct it in the proper channels. In that vision, the only untrammeled growth is for management, precipitated and justified by the catastrophic problems it preemptively solves.13
In early modern and still decidedly Aristotelian terms, the vegetative component of the human is at fault for this impending (if not yet presently occurring) catastrophe on account of its propensity toward growth without end, in both senses of that term. As Jeffrey T. Nealon notes, the absence of higher purpose or telos marks the central distinction between animal and plant life in Aristotle: “because they have no higher or more noble end-form (they just grow until they can grow no more), plants thereby evidence a weaker nature; they'll just feed and get bigger, toward no more ideal end, without a higher purpose.”14 The relevant passage in De Anima reduces the plant's power and capacity to raw growth:
Consequently all plants are considered to live, for they evidently have in themselves a capacity and first principle by means of which they exhibit both growth and decay in opposite directions; for they do not grow up and not down, but equally in both directions, and in every direction, and they are nourished and continue to live, as long as they are able to absorb food. This capacity to absorb food may exist apart from all other powers, but the others cannot exist apart from this in mortal beings. This is evident in the case of plants; for they have no other capacity of the soul.15
Unlike animals and humans, then, plants do not develop, progress, or advance: they grow up to the sky and down to the roots. In this system, plants still do have souls, but the aim of the vegetative soul is growth itself: growth alone is its organizing principle.16 The accomplishment of that aim occurs at the moment of the most miniscule expansion. That end differs in pivotal ways from the determining final cause of animate, locomotive beings within Aristotelian hylomorphism: for such beings, they're growing up, not just growing. They are becoming what they are meant to be, but a plant is already at the moment of its creation all that it's meant to be: a thing that grows.
I'm recounting Aristotle's model of psychic form here not just because of its continued influence in early modern England, but also because it nicely highlights the fraught relationship between growth and its management that is the recurrent obsession of estate poems. One of their most striking features, in a genre advocating and celebrating moderating stewardship of the land's resources (however miraculously achieved), is their formal organization as a paratactic series of couplets that multiply without end or aim. The country house poem does not predominantly imagine form as an external, disciplining force atop a pullulating chaos of matter. Rather, form just as often entails an autonomous purposeful aspiration toward an end, or an in-built capacity for self-reproduction and self-regulation. In other words, the point is never naked extraction, but an enabling direction for growth. It's that placid, even bemused overseeing of an immanent, seamless reciprocity and cooperation—emblematized by another conspicuous feature of the genre, procataleptic speculation about a servant's nonexistent resentment—that these poems ask readers to embrace. They depict an almost effortless transmutation of contestation into a reservoir of value that readers create, through their reading. As we'll see, that's a testament to these poems’ analysis of and advocacy for the growth of managerial decision-making and its concomitant terra-forming: namely, the transformation of the earth from a place where one lives into a problem to be solved.
II
Compared to other English country house poems, what is perhaps most striking about Ben Jonson's praise for Robert Sidney in “To Penshurst” is the attempt to imagine the benefits that the Sidney estate confers in the present, without the retrospective, contemplative impulses of metaphor.17 As Alastair Fowler notes, Jonson offers little in the way of descriptive detail about Penshurst, substituting instead an exhaustive listing and counting.18 Heather Dubrow describes the lists in the country house genre as “anticlosural,” unlike their appearance as emblems of mastery in other poetic types.19 In other words, “To Penshurst” offers only the list, not any moment when a lord or poet might reveal himself or herself as the controlling agency behind the listing. So intent is Jonson on surveying the estate and itemizing what he sees that the poem short-circuits the contemplative retrospection—itself a strophic stock-taking—that might attend figuration.20 Instead of pastoral contemplation, there is in Jonson a cutting to the chase that's significant for the poem's distaste for the more leisurely pace of thoughtful reversals and rumination. “To Penshurst” offers readers an emphatically present vision of available game, and highlights it with verb tense, the repeated use of “doe” and “doth”:
Jonson's not just advocating that readers be in the moment. “Doe feed” and “doth yeeld” indicate not just what's happening now, but what you can expect in a near-term, orderable future.22 According to Don E. Wayne, the pronounced caesuras in individual lines produce an effect of “evidence accumulating in support of the more general assumptions, feelings, attitudes, and values that are the ideational and emotional context.”23 In that reading, the sequence of pauses in the lines about self-sacrificing fish turn the successive clauses into exposition in the service of a broader, future aim, the assumed context that all readers presumably apprehend: “Thou hast thy ponds, [pause] that pay thee tribute fish, / [pause] Fat, aged carps, [pause] that runne into thy net. [pause] / And pikes, [pause] now weary their owne kinde to eat.” Unlike Wayne, I do not hear this sequence as an empirical accumulation of evidence, but rather as a more meandering and spontaneous collection of commentary. That is, whatever accumulation the caesuras imply proceeds according to the poem's more immediate principle of formal generation, appositive parataxis, and, as a result, sounds like thought driven by immediate metonymic association.24
Readers, then, do not come to the end of the poem as a conclusion of a developmental or pedagogical process. Rather, the conclusion is a continuation of this present, interminable weighing and sorting. The deictic “now” of resolution in the final lines of “To Penshurst” is identical to the present “now” throughout the poem:
Despite the concluding evocation of a restful dwelling at Penshurst, the poem does not provide space for the aristocratic, leisurely, or even elegiac contemplation that we witness in comparable poems in the country house genre, like Carew's “To Saxham” or Lanyer's “The Description of Cooke-ham.” Even the one past-tense section of Jonson's poem—in praise of Barbara Gamage Sidney's preparedness for an unexpected royal hunting party (75–88)—focuses on the speed with which, even in absentia, she's able to create a “sodayne cheare” (82). “To Penshurst” closes by evoking a decorous moderation that nonetheless requires that readers always be evaluating, discriminating, managing—just like the lady of Penshurst when she's away from the manor. There's not so much a catastrophic climax here as there is an insistently deictic present—“now”—that looks forward to a future of more of the same evaluative determinations.
The formal elements in this poem encourage readers to see themselves as managers, efficient overseers of even more efficient resource allocation who have so successfully anticipated problems that they never occur. That is not the same set of skills as one sees in the contemplation of metaphorical correspondences, or even the symbolic substitutions characteristic of exchange, metaphorical or market. Raymond Williams and Kari Boyd McBride read this tendency in the country house genre as an attempt to localize the fantasy of abundance characteristic of classical pastoral. For McBride, country house poems evoke a recent, not an immemorial past and the “haeccicity of a particular estate,” not the amorphous rurality of the “country.”25 For Williams, that localization, perhaps paradoxically, issues in a series of negative definitions that mark a valuable distinction between abundance and excess:
For what is most remarkable about it [“To Penshurst”], in any open reading, is its procedure of definition by negatives. . . . This declaration by negative and contrast, not now with city and court but with other country houses, is enough in itself to remind us that we can make no simple extension from Penshurst to a whole country civilization. The forces of pride, greed and calculation are evidently active among landowners as well as among city merchants and courtiers.26
The gesture that Williams highlights is pivotal for understanding what these poems can tell us about the liberating possibilities of an ever more finely tuned managerial problem-solving.27 The evaluative slicing and dicing that is the genre's organizing conceit is also what expands immoderately within and as a result of the poem. In short, the poem's paradoxical praise for moderate largesse rests on a celebration of management's own unplanned growth, its anticipation and thwarting of an ever more profligately and prophylactically imagined risk in opposition to and competition with botanical directionlessness.
Significantly, the fantastically achieved measured economy of Penshurst is not the result of careful planning and stockpiling, in anticipation of scarcity or catastrophe. Rather, the measured, present management within Jonson's poem works against the preservation of stock and store, themselves gestures of contemplative and speculative planning, and the reversals and imagined retreats that such stock-taking always entails. Peter Remien notes this central facet of Jonson's poem: the present-tense depiction of the estate's largesse acknowledges the reality of food spoilage in an era before refrigeration and, more importantly, depicts the estate as a sustainable economy and ecology.28 That sustainable economy, significantly, relies on just-in-time delivery, the present arrival of what one needs without preparation or provision. Yet whereas Remien sees this as Jonson's responsiveness to a necessary reality, I think that “To Penshurst” is much more keen on describing such high-risk, break-neck efficiency as desirable in itself. In fact, Jonson's image—of the lord deriving value not only from someone else's labor, but someone else's consumption—asks readers to embrace an always-on positivity that seeks to extract value from negativity, waste, and even consumed, and thus destroyed value. Scarcity, real or possible, requires not more careful management, but merely more management. So as not to be merely reactive, tossed from crisis to crisis, strophe to strophe, the orbit of management grows by projecting a series of revelatory catastrophes that never occur—not because of luck or planning, but because they are solved in and through their speculative utterance.
That sense of a decision's growing power is most apparent in one of the country house genre's central set-pieces: a speculative presentation in which a resentful waiter is evoked, only to be dismissed as absent. The depiction of the estate's abundance rests on speculation about what's not the case as evidence for what is, enlisting an ostensibly critical voice, so as to rebut objections in advance (i.e., procatalepsis), in the very process of poetic production. Jonson's version of this motif is illustrative as it insists explicitly that the waiter doesn't worry about possible scarcity because he's already a competent manager:
So not a careless waiter, but one who's confident in the estate's stocks: he “knows” that there's plenty of meat below. “Knows” probably signifies that the waiter does more than trust Robert Sidney's provisioning. Perhaps he's checked himself, but it is just as likely that the slight pause, indicated by the comma-sequestered “below,” indicates something less thorough than personal inspection. The waiter's faith is simultaneously in his own managerial predictions and in the managerial acumen of others. In sum, the sheer growth of management secures management's own success.
That's different in important respects from the comparable set-piece in Robert Herrick's “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton.” Significantly, Herrick's more robust imagination of what does not occur explains the servant's confidence through how he's treated—he's “well fed and taught”—not through what he knows or deduces of his own accord.29 There's no negativity at Rushden Hall, but that's because Pemberton has played everything out to its logical conclusion and decided on treating and teaching his servants well. Unlike in Jonson's poem, the servants aren't in on the game; they're its objects:
The reason for quoting this digressive passage at length is in part its length: thirty lines of a poem of 136 lines (or twenty-two percent) about what does not occur. It also offers a pivotal contrast to Jonson's anticipatory hand-waving. In the present of Jonson's poem, growth, resource extraction, consumption, nourishment, even what's not happening, happen seamlessly, with no dissonant echoes even in his speculated portrait of resentment. In Herrick's version of the present estate, the speaker must break off abruptly to follow the central trajectory of his own poem: “No, no, / Thy house . . . ”; “No, no, thy bread, thy wine, thy jocund Beere.” In other words, there's an overturning, a critical rethinking inside of Herrick's set-piece that's different from Jonson's seamless explanation, where the resentful waiter interprets the world correctly and generously, without needing such deliberative, pedagogical interventions on the part of a poem's speaker. That said, managerial decision increases in power either way: seamlessly in Jonson, or via an authoritative intervention and strophic reversal in Herrick.
Herrick's reader, in fact, takes on the role of Jonson's speaker: no longer an observer of someone else's confident assertion that all is well and orderly, but now the entity in whom the poem's witnessed strophic reversals are synthesized and resolved. The final lines silently elide the difference between Pemberton and readers, making the negative, inverted praise for the lord into a reassuring future for the reader:
In addition to being a standard gesture of flattery, these final lines incorporate the reader's own interpretive activity into the poem's scripted transformation of negatives into positives: “but all things even / Make for thy peace” does not just mean that all moderate and symmetrical things make for Pemberton's and the reader's peace, but also that all things fully and completely make for that peace, a possibility emphasized by the appearance of “even” at the end of the line. The lines then emphasize not just an imperative to evaluative discrimination, but a confident faith in the productivity that the genre heralds (even in a poem so bent on describing what's not happening).
Despite their different portraits of the role of the reader, Herrick's and Jonson's poems both interpellate readers as witnesses of an imagined counter-factual scenario that shapes their understanding of their own actions. The early modern genre co-opts readerly judgment and action and, in so doing, differs in important respects from these poems’ classical model, Martial's epigram 3.58. Martial's poem appears to have a similar aim to the country house genre: distinguishing one lord from another on the basis of his estate management. However, Martial's poem addresses the lord, Bassus, who mismanages his country estate, contrasting him with the more generous and virtuous Faustinus. In contrast to Faustinus's self-sufficient rural residence, Bassus's estate relies on city commerce to feed the countryside:
But you have a property near Rome, all elegance and starvation. From a high tower you look out over nothing but laurel bushes, and your mind is at ease, for your Priapus fears no thief. You feed your vineyard workers with town flour and in time of leisure transport vegetables, eggs, chickens, apples, cheese, must to your painted villa. Should this be called a place in the country or a townhouse out of town?30
The general effect of these poems is similar: praise for a lord's largesse predicated on a comparison with others more miserly. Yet the formally conclusive mechanisms of the verse matter because of their differing portraits of how readers learn from poems. Martial's poem concludes with the end of comparative discrimination and evaluation; the poem has done its work of evaluative cataloguing and then concludes. Whatever the reader learns from the poem comes from witnessing the comparison within the poem and is more procataleptic than proleptic: the reader's learning occurs as a result of stepping out of the process of comparative evaluation and viewing its results. In that respect, Martial retains a fundamentally strophic organization of pedagogy and poem.
Jonson's poem ends not only with the continuation of its evaluative distinctions into the future, but the sublimation of those distinctions into the very imaginative work of reading the poem: “They that will proportion thee” describes an evaluative gesture indistinct from what's happening in the poem. As Fowler notes, the poem itself is a list, one that's reanimated (not merely commemorated) through a reader's rereading. What we're learning at the end of Jonson's and Herrick's poems occurs not as a result of a derivative, represented spectacle—like Martial's comparison of Bassus and Faustinus—but through the reader's own role in decision's growth, readerly practice now imagined as itself a managerial surveying, not a prompt to contemplative surveying. The reader of “To Penshurst” and “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton” witnesses a merely potential problem, raised as a potential objection only to be dispensed with. That witnessing colonizes how readers use their own imaginations: no longer unhinged from pragmatic matters of business, the imagination now serves as a tool of more efficient management. In Martial's epigram, the poem's evaluative comparison teaches. In Jonson's and Herrick's poems, the poem itself is a readerly activity of managed evaluation, which doesn't so much teach or show as immerse readers in the activity of scenario planning and accounting. Martial teaches facts; Jonson and Herrick trick readers into adopting or miming skills, capacities, and functionalist mindsets (that's still a brand of teaching, of course). Importantly, these later poems never name, let alone address their negative targets, the foils against which Penshurst and Rushden Hall shine so brightly. Likewise, their procataleptic formal gesture is also one that, perhaps paradoxically, encourages putting a poem to use: a reader is able to use this standard (Penshurst or Rushden Hall) in the future to gauge other estates and their lords. The prospect of not engaging in such comparative valuing—a contestation not over resources, but over the status of one's projected managerial competence and other ephemeral, vain values—never enters the picture. Problems, even problems of marginal differences, need solving after all. That's not just ideological blindness or deception, but a commitment to a developmental purposiveness characteristic of modernity and, concomitantly, a distinctively humanist Anthropocene.
The early modern country house poem does not just provide a participatory fantasy, in which a literary form organizes the experience of events. Rather, readers learn to think of the world as kairotic, but now with an important difference. They are encouraged not to imagine their lives like a story in which they're the hero, or the singing bard, but rather like the reader of that story, now enjoined to do something with that story, beyond mere contemplation and reading. So not a fantastical identification with Achilles, but a moderate and reasonable identification as the reader who evaluates and predicts Achilles's actions. That readerly identification doesn't encourage passivity or, even worse, the offloading of responsibility to some authoritative lord, but rather reminds readers that reading alone will never be enough, that there are problems out there that need solving. Even at its most quiescent—the purportedly reassuring notion that Robert Sidney or Lewis Pemberton has everything under control—readers lead themselves to the conclusion that they too have something to do, an activity beyond thoughtful reading and faith in one's betters. They too have problems of efficiency to solve, resentful waiters to procataleptically outflank, plans and scenarios to unfold. In that, the country house genre promises not just a world of individual managerial successes, but also one of infinite bureaucratic growth, of a reading, in short, that grows.
III
In addition to the speculative, procataleptic set-piece, the other equally conspicuous feature of the country house genre is its reliance on the rhyming couplet for its formal generation. On the one hand, catastrophe, with its critical moment of turning and decision is at loggerheads with the rhyming couplet, a generative principle of repetitive homophony: rhyme just goes on chiming regardless of one's managerial interventions. Striking then is the estate poem's condemnation of excess growth in verse constructed of rhyming pairs that could conceivably go on forever. After all, the children's sing-song of rhyme irritates because it grows passively and aimlessly, without reason or purpose. But on the other hand, the couplet, even when placed in a paratactic string, often connotes epigrammatic wisdom, a miniature moment of extractable value and tied-off reversal for readers. Whether that's its own type of growth or an emblem of readerly decision is the focus of the remainder of this essay.
The expansion of criticality and crisis, the generation of kairos noted above, rests on the couplet's paratactic repetition, an instance of chronos. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes, the paratactically organized poem has no structurally planned end: “There is, in other words, no apparent terminal modification; and since a paratactic structure does not determine its own conclusion, and systematic repetitions are themselves forces for continuation, the structural sources of closure in this poem are minimal.”31 Its “form” is dynamic addition or growth—like Aristotle's plant. Paratactic poems do conclude, of course, but the reader's temporal constraints, the poem's content, and larger generic requirements contribute to this resolution. The paratactic poem, like a list, does not just connote mastery and expansiveness, a confident survey of an endlessly abundant estate.32 It also reminds readers, forces them to believe in fact, that time itself is not just passing, but scarce, a resource to be treated with the same managerial efficiency that one might bring to the task of cobbling.
In contrast to Smith's portrait of a contingently temporal closure, Paul Fussell describes end-stopped couplets as formal exhibitions of finality: “we are moved forward by line units and almost by syntactical units of predictable length and weight, and the effect is one of closure, of taking up a thing only when the thing preceding it is entirely finished.”33 Fussell's vision counters Smith's, proposing that the metrical regularity of the end-stopped distich connotes, in itself, resolution and completion. In referring to these accounts of poetic form and closure, I intend to highlight a formal conundrum at the heart of country house poems: whether couplets are bite-sized morsels that give order to an unmanageable fecundity, as Fussell might maintain, or a type of unmanaged and purposeless fecundity, as Smith implies. But I also mean to show the couplet's challenge to even this formal conundrum—division between order and disorder that abets management's own vision of its preeminent necessity. Rhyme's proliferation also, it turns out, miniaturizes and, ultimately, renders inconsequential the expository payoff of metaphor, a device that presents poetry as its own self-regulating interpreter and, in that sense, as a self-solving problem. I will argue here that these poems use couplets not to present the gradual accretion of wisdom and progress, or to replicate the interpretive dynamics of figuration. Instead, paratactic couplets offer an alternative possibility: a degenerative or nonprogressive growth, a winding down or fading away at odds with the ratcheting up of attention characteristic of catastrophe, both real and metaphorical.34
Aemilia Lanyer's and Andrew Marvell's country house poems both imagine their estates’ degeneration more fully than do Jonson, Herrick, and Carew, eschewing the procataleptic vision of undisturbed equilibrium and instead allowing resentment and disorder to occur (if only to be ultimately recuperated or papered over). Lanyer's depiction of Cookham's degeneration follows the pattern of the pathetic fallacy, reproducing an elegaic mood within natural phenomena:
There's nothing fantastical about dust accumulating in uninhabited houses, or echoes ceasing when no one's around to speak. All that changes, in Lanyer's telling, is the reader's interpretive observation of those phenomena, which in turn becomes the pivotal gesture of any moderating stability. That is, whatever degeneration occurs when Margaret Clifford departs transmutes into significance via the reader's witnessing: there is no depicted cataclysm that one cannot redeem via the reader's transcendence of the poem itself. Yet whatever stability “The Description of Cooke-ham” offers also hinges on a commemorative work that rings out sententiously in couplets, which could, of course, go on—and drag the reader along—forever.
“Upon Appleton House” offers a similar account of catastrophe tamed through the speaker's and readers’ interpretive interventions. Notable here is Marvell's representation of the Regicide as the entirely natural, but also metaphorically significant process of the hewel (a woodpecker) toppling a hollowed-out oak, a process that ends with the tree's content viewing of the punishment of the “traitor-worm”: “While the oak seems to fall content, / Viewing the treason's punishment” (559–60).35 For Marvell, as for Lanyer, metaphor is not all one-way traffic, the natural world standing in for politics and political economy. Witness his contention that the Levellers “take pattern at” (450) the deforested plain, itself like canvas stretched before painting; which is, in the very next couplet, like the world when first created (never mind that this doesn't seem very applicable to an Eden known for its trees); which, in turn, is like a Spanish bullfighting ring (443–48). The speed of these reinterpretations—they occur immediately, without any intervening deliberative or contemplative work, in one couplet after another—does not issue in the comforting recognition of a world stably and symbolically connected. “Upon Appleton House” doesn't fight against a destabilizing chaos in this moment, but rather accentuates the remoteness, the tenuousness, and even the temporal contingency of these metaleptic associations.
When Maria Fairfax, Marvell's pupil, enters the poem, she miraculously enables a reordering of the miniature world of the country estate, but only after the world's general decline:
Marvell certainly celebrates Fairfax's power as an epitome, but there's still an elegiac mutedness to his praise: her local, “lesser” world is a model for paradise, but it nonetheless contains the same heaps, only more decently ordered. As Donald Friedman maintains, the poem describes not so much an ordering of chaos as a further ordering of order: “But order in this line is itself contained and limited, since ‘decent’ establishes a criterion of appropriateness, adjustment to a standard, fittingness—in other words, orderliness. And to tame order would seem to be supererogatory, or at least to ensure that its potential for government or creation is moderated, that order, again, has been ordered.”36 The couplet, I assert, is the formal badge, in both Marvell and Lanyer, of such supererogatory ordering of order.
The entire country house genre uses rhyme to figure regular growth and stability, but Lanyer and Marvell are especially keen to explore the ways in which it also connotes a winding down or repetitive degeneration closer to collapse and exhaustion. Marvell's focus seems to be on proliferating these formal mechanisms of poetic generation to absurdity. As Dubrow suggests, the sheer size of “Upon Appleton House” troubles its early condemnation of immoderation: “Given the length of other country house poems and Marvell's own condemnation, in a pivotal early stanza, of ‘superfluously spread’ men and their ‘unproportion'd dwellings’ (17, 10), might not the ninety-seven stanzas of ‘Upon Appleton House’ at the very least introduce uneasy questions?”37 The poem exhibits stichic and strophic organization, both of which are paratactic: there's no reason the poem must stop at stanza ninety-seven. In fact, it's only the overarching temporal conceit of the poem—that the poem tours the estate during the course of a single day—that prompts its conclusion. The speaker's meditation on Maria Fairfax breaks off suddenly, interrupted by symbolically freighted laborers at the end of a working day:
Marvell's repeated use of “now” does not herald a circular return to the poem's beginning, as does the concluding “now” in “To Penshurst.” Marvell's multiple nows continue to signify finality, but their repetition serves to immobilize the deictic marker, exhausting it by repetition.38 The result is a finality no longer imagined as a preparatory staging ground for growth into the future. The successive couplets in this stanza act as interpretive expostulations that close off future reinterpretation, by performing and co-opting that reinterpretation within the poem. In addition to the repeated “now,” this stanza repeats three times what something is “like”: the fishers are like Antipodes, and then they're like tortoises, but that in fact makes the speaker think of the dark hemisphere of night, which is why the reader is now enjoined to go in. The couplet here appears as a form of retrospective commentary, despite the adverbial marker: “now” I'm reinterpreting what I've just written and, in so doing, I'm resolving a couplet, which itself was apparently incomplete despite its appearance of closure, which itself prompts yet another couplet of commentary. The reader's own interpretive action is not so much satirized as replicated and trapped inside of this metaleptic sequence, thus preventing the reader from accomplishing any stabilizing interpretive work. By commenting on and reinterpreting the immediately preceding couplet, Marvell here depicts parataxis as degenerative excess, not as progressively expository or as an appositive accumulation of evidence.
In Marvell's hands, “now” doesn't always mean a cliff-edge present, a reader's interpellation before a moment of crisis and opportunity. Rather, “now” connotes yet one more added, metaleptically connected idea or thing, one that the reader has not so much discovered in the preceding lines as explicitly and merely added.39 The concluding couplet of “Upon Appleton House” accentuates precisely that feature. “Let's in: for the dark hemisphere / Does now like one of them appear” means both that the dark hemisphere happens or occurs (it appears over the horizon) and that it seems now similar to the canoe-headed fishermen (the speaker interprets and catalogues something's appearance). The poem registers, and even encapsulates in these final lines, the managerial wish not to govern, discipline, or limit things, but to grow its own interpretive possibilities, to expand deliberation like a plant, without telos or aim.40 But that growth is also nothing more than the marking of time's linear passage within the poem, not some revealed or reported truth. The dark hemisphere appears “now like” the fishermen not because of any special apprehension on the part of the reader or poet, nor because of the day's winding down. The similarity occurs because of the poem's own temporal progression, its entirely contingent additive series of “now like.” In that sense, the ambiguity of the final couplet isn't an ambiguity at all. Similes and metaphors are no longer mechanisms of explanation and discrimination, but commentative units without consequence. Like the couplets in which they are encased, one follows the other as tick follows tock.
Yet what's also happened in these brisk couplets, in miniature, is the speaker's learning from metaphors and then reapplying that learning to the real world. However fantastically and briefly, the poem stages internally literature's practical, but also metaleptic consequence, which amounts to the supplanting of immediate cause and consequence, which are the very presuppositions on which decision-making and problem-solving are based. Future comparisons and prospective valuing do not take place after the poem concludes, but occur inside the poem on the basis of distant figurative associations nonetheless rendered in this miniature space (i.e., here, the poem does what it says Maria Fairfax does). This does not mean Marvell fantasizes about arresting growth (and is on the side of ecological angels), whereas Jonson celebrates not only untrammeled resource extraction but also the expansion of managerial oversight (making him doubly on the side of the demons). Rather, the couplet's use in “Upon Appleton House” reveals deliberation, economic rationalization, and interpretive evaluation as growing like a plant, but also degenerating like one as well. Most significantly, the poem does not lament or attempt to arrest that entropic rhyming. It just peters out, like the salmon fishers returning at the end of a day's work.
“The Description of Cooke-ham” is one of the most elegiac of the English country house poems, at least in part because its addressee, Margaret Clifford, does not own Cookham and, thus, can truly leave it.41 As a result, the temporal present in the poem is one of mournful decline, an admittedly anthropomorphized melancholy, upon Clifford's departure. Early in the poem, Lanyer evokes “little Birds” (29) and “pretty birds” (47) who sing for Margaret Clifford on the estate. By poem's end, those same birds do not so much fall silent as sing a different song:
Perhaps warbling means something other than singing here, and I'm not adducing this moment to accuse Lanyer of sloppiness or inconsistency. Rather, this moment is of a piece with her self-conscious deployment of the pathetic fallacy throughout the poem. Not only are these sentimental affinities just a way of speaking and remembering; the interpretive power that they purportedly herald turns out to be a sign of a logorrheic disintegration, so demanding that it turns silence into singing in the course of two couplets. That is, even silence must lash itself to the mast of couplets’ paratactic autogeneration.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the poem's most dramatic, if not catastrophic moment: the simultaneously literal and metaphorical spectacle of kissing a tree to steal the kiss that the Countess of Cumberland already left there. As Anna Beskin notes, “The Description of Cooke-ham” doesn't ask Clifford to do anything: all the estate wants is her presence; all it offers her is song (from the birds) and yearning (from the trees).42 Thus, the poem does not use the pathetic fallacy to show a paradise of natural, cosmological harmony, but rather a presently degenerating landscape of purely symbolic gestures. The Countess departs,
At this point, within the couplet, the speaker briefly turns into a literalizer of metaphor, stealing Clifford's symbolic gesture of parting. But even that literalizing response—she steals the kiss from the tree, one assumes, by kissing the tree herself—amounts to yet one more symbolic gesture, not the final turn that one might expect from catastrophe, imagined either as decision or denouement:
After her pivotal symbolic gesture, the speaker anatomizes, in successive couplets, her own motivations. Unlike Marvell's “now like,” Lanyer's couplets do offer subordinating markers: “So [i.e., therefore] I ingratefull Creature”; “And though . . . Yet this great wrong I never could repent”; “But . . . made it most forlorne, / To show.” Lanyer explains herself in these moments, but the commentative, paratactic couplets that she uses to do so do not describe the mournful winding down of nature, but rather present a temporal degeneration animated by rhyme's own supererogatory power. That is, Lanyer's couplets stretch an ever more tenuous metaleptic skein, of both sound and sense, over a nature that proceeds without her: “While all the rest with this most beauteous tree, / Made their sad consort Sorrowes harmony” (177–78). Sorrow's harmony, as with the little birds, is silence.
Poems end, in catastrophe or resolution, only because someone reads them. In that respect, Lanyer acknowledges the extent to which even retrospective memorial completion depends on and authorizes the ever-advancing power of the reader:
Lanyer's conventional celebration of poetry's immortality here also leads to the speaker's own redundancy, hastily and desperately denied in the poem's final couplet. That is, like Marvell's concluding couplets of logorrheic reinterpretation, Lanyer offers logorrheic, even repetitious overexplanation. “And ever shall . . . ” seems to reresolve or overresolve what's already been concluded: “This poem will preserve your name after I am dead; but I'll also keep performing your wishes so long as I live.” The tacked-on, apparent reversal here is not evidence of Lanyer's poetic ineptitude, but of the couplet's own propensity toward exhausted addition, toward a solution that no longer resolves but dissolves. In such a poem, the resolution itself isn't a wrapping up, but a vestigial supplement, which is why rhyme in this case conveys a sense of disintegrating entropy. There may well be a type of closure in a couplet, as Fussell maintains, but in “The Description of Cooke-ham” it is the closure of exhausted degeneration, not managed solution. After all, the poem solves the problem of Clifford's absence only by enjoining the reader to reread the poem.
IV
Jonson and Herrick do not have a solution to the impending collapse of the earth's ecosystem. Neither do Marvell or Lanyer. Neither do I. But that's the point of these poems. Treating the world, its “resources,” and their finitude as a problem in need of solving encourages the very managerial decision-making that enabled, if not produced this impending catastrophe in the first place. Perhaps not an environmental shock-doctrine, but a growing decisionism does need something on which to act, a problem to tackle. Stopping that isn't the work of yet another decision but of a fundamental unthinking of our own cherished interventionism, especially when we think we're just surveying the scene, just reading. I'm not advocating something so glib as “save the planet; kill yourself,” but the nature of ecological cataclysm might require a more thorough interrogation of the conceptual tools humans rely on to imagine the form of the world, most notably the examiner's vision of solutions and problems (a conceptual lens particularly prevalent among pedagogues and scholars).
The point of the catastrophe in literature is not contemplative inertia in the face of destruction, degeneration, or death. Rather, the catastrophe promises readers a vision of the world in which even when there's not an opportunity for development, there's still room for active growth. Readers are in the enviable position of witnessing even the most horrifying downturns as an example of revelatory overturning, but that overturning isn't just sadistic glee or relieved thankfulness. The general proleptic impulses of the reader—treating the future as already here in the present because, in a very real sense, it is (the end of the poem or book is in your hands, right now)—are only accentuated by a country house genre that uses its speculative set-piece to transform reading into a knowing prediction and complicity. A reader's survey of the state of affairs on the estate is then not just a witnessing, but an added action, a managerial labor whose chief virtue is precisely that it is interpretation operationalized or turned into action. A reader of country house poems does not look backward at an irretrievable past or a by-gone comparison of lords that needs translation into present practice. Rather, the reader, in weighing and sorting the estate's resources, is already acting in a future of endless, relentless productivity in which nothing will be wasted, not even negation, opposition, resistance. Rhyming couplets contribute to that additive impulse, but also have the decency to admit that their jangling self-generation doesn't admit of the moderation and reassurance that comes from a purposeful development. With their automatic, contingent expansion, they hint at an alternative to managed chaos and productive problem-solving as a response to the Anthropocene. Rhyming couplets present a reading (and a concomitant world) that does not end in cataclysm or catastrophe, ice or fire, but in a repetitive, metronomic exhaustion. In that, they might well be more clear-eyed than the humans who read them.
Notes
For an early modern account of the rhetorical device of procatalepsis, the anticipation and rebuttal of an interlocutor's potential objections, see George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), bk. 3, chap. 19, sig. 2C1v.
For a description of environmental and world-system collapse, as opposed to ecological catastrophes, crises, and disasters, see Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Medford, Mass.: Polity, 2020), x, 2. Servigne and Stevens emphasize that “collapse” is something we must learn to live with, not cure or solve. In fact, most solutions end up draining more energy than they purport to save: “faced with an alarming figure, for example the oil peak, the reflex of our reductionist scientific culture is to spontaneously look for ‘solutions’ in the same domain, even if these are often incompatible with connected ‘crises’ ” (90).
For a survey of various origins for the Anthropocene that advances 1610 as the preferable date, see Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015): 171–80, at 177. Lewis and Maslin's argument for 1610 rests on the decline in CO2 levels that resulted from the mass die-off of North Americans during the century succeeding contact with Europeans (175–76).
For an expansive definition of the country house genre in the seventeenth century, see Alastair Fowler, “Country House Poems: The Politics of a Genre,” The Seventeenth Century 1, no. 1 (1986): 1–14, at 1–2. For an anthology of these poems, see also Fowler, The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). For a discussion of country house discourse in general and the political and economic developments that it charts between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, see Kari Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001). McBride dates country house discourse, as well as the poetic genre, to the sixteenth century.
For these two central classical influences on the genre, see Martial, Epigram 3.58, in Epigrams, vol. 1, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 94 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 226–31; Horace, Epode 2, “Country joys,” in Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 33 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 273–77: “Happy the man who, far from business concerns, works his ancestral acres with his oxen like the men of old, free from every kind of debt; he is not wakened, like a soldier, by the harsh bray of the bugle, and has no fear of the angry sea; he avoids both the city centre and the lofty doorways of powerful citizens” (273); “After these remarks, the money-lender Alfius, just on the very point of becoming a countryman, called in all his money on the Ides, intending to put it out again on the Kalends” (277).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 18.
For the influence of Tudor “new men,” agrarian capitalist administrators instead of feudal warriors, on the ideology of the country house poem and Jonson's poem in particular, see Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 24–25. For the contention that the country house poem emerges as a genre just as lords turned to “intermediary officials,” or professional managers, to handle interactions with servants and tenants, see G. R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19, no. 1/2 (1956): 159–74, at 161. Hibbard's essay also offers the seminal distinction between use and show that organizes much criticism of the genre (167, 174).
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. catastrophe (n.), 1, 2a, Oxford University Press, at www.oed.com.
For an early modern definition of catastrophe that combines literary and environmental meanings, see Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), sig. O5r, s.v. catastrophe: “A Catastrophe, conclusion, last act, or part of a play; the shutting up of a matter; also, th'utter ruine, subversion, destruction, fatall, or finall, end of.” For the distinction between classical and early modern understandings of the literary concept, as well as the contention that Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel introduces the concept of “catastrophe” in the European vernaculars, see Knut Ove Eliassen, “Catastrophic Turns: From the Literary History of the Catastrophic,” in The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises, ed. Carsten Meiner and Kristin Veel (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 33–57.
I recognize, of course, that in singling out this coincidence, I'm treating it as a kairotic opportunity, a gesture that jars with later claims in this essay. That's a problem that besets the critical essay as a form, but I do not have a solution to it.
Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18, at 18. Crutzen and Stoermer date the Anthropocene from the second half of the eighteenth century, specifically Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1784 (17–18).
For the contention that the country house genre reaches its peak simultaneously with increased activity in the land market, see McBride, Country House Discourse, 13, 93. For the argument that country house poems chart the conceptual shift from property as right to property as thing, thus enabling a land market, see Wayne, Penshurst, 23. Wayne also maintains that country house poems conceptualize this historical shift prior to the triumph of “bourgeois ideology” (25), a contention that's significant for my argument here about the nonreactive character of the genre.
For the intriguing suggestion that catastrophic narratives develop alongside, if not result from, public authorities’ management of crises, see Françoise Lavocat, “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” Poetics Today 33, no. 3–4 (2012): 253–99, at 271. For the contention that degrowth/décroissance impulses presume the very managerial mastery that's untenable (and part of the problem), see Servigne and Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse, 128.
Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), 32.
Aristotle, On the Soul, 413a25–35, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 288 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 75.
On the Soul, 415b13–25 (87–89).
For example, see Aemilia Lanyer's “The Description of Cooke-ham,” which asks the Countess of Cumberland, “Vouchsafe to thinke upon those pleasures past, / As fleeting worldly Joyes that could not last” (13–14) and even presents the speaker's own description as retrospective: “Oh how me thought” appears three times in the poem (16, 33, 132). Aemilia Lanyer, “The Description of Cooke-ham,” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 130–38. Further citations are given in the text by line numbers. For another example, see Thomas Carew's “To Saxham,” which opens with a retrospective view, from a winter window, of past productivity, in Poems 1640, Together with Poems from the Wyburd Manuscript (Menston, West Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1969), 45, lines 23–26.
Alastair Fowler, “The ‘Better Marks’ of Jonson's To Penshurst,” Review of English Studies 24, no. 95 (1973): 266–82, at 271. Fowler also takes this listing propensity to be part of Jonson's broader numerological organization of the poem (276).
Heather Dubrow, “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Reinterpreting Formalism and the Country House Poem,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 59–78, at 72: “While lists in other subgenres may suggest order and control, here the parataxis seems anticlosural, hence resembling gluttony more than a well-balanced diet. Much as Penshurst itself today strikes the viewer as built for envious show, so Jonson's poem and cognate texts do not uniformly achieve the modesty they advocate.” Dubrow's account of the insistent dissonance between the poems’ overt praise for moderation and their own formal immoderation (for example, Marvell's very long “Upon Appleton House” and his very long digression on the nunnery therein) informs much of my argument here.
For the argument that even when they're written in the present, country house poems are retrospective, see Judith Dundas, “A Pattern of the Mind: The Country House Poem Revisited,” Connotations 8, no. 1 (1998): 22–47, at 22.
Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” from The Forrest, in Ben Jonson, Volume 8: The Poems [and] the Prose Works, ed. C. H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 93. Further citations by line numbers are given in the text. I have modernized u/v and i/j throughout quotations from this edition.
For the contention that prolepsis effects the displacement of expectation by explanation, see Mark Currie, “The Novel and the Moving Now,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2 (2009): 318–25, at 324: “As we move forward from left to right in the linguistic sequence, from beginning to middle to end, our forward movement is joined to the backward movement of explanation, and it is something of this displacement of expectation with explanation that prolepsis seeks to condense in the present experienced as the object of a future memory.” For the contrary contention, that prolepsis produces suspense, see Teresa Bridgeman, “Thinking ahead: A Cognitive Approach to Prolepsis,” Narrative 13, no. 2 (2005): 125–59, at 134. For Puttenham's description of prolepsis as “the propounder,” a speaker sketching the outlines of something that he will later explain more fully, see Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, bk. 3, chap. 12, sig. T4r–v.
Wayne, Penshurst, 31.
For a compelling account of Jonson's suspicion of metaphor and preference for a metonymic plain style, see Wayne, 29–31. Wayne also notes Jonson's anti-Ciceronian preference for parataxis (34–35).
McBride, Country House Discourse, 7.
Williams, The Country and the City, 28. For another account of the centrality of the “negative formula,” or introducing something under erasure, to the genre, see Dubrow, “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?,” 70.
Thus, I do not think the early modern version of the genre is as incompatible with commercial wealth as Clare Bucknell maintains. For her argument, that country house poems after 1660 develop a greater comfort with commercial wealth and its display than their early modern predecessors, see Bucknell, “Luxury and Political Economy in Estate Poetry, 1670–1750,” Philological Quarterly 96, no. 3 (2017): 349–72, at 354–55, 367.
Peter Remien, The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 77.
Robert Herrick, “A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton” from Hesperides, in The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, vol. 1, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 139, line 34. I have also consulted The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1963).
Martial, Epigram 3.58, in Epigrams, 231: “at tu sub urbe possides famem mundam / et turre ab alta prospicis meras laurus, / furem Priapo non timente securus; / et vinitorem farre pascis urbano / pictamque portas otiosus ad villam / holus, ova, pullos, poma, caseum, mustum. / rus hoc vocari debet, an domus longe?” (45–51).
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 180.
For an account of the list as a nonnarratival approach to catastrophe, see William Rhodes, “The Apocalyptic Aesthetics of the List: Form and Political Economy in Wynnere and Wastoure,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 52, no. 1 (2022): 119–45.
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 113.
For Smith's contention that the literary work's completion depends on readerly calculations of marginal utility and, ultimately, exhaustion or boredom, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 44: “The completed work is thus always, in a sense, a temporary truce among contending forces, achieved at the point of exhaustion, that is, the literal depletion of the author's current resources or, given the most fundamental principle of the economics of existence, at the point when she simply has something else—or more worthwhile—to do. . . . It is for comparable reasons that we, as readers of the work, will later let our own experience of it stand: not because we have ‘fully appreciated’ the work, not because we have exhausted all its possible sources of interest and hence of value, but because we, too, ultimately have something else—more worthwhile—to do.”
Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. ed. (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2007), lines 769–76. Further citations are given by line numbers in the text.
Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 135.
Dubrow, “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?,” 72.
For the related claim, that there's an indefinite present associated with Fairfax as opposed to the much more punctual present, indicated by “now,” in other episodes within the poem, see Julianne Werlin, “Upon Appleton House,” in The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 481–98, at 489.
This is something of a Marvellian obsession. See, for example, his anaphoric “Now like” in “Eyes and Tears,” another poem of stichic and strophic organization: “Now like two clouds dissolving, drop, / And at each tear in distance stop: / Now like two fountains trickle down: / Now like two floods o'erturn and drown” (Poems, ed. Smith, 49–52).
For the transitive use of grow, and its first attestation in the eighteenth century, see OED Online, s.v. grow (v.), II.14a–b.
See McBride, Country House Discourse, 109. McBride maintains that the poem doesn't need to depict the countess's efficient management of the land as a result (119).
Anna Beskin, “The Birds of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘The Description of Cooke-Ham,’ ” Modern Philology 114, no. 3 (2017): 524–51, at 530–31.
