GREEN THOUGHTS The forms, affordances, and politics of garden poetry by Jake Arthur A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2016 Arthur ii Arthur iii Frontispiece to John Worlidge’s System Agriculturæ, 1675. Arthur iv Contents Acknowledgements................................................................................................v Abstract................................................................................................................vi Introduction..........................................................................................................1 1. “More Luscious Earth” ...................................................................................17 2. “My Humble State Despise” ...........................................................................45 3. “Fond Human Enclosures” .............................................................................66 4. “What If I Don’t Have a Garden?” .................................................................87 Conclusion.........................................................................................................105 Works Cited.......................................................................................................109 Arthur v Acknowledgements I’m very grateful to my supervisors, Sarah Ross and Anna Jackson, for their helpful suggestions, email responses outside of work hours, and life advice. Thanks to my flatmates past and present, and to my family. Thank you to Todd Atticus for the love and the flower dinkuses. Arthur vi ABSTRACT The garden is a rich site for framing the flows and contestations of culture because it is, on the one hand, a social practice with its own extensive history, methods, and concerns, and, on the other, a rich literary image. This interwoven history makes it a worthwhile object of study, but it has also resulted in studies that are either decidedly broad, very specific, or that focus exclusively on one kind of garden at the expense of the other. This thesis seeks to address these obstacles by challenging the line between real gardens and their images. Applying a novel working definition of “form”, I argue that the constituent forms of real gardens can be conceptualised as a set of meaning-bearing resources which enable, when represented, kinds of figurative meanings. This thesis considers the real garden as reducible to three forms essential to all gardens: enclosure, internal arrangement, and cultivation by a gardener. Such a distillation allows us to interrogate persistent meanings of the garden image across literatures by fixing it as an object of inquiry. These three forms, I argue, enable political meanings, figuring the relationship of individuals to greater systems or wholes, their arrangement of elements, and dramatising the operation and limits of power. However, those forms have been emphasised, represented, and ultimately signified differently in images of various provenance and in various writers’ hands. My chapters trace the garden’s persistent forms across time and place. Two of my chapters address Civil War England. The first considers how gardens respond to a specific discursive context to imagine a dystopian state in Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower against Gardens” and the potential for utopian change in “The Garden”. In my second chapter, I turn to Lucy Hutchinson’s “Elegies”, considering how her poetic garden operates within the elegy and country house genres and responds to literary precedents like Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” Arthur vii to characterise a grief that is intractably personal and political. My final two chapters shift in time and place to consider twentieth- and twenty-first-century New Zealand poetry, analysing in the third chapter the turn away from colonial settler verse in Ursula Bethell’s poetry towards the domestic garden as a site of home and belonging. Finally, my last chapter considers Jenny Bornholdt’s contemporary New Zealand verse, in which the garden image dramatises the power imbalance and artifice intrinsic to poetry itself. This thesis therefore seeks to produce general knowledge about how the garden, through its forms, can mean, while also producing specific knowledge about how garden images have meant in particular texts across different contexts. I argue that these are not contrary aims: a new approach to the garden as a set of forms proves an incisive tool with which to understand this important and variegated image. Arthur 1 INTRODUCTION: Garden forms and their affordances To write about nature is to write about ourselves. Not an objective entity, nature is a category people construct as they represent it. As Rebecca Bushnell puts it, “Any argument we might make on behalf of nature . tells us as much about our fears and hopes for [our] culture as it does about what lurks in the woods and blooms in the fields” (5). This is particularly true of the garden, commonly held to be a part of what we call “nature” but also the direct product of our cultivation. By definition entailing human intervention, the garden is at once “natural” and conspicuously human; it is both manmade and “deeply entangled with the words and images” we use to describe it and its making (Cronon 20). As a result, gardens are rich sites through which we can frame the flows and contestations of a culture. Though many studies recognise gardens as socially constructed, they rarely combine scrutiny of how they are represented in literature with an understanding of gardens as a historical practice. Gardening is a practice with a long history. We know that gardens existed in Ancient Mesopotamia from as early as 2000 BCE, becoming important elements of royal palaces, places of worship, and city design (Dalley 1). Gardens were a significant part of early Islamic culture, and were adopted in the cities of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, before spreading throughout Europe and around the world. Gardens have never had a fixed purpose, nor a fixed design. From royal courtyards and the intricate geometries of Italian and French-inspired Renaissance gardens of the sixteenth century to the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century fashion for wilderness gardens (Clark), gardens have changed over time. Moreover, the way gardens should be has often been hotly contested, reflecting cultural anxieties or current political debates. These arguments extend to the way in which they are or Arthur 2 have been represented. Gardens are places of cultural disputation as “each culture endows garden forms with particular sets of meanings”, varying over time but also “within that culture, [so that] those meanings, and therefore vehicles that express them, are contested and not fixed” (Helmreich 1). These vehicles are both natural and representational. Helmreich locates in the resurgence of gardens (and controversy about them) in the nineteenth and twentieth century an attempt to counteract a perceived loss of England’s green character (7-8). However, this image of England—and its embodiment specifically in the garden—cannot be discussed separately from the long literary and artistic tradition of representing England in terms of ideal natural places, whether it be the Garden of Eden, Homer’s locus amoenus, Virgil and Theocritus’ Ecologues, or the Canticlean (and Marian) enclosed garden. The garden’s ability to reflect political issues such as the makeup of the nation is, I argue, not only traceable to these canonical precedents, but fundamentally enabled by certain forms essential to all gardens. In his essay “Different Spaces”, Foucault describes the garden as the oldest example of a “heterotopia”, a place “outside all places” where “all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed” (178). A place of “mixed, intermediate experience” (179), he describes the garden as “deeply symbolic” (181): The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that is said to have joined together within its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space even more sacred than the others which was like the umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (this was the location of the basin and the fountain); and all the garden’s vegetation was supposed to be distributed within that space, within that figurative microcosm . The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and the whole world at the same time. (181-2) Arthur 3 This formulation is helpful because its concept of emplacements—“the relations of proximity between points or elements” (176)—ties the symbolism of the garden to its materiality. The garden is conspicuously formed and cultural meanings emerge from or percolate around those forms, its enclosed “rectangle” and its “distributed” plantings allowing it, in Foucault’s argument, to figure the world itself. Fig. 1. Geometrical seventeenth-century garden designs from Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1979; print; 119) Gardens in literature derive their meanings from a long literary tradition, but those meanings—past and present—stem also from the material forms that constitute gardens in the real world. This thesis will argue that conceiving of the garden as a persistent set of forms can prove an incisive tool in understanding it as an important and culturally various poetic image. This study responds