“To Penshurst” is a country-house poem, a sub-species of topographical poetry (from the Latin topos or “place” and graphia or “writing”). Jonson modeled his poem on classical precedents, notably works by the Roman poets Horace and Martial, both of whom were influential on much of Jonson’s verse.
Though Jonson has long been credited with originating the form in English, we know that an earlier country-house poem was published in 1611 by Aemilia Lanyer, one of the few but brilliant female poets of the early-modern era. Her “Description of Cooke-ham” is the subject of our next class.
The Penshurst estate belonged in Jonson’s day to Robert Sidney, member of a noble family with longstanding ties to Tudor royalty. Indeed, the property had been bequeathed to Robert’s grandfather William Sidney by Edward VI, son to Henry VIII, who had confiscated the estate from its previous owner, the Duke of Buckingham, following the latter’s being charged with treason and executed in 1521. The Sidneys’ aristocratic connections were further enhanced by the marriage of Robert’s father Henry Sidney to a relative of the Earl of Leicester, a court favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth’s successor to the English throne, James I, is known to have complained about the aristocracy’s neglect of their country estates as they spent more and more time in London, a fast-growing metropolis filled with numerous social and cultural attractions, as well as the vices of gambling, drinking, and whoring that tended to diminish noble reputations. James was concerned that the presence of regional aristocratic authority is essential to the keeping of law and order, the observance of established social hierarchy, and the smooth functioning of a feudal economic system.
Central to that system was a social arrangement in which local farmers and shepherds defer to their land-holding superiors—families such as the Sidneys—in exchange for the right to work the land and derive sustenance therefrom. Jonson’s poem celebrates this traditional world of reciprocal duties and ties, preferring the simple elegance of the Penshurst estate to the supposed showiness and ornate flamboyance of the nouveau riches—i.e., the affluent but non-noble gentry, merchants, and wealthy yeomen of an emerging capitalist economy.
The prompts below suggest that we not take for granted the poem’s ostensibly celebratory stance. Though Jonson was a court poet, and a master of social navigation and mobility, he was also deeply critical of court life and aristocratic pretension (as we saw in the two epigrams examined previously).
How does the poem handle its nature imagery, and what might this suggest about the place of powerful nobility in the English countryside? What are we to make, for example, of lines 32-38? What other passages describing Penshurst’s natural environs are interesting, and why?
Lines 45-50 contain one of several passages describing what is absent from this ideal world. What is identified here as missing? And why do you suppose these things in particular are mentioned?
Notice in lines 57-70 the speaker’s description of dining at Penshurt. What does this tell us about his attitude? Note too that the speaker refers to himself here. Why? And to what effect?
What mean lines 90-92? Why mention this at all?
What other passages do you find striking, and why?
©Robert Whalen, 2023