“Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade.”
–Andrew Marvell, 1681
Sometime in 1612, the genius dramatist, unofficial Poet Laurette, and all-around Falstaffian personality that was the writer Ben Jonson imagined a sort of epic voyage down London’s now-long-lost Fleet River. Jonson’s epic concerned neither the harrowing of hell, nor the loss of Paradise, or at least it didn’t do either in quite the manner that Dante had or that Milton would. Rather, Jonson envisioned the travails of his characters on this industrial Styx as less sacred and more profane, lacking transcendence but making up for it in the sheer fecundity of sewage that floated upon the canal that today flows underneath the bohemian environs of Camden Town, and whose tinkling can be heard through sewer grates in Clerkenwell.
In Jonson’s mock-epic “On the Famous Voyage,” the bucolic and pastoral have been replaced with offal and shit, where “Arses were heard to croak, instead of frogs,” and a thick crust called “Ycleped Mud” composed of excrement and refuse was known to bob like moss on the surface of the water. So disgusting are the noxious fumes from both commerce and latrine that Jonson’s fellow colleague, the poet Sir John Harrington, would write in his 1586 A New Discourse of a Stale Subject Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax that such smells “are two of those pains of Hell…and therefore I have endeavored in my poor buildings to avoid those two inconveniences as much as I may.” And so, at his manor of Kelston, he constructed the forerunner of the modern flushing toilet.
Conventions of pastoral poetry often had characters with names like Strephon and Chloe in repose upon halcyon shores; Jonson’s is rather a sort of anti-pastoral, one in keeping with the grime and dirt that increasingly defined his era. On the Fleet River, “The sinks ran grease, and hair of measled hogs, /The heads, houghs, entrails, and the hides of dogs.” Flowing from the center green of the city out to the Thames, the Fleet was polluted with the garbage of nascent industry, a slick, oily stream; a fetid and beshitted, offal-filled cesspool, made glistening with the rendering of animal fat and the corpses of dogs and cats. Notorious prisons like Ludgate and Newgate were on the banks of that now-subterranean river; plague-ridden slums filled with rural transplants clung to the brown shores of the Fleet.
In his delightful A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, social historian Ian Mortimer describes the privies that would have been in homes lining rivers like the Fleet: a “twelve-foot shaft of several hundred gallons of decomposing excrement and urine…seeping into the clay, for two or three years.” Mortimer reminds us, however, that though “Noisome smells and noxious fumes are common” in early modern England, this “does not mean that people do not notice them.” Indeed, both the population growth of London as well as the beginnings of mass industry, from leather tanning to wool dying, would have wafted new smells into the nostrils of the English. As Jonson wrote with infernal gleam, “Your Fleet Lane Furies…That, with still-scalding streams, make this place hell.”
Filth had been a topic of literary expression long before Jonson, one only read Geoffrey Chaucer, Francois Rabelais, or Giovani Boccaccio to know that poets have long sung not just of heaven, but of the asshole, the piss-bucket, and the privy as well. I’d venture that “On the Famous Voyage” does something a little bit different than the scatological depictions in The Canterbury Tales, however. Because Jonson’s London was so much bigger than Chaucer’s, because it was just beginning to be ensnared in the environmental degradations of industrialization, the scope of the olfactory and hygienic assault is greater than a Medieval writer could have imagined. “On the Famous Voyage” is satirical verse, yes; but it’s also an ecological poem.
Almost three centuries before the Romantic poet William Blake would castigate the “dark Satanic Mills” of Britain’s industrial revolution, Jonson gave expression to misgivings about how London was quickly erasing nature in the name of mercantile aspiration. Throughout the 16th-century, London expanded from the former sleepy agrarian capital of a sleepy agrarian kingdom into what would soon be the largest city on Earth. Around when Jonson was born, the city’s population was roughly 70,000 people; by the time he wrote “On the Famous Voyage,” it had grown to 200,000. Only a half-century later and London was home to half-a-million women and men. Emily Cockayne writes in Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England that “London was a wealthy bustling and expanding city, but infrastructural development could not keep pace and parts of the city became increasingly crowded, dirty and noisy.” Jonson didn’t just speak of dirt, he sang about waste; he didn’t just talk of filth, he was revulsed at garbage. “On the Famous Voyage” was among the first of what critics call ecopoems, and that’s because it’s an early missive from the beginning of our current geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
That term has become recently trendy in academic discussions of literature, a designation borrowed from geologists and climatologists to clarify the ways in which the Earth has been inextricably altered by humanity. With coinage frequently credited to the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene is supposed to define our current era, when people have (mostly for worse) altered the environment of the world in such a way that we’ve become the dominate actor and force in the acidity of the ocean, the thickness of the ozone layer, the very temperature of the planet. Legal scholar Jedediah Purdy explains in After Nature: A Politics of the Anthropocene that “we have made the world our anthill: the geological layers we are now laying down on the earth’s surface are marked by our chemicals and other industrial emissions, the pollens of our crops, and the absence of the many species we have driven to extinction.”
Scientists disagree on when it’s appropriate to mark the beginnings of the Anthropocene. As the period is most spectacularly defined by anthropogenic climate catastrophe, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, with its harnessing of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, would seem an appropriate starting point. Others identify the Anthropocene’s creation moment as recently as the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in 1945, to as long as 10 millennia ago when agriculture first emerged on the silty banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. At the risk of betraying my own early-modern-minded myopia, a credible case could be made for Jonson’s era as the dawn of the Anthropocene, which would have certain implications for how we read him and his compatriots in our own day, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report concludes that we may have less than a decade to avert the worst results of global warming.
There are social, cultural, technological, and economic reasons for understanding the 16th and 17th centuries as the earliest decades of the Anthropocene. By Jonson’s birth there had already been a century of the Columbian Exchange, whereby the flora and fauna of the western and eastern hemispheres, which had been separated for millions of years, suddenly circumnavigated the world in a flurry of trade that radically altered the planet. Many of the economic and social trends that we associate with modernity—colonialism, globalization, and capitalism—see their start in Jonson’s century. The Renaissance also helps us to understand the interactions between climate and humanity, as the women and men of Jonson’s day were in the midst of what’s been called the “Little Ice Age.” During that period, temperatures plummeted, possibly due to the reforestation of North America brought about by plague and genocide that decimated native populations. Arguably, this process didn’t end until the cumulative effect of the Industrial Revolution’s mass emissions of carbon-dioxide began to warm the planet—obviously an ongoing process. During those years of snow and ice, Europe appeared radically different from the way it does today, as accounts of Tudor fairs upon the frozen Thames or the grey winter paintings of Peter Breughel attest. Philipp Blom in Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present writes that “Climate change…affected everyone. There was no escaping the weather.” What’s crucial to remember is that though the thermometer’s mercury was headed in a different direction than it is today, the weather of Jonson’s day was also shaped profoundly by the affairs of people.
An important result of humanity’s changed relationship to nature—the alteration that defines the Anthropocene—is the emergence of new urban spaces, new relationships between people and place that fundamentally changed the experience of what it means to be an inhabitant of Earth. Something new in “On the Famous Voyage:” Jonson has produced a literature that isn’t just about hygiene (or the lack thereof) but about mass pollution. For such lyrics to be written, the conditions of crowded, filthy, industrialized urbanity were required. “On the Famous Voyage” is about environmental collapse. Though rarely thought of as such, Jonson is an ecopoet at the precise moment in history when we redefined our relationship to nature—for the worse. Which is precisely what begs for a reevaluation of not just Jonson, but that entire tribe of under-read 17th-century poets whom he influenced and that called themselves the “Tribe of Ben,” posterity remembering them (when it does) as the Cavalier poets. Writers like Robert Herrick, John Suckling, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and most famous of them, though only occasionally categorized in their company, Andrew Marvell. Editor Miriam K. Starkman writes in her introduction to 17th-Century English Poetry that for the Cavalier poets, “External nature is…[the] most direct referent, source of beauty, joy, and mutability.”
For the Cavaliers, the pastoralism of classical poets like Hesiod and Virgil had much to recommend. One of their favored genres was the “country-house poem,” where their ecological concerns become apparent. In Jonson’s 1616 “To Penshurst,” he described the manor of Sir Richard Sidney with a language very different from that which he deployed four years earlier in his panegyric to the Fleet River. In “To Penshurst” Jonson extols this estate with its “better marks, of soil, of air, /Of wood, of water,” this “lower land, that to the river bends, /Thy sheep, they bullocks, kine, and calves do feed;/The middle grounds they mares and horses breed.” Jonson’s is a rhetoric of Eden, with prelapsarian tongue he describes:
…thy orchard fruit, they garden flowers, hurst
Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
The blushing apricot and wooly peach
Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.
Such prelapsarian evocation of Eden is a common trope in country-house poems, what Starkman described as “vague overtones of a faded fragrance, a world just lost.” Unlike the Puritan, the Cavalier does not simply mourn paradises lost, but rather preserves a bit of that charged immanence within nature as it is now, acknowledging for the possibility of transcendence just below surface appearances. What the country-house poem presents is paradise in verse, a lyric crafted by the human mind as surely as a garden is planted by human hands, with the verse itself becoming a type of perfection that you can step into. Consider Jonson’s clear influence in Marvell’s almost-perfect 1681 “Upon Appleton House:”
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
By imagining a world without the fall, poems such as these query us with the possibility of a future where the fall has been reversed, where the exploitation of nature is ceased. “On the Famous Voyage,” with its bawdy, earthy, fecal corporality may seem a long distance from Penshurst Palace. Yet pastoralism and its discontents are actually part of the same project; the disjunct between depicting nature in its abundance as well as the exploitation of the environment share a similar ideological underpinning. Starkman explains that for the Cavaliers, there is a “stoical awareness of the tragedy of Nature, the garden of innocence violated by experience.” Whether writing about bucolic orchards or shit-contaminated rivers, whether talking of nature or its violation, what these poems take as their subject is the environment. What their critics might say they lack in ingenuity, the Cavaliers more than make up in ecological prescience.
Drawing inspiration from Jonson’s verse, the Cavaliers have historically (and with much reductionism) been made to contrast with the other dominant tradition of 17th-century English poetry, the metaphysical school influenced by John Donne, and including George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne. Owing much to a distinction made by Dr. Johnson (of no relation to Ben) in his 1781 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, the author described the Cavalier as being concerned with “sprightliness and dignity,” a verse which “endeavors to be gay,” where the poetry is “liberally supplied with… soft images; for beauty is more easily found.” By contrast, Dr. Johnson saw the metaphysicals as writing poetry where the “most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and illusions.” Something, perhaps, to be observed in the fact that where the Cavaliers were content to observe nature, the metaphysicals mined the environment for metaphors, as if they were a precious non-renewable resource hidden below the broken crust of the world. Poetry such as Donne’s was defined by the so-called “metaphysical conceit,” the deployment of a metaphor that was surprising and novel—Dr. Johnson’s “heterogenous ideas… yoked by violence together.”
If the Cavaliers were plain-spoken, the metaphysicals were sophisticated; the former literal and physical, the latter metaphorical and spiritual; the first were backward-looking pastoral conservatives, the second forward-looking aesthetic radicals. Not to mention the coming political and sectarian splits of the English civil wars, with the Cavaliers (true to their courtly name) associated with High Church religion while fighting on behalf of the Royalist cause. John Stubbs writes in Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War that “the cavaliers were elegant gentlemen, chivalrous if sometimes dissipated,” though by contrast their political adversaries “the roundheads were religious and social revolutionaries.” Such a difference could presumably be seen in their writing. Cavalier verse lends itself to the almost pagan imagery of a poem like Herrick’s 1648 “The Argument to His Book,” which indeed could be read as an ars poetica for the entire tradition:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers:
Of April, May, of June, and July-flower.
I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes
Of bride-grooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.
I write of youth, of love and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly-wantonness.
Nobody would mistake that sentiment for a Puritan ethos. Yet there is a simplicity to the traditional division; it implies that the Cavaliers lacked in Christianity (though Herrick was a priest), or that the metaphysicals lacked in sensuality—and anybody who has read Donne knows that that’s not the case. Literary historians often still teach the split between those two 17th-century literary traditions as an archetypal and Manichean struggle between abstraction and literalism, metaphysical sophistication and sentimental pastoralism. Despite the crudeness of such a formulation, there is a romanticism in understanding seventeenth-century poetry as divided between the head of the Puritan and the heart of the Cavalier. Scholar Earl Miner observes in an essay included in the Norton Critical Edition of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets that the Cavalier ideal “reflects many things: a conservative outlook, a response to a social threat, classical recollections, love of a very English way of life, and a new blending of old ideas.”
Dr. Johnson, it should be said, cared not for the metaphysicals; his poetic conservatism and political royalism predisposed him to the Cavaliers, but this is a position that has not been commonly held for a very long time. For the literary modernists of the early 20th-century, the Cavaliers seemed naïve, sentimental, simple, pastoral; poet T.S. Eliot in his 1922 essay on the metaphysicals argued that “civilization comprehends great variety and complexity… The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” For Eliot and others like him, the metaphysicals with their ingenious and sophisticated rhetoric, their complexity and abstraction, were a model to be emulated, and the Cavaliers, well, not so much.
The result is that the Cavaliers have seen a critical eclipse over the course of the last 10 decades. The metaphysicals dwelled amongst the stars, but the Cavaliers were content to muck in the dirt, and perhaps to dwell upon the beauty of the rosebuds while they were there. The ideology of the Cavalier was seen as hopelessly archaic when confronting the complexity of modernity. Not for nothing, the Cavaliers—and their royalist political program—are associated with Maypoles and Mummer parades, feast-days and carnival, and all the rest of the lackadaisical accoutrement conflated with a Merry Old England swept aside by Puritanism and modern capitalism. The Cavalier is thus a figure of naïve romanticism, Stubbs writing of how “Everyone can picture him…with his lovelocks, his broad hat, his mantle and bucket-topped boots, the basked handled rapier at his side, a buskin covering his satin doublet.” It’s true that the Cavaliers were often aristocratic (though not always), often royalist (though some like Marvell equivocated with chameleon-like urgency depending on politics), and that their verse could be plain-spoken and conservative (though deceptively so).
But we need not abandon them because of their embrace of a royalist politics; we need not obscure them because they spoke not to Eliot, or because modernists didn’t find their verse sufficiently complicated. To slur the Cavaliers as “conservative” is to perform a political category mistake; it’s to impose the conditions of the present day onto a period where exact corollaries are impossible to find. Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets that the Cavaliers mark the “beginnings of a literary tradition that takes pastoral convention into the actual countryside and finds in the harmony between nature and nurture a civilizing theme.” They have at the core of their ethics an understanding about an inseparable connection between nature and humanity that is almost “pagan in attitude.” For all of their reputation as being steadfastly traditionalist, and as much as their enthusiasms for the Caroline regime strike us as reactionary, the Cavaliers’ embrace of nature does have a radical message, standing as it does in opposition to the environmental exploitation that in our current day takes us to the precipice of complete collapse.
Stubbs described how the “cavalier and the puritan are potent archetypes. The puritan upholds the work ethic and the will to give up pleasure, scourging the soul for flaws. In the cavalier we have the individualist, more attuned to the passing moment and in greater touch with his desires.” How could we not recommend them, the Cavaliers, standing as they did in opposition to positivism, Puritanism, and privatization—forces that threaten to destroy our world—at the precise moment when those forces first emerged? Often dismissed for lacking seriousness, for their enthusiasm for sport and drink, for their indulgence, foppery, and libertinism, could we not identify such values as precisely those that should be valorized? Could we not see in their celebration of fairs, feasts, festivals, flora, and fauna a denunciation of work, industry, commerce, and all the rest of the alienated soullessness that now threatens us with ecological collapse?
Now is the precise moment to consider the earliest body of eco-poems ever penned—at the moment when the Anthropocene dawned. There is as much of Extinction Rebellion in Cavalier poetry as there is royalism. In embracing nature, they rejected the Puritanism that threatens our world, and in the process, what emerged was a powerful aesthetic of “Anarchopastoralism.” Schmidt writes that a “long time must pass before an anachronism is released back into time,” but if ever there was a moment to embrace the radical ecopoetics of the Cavaliers and their Anarchopastoralism, it’s in our current warm winter of the late Anthropocene. Too often dismissed by the ruthless individualists of modernism as embarrassing throwbacks engaged in Medieval affectations, the Cavaliers actually offered a complex meditation on the relationship of humanity to nature, and how the violation of the later compels the same for the former.
What the modernists saw as so rightly evocative in metaphysical poetry—the abstraction, the ingenuity, the philosophical sophistication—is arguably the foundation of the very alienation that has so easily separated us from nature; an inadvertent capitulation to the inhuman perspective that treats both people and the environment as mere commodities. This is not to blame the metaphysicals—that would be absurd, and I’m too much in love with the verse of Donne and Herbert to ever countenance such a thing. Besides, I may argue that the Cavaliers are more than just charming, but it’d be a hard claim to count Lovelace the poetic equal of Donne. What the metaphysical poets did accomplish, however, is a certain achievement of abstraction; a product of the age that allowed for mechanistic metaphors for human anatomy, where the French philosopher Rene Descartes could argue contra all experience that animals are simply little machines. Such a perspective is one that hasn’t unsurprisingly pushed us deeper into the Anthropocene.
To court reductionism once again, it’s the Puritanism that’s so dangerous in the metaphysicals, but we might yet be saved by the paganism in the Cavaliers; we may yet find our proper relationship to what Herrick called the “civil wilderness.” Stubbs writes that the “puritan is more dominant in recent times, present in the astonishing intellectual and physical achievements of the modern era—achieved at crushing human cost.” Might we not find room for the Cavalier then? For theirs is a theology that Starkman described as “under the influences of Neo-Platonism,” a “sensibility…well on its way to secular transcendentalism,” where nature “is divine.”
Perhaps the most crucial, if most subtle, difference between the metaphysicals and the Cavaliers is in their approach towards time, mutability, finality, and death. With a touch of critical eccentricity, I claim that for the metaphysicals their approach to the hereafter is one of memento mori, but for that of the Cavalier it’s carpe diem. The first refers to the approach that asks a penitent to forever remember while they are alive that one day, they shall be dead; the second is the exhortation that because you’ll shall be dead one day, you must “Seize the day” in the present. Memento mori is the aesthetic of spoiled fruit and time-glasses depicted in Dutch vanitas paintings; it’s the winged skull on a Puritan’s grave. Carpe diem, by contrast, is the drained wine-glass, the chicken bone cleared of meat. Not necessarily mutually exclusive positions, but as aesthetics they differ by giving the metaphysicals a gloss of piety, prayer, and death-obsession; the Cavaliers one of a lusty embrace of the moment. Carpe diem is the convention that allows Herrick to implore virgins to “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, /Old Time is still a-flying;/And this same flower that smiles today/To-morrow will be dying.”
While often simply read as an injunction to live life to the fullest, Stubbs correctly notes how this poem from Herrick’s 1648 Hesperides is “almost an austere lyric.” For lacking the apparent sobriety of memento mori, poems read as carpe diem are counter-intuitively more severe. Without claiming that any of the poets across both traditions were anything other than (mostly) orthodox Christians, the differences between a memento mori and a carpe diem perspective are crucial. While it would seem that the later would encourage us to live a life that could be wasteful, the opposite is actually true. Without the consolations of eternity, we are to make our lives as fit as possible while we’re actually living them, for when “now to the abyss I pass” (as Marvell wrote in 1651), any continued action becomes an impossibility.
What the ecopoetics of the Cavaliers offer us, in this era where (to repurpose a lyric of Carew), “the winters [are] gone, the earth hath lost/Her snow-whited robes, and now no more the frost/Candies the grasse, or casts an ycie creame/Vpon the silver Lake, or Chyrstall streame,” is a type of wisdom. Memento mori may ask us to reflect on the singularity of our own death, yet such a view presupposes a passing moment separating this life from the next, an entrance into eternity where all may be reconciled, all may be answered, all may be saved. But we can’t wait for such a moment of enlightenment, or for saviors other than ourselves to provide entrance into the next scene. Carpe diem, contrary to its reputation, does not necessarily hold such a naive faith. What “Gather ye rosebuds” reminds us of is not just our own mortality, but that of Arcadia as well. It’s an elegy for a dying world. The Cavalier intuits that the garden is not a symbol for anything higher; the garden is all that we have—and it’s good enough. Now our task is to preserve it.
