“Pond’rous Engines” in “Outraged Groves”: The Environmental Argument of Anna Seward’s “Colebrook Dale”

Abstract

Anna Seward’s “Colebrook Dale” is the first known account of the locale to figure industrial activity associated with the famous ironworks as a sexual violation of the landscape. Seward’s poem challenges masculine narratives of providential and progressive history as it enters into dialogue with earlier topographical poems (such as Milton’s Comus, Pope’s Windsor‐Forest, and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden) and translates their mythic images of rape into an implicit argument against the industrial degradation of Colebrook Dale. Although Seward’s nascent ecofeminist consciousness is finally a very selective one, privileging “beauteous” Colebrook Dale at the expense of her “unpoetic” sisters, the tutelary role she assumes as a speaking genius loci marks a significant intervention in the masculine loco‐descriptive tradition.