Thomas Churchyard's Country House Poem

Abstract

COUNTRY house poetry is a relatively compact genre in terms of how many English country house poems scholars have identified. Generally speaking, Ben Jonson's ‘To Penshurt’ (1616) and Amelia Lanyer's ‘Description of Cookeham’ (1611) are taught and discussed as the preeminent forms of the genre, and Geoffrey Whitney's ‘Patria Cuique Cara: To Richard Cotton, Esquire’ has been discussed as the earliest representative of this poetic form, dating to 1586.1 Given the fluid nature of genre, it seems that once again the country house catalogue/collection can be expanded to include an even earlier example of the form: Thomas Churchyard's ‘A Letter in Maie’, published in 1580.2 The only mention of this poem seems to come from Steven May and William Ringler, who identify ‘A Letter in Maie’ as a country house poem in Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603.3 One can easily recognize elements of country house poetry in Churchyard's poem. First, poems of the country house genre have at their nucleus not just the country house itself but also the owner of said house. The house simply supplies the poet a means to an end, and that end is simply to ‘[idealize] the aristocratic lord, his country estate, and the responsibilities and perquisites of land ownership’.4 And, in country house poetry, the lord's unceasing, generous hospitality to all constitutes the principal responsibility of land ownership. Thus the hospitable lord is a virtuous lord. While writers of this genre had used different poetic devices and conventions to craft panegyrics, one staple convention dominates the landscape of such poems: the estate as the descriptive focal point of the lord's hospitality, thereby denoting the lord's virtuous nature.