10 - Speaking Water and Seeping Memory in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion

Summary

Abstract

xThis chapter continues the treatment of Michael Drayton as early modern England's greatest ecopoet by attending to how his epic voices the memories of rivers. Poly-Olbion also comes alive when read through an ecofeminist lens, as female figures speak for the non-human world. For Drayton, water moves as the primal source through a network of rivers, which serve as our guides, our historians, and our opinion columnists leading us across his island. The connections between water and memory, and Drayton's innovative fusion of the chorography and the Tudor complaint poem, lay out an historically specific version of environmental awareness, touching on mountains and forests but offering most powerfully an example of hydropoesis, or a watery aesthetics.

Keywords: rivers, Michael Drayton, deep time, ecofeminism, posthumanism, complaint

Recent readers have argued convincingly that Michael Drayton (1563–1631) wrote with a unique and powerful ecological sensibility. Todd Borlik calls him “England's first environmentalist,” Andrew McRae calls Poly-Olbion “one of the most passionate expressions of environmental concern in the period,” and Sukanya Dasgupta says of the poem that “the ecopolitical resonances of the poetics permeate the entire text.” Poly-Olbion, the voluminous long poem, traditionally classified as chorography—a long description of place, which had a vogue of popularity following William Camden's Britannia in 1586—was published in two parts: eighteen books in 1612, and twelve more in 1622. We might see Poly-Olbion as either the last gasp of the chorographical moment or its crowning and most daring achievement. It dares in its ecopoetics, its formal innovations, its attention to human cognition as ecologically dependent, its deployment of gender, and its politics. But so far, most green readings of this poem have been connected with Drayton's passionate concerns for England's forests, and historical events surrounding deforestation, where he tells the story of the economic changes that were leading to massive environmental change in early seventeenth-century England. In short, our Green Drayton has been a Woody Drayton.