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c h a p t e r s i x Bowers of Bliss Jasmine, Potpourri Vases, Pleasure Gardens In his preface to his poem “The Garden,” published posthumously in Thomas Sprat’s widely read Workes of Abraham Cowley (1668), Cowley declares that what he desires most is to be the master of a “small house and a large garden.”1 Such desire, at least according to the preface, was never fulfilled. Cowley’s spatial yearning, “so strong, and so like to Covetousness,” remained frustrated by his physical location. He spent most of his last days located, as he puts it, somewhere in between the city and the country. Born in London, educated at Cambridge, exiled to Oxford (with other Royalists) and then to Paris (with Queen Henrietta Maria) during the English Civil War, Cowley returned to England as a bachelor during the Restoration and ended his literary career in Surrey, where he retired to a small home and dedicated himself to the study of botany (including translating John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense).2 Though this was better than life in the city, Cowley confesses in the preface that it was still not ideal: “I am gone out from Sodom, but I have not yet arrived at my little Zoar.”3 Cowley penned his paean to horticulture in a decidedly non-pastoral space: “I stick still in the Inn of a hired House and garden, among Weeds and Rubbish.”4 Echoing many descriptions of seventeenth-century city life as materially and metaphorically diseased, Cowley emphasizes that he had left the “monster London ,” but had not yet achieved his own garden paradise, imagined as its antithesis , a pastoral Zoar to London’s Sodom.5 That Cowley imagines London as Sodom is not surprising; post plague, such references were common, especially as writers struggled to represent the invasive presence of crowds, particularly phenomenological experiences of the crowded city. Its stench was often cited in such accounts. For example, the mud holding its paved streets in place was so foul that in 1617, Orlando Busino, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, punned that the city should be renamed Lorda, or filth, rather than Londra.6 Likewise, Ben Jonson’s “On the Famous Voyage” describes the Fleet ditch as an “ugly monster yclepèd Mud,” which, when stirred, “[b]elched forth an air as hot as at Bowers of Bliss 155 the muster,” like carts discharging a “merde-urinous load.”7 Given such pervasive , urban, “merde-urinous” mud, it is unsurprising that Cowley, and others like him, longed for an escape through gardening. Throughout the seventeenth century, gardens were increasingly imagined as a way to escape urban sensory assaults, promising a horticultural respite that could reduce all sensation to a “green thought in a green shade.”8 Juxtaposed with the cramped, interior writing spaces and rubbish-strewn gardens of the preface, Cowley’s poetic garden celebrates the expansive, yet ordinate , pleasures of nature. These are both sensual and literary, imagined to be like those of a “virtuous wife” who offers pleasures refined and sweet: “the fairest garden in her looks and in her mind the wisest books.”9 And the pleasures are multisensorial; the garden offers “a gentle, cool retreat,” from the burning heat of the world, along with delicious grapes and melons to satisfy even the most re- fined epicurean. Harmonious birdsongs offer sonic pleasures, while lilies, along with the roses, visually amplify the garden’s beauty. Such roses also issue forth a delightful scent that, when mingled with the scent of jasmine, creates a perfume strong enough to counter even the “pestilent clouds of a populous town.”10 Given the choice between the country and the city, as his narrator asks, “Who that has reason and his smell/Would not among roses and jasmine dwell?”11 Cowley’s pastoral celebration of garden pleasures was not new; writers since Horace had celebrated the bucolic pleasures afforded in nature. Yet his garden— and its emphasis on olfactory pleasures within it—describes a new sensation in seventeenth-century England: the scent of jasmine. The floral scent of roses and jasmine surpasses other perfumes sold in London’s luxury markets, including the ambergris-scented gloves and musk-based perfumes sold in the Royal and New Exchange. For “the earth itself breathes better perfumes here/Than all the female men or women there, Not without cause, about them bear.”12 The delights of jasmine are imagined as natural, issued forth from the earth...

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