Aemilea Lanyer (1569-1645) 
"The Description of Cooke-ham" (1611)

Lanyer was the daughter of one court musician, and married another.  One of the few women published during the Renaissance, her poetry has an early feminist quality.  One poem contrasts the good women who stayed with Christ during the crucifixion with the evil men who killed him and the weak men who abandoned him.  She further defended Eve and other women against the charge that they were more immoral than men.  The querelle de femmes, the "debate over women," their worthiness or unworthiness, had been going on for centuries.   This is the same debate that the Wife of Bath participated in when she tore up her husband's misogynistic book.

"The Description of Cooke-ham" praises the estate of her patroness, Margaret, countess of Cumberland,  as being a lost Eden for women.  In this poem, she uses the conventions of pastoral poetry and farewell to a place poems.

She employs the pathetic fallacy, wherein she imagines that nature shares her feelings.
 
2 Grace has 2 meanings 
  1. God's grace
  2. the favor of Margaret toward her & the other women.
3 "the muses gave their full consent," i.e., women were allowed to write with no opposition.  In that time, writing was considered men's work.  Women should tend to their knitting. 
 
23-25 An Edenic paradise. 
 
31 Philomela - the presence of this bird (the nightingale) in the garden reminds us of the violence often perpetrated against women. 
 
64 "Phoebus" = Apollo, god of the sun.  The oak's shade protected the ladies against the assault of the sun. 
 
83 "holy Writ" = the Bible 
"in some fair tree" = God reveals himself in nature.  The idea that God does this is sometimes called "natural revelation" or "general revelation," God's revelation to everybody in general.  The Bible is special revelation that comes to some people in a supernatural manner.
 
126 "blind Fortune" - Fortune was often pictured as being blind, as well as having the famous wheel.  Fortune turned against them by making leave their paradise.  They weren't expelled for their own sin, as happend to Adam and Eve.
 
133 The trees lost their leaves when Margaret left.  This is an example of the pathetic fallacy.
 
195 "The sun grew weak" - in the winter, the sun is weak.  The green plants lost their color.