Navigating Terraqueous Interfaces in the Poetry of Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth’s poetry is full of interfaces. In The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the cohabitation of prose and verse establishes visual and generic thresholds that draw attention to the materiality of the text, as does the addition of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus at the end of the romance. In the poetry itself, Wroth’s imagined landscapes are strewn with geographic thresholds, where land meets water and nature meets the human—especially female—body. These interfaces—which comprise terraqueous, littoral, material, and poetic contact zones—invite the reader to question the construction of the female body and the female poet in relation to natural environments. Beyond the tropes of pastoral convention, Wroth’s environment, in both its green and blue incarnations, is depicted in complex exchanges with the female body. This weaving of body and environment, materiality and poetics, underscores a broader entanglement of human and nature. Wroth’s thinking body is often positioned at an environmental interface, connected to a natural world that is at times hostile, yet sometimes attuned to her feelings. This essay will examine two understudied poems, “Love peruse me, seeke, and finde” from the prose romance and “My paine, still smother’d in my grieved brest” from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, to offer a material ecofeminist reading that highlights the connection between Wroth’s understanding of nature and her self-fashioning as a female poet. [A.G., C.H.]