“A bird, or boat, or any thing”: Weedy Entanglement and Oceanic Freedom in Eliza Cook’s Anthropomorphous World

19 “A BIRD, OR BOAT, OR ANY THING”: WEEDY ENTANGLEMENT AND OCEANIC FREEDOM IN ELIZA COOK’S ANTHROPOMORPHOUS WORLD Rachael Eleanor Murray DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2023.66.3 Abstract: Victorian poet Eliza Cook (1812-1889) once wished to be a “bird, or boat, or any thing” to inhabit the seascape she loved. Achieving this elision of human, object, and environment poetically, if not practically, Cook produced several anthropomorphising and animating it-narratives which adopted nonhuman perspectives as her own. This article examines the creation of plant voices in two such poems, “Song of the Hempseed” (1843) and “Song of the Seaweed” (1844), which offer contrasting yet intertwined negotiations of human–environment relationships. To foreground and theorise these texts’ plant/algal protagonists, I adopt an EcoGothic lens which pays particular attention to Cook’s use of key nonhuman EcoGothic tropes in “Song of the Seaweed,” namely her evocation of uncanny vegetal agency, multi-species monstrosity, and transcorporeal and sympathetic entanglements. Through these means, I argue that Cook’s “Seaweed” offers an education in shedding plant indifference, an opportunity to imaginatively identify with the nonhuman, and an encapsulation of the struggles of animating plants without erasing their alterity. An EcoGothic approach to Cook thus allows “Seaweed” to afford a poetic route through concepts key to current environmental thought and points to as yet uncharted territories which may prove fruitful in the expanding field of ecocriticism. Keywords: Eliza Cook, EcoGothic, ecocriticism, plant-thinking, anthropomorphism Like so many now-forgotten Victorian writers, British poet Eliza Cook (1812-1889) was once assured of an “undying reputation” by contemporary critics, and her work’s encapsulation of a cosy, if unoriginal, “spirit of home” assured her popular Rachael Eleanor Murray 20 favour.1 Cook cultivated this domesticised reception of her verses through frontispiece portraits featuring the old armchair which gave its name to her most famous poem and through epigraphs promising a muse “homely in attire”; the resultant persona proved a persuasive one.2 So well did it convince her contemporaries that even readers who admitted, “true, her imagination will sometimes soar with the lark above the clouds; or skim the ocean, in calm or storm,” dismissed these moments as anomalous flights of fancy from a domestic norm.3 Thus, the very works which, as her obituaries reminisced, gave Cook’s name “the familiar sound of a household word” also made it a byword for that same sphere, orchestrating an erasure, both contemporary and modern, of her frequent engagements with the natural world.4 Yet an alternative view of Cook, which this article will propose, is both necessary and possible, as testified by a contrasting portrait which circulated as a ballad-sheet illustration.5 Here, Cook trades in her armchair to perch on a shoreline rock with paper and pen at the ready, offering a rare glimpse of the environmentally inspired Cook this article will trace: a poet for whom the sea engenders such an “ecstacy of joyous fear” that she declared she would barter her very selfhood, become “a bird, or boat, or any thing,” to call it home.6 This wish was granted after a poetic fashion; Cook transformed herself into many different objects throughout her career in a mode of verse which Fabienne 1 “Eliza Cook,” The London Journal 1 (1845): 376; “Eliza Cook’s Poetry,” The Anglo American 9, no. 15 (1847): 342. 2 Melaia and Other Poems (London: Charles Tilt, 1840) and many later editions of Cook’s collected Poems borrow this epigraph from Robert Burns. Cook’s branding was so effective the phrase reappeared as unquoted and descriptive fact in J.H. Ingram’s review of her career in The Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, ed. A.H. Miles, vol. 8 (London: George Routledge, 1905-1907) 269. 3 “Eliza Cook’s Poetry” 342. 4 [Untitled Obituary], The Glasgow Herald, 26 September 1889, 6. 5 Lithographic prints of J. Watkins’ sea-side portrait of Cook were drawn by H. Brittan Willis and printed alongside a verse paying tribute to Cook’s “Ocean Altar.” This likeness gained wider circulation as a cover for “Song of the Dog,” Musical Treasury No. 660, just as T. Smart’s portrait of Cook with her mother’s armchair was mimicked across the ballad sheets of “The Old Arm Chair.” For a detailed examination of the signaling at work in Cook’s portraits, see Alexis Easley’s New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832-1860 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). 6 Eliza Cook, “Stanzas by the Sea-Side,” Family Herald 3, no. 122 (1845): l.7; Eliza Cook, “The Waters,” Melaia and Other Poems (London: Charles Tilt, 1840) l.20. Contemporary printings give both “any thing” and “anything”; Eliza Cook’s Journal has the latter, Melaia has the former. “A bird, or boat, or any thing” 21 Moine, in one of the few pieces of recent Cook criticism, has grouped as her “biographies […] or autobiographies of things—of a goblet, a seaweed, a church bell, a faggot.”7 Although Moine does a great deal in advocating for consideration of Cook’s neglected works as sites of socio-political commentary, her list re-enacts and reinforces the nineteenth-century erasure, seen above, of Cook’s environmentally engaged verses; ranking a living organism alongside inanimate objects due to a cultural habit of overlooking vegetal being – a tendency termed “plant indifference” by Michael Marder – Moine pushes it down the final rung of the scala naturae into lifelessness.8 Lifting its speaker out of this objectifying position, I will examine “Song of the Seaweed,” first published in The New Monthly Magazine in December 1844, alongside “Song of the Hempseed,” also treated by Moine, which first appeared in The Northern Star in October 1843.9 In each poem, one landed, one aquatic, Cook offers a prosopopoetic autobiography in the style of an object narrative. In order to foreground and theorise these poems’ nonhuman protagonists, I will approach them by way of the “EcoGothic.” Since both subfields colliding in its creation – ecocriticism and the Gothic – are, as Tom J. Hillard has noted, themselves characterised by many diverging definitions, it is hardly surprising that this term has had something of a predilection for shapeshifting from tool to text descriptor and back again – sometimes within the same volume in the case of Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ edited collection, Ecogothic.10 Prompted by these variants to give increased stability to the term, Elizabeth Parker argues persuasively that although “EcoGothic” has some remaining merit as a mode or “flavour” uniting an otherwise indefinite body of texts, it is most usefully employed as denoting a framework or method, and such is its primary role in the following discussion.11 7 Fabienne Moine, “The Politics of Objects: Eliza Cook’s Biographies of Things,” Cahiers victoriens et édouardien 83 (2016): 3. 8 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 9 Eliza Cook, “Song of the Seaweed,” The New Monthly Magazine 72, no. 288 (1844): 448-52 and “Song of the Hempseed,” The Northern Star 6, no. 310 (1843): 3. 10 T.J. Hillard, “Gothic Nature Revisited: Reflections on the Gothic of Ecocriticism,” Gothic Nature 1 (2019): 26-28. This fluctuation across Ecogothic, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) has been noted by both Suzanne Roberts, “Review,” Pacific Coast Philology 50 (2015): 131-34 and Elizabeth Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) 18-22. 11 Parker, Forest and the EcoGothic 33-36. Original italics. Rachael Eleanor Murray 22 EcoGothic criticism is ultimately unified by the same central concern as its otherwise disparate Gothic parent; having evolved from Simon C. Estok’s exploration of ecophobia (a “contempt and fear” of the natural world), “[v]irtually every critic who has written on the ecogothic,” as Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils summarise, “describes its principal function as expressing fear.”12 Given the plant speakers operating in “Seaweed” and “Hempseed,” I will examine Cook’s generation of environmentally focused unease through techniques featured in Keetley and Sivils’ description of “the nonhuman ecogothic”: namely, nonhuman agency, monstrosity, and an entanglement of human and world. This strand of the EcoGothic not only encourages the decentring of human perspectives, but also recognises our enmeshment with the nonhuman as a means to “account for [the] agency of ‘things’” – a fitting lens for Cook’s it-narratives.13 The extent to which Cook’s nonhumans are able to execute independent thought and action will therefore form the basis of this study. For Keetley and Sivils, it is a short hop from such agency to monstrosity, a predatory other hunting the human.14 Recognising with Estok that anthropocentrism leads to imagining monsters at the (human defined) margins, I will appropriate plant horror for algal purposes to explore the potential of new margins, implicit in plant perspectives, in making new monsters.15 Such agential monstrosities inevitably come to entangle Cook’s human characters in the vegetal, allowing the Seaweed16 to render bodily boundaries meaningless in true Gothic transcorporeal style.17 Yet beyond this corporeal dimension, I will also propose that Cook’s Seaweed threatens to infiltrate human identity, enmeshing readers’ sympathies with the more-thanhuman world in a manner which draws upon another dimension of the Gothic: a desire which often accompanies the fear. This is not to disagree with Estok that “ecoGothic [is] always ecophobic,” but rather to say that EcoGothic does not have to be solely ecophobic; indeed, we return to the “flavour” because of a strange, 12 Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE 16 (2009): 207; Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic,” in Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Keetley and Sivils (New York: Routledge, 2018) n2. 13 Keetley and Sivils, “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic” 11-12. 14 Keetley and Sivils, “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic” 7. 15 S.C. Estok, “Theorising the Ecogothic,” Gothic Nature 1 (2019): 34. 16 To prevent elision of Cook’s constructed, anthropomorphised plants with real nonhuman lives and the erasure this would enact, I capitalise her characterised plants throughout. 17 Fred Botting’s definition of the Gothic as “a writing of excess,” straining at boundaries of all kinds, is almost universally quoted. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) 1. “A bird, or boat, or any thing” 23 fascinated desire for the monsters it holds.18 Having constructed an agential and opinionated EcoGothic Seaweed, I will close with a brief attempt to nuance the violence inherent in writing nonhuman perspectives by contextualising Cook’s poem in light of contemporary specimen books. I do not seek to suggest in all this that Cook was anything resembling a modern environmentalist, but rather that as the ecologically aware reader traverses the smooth sands of her collected works, they may just find themselves caught at by the sudden coldness of nonhuman perspectives capable of entangling them in new ways of thinking, beyond landedness and beyond humanness, even today. First published a year before “Seaweed,” “Song of the Hempseed” provides an interesting benchmark. Although its title seems to promise extensive engagement with landed plant life, the vegetal is rather rendered conspicuous by its absence, as the Hempseed’s autobiography passes over its time as a living and growing organism within the first few lines: Ay scatter me well, ’tis a moist spring day, Wide and far be the Hempseed sown; And bravely I'll stand on the autumn land When the rains have dropp’d and the winds have blown: Man shall carefully gather me up; His hand shall rule, and my form shall change.19 From this point onwards, the narrating Hempseed instead dwells upon the assorted human uses for rope, its posthumous form. The Hempseed’s very body as we encounter it is thus proudly manmade – “His hand shall rule,” not its own – as are the identities this form generates: throughout its afterlife, the Hempseed carries flags, makes toys, secures ships, hangs criminals, lowers coffins, rings church bells, and gathers harvests, fish, and water.20 All too literally tied up in national agendas, education, colonialism, capital punishment, religious services, and the overuse of environmental resources, the Hempseed becomes the agent of all that seeks to impose culture as the antonym and shaping hand of nature. With no subjectivity beyond these functions, Cook’s Hempseed does indeed stay a “thing;” it is defined by and – from its first compliant utterance, “Ay” – revels in its literal objectification, despite its narrating role.21 Any potential for reading in 18 Estok, “Theorising the EcoGothic” 48. Parker’s EcoGothic is also “often somewhat tinged with desire,” Parker, Forest and the EcoGothic 36. 19 Cook, “Hempseed” ll.1-6. 20 Cook, “Hempseed” l.6. 21 Cook, “Hempseed” l.1. Rachael Eleanor Murray 24 an EcoGothic discomfort is thus effectually quashed; since the Hempseed is afforded no agency outside or beyond the human, no otherness is permitted to enter the poem or challenge its anthropocentrism. This disregard of nonhuman life reappears in other poems; Cook instructs the eponymous addressees of her earlier poem “The Forest Trees” (1833) to “wave proudly” precisely because of their utility to humans.22 Constraining her supposed plant perspectives within these human value systems, Cook reduces the Hempseed to a mere puppet of plant life through which a noticeably human voice declares it “a goodly thing” because it “serve[s] from the play-ground to the grave” – in other words, that its sole virtue is its socioeconomic function.23 When Cook writes about the sea, however, even critics who found her poetry “risible” and endued only with “a lumbering elephantine sportiveness” were forced to acknowledge an unaccountable shift.24 Characterising the ocean as a “fathomless,” “free” companion for her “own bond-hating soul,” a sudden celebration of liberty bursts forth with an intensity of feeling no landed home seems able to match.25 Cook compares the land and sea in fourteen separate poems, and each time solid ground comes up short; even when warned that the sea air would likely prove fatal, she declares in a letter quoted in the preface to an American edition of her works that she “would sooner dwell in a ship than a castle” all the same.26 Across her sea-centred verses (over thirty in total), the human–nature power dynamic of “Hempseed” and “The Forest Trees” is thus rewritten and reversed; in a suddenly agential world, it is the human poet who is held a worshipping “captive” in Cook’s littoral spaces, bewitched by the ocean “as the bird is charm-bound by the snake.”27 In a promisingly EcoGothic entanglement, she is now the willing and consumed resource at risk of losing her authorial powers to the sea which “subdues [her verse] to a low and whisper’d dirge.”28 Perhaps this is why the Hempseed takes the time to declare its service as ships’ ropes will not turn it “into aught that is ‘rich and strange’” – the aquatic 22 Eliza Cook, “The Forest Trees,” in Melaia and Other Poems (London: R.J. Wood Dispatch Office, 1833) ll.2, 38. 23 Cook, “Hempseed” ll.103-104. 24 L., “Remarks on Various Late Poets, No. IV. Eliza Cook,” Southern Literary Messenger 11 (1845): n.p. 25 Cook, “The Waters” l.9; Eliza Cook, “The Mother Who Has a Child at Sea,” in Melaia and Other Poems (London: Charles Tilt, 1840) l.42. 26 Letter from Eliza Cook quoted in the “Preface to the New Edition,” Poetical Works (Philadelphia, PA: Willis P. Hazard, 1856) xi. 27 Cook, “Stanzas by the Sea-Side” ll.60, 65. 28 Eliza Cook, “Stanzas to an Old Friend,” Eliza Cook’s Journal 28 (1849): l.4. “A bird, or boat, or any thing” 25 spaces of Cook’s poetic world threaten to dissolve the anthropocentric value systems the Hempseed holds so dear.29 Yet in its very denial of Ariel’s song, the Hempseed invites the question, would such a sea change allow modern readers to find an EcoGothic flavour in Cook’s creation of nonhuman voices? In a politically and economically focused reading of “Song of the Seaweed” like Moine’s, there is no change to speak of. The poem follows the titular Seaweed from its birth and breaking of its holdfast through a series of nautical adventures – encounters with ships, storms, rockpooling children, whalers, sunken riches, and various creatures – until it is washed up on the strand and burned by Vraic harvesters. Interpreting this narrative as a form of algal Bildungsroman, Moine argues that Cook’s Seaweed learns to willingly surrender itself to a human, Chartist common good, and that this is “the true meaning of its existence.”30 Stopping short of acknowledging the anthropocentric nature of this “common” good where commonality does not extend to the rest of the ecosystem, she assumes the use-based morality espoused in many of Cook’s works applies uniformly across her poetic world. Yet Cook’s fascination with liberating oceanic spaces suggests, I think, that her treatment of land-based lives may not translate directly to their aquatic counterparts. Therefore, although Moine sees the Seaweed as a convert investing its bodily “treasure” in a human economy, I would suggest that Cook repeatedly accentuates the otherness of her Seaweed:31 it thrives on salty seawater where dying mariners cannot, shows no enthusiasm to become fertilising treasure, and does not even touch the vast riches it passes under the waves. Engineering a gulf between our perspective and the Seaweed’s, Cook rather creates the unsettling sense that her object-subject has broken the holdfast connecting it to the anthropocentric world of her other it-narratives and become independent of us. The Seaweed follows its own agenda outwith human control – and from such anxieties about control, Estok argues, stems ecophobia.32 The EcoGothic potential of “Seaweed” is accentuated by juxtaposition. Since the Seaweed is gathered “to quicken the grain of the earth,” its song is open to interpretation as a form of critical prequel to “Hempseed,” a doubling back of narrative thread that intertwines two divergent styles of it-narrative.33 The Seaweed is, very pointedly, not the Hempseed, and staunchly defends its claims to vegetal life independent of anthropocentric frameworks: 29 Cook, “Hempseed” l.8. 30 Fabienne Moine, Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) 41-42. 31 Cook, “Seaweed” l.211. 32 Estok, “Theorising the Ecogothic” 46. 33 Cook, “Seaweed” l.192. Rachael Eleanor Murray 26 I am born in chrystal bower, Where the despot hath no power To trail and turn the oozy fern, Or trample down the fair sea-flower. I am born where human skill Cannot bend me to its will.34 In an inverted echo of the Hempseed’s opening request that humankind put it to use, “scatter me well,” the Seaweed’s being “scatter’d abroad” as fertiliser brings death and poetic closure, implicitly critiquing its compliant predecessor: refusing to participate in the narration of the product rather than the plant, this poem goes no further.35 Various human characters operating as though “Seaweed” were an it-narrative risk or lose their lives by failing to respect its animacy; a sailor seeing a “saving rope” chokes on it as he drowns, a foraging child seeking a toy or decoration teeters on the shoreline trying to reach it.36 More threatening still, in setting out to “match” a ship’s ropes – a role once filled by the reliable Hempseed – the Seaweed implies that it could put its “rich curling threads” to the same use as the Hempseed’s suggestively similar “fine threads curl’d.”37 That is, in a moment of extra-textual awareness unique in Cook’s it-narratives, it could be a “saving rope,” but chooses instead to leave humanity to its own devices.38 Courting the realisation that “the sea-weed creeps” across the background of the Hempseed’s service as an anchor rope, this retrospectively significant cameo allows the Seaweed to overwrite the Hempseed’s good deeds with dramatic irony, drowning those it once saved.39 “The Forest Trees,” too, seems undone in this shipwreck as the “cloud-crown’d pine,” there cut down to enable human naval dominance, is here felled a second time.40 Now a mast, the Seaweed’s “pine” falls under “the heavy axe below,” an unusual choice of wave metaphor which completes the image of reversed human–nature power dynamics.41 Slipping through the generic straitjacket of a typical Cook it-narrative and refusing to be another appendage to anthropocentric ends, the Seaweed defiantly proclaims the alterity and independence of its poetic voice. 34 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.1-6. 35 Cook, “Hempseed” l.1; Cook, “Seaweed” l.204. 36 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.71, 98-105. 37 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.27, 99; Cook, “Hempseed” l.10. 38 Cook, “Seaweed” l.71. 39 Cook, “Hempseed” l.21. 40 Cook, “Forest Trees” l.11. 41 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.49-54. “A bird, or boat, or any thing” 27 Before tracing this mental and narratorial freedom into a potentially monstrous physical agency within the narrative, it is worth saying that, of course, “Song of the Seaweed” does not contain a genuine reflection of more-than-human “thought” any more than “Hempseed.” It cannot. Such anthropomorphisms are particularly contentious within the plant sciences; with varying definitions of “behaviour,” “intelligence,” and “consciousness,” many phytologists argue that such terms obfuscate the issue by conjuring the Darwinian idea of a plant “brain” in a literal and animal-like rather than a metaphorical, or here poetic, sense.42 By contrast, Catherine Packham’s study of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1789) has also argued compellingly that poetic personification can function as a means of, rather than hindrance to, scientific thought by encapsulating specimens’ vitality and raising ideas or questions in ways beyond the reach of standard and rationally bounded scientific writing.43 Even in obviously literary contexts, as Keetley summarises, “plants exist on (and beyond) the outer limits of what we know” – their experiences can only be guessed at, and in that approximation (especially when assuming the very voice of plants) such narratives strain under the weight of their anthropomorphisms.44 Marder, Natania Meeker, and Antónia Szabari agree that plants also sit outside our notions of agency and selfhood, and Marder in particular traces a species of “violence” in misguided attempts to confer status on plants (within human parameters) by attribution of these qualities; their otherness suffers once again.45 And yet these same projections of autonomous identity simultaneously open new doors. By prompting us to recognise vegetal life as life, moments of pathetic fallacy carry a potentially powerful antidote to plant indifference that may prevent other violences – like the listing of our seaweed as an object. In fact, Lawrence Buell suggests that our urge to protect the more-than-human world might cease to exist without them.46 In navigating this 42 Michael Pollan’s “The Intelligent Plant: Scientists Debate a New Way of Understanding Flora,” The New Yorker, 23 and 30 December 2013, brings together many phytologists’ opinions in a balanced account of this ongoing debate attentive to the role of metaphor in scientific enquiry and the lasting influence of Charles Darwin’s The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). 43 Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 149-59. 44 Dawn Keetley, “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” in Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, ed. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) 6. 45 Marder, Plant-Thinking 55; Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) 7. 46 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995) 218. This said, first-person writing does not necessarily produce real-world behavioural changes. Rachael Eleanor Murray 34 The land must be till’d, the tiller must feed, And the corn must be help’d by the good Seaweed.73 We could, therefore, pick up our old perspectives where we left off and read this return to human narratorial structures as authoritative closure and an imposition of order. The harvesters’ “lightsome” tune is, however, also our Seaweed’s “deathdirge”: leaving its world behind, its body is burned and ashes scattered.74 “Dust to dust.”75 As Keetley notes, neither life nor literature asks humans to peer through vegetal eyes very often, but from the opening, first-person words, “I am born,” until this final scene, Cook’s “Seaweed” has made just such a call upon readers’ imaginations.76 Through sharing the Seaweed’s perspective, many readers will have come to identify with it, developing an increased consciousness of its individual value and lively presence;77 the harvesters’ “merry strains” of funereal allusions may thereby sound off-key.78 Cook’s readers thus implicitly choose their own ending depending on their current position on the plant awareness–plant indifference spectrum. For readers no longer able to identify with the plant indifference of the new human narrators’ song, their mourning betrays the extent of their newfound more-than-human sympathies, while their heightened awareness of the vegetal narrator’s sudden disappearance recreates something of the plant silence ever present in the world outside the text. Sympathetic readers are left in this deafening silence to wonder what the seaweed might have said if left to finish its story on its own terms. The absence of these concluding vegetal remarks is made all the more conspicuous by the Seaweed’s moralising of others’ exploits during its adventures: I am gone, my fair boy, I am gone, and for ever; Thou wilt covet full many bright things, but take heed, They elude not your grasp like the pretty Seaweed, quietly directing attention to the existence and potential of plant narrators in themselves.79 Plants as authors, writers, and tellers of tales in the conventional 73 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.201-208. 74 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.187-88. 75 Cook, “Seaweed” l.214. 76 Keetley, “Theses on Plant Horror” 6; Cook, “Seaweed” l.1. 77 Buell, for example, notes the causation between anthropomorphism and the reader’s ties with nonhuman characters. Buell, The Environmental Imagination 196. 78 Cook, “Seaweed” l.183. 79 Cook, “Seaweed” ll.107-109. “A bird, or boat, or any thing” 35 sense are, of course, an impossibility in nature. As a basis for his model of plantthinking, Marder argues that real-world plants externalise via chemical signals, bodily form, and movement; “the silence of vegetation is unbreakable and absolute,” and in this silence plant experience is held incontrovertibly beyond us.80 Cook’s singing Seaweed is, quite intentionally, a long chain of anthropomorphisms removed from this raw vegetality and it is undeniable that, for all its many rebellions, it fulfils more human purposes than fertilising grain. Outwith the narrative, the Seaweed serves readers’ ends in being made to speak to and entertain them; it serves Cook in bringing her financial gain and visibility before a reading public; it serves editors and publishers in circulating across the wider textual economy of the Victorian periodical press. In being made to “speak” it seems to lose itself, becoming more objectified than ever. And yet I would like to close with an attempt to counterbalance the commodification of Cook’s Seaweed, to find space for the “agency of ‘things’” characterising the nonhuman EcoGothic, by siting the poem within its original context, specifically the popularity of seaweed books using pressed specimens as illustrations throughout the 1840s–50s.81 In her study of an offshoot of these books, Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae (1843–1853), Ann Garascia argues that the impact of plant bodies upon the finished products – through specimens’ individualities and the absence of a human agent drawing the final plant form upon the paper – is such that the plants functioned as authors.82 Yet the dynamics at play in this translation from plant body to plant author are, I think, more problematic than she allows: whether dried and pressed or submersed in chemical reagents, the algae in this situation are only authors in so far as a corpse is an author. Seaweeds in particular, as established above, live a life of perpetual motion; it is only through our habituation to an apparent vegetal stillness – remember Keetley’s moving monsters – that the arrested lives of seaweeds are more easily overlooked than those of more animated beings, like an insect or a bird shut between the pages. What specimen books offer are fragments of plants without context, shaped by human hands, arbitrarily flattened, and slowly discolouring. Recognising this violence, it becomes increasingly telling that the 80 Marder, Plant-Thinking 74-75. It is also a foundational, first-page fact in Keetley’s “Theses on Plant Horror” that vegetal life is silence made tangible; however, recent studies have recorded and attributed meaning to plant-produced sounds: I. Khait et al., “Sounds Emitted by Plants Under Stress Are Airborne and Informative,” Cell 186 (2023): 1328-36. 81 Keetley and Sivils, “Introduction” 12. 82 Ann Garascia, “‘Impressions of Plants Themselves’: Materializing Eco-Archival Practices with Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae,” Victorian Literature and Culture 47 (2019): 267-303. Rachael Eleanor Murray 36 text-substituting bodies of these supposed co-authors are inherently opposed to the materiality of the media they are made to inhabit; were such a book to get wet enough, the paper and ink would be destroyed but the algae might just regain its animation, its movement, and its third dimension.83 Its unmediated expression comes in the destruction of, not via, the page. It is amongst such other commodified algal “authors” that Cook’s “Seaweed” entered the literary world, and in many ways the verse form seems to double a real plant body as a textual decoy for the speaking subject. As well as altering the pace, Cook’s wide divergences in line and stanza length allow the poem to twist and morph its shape upon the page, with lines narrowing and flaring between four and twelve syllables, and stanzas fluctuating from four to twenty-two lines. Of particular note is Cook’s choice to mark these shifts with four hard section breaks – solid lines between the verses – which appear rarely in Cook’s poetic output and mimic the larger indicators dividing one periodical article or poem from another.84 The momentary illusion this creates – that these are, in fact, five different poems among the miscellany of a periodical or collection – presents an apparently self-fragmenting poem, each break allowing another part the possibility of splitting off from the whole.85 The poem looks, in short, something like the textual equivalent of a pressed specimen, undulating, inconsistent, and in danger of cracking, but remains untouched by both physical pressing and the quiet violence of taxonomic naming. As we have already seen, Cook’s poem also mimics the entanglements of preserved seaweed specimens beyond their allocated page – wrapping around page edges, ghosting through onto other sheets, overrunning printed borders – in the way it forges connections with and incorporates parts of Cook’s larger poetic output. Allusions to “Hempseed” and “Forest Trees” can be read in. Yet “Song of the Goblet,” “Song of the Beggars,” “Song of the Carrion Crow,” and Cook’s other “Song of—" pieces are also each conceptually interlinked with “Seaweed” through the repetition of titular structure and 83 W.J. Hooker’s Flora Scotica; or A Description of Scottish Plants, II (London: Constable and Co., 1821) 74 notes that rehydration could return some pressed algae to their original state. 84 Including “Seaweed,” only nine of the 383 pieces in the 1861 Routledge, Warne and Routledge Poems feature printed in-poem breaks (two being the unusually lengthy opening poems). 85 The degree of resemblance between section breaks and article divides naturally differs from periodical to periodical. This variable confusion also translates into volume form: the in-poem breaks in the 1861 Routledge, Warne and Routledge and the 1848 Simpkin, Marshall and Co. Poems are the same as those marking transitions between poems. Other publishers, e.g. Frederick Warne and Co, create a sharper visual distinction. “A bird, or boat, or any thing” 37 autodiegetic narration, thereby constructing a continuum of perspectives encompassing and interlinking objects, humans, animals, and plants alike. The poetic body of Cook’s “Seaweed” might even be said to fall prey to the textual “recycling” that, in Margaret Beetham’s ecologically apt words, characterised the Victorian periodical market, allowing its continued circulation in other forms.86 “Song of the Seaweed” is, then, also a promising song in place of the seaweed. Since its twisting, entangling, and fragmenting pseudo-body allows the algal speaker to replace the susceptible plant body with an uninjurable textual substitute, it evades the objectification of collectors (paradoxically for a plant) by becoming all voice. In turning an EcoGothic lens upon such an unlikely candidate as Eliza Cook, this short piece has sought to show that this framework’s potential to dig up the often overlooked negative and terrifying side of nature writing, which Hillard has called “the body buried in the basement” of ecocriticism, can be applied much more broadly than it has been to date – even within the cosy walls of Cook’s apparently domestic idyll.87 By tracing the uncanny vegetal agency, the multispecies monstrosity, and the transcorporeal and sympathetic entanglements at work in “Song of the Seaweed,” it becomes apparent that Cook not only “sang for the people” as J.H. Ingram believed.88 She also sang against the people, willing both to make herself into “any thing” and to make room for any thing in anyone.89 A modern EcoGothic approach thus allows a Victorian author known for “beautiful conservatism” to offer unusual tools for negotiating current human– environment relationships and the questions continuing to vex plant studies.90 In an EcoGothic “Seaweed,” we find an education in shedding plant indifference, an opportunity to imaginatively identify with the nonhuman, and an encapsulation of the struggles of representing plant voice and agency without violence. And perhaps most usefully, we also come up against the edges of the still-evolving fields of EcoGothic and plant-thinking through the limited applicability of existing landed frameworks in conceptualising life in aquatic spaces. 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