To Penshurst

“Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show / Of touch or marble” (Lines 1-2). You, the poet says to a building, are not designed to show off like all the other buildings around you. The poet talks to a building. Under any other circumstances surely the poem sets up a comic premise or makes ironic the poet as some kind of unsettling delusional loner determined to hold a conversation with a pile of stones. The opening line establishes that sort of curiously intimate relationship with a structure by using an apostrophe, a poetic convention in which the poet speaks directly to a person, a lover perhaps, usually absent, sometimes dead, as a way to give solace to the great absence the poet is feeling and to bring the absent one to life to make that absence a reassuring presence. In using that device to address a building that is very much there, the poet introduces the dilemma central to his poem.

The more he addresses the grand manor, the more that same grand manor— despite its imposing edifice, extravagant plenty, and imposing vastness—seems threatened, isolated, like some grand lady in distress as if the poet speaks words to console it. The poet gifts the estate a feeling of being alive as the poet continues for more than 80 lines to celebrate “you”—it is in its own way a kind of love poem, though the more he celebrates “you,” the more he realizes Penshurst represents a way of life that has begun to vanish. Thus, the poem fulfills the basic emotional strategy of an apostrophe. The grand manor is both here and not here; it is a magnificent presence edging into dark absence.

The strategy of the opening, from Lines 1-48 at which point the poet turns to those who visit the estate, is twofold: first, it establishes the reassuring abundance of Penshurst: its fruits, gardens, and woods teeming with animals and birds; it is a place of beautiful natural plenty and a world unto itself that invites meandering walks just to revel in its natural grace. Second, it defines the estate as a singular place that is strikingly at odds with the other, newer estates nearby that, despite being far more opulent and showy, seem fake, pushy, and noisy. Much like Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Castle, Henry James’ Gardencourt, or Margaret Mitchell’s Tara, Penshurst is a grand home that embodies an entire era, a way of life, a culture that is grand but doomed. For the writer, such edifices come to symbolize a compelling code of virtues—in Penshurst’s case, hospitality, respect, learning, manners, and compassion—that the writer sees as tragically vanishing, a way of life too rapidly becoming ironic, as there has emerged a new class of wealth uncomplicated by such virtues and defined by its conception of entitlement and privilege, a wealthy class that is, in contrast to the Sydneys and their era, cheap and shallow.

The portrait of the estate that emerges initially is not merely one of wealth (the bounty of the estate’s gardens and the teeming livestock in its pens and surrounding woods testifies to that sense of blessed wealth) but more a perception of this estate as a manifestation of harmony. Nature itself is at peace with the estate: the flourishing gardens and the surplus of game birds and farm animals reflect not just wealth but happiness. Indeed, the poet argues that the pigs and cows and gamebirds all there to be served on the groaning tables of the estate are all too happy to surrender their lives to be slaughtered as an expression of the estate’s sense of cooperation. Everything, the poet argues, from the figs to the pigs, from apples to horses, and everything Renaissance thought perceived as the great chain of being that defined the cosmos itself works together at Penshurst in a reflection of cosmic order.

Commencing at line 44 when the poet directs his attentions to the boundary walls that mark Penshurst, the poem moves from acknowledging the wealth of the estate’s beauty and the remarkable fecundity of its gardens and woods to a consideration of how people—visitors, the serving staff, the Sydney family, even the King himself—operate within the boundaries of the estate in a stately kind of order. The boundary walls are shorter in height than neighboring estates to signal the estate’s sense of welcome. The poet details the code of hospitality the estate follows, such as how neighbors are treated to the same food and wine—“beer and bread, and selfsame wine” (Line 63)—as the family itself when they would dine alone. That “liberal board” (Line 59) defines the family’s generosity, to which the poet himself, a guest at the estate, can testify. In introducing the anecdote about the visit by James I and the prince while they were on a hunting trip in the area, the poet reveals how, taken by surprise with an unannounced visit by such august company, the Sydney family was prepared to extend a lavish welcome for which “praise was heaped / on [Penhurst’s] good lady” (Line 85). The poem then includes the Sydney children, now grown and presumably assuming their place in society, as part of the noble culture of the estate. The children were schooled in manners, arts, and most importantly religion; their conduct, in turn, reflecting the best of England’s aristocracy.

Had the poem ended there at line 98 it would be an uncomplicated celebration of the wealthy class in Elizabethan England embodied by the Sydney family. In the closing quatrain, however, the poet acknowledges how the life and culture embodied by the Sydney family and its estate are losing their prominence in England, which is suggested by the other “edifices” (100), the other estates surrounding Penshurst and built by the new rich middle class only for show (the residents, the poet notes, are most often in London tending to the business of making money). Those estates are garish monuments to ego; Penshurst, where the Sydney family actually lives year-round, reflects the slow disappearance of that generation of wealth and its sense of noble responsibility.