To Penshurst

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1616

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

The entire poem is executed in rhyming couplets, two lines in a row, each with five units of stressed and unstressed clusters (for 10 beats altogether) and with some variation to avoid monotony and to provide emphasis at critical moments.

Most lines are provided with an end-mark, a closing-off of the line using a mark of punctuation—a comma or a period or a semicolon—giving each line its own integrity. That use of closed lines traditionally renders the poem its grandeur and stately pace when recited publicly.

The form, which dates to antiquity, is known as heroic couplets and is most often associated in Greek and Roman literatures with topics of great gravitas, for example narratives of great battles, epic adventures of heroes, or grand apocalyptic showdowns between the gods and mortals. Thus, the poem is compelled by its percussive rhythm and its anticipated rhymes.

Jonson’s audience would recognize the heroic couplet. That Jonson, schooled in the literatures of antiquity, should chose the heroic couplet as the form for a poem celebrating an estate might suggest irony. Surely the poet does not place the fig trees and some country stream teeming with carp on the estate of country home on par with grand narratives of heroic and extraordinary exploits with broad implications, a tradition that would include Odysseus, Virgil, and Achilles. But the poet manifestly does. Rather than mock the traditional heroic couplet, Jonson conveys his sense of the wide implications of the way of life exemplified by the Sydney family by elevating that code of living to the heroic form.

Meter

The meter of the poem is tightly controlled and predictive. Each line contains 10 beats, or pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables. The metric pattern, associated with the grandest expressions of epic poetry, evolved through centuries of the oral tradition of poetry. The metric pattern helped memorize lines and helped share the poetry with an audience not reading but rather listening to it. The tight meter compels Jonson’s poem forward for more than 100 lines and, because of its sonic pattern, invites the reader into the work. The meter plays tight in the ear—of course, Jonson breaks the strict 10 beats per line meter to avoid distracting, singsong recitation.

Here for instance is one heroic couplet (Lines 29-30) that are among the most famous (or notorious) in the work. The heroic couplet here is maintained using eye rhymes, that is the two words at the end of each line that look like they should rhyme. The meter is strict iambic pentameter, each line closing on an end-mark of punctuation that, in turn, promotes a stately and paced recitation.

The paint | ed part | ridge lies | in ev | ery | field,

And for | thy mess | is will | ing to | be | killed.

This couplet is among the most outrageous claims the poet makes, that game birds submit happily to being slaughtered to become part of the Penshurst meals. The meter, however, delivers that wonderfully exaggerated idea, literally, without missing a beat. The meter thus gives the absurd claim its sense of legitimacy and its import. Thus, meter became a critical element in Jonson’s anything-but-ironic celebration of the wealth and bounty of Penshurst.

Voice

Until Line 68, that is for nearly 2/3 of the poem, the voice is a kind of vague presence, a speaker, someone obviously enthralled sufficiently with the Sydney estate that they speak to the building itself in a direct address (“you”), inventorying the various signature elements of the grounds—gardens, trees, livestock, and animal life—with a series of “thys” and “thous.” For the speaker, the grounds of the estate are perfect; the voice never hints at irony even as what emerges from the detailing is a sense of paradise on Earth. The voice embraces and celebrates that ideal world, never suggesting that what he is recording so carefully is, despite its sense of exaggeration, anything but documentarian realism.

The poet, however, needs a witness—and who better than himself—to validate that sense of realism. The poem inserts himself as a first-person eyewitness to the estate’s ideal environment. In Lines 68, the speaker settles himself at the actual table of the Sydney estate, identifies himself as an actual guest in the home, a lodger as it were (Line 72). With the introduction of that first-person voice, the dynamics of the poem considerably change. No longer is this some kind of grand idealized fantasy but it is now a direct and honest account of what the speaker has actually experienced. “There’s nothing I can wish for, for which I stay” (Lines 74). The beneficence, the generosity, the gracious hospitality of the family is here offered as testimony. That change in voice provides the poem its authenticity. When the poem returns in its closing lines to addressing the manor itself, the interlude in which the poet speaks directly gives the conclusion its conviction and its certainty. Acting as a kind of surrogate reader, the poet in introducing his voice into the poem registers how the Sydney house has impacted him and in turn how it should impact the reader. This is how it affected me, the voice asserts, and so should it affect you.