To Penshurst

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1616

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Poem Analysis

Themes

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“The Country Life” by Robert Herrick (1681)

One of the self-styled “Sons of Ben,” a loose confederation of younger poets who found in Jonson and in his poetry a mentor and who used Jonson ‘s prosody and his subject matter to direct their own output, Robert Herrick (1591-1674) composed this pastoral idyll concerning the life at a country estate just outside his native London as a kind of riff on “To Penshurst.” For Herrick, however, the focus was less on Jonson’s interest in using the country house of the Sydneys as a bellwether for great socio-economic changes and more on the simple delights of the bounty and beauties of the rural life.

“Upon Appleton House” by Andrew Marvell (1681)

One of the most accomplished poets in the generation after Jonson’s death, a generation collectively known now as the Metaphysical Poets, Marvell here pays his own tribute to Jonson’s country house poetry. In this tour of the country home of Royalist general Sir Thomas Fairfax, Marvell takes a leisurely look (more than 900 lines) at the architecture, the grounds, and the actual home, emphasizing that here is the stability, order, and integrity of the generation that supported the restoration of the monarchy. In this, like Jonson, he uses the genre to make a broader socio-economic statement.

“To Saxham” by Thomas Carew (1640)

Completed after Jonson’s death by another of the so-called Sons of Ben, the poem is a homage to Jonson’s idea of a country house as a reflection of the owner’s moral integrity and virtue, in this case Sir John Crofts, a now-obscure aristocrat known at the time for exemplary military service in Ireland. Like Jonson, Carew (1594-1640) uses the poem to address in the second person the country house itself. Like Jonson, Carew inventories in tight heroic couplets the natural abundance of the estate grounds.

Further Literary Resources

“The Mixed Genre of Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and the Perilous Spring of Netherlandish Landscape” by Martin Elsky (2002)

A contemporary reading of the poem, the article seeks to break from the traditional reading of the poem as a socio-economic examination of the approaching end of the aristocracy. The article focuses more on the curious relationship between the speaker and his own nation and how Jonson, drawing on his own experiences in his military service in the Netherlands, speaks to a different dynamic, one that creates a dramatic tragedy in the perilous condition of Penshurst itself and the rise of the nouveau riche that is far wider and much broader than the conventional reading of the country house genre.

“Addressing the House: The Ideology of ‘Penshurst’” by Thomas D. Marshall (1993)

The article examines the relationship between a place and a “social ideal.” The country house with its wealth of natural blessings and its hospitality reflects Jonson’s own sense of the superiority of the upper class itself. The poem then is not about figs or carps or even dining tables loaded with food and drink, but rather the ideal of a life, the educated, landed wealthy, that could, really should, provide England itself with a template for moral and virtuous life.

“The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century” by G. R. Hibbard (1956)

Still regarded as the seminal definition of the short-lived genre of British poetry, this article, by an iconic figure in British literary scholarship, defines the elements of the poems, cites numerous examples of the genre (including an extensive look at Jonson’s poem as the prototype of the genre), and a takes a careful look at the implications of these poems and their socio-political argument. The charge leveled against Jonson (and other country home poems) is that because the poets were receiving patronage support from these wealthy landowners and were often (as was the case with Jonson) actually living at the estate, these poets can be dismissed as crude sycophants. Using a wide range of other works by the poets, however, the article reveals how the admiration these poets expressed was more about the well-being of England than their own comfort and well-being.