Today’s Poem: Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint

Even at his most personal, Milton speaks of public things

Eugène Delacroix, Milton Dictated Paradise Lost to His Daughters, 1826 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Sonnet 23: “Methought I saw my late espoused saint”

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
       Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
       Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
       Rescu’d from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint
       Purification in the old Law did save,
       And such as yet once more I trust to have
       Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
       Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight
       Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d
So clear as in no face with more delight.
       But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d,
       I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

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When written in what we might call the public voice, poems tend to speak what they assert are truths about the universe. In the personal voice, poems tend to open the heart and show what’s inside. 

This distinction has fuzzy edges, of course. There’s plenty of insight into the private mind offered by poetry in a public voice. And there are plenty of claims about reality that appear in a personal voice. Still, at the center of each of the voices, the distinction is clear. Samuel Johnson gives us almost no self-display. John of the Cross pulls out his heart and holds it in the air before us. 

John Milton (1608–1674) certainly looks the epitome of public speakers. Paradise Lost is a parade of grand statements about the metaphysics of creation, the psychology of human beings, and the history of heaven. Even a personal fact — the blindness that afflicted him in 1652 — becomes a meditation on the will of God in the c.-1655 sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent.” “I did but prompt the age” starts as a look back at the author’s role in the battles that would kill the king but soon turns to a universal definition of liberty and insists on the moral character needed to maintain it: “For who loves that, must first be wise and good.”

And yet, in Sonnet 23 — “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” a 1658 poem describing a dream vision of his deceased wife — we have a highly personal poem: “Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight / Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d / So clear as in no face with more delight.”

John Milton, c. 1629 (Wikimedia Commons)

Still, the mind that gave us Paradise Lost is incapable of leaving it so. The poem begins with the metaphor of Greek mythology’s Alcestis, who sacrificed herself for her husband and was brought back from the underworld by Hercules. The poem then offers another metaphorical description, as though the vision were the deceased wife washed clean — recalling that “Purification in the old Law did save,” drawing from the purifications after childbirth in Leviticus 12. And the poem makes yet a third turn, describing her as “vested all in white, pure as her mind.”

This is the progression of Milton’s understanding of the history of thought about salvation: the ancient pagan sense, surpassed by the Old Testament sense, surpassed by the Christian revelation. Even in a personal poem, Milton moves into the public voice.

Even so, the poem returns in its concluding lines to the personal description of the visual dream in his time of blindness: “But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d, / I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”

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